Investor Jeff Schrock calls Seattle-based EVO Media a “ramen profitable” startup. Co-founder and CEO Geoff Nuval calls it “roast beef sandwich” profitable. Two guys, two spellings of the same first name, two different food analogies. But the message is clear: these guys are hungry.

Call it what you want, EVO Media is turning a profit some six months after launching DevHub—a free Web publishing platform that helps companies and individuals manage and monetize niche websites—and after going through a strategic downsizing. The company, founded in late 2007, had raised money from Monster Venture Partners and prominent angel investors including Alex Algard, John Cunningham, and Geoff Entress.

But early this year, EVO realized it would not be able to raise a favorable round of venture funding. So what did it do? Focused on getting revenue. Schrock, a tech entrepreneur-turned-executive-turned-investor (he co-founded Seattle-based Activate before his time at Yahoo, RealNetworks, Monster Venture Partners, and now Intel Capital), has overseen the company through this formative period as its chairman. (See more on DevHub in this TechFlash piece.)

The story goes back to the fall of 2007, when Nuval, a Stanford grad, moved to Seattle from Silicon Valley, where he had worked at Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, doing mobile and Internet investments. He had been introduced to fellow EVO co-founders Daniel Lee Rust (a tech expert) and Mark Michael (a sales expert) through his assistant at Lehman, a childhood friend of theirs. Rust and Michael were running a Web development shop for startups, but together with Nuval, they conspired to make a Web platform for themselves—one that customers could use to create sites. “The chemistry was awesome, the idea was compelling enough,” Nuval says. “I threw as much stuff as I could into my SUV and drove up here.”

Schrock met the team in early 2008, and was duly impressed. “One of the investment themes of Monster Venture Partners was capital-efficient development of technology businesses,” he says. “The founders here, they had a lot of the attributes I really admire and look for in startups. They were young, aggressive, intelligent, hard-working, and they had this set of tools and a balanced skill set. They figured out a way to turn blank domains into real working websites.”

It was a way to lower the cost of creating websites and content, Schrock says. WordPress had done something similar for blogs, but there was still no built-in way to make money from those sites. So Nuval and his team focused on tools for building and managing commercial sites. They raised …Next Page »

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Regulatory documents filed yesterday show that Cambridge, MA-based Greentech Media, which covers cleantech innovation through an online news site, market research, and events, has collected $825,000 of a planned $1.25 million equity funding round.

Contacted by Xconomy, Greentech Media’s president and CEO Scott Clavenna says the money is an extension of the $2.75 million Series B round that the company raised in 2008, and comes from the same investors, including EGORA Holding and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund.

The funding round is “really meant to shore up the plan for 2010,” Clavenna said in an e-mail note. “The summer has been good to us: traffic has doubled since the relaunch of the website in May, new Grid and Enterprise businesses [are] expanding our reach and customer base (grid event at PG&E HQ in San Francisco, Wal-Mart workshop here in Boston in September, etc.) and we have grand ambitions for next year, so there was consensus to expand the balance sheet a bit to make sure we were in a position to take any steps we needed to keep building.”

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Quite a few tasks in life require investigation and planning. Cooking dinner tonight? First you need to find a recipe, then you need to make a shopping list. Going on vacation? Before you can even begin to finalize your itinerary, you’ll probably collect reams of information on plane fares, local attractions, and places to stay.

The Internet obviously makes these types of research easier. But unfortunately, Web browsers don’t come with handy organizers where you can store and personalize all this information. Or at least, they didn’t until Springpad, the creation of Boston-based Spring Partners, came along. Springpad is a free online organizer that automatically files away the kinds of electronic information involved in planning many everyday tasks, from recipes to restaurant listings, then makes it easy for you to find that information and use it when you really need it.

But while the guys at Spring Partners are really nice (I’ve met them), they aren’t providing this service wholly out of the goodness of their hearts. The big idea behind Springpad is that giving consumers a free platform for organizing their lives can be a profitable business, if it also gives publishers and brands new ways to reach potential customers.

[Editor's Note: Every startup has a "big idea" that it thinks will catapult it to success. With this story, we inaugurate an occasional column highlighting the big ideas---and the resulting challenges---at companies in Xconomy's home cities.]

