A small Seattle-area company is blazing a trail in the crowded field of mobile marketing. Kirkland, WA-based HipCricket, a company founded in 2004 to do mobile marketing for brands and media companies, has been growing its revenue significantly from quarter to quarter and aims to be profitable for the first time by the end of this year.

It’s a big step for HipCricket, which has been diligently chirping away in a nascent but noisy industry. Mobile marketing essentially just means advertising via mobile devices. The sector has gained in popularity since the rise of text messaging, particularly in Europe and Asia. But marketing firms, at least in the U.S., have largely struggled to make much money in mobile. So HipCricket makes for a compelling case study in how to deliver the goods for big brands—all while helping create a new industry.

On Friday, I spoke with Ivan Braiker, HipCricket’s co-founder and chief executive, after his talk at a Northwest Entrepreneur Network venture breakfast. Braiker previously co-founded Satellite Music Network, the first radio network to distribute live, 24-hour satellite programming. He has extensive experience in building radio networks and in the broadcasting industry.

Things at HipCricket have been very busy, he says. “Even in the down economy, the activity level has been incredible,” Braiker says. “Mobile is getting to be better understood on the brand level.” He didn’t disclose any specific sales numbers.

The company was self-funded in its early days, followed by a friends and family round, and then a round of outside investment. HipCricket went public on London’s Alternative Investment Market in November 2007, only to be de-listed this summer after the markets crashed. The firm, which is now privately held, is backed by some prominent investors, including Joe Schocken from Seattle-based Broadmark Capital.

One of its key advantages is its deep relationships in broadcasting. HipCricket’s customers include some 300 local and national radio and TV stations, including KZOK, KUBE, and KOMO-TV in Seattle, and KIIS-FM in Los Angeles. The company also does marketing for about 50 brands, including Arby’s, Macy’s, Coca-Cola, Rite Aid Pharmacy, and Harley-Davidson. “It’s all about creating engaged communities,” Braiker says.

The technology is important too. HipCricket’s software and services, for which it charges a subscription fee, lets broadcasters and brands track response rates to ads based on keywords, type of media, or time of day—all in real-time. Braiker says this is a key differentiator for his business. “There’s a new vendor every day that gets into this. But they don’t understand the millions of dollars of software we have that parses data and comes up with sophisticated analytics,” he says.

HipCricket, which has just shy of 60 employees (it has added nine so far this year), now seems to be growing steadily. Earlier this year, the company expanded to Mexico and is seeing a fair bit of growth in the Latino advertising community. In the next few months, Braiker says, HipCricket will be pursuing some “new, unique things” in the mobile space, including “mobile coupons integrated with point of sale,” a mobile billing service that bypasses wireless carriers, and other e-commerce applications. “We see HipCricket as a full-service mobile marketing company,” he says.

Asked for his advice to entrepreneurs in the sector, Braiker says, “Understand you’re going to need endless energy. You have to clearly see your vision, you have to understand that vision, and never stop evangelizing. If you believe you’re right, you have to stay with it.” He adds that the most important factor in success is, in a word, “tenaciousness.”

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At first, the mission of the Public Radio Exchange was simple enough: Create an online clearinghouse for news-and-culture radio programming where public radio stations would have an easier time shopping for shows and independent producers would have a better shot at getting their stuff on the air. PRX launched that system in 2003, and it’s now used by 400 stations across the country. But one thing leads to another—and under the entrepreneurial leadership of its founding executive director, Jake Shapiro, the Cambridge, MA, non-profit has developed from a mere marketplace into an increasingly disruptive force in the public radio ecosystem.

Through projects like the Public Radio Player, an iPhone application that lets users listen to virtually any public radio program instantly, PRX is showing the way toward a future in which individual stations, such as Boston’s own WBUR and WGBH, may have drastically different, probably smaller, roles. But at the same time, the opportunities for public radio to serve specific communities and to distribute more types of programming from a broader range of sources may be growing.

I wanted to sit down with Shapiro to pick his brain about the Public Radio Player and PRX’s other game-changing projects because public radio is such an important cultural and intellectual resource in innovative regions like Boston, San Diego, and Seattle—and because the public radio ecosystem still tends to attract the people doing the most thought-provoking audio storytelling out there, whether those stories travel via Internet packets or frequency-modulated radio waves. In my two-hour interview with him at the organization’s Harvard Square office last week, I asked him to outline how PRX was born and how the organization is guiding public radio through an era when old-fashioned broadcasting is gradually giving way to personalized, Internet-based multicasting. The interview is drastically condensed below.