The 12-employee startup is out to prove its big idea by bringing consumers and advertisers together in two specific realms: cooking and parenting. Of course, as I detailed in a column published shortly after Springpad’s launch last November, you can collect many more types of information than that in a customized Springpad notebook, from holiday gift ideas to date-night plans to “Getting Things Done”-style to-do lists. But when it came to demonstrating how the platform can connect consumers and advertisers, explains co-founder and CEO Jeff Janer, the company had to start somewhere.

“The notion of focusing on food and moms first is that from a monetization standpoint, consumer product companies are keenly interested in moms who are running the household,” says Janer. “And food is a huge category. So if we can essentially build a beachhead in these two verticals, people will then discover that they can use this for a lot of other things as well.”

Last week, Janer walked me through Springpad’s latest features—there are quite a few new ones since I last wrote about the company—as well as the monetization mechanisms, which weren’t yet in place last November. You might think that that seeing marketing messages pop up amidst your personal data would be intrusive and annoying, but from the examples Janer showed me, Spring Partners has come up with tasteful ways to integrate brand messages that actually make the site more useful.

Say you’re planning dinner, and you find a lasagna recipe that sounds good at a cooking site like Epicurious, FoodNetwork.com, or MyRecipes.com. If the site’s publisher is a Springpad partner, you might see a “Spring It” button right alongside the recipe, allowing you to clip it into your Springpad account in one step. If the site isn’t a partner, you can do the same thing using a special browser bookmarklet. In either case, the Springpad software is smart enough to recognize that you’re saving a recipe and to grab the ingredient list, the source URL, and any images that went along with the recipe. It assembles all of this into a convenient little file, a lot like the old-fashioned 3-by-5 index cards that my mom uses to keep track of all her recipes.

But here’s the first marketing twist: say the lasagna recipe calls for Parmesan cheese. Springpad’s software will reason that you’re probably going cheese-shopping soon, so it might show …Next Page »

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When Ryan Damico was an undergraduate at MIT, he attended a training session at the university’s library. Ostensibly, the students were being taught how to properly organize sources for research papers. But it turned out to be a session on how to copy blocks of text from websites and paste them into Word documents, and how to record URLs by copying them into e-mails.

“It seemed like a backwards way of doing things,” Damico says. Instead, why not take notes directly on the Web page? This simple idea eventually became Damico’s startup, WebNotes.

Say you’re writing a research paper on Istanbul. You might find several websites of interest: the city’s Wikipedia page, its official website, and perhaps a news story on the construction of a new hotel. Instead of copying and pasting text from all of these websites, or printing them out to make notes and highlights, an online annotation tool like WebNotes lets you highlight important text directly on the computer screen. It’s an integration of the most user-friendly aspects of print with the vast resources of the Internet.

Taking notes online also has an extra advantage: the notes themselves can be archived, rearranged, and remixed. In a time where many industries and individuals are transitioning into a wholly digital realm, web annotation services like WebNotes help bridge the gap between page and pixel.

The story of WebNotes itself is a snapshot of Boston’s entrepreneurial culture. As an undergraduate, Damico would labor after classes on his pet project. Meanwhile, he completed a B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science, graduating from MIT in 2006. Damico took a job in the Tewksbury, MA headquarters of Avid, the video production giant. But the siren song of entrepreneurship was hard to ignore. After raising some funds from angel investors, Damico struck out on his own.

To grow his company, Damico looked close to home. He began by luring Bennett Rogers, MIT ‘07, away from a position at Jump Trading. Peter Lai, MIT ‘09, had been considering graduate school at Stanford, but decided his heart lay in the startup world. Matt Long, MIT ‘08, rounded out the WebNotes team. Damico had worked with each of them before on class projects or, in Lai’s case, a microgravity project for NASA.

The WebNotes team (from left to right): Matt Long, Peter Lai, Bennett Rogers, Ryan Damico, Alex King.

Last July, the group released a prototype at a meeting of the Web Innovators Group, a semi-monthly gathering of Boston Internet entrepreneurs. It was at the WebInno meeting that they picked up the last member of the current group, Alex King, who has a B.S. in business administration from Washington University.

“It’s kind of like The Wizard of Oz,” King says. “Ryan was just walking along and grabbed us to go with him.”

Another few months of development resulted in an invite-only beta version that the team shared with a sampling of people representing the audiences they figured their service would attract: bloggers, students, professors, and consultants. The beta testers praised WebNotes for its simple tools—”a pencil, rather than a Swiss Army knife,” as one blogger put it—and ease of use.

“Other annotation tools get really cluttered,” says King. “We wanted to pare down the number of features to keep it clean, responsive, and secure.”

After fixing some minor bugs, mostly involving the placement of the virtual sticky notes, WebNotes was ready for primetime. In May 2009, Damico’s team released the service to the public. The basic version is free, and allows users to …Next Page »

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EveryZing, the Cambridge, MA-based maker of search-related software for media companies, announced today that it has raised $8.25 million in Series C funding, including $3 million from Peacock Equity Fund, the venture investing wing of General Electric and NBC Universal. At the same time, EveryZing said NBC Universal will deploy its search technology across all NBC Universal Web properties, which include NBC.com, CNBC, Bravo, Sci-Fi, Telemundo, iVillage, and more than 80 other sites.

NBC Universal is by far the biggest customer EveryZing has ever landed, and Peacock’s participation represents the first time EveryZing has collected a strategic investment from a media and entertainment company. It also shows how EveryZing has evolved from a podcast indexing service into a major provider of white-label search services to giant media organizations, including CBS Radio and Fox Sports.

Peacock was joined in this financing round by existing investors Fairhaven Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Accel Partners, and BBN Technologies. EveryZing is a 2006 spinoff of BBN.

Last week I interviewed EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde about the funding; a transcript follows. He had some very interesting things to say about big media companies, who have generally been slow to figure out how to monetize video and audio content on the Internet. EveryZing’s technology is designed to help them figure out what content they really have and how deploy it in new ways that will attract both consumers and advertisers.

Big media companies “watched Google build a $20 billion business by knowing more about their content than they did,” Wilde says. “But the media companies have really gotten religion now, and they want help knowing everything they can know about every content object in their archives.”

Xconomy: Congratulations on the funding round. How does it break down, in terms of new versus existing investors?

Tom Wilde: $3 million of this round is from Peacock. The rest is from existing investors. We’ve raised about $22.5 million altogether.

X: And does the deal with NBC Universal cover all of their web properties?

TW: This is a master service agreement that spans all of the properties on the NBC Universal landscape. That includes CNBC, iVillage, Telemundo, and the cable networks, including Oxygen.

X: So you’ll be helping those websites make their content more visible to search engines.

TW: As an update around the company in general, we’ve moved away from our initial positioning of doing video SEO [search engine optimization] and we’ve moved toward universal search and publishing. By universal, I’m talking about the ability to index not just audio and video but text and images. That unique ability that we have from our speech-to-text algorithms and our natural language processing, combined with text and image search, means that we can now deliver a single search box for all of your content. We can also organize your content into topic pages for SEO purposes, and build out what’s almost a complete site with this automated appraoch. PetSide.com is one of the sites that we’ve built with NBC; it’s a pilot product, an experiment in building mini-vertical sites around topic areas where they have a lot of content and advertising demand.

X: NBC Universal doesn’t have a cable channel about pets, but you’re saying they have enough content about pets across all their existing properties that you can build a website out of it?

TW: Think of it this way—across the world of NBC Universal they have all this content which can be centered around all these different topics, if only it could be collected, organized, filtered, and repackaged. The vast majority of their investment is in the initial production of a piece of media, an article or a TV program, which is where a media company should be putting its money. If you releverage that content, all the new revenue falls to the bottom line. The beauty of the Web is that …Next Page »

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Fans of this column know that I spent months dithering over whether to buy Amazon’s Kindle 2 e-book reader. I had mercilessly panned the original Kindle, mainly for its ungainly looks. And while I was much more impressed by the Kindle 2 when it came out in February, I was put off by the $359 price tag, which left me casting about for more excuses to resist a purchase.

Well, I finally ran out of excuses and let my inner geek take over. My new Kindle 2 showed up last Wednesday, and I’ve been enjoying it immensely, for reasons I’ll detail below. But as luck would have it, my Kindle arrived exactly a week before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced another new Amazon device, the large-screen Kindle DX. So the first question I want to tackle is whether Kindle 2 owners should feel any buyer’s remorse—that is, whether they would have been better off waiting until this summer, when the DX, with its much bigger 9.7-inch screen, will start shipping. I don’t think so. The Kindle DX will be great for reading electronic documents where some extra formatting aids comprehension—meaning textbooks, business documents like PDF brochures and white papers, and maybe magazines and newspapers. But for any document where the text is primary, meaning the vast majority of current fiction and nonfiction literature, the DX will be overkill. And for $489, the announced price of the DX, you could buy a very good netbook or even a basic laptop and get access to a much broader world of digital media, and in color to boot.