Xconomy: So, how did you get into the world of digital radio distribution?

Jake Shapiro: Right prior to PRX, I’d been associate director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society [at Harvard Law School] for about a year, after having been producer for The Connection on WBUR for Chris Lydon. When that show and the [WBUR] management ended up getting into a tussle over the ownership and future direction of the show, Chris started a production company that ended up creating Open Source Media. [Lydon also became a fellow at the Berkman Center, where he and Dave Winer, another fellow, created the first-ever RSS-based podcasts.] That was my introduction to the business of public media and a segue into my work at the Berkman Center. This was the summer of 2002 and there was a lot of work going on there at that time around intellectual property and copyrights. The Creative Commons was just getting its start. Digital distribution of music, in particular, was becoming a focus of transformative change.

That tied to my other hat, which has been as an independent rock musician, guitarist, cellist, and cofounder of a number of bands. I don’t look like it, but I’m a Korean rock star. It’s the ultimate success story in long-tail music distribution. My band Two Ton Shoe, which we started in the ’90s in Boston, was one of the first 100 bands to sign up on MP3.com, so we were pretty involved in digital media from the beginning. One of our songs, called Medicine, took off of its own accord in the Korean blogosphere, and started to get passed around by aspiring Korean musicians. We got a call out of the blue from a guy who said he represented a Korean record label, and he wanted to know if he could represent us in South Korea…They licensed our back catalog and put out a double album, and a few years ago, this was in 2005, they called and said they’d like to fly us over to Seoul to perform. It was a true Spinal Tap moment—the fulfillment of your teenage rock star fantasies. The true indicator of the phenomenon is that there are now more hits on YouTube of Korean bands covering our songs than on our songs themselves.

So music and the Internet as a change agent for the arts and fans; public radio producing; the Berkman Center; all of those things only in retrospect ended up being the perfect training ground for what PRX would be as an opportunity and an idea.

X: Where did the original idea for PRX come from?

JS: Two partners—the Station Research Group in Maryland, which is a group that does strategy research and policy work for public radio stations, and Jay Allison, who runs [the NPR productions] This I Believe and Lost and Found Sound and Transom.org and is a true pied piper of public radio—had taken a look at the industry back in 2001, 2002 and said …Next Page »

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San Diego-based Rayspan said today that it has collected $12.5 million in Series B funding to finance its work on advanced materials that could be used to make smaller, more sensitive, and more versatile antennas for mobile devices. Existing investor Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, CA, provided part of the money, with the rest coming from new investor Khosla Ventures, also of Menlo Park.

The wireless world is fraught with different, often competing standards for delivering data to mobile devices across small or large distances, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 2G and 3G cellular, and GPS. Coming down the road just behind those are newer technologies like WiMax, Long Term Evolution (LTE), and ultrawideband. It takes a fancy antenna, or several of them, to make a mobile device like a cell phone work on several of these standards at once. And WiMax and LTE work best using an altogether new type of antenna called multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO).

The problem with MIMO antennas to date has been that to work efficiently, they need to be of a certain size—about half of the wavelength of the radio frequency they’re designed to detect. If you make them small enough to fit inside a mobile device, they lose sensitivity.

Rayspan, founded in 2006, is taking advantage of progress in a field called metamaterials to make much smaller MIMO antennas that still have high performance.

Metamaterials are composite materials that are structured on a macroscopic level to have unusual optical or electromagnetic properties. Maha Achour, Rayspan’s co-founder and chief technology officer, has applied for patents on a range of radio-related applications for metamaterials, including MIMO antennas (also called “air interfaces”) with individual elements that are as small as one-tenth to one-fifteenth of a wavelength. Such elements can be printed directly on a circuit board and spaced very closely together, potentially giving small mobile devices full MIMO performance.

Rayspan hopes to license the intellectual property behind its metamaterial antennas to wireless device manufacturers making cellular, Wi-Fi, WiMax, and multiband equipment. Pierre Lamond, a general partner at Khosla ventures, said in today’s announcement that the firm believes Rayspan will become “an industry-leading air interface provider in the huge wireless markets they target.”