Or you could spend nothing and simply read e-books on your mobile phone. The excellent resolution of smart phones like the iPhone actually makes them credible e-book readers. Companies like Lexcycle, Shortcovers, and Amazon itself have come out with very nice e-book software for the iPhone, and e-books are the fastest-growing category of applications in the iTunes App Store. But the iPhone’s weakness—-for purposes of reading, anyway—its its limited screen size, which means you have to flick to the next page every few seconds.

The Kindle 2 feels to me like the Goldilocks of information display devices: bigger than a smartphone, but smaller than a tablet PC. Its electronic ink display, which measures 6 inches diagonally, is more than twice the size of the iPhone’s screen. It can hold about the same amount of text as one standard paperback book page, depending on the font size you’ve selected. So you press the “next page” button only twice as often as you would turn the pages of a printed book (since the Kindle doesn’t have two facing pages, the way printed books do). But it’s still small enough to make the device extremely light and portable. You can read it comfortably using one hand. I can imagine pulling out my Kindle 2 on a bus or a subway car. I’ll be surprised if I ever see anyone do that with a Kindle DX.

Reading on the Kindle 2 is a beautiful experience. It is no less immersive than reading a printed book. (The first two e-books I read on the Kindle were The Guernsey Literary and Potato-Peel-Pie Society and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies—The Classic Regency Romance, Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem; I recommend both heartily.) Of course, I didn’t really need to be convinced on this score. I first fell in love with e-book devices in 1999, when NuvoMedia brought out the Rocket eBook—in fact, I liked it so much I went to work for the company for a couple of years. But I’m still amazed by how much displays have evolved over the past decade. The Kindle’s electronic paper display, made by Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, is sharp and clear. It sips electricity like a hummingbird, meaning the battery lasts for days between rechargings. And the screen’s momentary flicker when you turn a page—which is needed to fully erase the previous screen, sort of like shaking an Etch-a-Sketch—isn’t nearly as annoying as it was on the original Kindle, thanks to the improvements E Ink built into the Kindle 2’s electronics. In fact, the screen redraws itself quickly enough now to allow a fully interactive interface, with pop-up menus for doing things like jumping around within or between books.

Far more earthshaking, however, is Whispernet, the 3-G wireless network that Amazon built for the Kindle family of devices. Even if you left out the electronic paper screen, wirelessness would make the Kindle a huge improvement over all previous e-book devices, because it lets you shop for books, magazines, and newspapers on the device itself and download them instantly, from practically any location where you can get a cellular signal.

The fact that Amazon has also released an iPhone app for reading Kindle editions makes it clear that the company’s long-term e-book strategy is to sell content, not gadgets. (As David Pogue puts it, “The Kindle is just the razor. The books are the blades—ka-ching!”). Going wireless was a master stroke, because …Next Page »

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Until now, the only way to read the 400-plus-page American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (otherwise known as the Stimulus Bill) has been to download a 13-megabyte PDF version or scroll through messy, unpaginated HTML versions. But now Tizra, the Providence, RI online publishing company we profiled in February, has used its platform to create a searchable online version of the bill that breaks the giant document into easily navigable sections.

The Tizra version preserves the bill’s original formatting and page numbers, allowing users to reference or bookmark specific sections. The idea is to make the whole bill more Web-friendly—for example, by making it easier to cite specific spending provisions in the bill via social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Delicious. Tizra has also added a commenting function that lets users share their thoughts about specific pages of the bill.

“There is no single piece of information or legislation that has gained so much attention in recent times, yet there was clearly a lack of easy and useful access to this historic bill,” Tizra’s chief operating officer, Abe Dane, said in a statement. “With the media focusing so much attention on who actually read the bill, we thought it would be helpful to see how easy it was for the public, media and lawmakers to access and research it.”

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According to a report today in Fortune, publishing giant Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other prominent newspapers and magazines, is developing an e-reading device similar to the Amazon Kindle 2 and the Sony PRS-700.

Kenneth Bronfin, head of Hearst’s interactive media group, wouldn’t give Fortune details about the device, but he said Hearst had a “deep expertise” (in Fortune’s paraphrase) in e-reading technology. “I can’t tell you the details of what we are doing, but I can say we are keenly interested in this, and expect these devices will be a big part of our future,” Bronfin said.

Bronfin is almost certainly referring to Hearst’s longtime relationship with Cambridge, MA-based E Ink, the company that developed the “electronic paper” screen technology at the heart of both the Amazon and Sony devices. As I noted in my interview earlier this week with E Ink co-founder and CEO Russ Wilcox, Hearst Interactive Media is among a group of strategic investors that have together poured more than $150 million into E Ink’s low-power, microcapsule-based, non-backlit display technology.

According to Hearst insiders cited in the Fortune article, the new device will have a screen that’s larger than the 6-inch-diagonal screen on the Kindle 2 and the PRS-700—probably about the size of a standard 8.5-by-11-inch piece of paper. That’s consistent with what Wilcox told me in our interview. “What you’ll see next is a great range of screen sizes,” Wilcox said when I asked him what improvements E Ink was focusing on post-Kindle. “So far the industry has been using the 6-inch size, which has helped to drive down the cost for everybody, by consolidating on one manufacturing process. But we are starting to introduce displays that are in many different sizes.”

I’ve been unable to reach E Ink for comment this evening, but the company is unlikely to confirm any details of the Fortune story, given its customers’ sensitivities. Wilcox did tell me E Ink has to be “very careful” about managing its relationships with rivals like Amazon and Sony, who use the same 6-inch E Ink screen and the same electronic drivers in their competing devices.

TechFlash and other outlets are speculating today on what the Hearst disclosure could mean for the company’s chain of newspapers, many of which have been teetering financially. (The Seattle P-I said on January 9 that Hearst had put the paper up for sale, and that if no takers could be found within 60 days, it would close. The 60 days will be up on March 10.) Hearst reportedly plans to sell the devices to its publishing subsidiaries—which would in turn sell them or perhaps give them to readers—and keep a slice of the subscription revenues for itself. So the day when news organizations like Hearst turn to e-paper delivery as a way around the crushing expense of printing and delivering old-fashioned newsprint could arrive much sooner than anyone anticipated. It’s unclear, though, whether such a delivery system could be brought online in time to save struggling papers like the P-I and the Chronicle.

But it does seem that the Fortune article’s closing question—”Will readers give up their newspapers and magazines for these new readers?”—will turn out to be moot. Instead, the question will be how many newspaper and magazine companies can afford to keep publishing on paper.

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Almost as soon as Amazon released the Kindle e-book reader in November 2007, I settled in to wait for the Kindle 2. Like many other observers, I thought Amazon had made a good first stab at building a usable e-book device, but that it needed a sleeker profile, better ergonomics, new features such as text-to-speech capability, and a lower price point. Well, 15 months later, Amazon has thoughtfully delivered on most of my requests. From all accounts, the Kindle 2, which was unveiled on February 9 and began arriving on customers’ doorsteps this week, is such a giant improvement that it makes the first Kindle look like a clunky lab prototype. (Now if they’d only consider lowering the $359 price tag.)

But there’s someone who has been waiting a lot longer than I have for the Kindle 2, and for the huge buzz it’s creating around e-reading—about 11 years longer, in fact. It’s Russ Wilcox, co-founder and CEO of E Ink, the Cambridge, MA company behind the low-power, high-contrast “electronic paper” screen that is the Kindle’s main selling point. I had a chance to meet with Wilcox on Tuesday—and to play briefly with a Kindle 2, which had just arrived that morning. My first question was about whether any of E Ink’s founders thought it would take so much time, and so much money, to bring e-paper to the mass market.

After all, E Ink was launched in 1997, and has had to raise more than $150 million—mostly from big industry players like Intel, Motorola, Philips, Hearst Interactive Media, and Japan’s TOPPAN Printing—to transform e-paper from a drawing-board concept into a manufacturable product. Conceived at the MIT Media Lab, E Ink’s material consists of a layer of tiny fluid-filled microcapsules that contain positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles. Applying a voltage across the microcapsules pushes the white particles to the top and pulls the black particles to the bottom, forming white pixels that are clearly visible without the backlighting needed in traditional liquid-crystal displays. Applying the opposite voltage across the microcapsules creates black pixels. The material is “bistable,” meaning the particles stay in place after a voltage is applied—which is why the batteries in the Kindle, the Sony PRS-700, and other devices with E Ink screens last so long.

It sounds simple enough, but Wilcox says the company spent six years getting the technology to the point where Sony could use it in the world’s first e-paper-based e-book reader, the Librié, introduced in 2004. And it’s taken another five years for Sony, Amazon, and their competitors to create e-publishing ecosystems that consumers are interested in inhabiting (meaning not just the devices, but the content available for them and the mechanisms for purchasing, storing, searching, and annotating that content).