Achour is a San Diego wireless industry veteran with a doctorate in physics from MIT. She has worked at
San Diego Research Center, UlmTech, Optical Access, LightPointe, and Tiernan Communication. Her co-founder Franz Birkner, Rayspan’s CEO and president, is managing director of Express Ventures and is a veteran of Dot Wireless (acquired by Texas Instruments), Cognet Microsystems (acquired by Intel), and ComStream (acquired by Spar Aerospace).

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In case you missed it over the holiday, an electrical fire and power outage at Fisher Plaza near Seattle Center late on Thursday night disrupted a number of websites and services, including those of local tech companies Redfin, Survey Analytics, and Big Fish Games, as well as Microsoft’s Bing Travel site (formerly Farecast), Verizon’s DSL service in the Seattle area, and local television and radio stations including KOMO.

There were no injuries, and most operations were back to normal by the weekend, though Bing Travel was down until late Saturday morning. The news was reported by local and national outlets, including TechFlash, The Seattle Times, The Seattle P-I, and CNET.

Internet companies were directly affected as far away as Marlborough, MA-based Authorize.net (now owned by CyberSource), a credit-card service for online merchants that uses a data center at Fisher Plaza. And there was a ripple effect from there. Annette Tonti, the CEO of Rhode Island-based MoFuse, a network of build-it-yourself mobile sites, says her company’s service was disrupted on Friday because it uses Authorize.net to process credit cards. “The issue for us was getting customers signed up,” Tonti says. “However, we were not affected too long and everything appeared to be working fine by later in the day.”

“Companies should have servers at various physical locations, spread far apart, to keep isolated incidents like a fire from taking down a service,” says David Berube, MoFuse’s founder and chief architect. “I’m sure Authorize.net does have a redundant system, and their quick response to get service back up shows to me that they do have some sort of redundancies in place.”

Closer to home, there has been quite a lot of discussion about what went wrong, and how companies can better prepare for such outages, which seem rather inevitable. The cause of this particular fire is still under investigation.

Praerit Garg, co-founder of Symform, a data storage startup in Seattle, agrees it’s important …Next Page »

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I have a bunch of wireless devices at home, but none of them are radios. And if I’m at all typical, then the radio business has a big problem.

For broadcasters, getting radio programming to people like me, who find most or all of their news, information, and entertainment on the Internet, is challenging enough. But the problem gets even more acute when you consider that more and more of us are accessing the net using our cell phones. A lot of phones today can play podcasts and streaming audio—but when it comes to finding a specific radio station’s audio stream on a mobile device, there aren’t a lot of good tools. And that means members of the mobile generation are increasingly cut off from their local radio stations.

Now, if we were only talking about commercial radio, with its evanescent mix of Top 40 music, shock-jock antics, and right-wing political talk, I wouldn’t be too worked up about radio’s crisis. It would be just one more old medium, like newspapers, finding itself left behind by technological change. The problem is that public radio—one of the country’s key bastions of arts, culture, and independent news and analysis, not to mention jazz, folk, and classical music—is also endangered.

Fortunately, the public radio community is awake to the problem. “Cell phone ownership and its many uses and applications also provide both potential and fragmentation” for public radio, the Public Radio Program Directors Association concluded from a survey it conducted last year. “As consumers avail themselves of many different functions on these devices, it will be imperative that Public Radio streaming efforts, as well as related digital products, be available on these gadgets that are rapidly become handheld computers.”

This isn’t just idle talk. Late last year, a coalition led by the Cambridge, MA-based Public Radio Exchange (PRX) created the best tool yet for accessing live public radio streams on a mobile device: The Public Radio Tuner, a free app for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. (The effort also brought in American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Interactive, and Public Radio International, and was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

I was ecstatic when I found the app recently. I love shows like “On Point,” “All Things Considered,” “Marketplace,” “NPR: Science Friday,” “Car Talk,” “Fresh Air,” “Radio Lab,” and “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” But the only radio I own is the one in my car. Since my commute to work is a disappointingly short 12 minutes—and I often bike or walk—I only hear infrequent, short snippets of these shows.

But I’ve always got my iPhone with me. So now I just turn on the Public Radio Tuner, pull up my favorite local station (WBUR), and listen to my heart’s content over my phone’s 3G data connection. The audio quality is perfectly adequate, and I can listen when I’m at home just by hooking my iPhone up to my HDTV’s audio input jacks (using a $6 Belkin cable splitter that I should have bought ages ago).