So while E Ink has been happy to leave the media spotlight to Amazon this month, the Kindle 2 and the near-iPhone-scale excitement that has greeted it represent an important coming-of-age for the 100-employee company. It’s perhaps the first moment when the founders’ vision for a world of publishing sans paper has seemed feasible. E Ink continues to explore applications for its e-paper displays outside the realm of publishing—Wilcox and his team showed me examples like a remote key fob for high-end automobiles, a credit-card-sized one-time password device for logging into a secure computer network, and a decorative cell phone cover—but the company’s core mission, Wilcox told me, is to “provide the world’s best digital reading experience.” That means creating better displays for handheld e-book devices, but it also means designing larger screens—and eventually, color versions—that would be better for magazine-style or newspaper-style content.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty over the prospects for such technologies. Many potential Kindle buyers (myself included) are balking at the device’s steep price tag, and if Amazon comes out with a rumored tablet-sized version aimed at the college textbook market, it’s sure to be even more expensive. (When I asked marketing vice president Sriram Peruvemba whether E Ink is working with Amazon on such a product, his answer was “No comment.”)

But over the long term, Wilcox expects that simple economics will drive more and more print-media companies toward electronic platforms, and that E Ink will be there to scoop up their business. When Silicon Alley Insider calculated recently that the New York Times could save more than $300 million every year if it stopped printing and delivering its newspaper and simply gave every subscriber a free Kindle, it was with tongue firmly in cheek. But for Wilcox, such suggestions are deadly serious. “What we’ve got here is a technology that could be saving the [global print media] $80 billion a year,” he insists.

Below are some of the other interesting outtakes from my conversation with Wilcox.

On the early days of E Ink, and the importance of being naive:

I co-founded E Ink with three fellows out of MIT and with Jerry Rubin, the founder of Lexis-Nexis. I wrote the business plan in my study, and got copies bound at Staples, and mailed it out through Kinko’s, and all that. I did all the things you should apocryphally do when you’re an entrepreneur. At the time, we had no idea it was going to take so long. It may be that naivete is your friend when you’re starting out in such a daunting venture. We understood that it was probably going to take two years to make something that people wanted to buy. And in terms of making something that looked good, we did that. But what we didn’t see in the beginning, and learned over time, was that it would take another two years to go from something that looked good to something that would look good for many years under all operating conditions—in other words, to achieve stability and robustness. And then it would take another two years to get something that you could reproducibly manufacture, at an affordable cost point.

On finding a sustainable business model:

We went through the bubble bursting like everyone else. We had several different applications on the table. And we had to figure out how we were going to have a big impact on the world with a very small amount of cash. We came up with a grand vision of doing “radio paper”—a complete device and a service. [Essentially, the Kindle, but about eight years before it was feasible---Eds.] But it became clear that, even after spending $100 million, we still had …Next Page »

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For traditional print publishers, the fact that more and more people are buying book-length works online and reading them on their laptops, iPhones, or Kindles is both encouraging and anxiety-provoking. The rise of e-books opens up potential new markets. But it means publishers have to figure out the best way to share their content electronically—and whether to hand control of the electronic publishing process over to Google’s Book Search project or to a big retailer like Amazon, where their books might get lost alongside thousands of others.

In Providence, RI, there’s a tiny startup called Tizra that’s dedicated to helping publishers take charge of distributing their own e-books, without having to build their own e-publishing infrastructure. All a publisher needs is an Adobe PDF version of a book it wants to sell online. (Most publishers already use the format as part of their production process.) Once the publisher has uploaded the file to Tizra’s online service, the company’s software chops the book into individual pages, makes those pages searchable by Google, and organizes them in customizable Web-based storefronts where publishers can set prices and sell content by the page, by the chapter, or in any increment they please.

Try doing that through Amazon’s Kindle platform or Google Book Search, which only allow users to buy whole books. “We let content owners remix, brand, price and sell their e-books the way they want, rather than the way Amazon or Google want,” says Abe Dane, Tizra’s president and COO.

University presses—which, as you might expect, have oodles of specialized content awaiting digital distribution—are eating it up. Just one year after introducing its Tizra Publisher Sofware-as-a-Service platform, Tizra has landed major accounts with the presses at MIT, Indiana University, and Duke University, as well as a partnership with the Association of American University Presses. And last month, it added a feature allowing any content owner to join the platform and create an online bookstore instantly.

Dane says the Tizra system, designed under the direction of the company’s computer-scientist CEO David Durand, was built mainly for content owners who have lots of material to share, but don’t have it in the formats (such as XML or “.epub”) demanded by many distributors, and don’t want to give up control over how it’s sliced, priced, and presented. “There was a real opportunity to take all this know-how we had and create a Software-as-a-Service platform that would enable publishers to not only get up and running very quickly but also iterate on the market, which is what people need to do if they are going to survive in current conditions,” Dane says. “In the world of Amazon and Google you’ve got to find a way to differentiate your product, and you’ve got to work at your marketing and your identity.”

There’s no proof yet, of course, that digital distribution is going to be a big money-maker for academic book publishers, or anyone else. Even in the trade-book world, where platforms like the Kindle have made the biggest inroads, e-book sales still amount to a tiny slice of overall book sales. And there are legitimate questions about whether readers want to consume weighty academic content in digital formats.

But Dane believes there’s demand for the type of content Tizra is helping to liberate. “We started out in the reference world, where people have a question in their mind and they are looking for an answer,” he says. Google is great at finding answers, he says—and if a book is in Tizra Publisher, Google can show snippets from it, just as the search company does with everything else on the Web. But people who need accurate, reliable answers will be open to paying a premium for …Next Page »

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A growing number of online media companies offer mobile-friendly versions of their articles or videos, often resizing or stripping down the material to make it more easily accessible on smaller screens, and at lower bandwidth. But if you’re a cell phone owner who wants to spend a few minutes scanning mobile sites, there’s a problem. While there are services that aggregate specific types of mobile media, such as Veveo’s vtap for videos, there’s no central place to scan all of the most popular mobile content.

Today, however, Denver, CO-based Buzzwire is launching just such a service. The 20-employee startup, which obtained $4 million in venture funding from Boston’s Spark Capital and Matrix Partners in 2007, is rolling out a new community-driven website at m.buzzwire.com that collects mobile-friendly content from around the Internet, including sources like CNN, The Boston Globe, ABC.com, Slashdot, The New York Times, and People. It’s “something that hasn’t been done in mobile—a kind of mashup of Digg and Yahoo Buzz,” says founder, chairman, and chief product officer Andrew MacFarlane.

Some of the stories and videos listed on the site are selected by Buzzwire’s editors, and others are sent in by users—but all of it’s been vetted to make sure that it’s easily accessible from the user’s mobile device. The service is similar to Digg in that many of the stories are contributed by readers, and it’s similar to Yahoo Buzz in that stories are ranked according to how many people are clicking on them and sharing them. It differs from both Digg and Yahoo Buzz, however, in that users can’t actually vote stories up or down—the rankings are calculated by Buzzwire’s own algorithms.

When Buzzwire launched in 2007, it was tackling a very different problem: delivering actual streaming audio and video to cellular subscribers’ phones. And that’s still part of the company’s business—AT&T, Verizon, and Alltel use its platform, among others. But the new mobile content aggregation site “is what we meant to do from the beginning,” says MacFarlane. “We are big believers in the mobile Web. Ultimately, mobile devices are going to vastly outnumber PCs in terms of how content is addressed on the Internet, and we’re just trying to design a service that makes finding good content as easy as possible.”

Readers will like the service because the ranking algorithms will generally favor the highest-quality content, and publishers will like it because it will drive more traffic to their mobile sites, MacFarlane says. “This year 60 to 70 percent of publishers say they’re trying to figure out how to adapt content for and attract traffic to their mobile websites,” he says. “This is a place where users can go to find what’s interesting, we’ll send the traffic off to the original sources.”

Publishers can keep the cycle going by including buttons on their mobile websites that allow users to automatically share their favorite content at Buzzwire. MacFarlane says these so-called “Buzzie” buttons are “the first sharing buttons in the mobile world”—TV Guide Online is one of the first publishers to adopt them. But even if a story doesn’t have a Buzzie button, readers can send a link to Buzzwire via e-mail (to post@buzzwire.com) or text message (to the short code BUZZ9 or 28999).