Perhaps the coolest thing about the tuner is that …Next Page »

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If you’re a glass-half-empty person, you might say the mesh networking technology pioneered by Boston’s Ember Corporation is a solution in search of a problem. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’d probably call the company’s eight-year history a case study in flexible thinking. Regardless, after years of market struggles, Ember seems to have found a niche where its technology for self-organizing digital radio networks will shine: smart-energy systems designed to give utilities and consumers more control over how they use energy.

Andy Wheeler and Robert Poor, who built experimental wireless sensor networks for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency while they were students at MIT, founded Ember in 2001 with $3 million in seed funding from Polaris Venture Partners, DFJ New England, Stata Venture Partners, and Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe. (In subsequent funding rounds over the years, the company has raised an additional $78 million.) The idea was to find applications for the concept of ad-hoc mesh networking, in which pairs of transceivers in a network set up two-way communications as conditions allow, and messages hop from node to node until they reach their destination (roughly the same way they do inside the Internet).

In its early years, Ember made mesh-networking software for other companies’ microchips, usually equipment designed to be embedded in temperature sensors for petroleum refinery pipes and other similar devices. But over time, the company has evolved into a chipmaker in its own right—just one that happens to have a special expertise in the software running on its chips. And it has gone open-source, investing heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking.

Wheeler and Poor have both moved on to other companies. Meanwhile, Ember has moved on to new application areas—with the biggest near-term payoffs likely to emerge from a utility industry initiative called the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. In pilot AMI projects in states like California and Texas, computerized “smart meters,” or energy gateways, are being attached to utility customers’ homes. The devices communicate wirelessly both with utility control centers and with in-home thermostats, displays, and smart appliances, allowing utilities to dial back electrical usage during hours of peak demand and giving customers more information about their energy consumption patterns. The home side of these communications depends on technology from Ember, which is the leading supplier of communications chips for AMI devices.

“The core technology is not that different from what Andy and Rob had in mind,” Ember’s president and CEO, Robert LeFort, says. “But it’s being used in applications they never had in mind when they were developing it.”

LeFort joined Ember in 2006 from semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies, where he had spent four years as president of the company’s North American operations. I interviewed him about Ember’s development and its business opportunities last week at the company’s headquarters in the Fort Point district of South Boston. An abridged version of our talk follows.

Xconomy: How did Ember evolve from a software company into a chip company?

Robert LeFort: It’s just very hard to make a business case for embedded software. You typically earn a royalty on a per-instance basis, and you don’t usually cover even the cost of developing the software. So you need to be doing more than just software. The end devices and modules [using Ember's software] were interesting to us, and chips seemed to be a better fit. So in 2003 we introduced our first chip, the 2420, which we still sell today. And in 2004 Ember acquired RF [radio frequency] technology and the chip team that developed it from Cambridge, UK-based Cambridge Consultants. [The company's main products today are newer microprocessor models called the EM250 and EM260, both announced in 2006.] We monetize our software through the chips. I think it’s fair to say that there’s nobody who uses our software who doesn’t also buy our chips. And if you look at our competitors from the 2000 era, the ones who went up the chain and sold just software have not fared so well.

X: Talk a little about the company’s recent turn toward smart energy applications.

RL: There were a variety of things that converged, and some other things that fell off the table. When I first came, we were very excited about commercial buildings and lighting. Wireless mesh networking is perfect for that application, but we learned that it is a very fragmented market that moves very slowly. It’s still a good market for us, but it’s incremental. The home automation market is also good, but somewhat limited until they get the costs down and the maturity up.

Meanwhile, I think smart energy will work really well. It’s something we saw from being so tightly involved with the ZigBee Alliance, just from being down in the trenches and talking to guys about what they were doing. I would say smart energy only made up about 10 percent of our revenue in 2008, but we expect it to be 40 or 50 percent in 2009.

X: You mentioned the ZigBee Alliance. As I remember it, when ZigBee started out years ago it was mainly pitched as low-bandwidth alternative to the Bluetooth standard for home entertainment and automation applications. The one that sticks out in my mind was a remote control for opening and closing your blinds, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at the time. But Ember became instrumental in adapting the standard for more advanced applications, like monitoring devices for their energy usage. How did Ember help to advance that standard, specifically?