Buzzwire earns money on the new portal through the advertisements interspersed with the story listings. The mobile advertising business is in turmoil, with many companies in the space hard-pressed to recruit as many advertisers as they or their publishing partners would like. But for the service’s introductory “beta” period, Buzzwire has struck a deal with a single advertising agency, New York-based Deutsch, to fill up all of the available ad inventory on its mobile directory. So for now, Deutsch clients such as DirecTV, Kodak, and the Michael J. Fox Foundation have exclusive advertising rights at m.buzzwire.com. And after the beta period, according to MacFarlane, the company expects to work with other agencies and advertising networks to create “rich video advertising” tailored for specific types of mobile handsets. (Publishers can usually charge advertisers a higher rate for video ads than for typical text or display ads.)

Buzzwire gained a high-profile leader in December in the shape of CEO Greg Osberg, the former president and worldwide publisher of Newsweek and Newsweek.com and the former president of sales and marketing for CNET. MacFarlane, who had been CEO prior to Osberg’s arrival, continues to direct the company’s product strategy. He says the company has between 20 and 30 employees, all based in Denver. (Buzzwire had a Boston office until summer 2008, but closed it to cut costs, MacFarlane says.)

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Seattle-based Evo Media Group unveiled DevHub.com, a free Web publishing platform and content editor, to the public today. DevHub helps people create, manage, and monetize niche websites. Evo Media is backed by some of the same angel investors behind Seattle startups BuddyTV and Pet Holdings.

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At a press conference this morning in New York City, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos officially unveiled the Kindle 2, the second version of the Seattle-based e-retailer’s popular e-book reading device. Like its predecessor, the Kindle 2 features an electronic-paper screen devised by Cambridge, MA-based E Ink. But Bezos detailed a number of new features, including text-to-speech capability, potentially making every e-book into an audio book as well.

The new device has 2 gigabytes of internal memory, seven times more storage than the original Kindle, or enough for about 1,500 books, according to Bezos’s presentation. It is also thinner and lighter than the original. It weighs 10 ounces and, at 0.36 inches in thickness, is slimmer than the Apple iPhone (0.48 inches).

The Kindle 2 will have the same price as the original, $359. It’s available for pre-order now and will ship starting February 24, according to Amazon’s product page for the gadget.

Amazon says the Kindle 2’s 600 x 800-pixel e-paper display can show 16 shades of gray, compared to the previous screen’s four shades, and has been improved to re-draw the screen 20 percent faster. The need for E Ink’s displays to erase themselves before redrawing, resulting in a momentary blinking effect, had been one of the annoyances listed by early Kindle buyers.

The design for the new Kindle also appears to address another commonly voiced complaint, the placement of the next-page or previous-page buttons, which made it too easy to flip pages unintentionally. In the new version, those keys are smaller, and don’t occupy the entire left and right sides of the device, as before.

To help promote the new Kindle, Amazon persuaded celebrated horror novelist Stephen King to write a story involving the Kindle that will be available, for a time, exclusively on the Kindle platform. King was on hand for the New York press conference, and read part of the story on stage. This isn’t, however, the first time King has written a work exclusively for electronic platforms—his 2000 short story “Riding the Bullet” was also published as an e-book.

The Kindle 2’s text-to-speech capability—one of the features I urged Amazon to consider in an essay last fall—is still “experimental,” according to Amazon’s press release. The feature lets users listen to a synthesized male or female voice, and to switch between reading or listening modes. Pages turn automatically in sync with the synthesized voice. Anything that can be displayed on the Kindle, including newspapers and blogs, can be converted to speech, the company says.

For Kindle 2, Amazon has kept the feature that attracted some of the biggest raves for the first Kindle—its ability to quickly download books over a wireless network called “Whispernet.” But the company has added a new “Whispersync” feature that can sync content and bookmarks across multiple Kindles and “with a range of mobile devices in the future,” according to the press release. (Amazon said last week that it plans to make Kindle-formatted e-books available for reading on mobile phones.)

Bezos also said the new device’s battery lasts 25 percent longer than its predecessors, and lasts as long as two weeks between charges.

Both Engadget and CrunchGear offered informative live-blog renditions of this morning’s press conference.

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Portland, OR-based FreeRange Communications, a mobile publishing firm, announced it has been bought by Handmark, a mobile media company in Kansas City, MO. Financial terms of the deal were not given. FreeRange works with publishers like The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, CBS, and PaidContent.

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ThePlatform, a Seattle-based online video firm, announced it has partnered with the Australian publisher News Digital Media to manage video across 50 sites, including The Australian, news.com.au, and Vogue.com.au. ThePlatform is an independent subsidiary of Comcast.

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