RL: We were big proponents of the ZigBee Pro networking standard, and fundamental to that is true ad-hoc routing. We believe that RF links are inherently unreliable. Unlike a Bluetooth device or a cell phone, a temperature sensor that loses its signal can’t move six inches to the right to get a better signal. You need a network that can handle that efficiently. We wanted to build a network where you wouldn’t be constrained by …Next Page »

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As the CDG North America Regional Conference convenes in San Diego today, Perry LaForge, the trade association’s chief executive, says he has a lot to feel good about.

LaForge says he started working on behalf of CDMA, or code-division multiple access, after getting a preview of the wireless technology in 1988, when San Diego’s Qualcomm was barely three years old. It wasn’t until 1989 that Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs actually demonstrated his concept to the telecommunications industry.

“I pulled together the initial carrier consortium,” says LaForge. “I worked with the Japanese and Koreans… We convinced Samsung and LG to produce cell phones based on CDMA.”

LaForge’s has a bigger and more formal role now as head of the CDG, the CDMA Development Group. Looking back over the past 20 years, he says, “I think we have fundamentally changed the wireless landscape…We fundamentally changed an industry” that had already committed to a rival wireless technical standard. “It’s something that I take a great deal of pride in.”

The CDG represents roughly 100 leading CDMA operators and wireless equipment manufacturers. Yet as several hundred people gather for the two-day conference, industry questions about the viability of CDMA still seem to linger.

Even though Qualcomm ranks today as the world’s second-biggest maker of wireless chips, the rival GSM Association (for Global Systems Mobile communications) says 82 percent of the global market for mobile devices is based on its digital technology standard.

Despite GSM’s global dominance, and a broader migration to next-generation GSM technologies, LaForge maintains that CDMA operators continue to upgrade their networks to provide capacity for escalating voice and bandwidth-intensive data traffic

“There’s a lot of talk about 4G systems, but one thing I suspect is that when there are economic downturns that people tend to hunker down with the systems they have,” LaForge says. CDG members also have worked aggressively to reduce costs, getting the cost of CDMA handsets below $30 apiece, LaForge says.

The global economic downturn became apparent at Qualcomm earlier this month when the chip maker reported a 22 percent drop in profit in the quarter that ended in September.

Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told analysts last week that in the face of slowing demand, the company has stopped developing a next-generation wireless technology called Ultra Mobile Broadband, or UMB. Jacobs says the chip maker will put its resources into another high-speed technology called Long Term Evolution that Verizon Wirelss and other major customers have backed.

Jacobs indicated, though, that he expects the wireless industry to go through a pause, rather than a downturn, amid the broader financial crisis—a sentiment that LaForge echoed in our conversation yesterday.

“The macro-economic environment obviously impacts a lot of different sectors,” LaForge said. “But a lot of folks believe that the wireless industry in general will probably fare better than other sectors.”

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Vanu, the Cambridge, MA, company whose “all-software radios” allow wireless operators to broadcast using multiple standards such as GSM and CDMA, has raised $32 million a stealthy Series B venture round, Dan Primack of Private Equity Hub is reporting today. Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures, which led a $9 million Series A round for Vanu last year, has returned for the new round, which also included Norwest Venture Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and Tata Capital of India.

Vanu, founded in 1998 by MIT computer science PhD Vanu Bose, the son of Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, isn’t publicizing the funding round. But Andy Beard, the company’s chief strategy officer, told Primack that the company will use the funds to expand operations in the United States and India. The company “will talk later this year about the motivation behind the round and what it means for our future plans,” Beard said.

Software radio technology uses computer software to emulate functions such as mixing and amplification that are handled by separate hardware components in traditional radios. Software-defined radios can communicate using multiple radio protocols that would normally require separate chips. In Vanu’s implementation of software radio, the software runs on standard Linux PCs rather than the specialized hardware used by most manufacturers of cellular base stations, making the systems easier to upgrade.

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Last week we wrote about ThingMagic’s compact new RFID reader, Astra, which is designed to fit into small spaces such as office ceilings, allowing more kinds of organizations to use RFID technology to track tagged items. This week ThingMagic is bringing out an additional set of products intended to help organizations experiment with RFID technology.

It’s a trio of “development kits” that include all the hardware and software engineers need to write and read RFID tags. The kits, which are available from a ThingMagic web storefront that opened today, cost $1,495 and include one of the company’s three embedded RFID reader modules along with a chassis, connectors, antenna cable, power converter, and other hardware. The kits also come with ThingMagic’s RFID firmware (which is the same for all three reader modules) and sample RFID tags.

Up to now, RFID technology has been deployed mainly in warehouses and retail locations, where it’s used to keep track of tagged packages and products. The point of the kits is to help potential ThingMagic customers and partners come up with new applications of RFID technology, moving toward the “Internet of things” envisioned by ThingMagic’s founders.

They could use the development kits, for example, to build and test prototype devices that contain embedded RFID readers, the way ThingMagic itself has worked with Ford Motor Company and DeWalt to put RFID readers in the beds of Ford 150 trucks, where they scan for tagged construction tools.

Many ThingMagic customers and business partners are “eager to explore, research and develop embedded and mobile RFID solutions that require small form factors and low power requirements,” ThingMagic CTO and co-founder Yael Maguire said in a statement. “The development kits include everything they need to experiment with, design and develop RFID applications that meet these needs.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Most radio stations these days have websites where you can listen to streaming versions of their broadcasts. But few have taken the added step of making individual shows available online—in part because there’s little financial incentive, unless they can sell online ads against that content. That’s where EveryZing of Cambridge, MA, thinks it can help—and the company said today that Cox Radio (NYSE: CXR) will use its software to make it easier for consumers (and search engines and advertisers) to find specific radio clips on the websites of all 68 of its FM and AM radio stations nationwide.

We profiled EveryZing, a BBN Technologies spinoff that uses speech-to-text algorithms to create transcripts of Web video and audio content that can then be indexed by search engines, last July and again in February. Up to now, EveryZing has mainly been working to help big media portals like Boston.com monetize their video content. But it has also had a long-running deal with Entercom Boston’s WEEI Sports Radio Network, where, according to EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde, the number of unique users listening to the station’s online clips has increased 16-fold over the last 18 months.

“The paradigm with radio on the Internet to date has been, bring it up in a streaming media player, minimize it, and listen,” says Wilde. “That’s not very interesting. It’s just another pipe. We’re trying to bring a ‘lean forward’ metaphor to the consumption of radio.” Once a company has installed EveryZing’s system, Wilde explains, customers can discover specific clips through web searches and jump precisely to the point of interest within those clips. “That’s what the Web is for and that’s what users want,” says Wilde.

The Cox deal is the biggest deployment to date for EveryZing’s software. “By partnering with EveryZing, we are able to leverage the unique content assets from our terrestrial broadcasts on the web and significantly enhance how that content is discovered, presented, and monetized,” said Gregg Lindahl, vice president of interactive technologies for Cox Radio, in EveryZing’s announcement of the agreement. Cox is in the process of acquiring an additional 18 stations that will give it a presence in 19 radio markets nationwide, including Atlanta, Houston, Miami, Orlando, San Antonio, and Tampa.

Wilde says EveryZing is on a path to keep growing quickly. “As a company we’re having the right conversations and ultimately winning the right deals with established media companies, who are in great need of solutions to transition their businesses successfully into the Internet age,” says Wilde.

But only recently, says Wilde, has the company developed its software to the point where it can be scaled up to work across companies as big as Cox. “If they had come to us six months ago to do a 68-station rollout, it would have crushed us. But we’ve built out the platform with this use case in mind—conglomerates with dozens of units that need to be serviced.” Along with the Cox deal, EveryZing today introduced a new management interface called RAMP—for “Reach, Access, Monetization, and Protection”—that lets clients control how content is presented to search engines and consumers and how advertising should appear alongside that content.

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The MacArthur Foundation in Chicago announced yesterday that that the Public Radio Exchange (PRX), a Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit that  maintains an online library of independently-produced radio documentaries from which public radio station managers can select programs for broadcast, is one of eight organizations selected for its 2008 MacArthur Awards for Creative and Effective Institutions. The award comes with a $500,000 prize. PRX says it will use the money to migrate its Java-based Web service to the Ruby on Rails language, provide more seed funding for content creators, and add to its capital reserves.

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Boston’s Bain Capital Ventures is the lead investor in n $8.6 million Series B funding round announced today for New York, NY-based TargetSpot, which helps advertisers create and place ads on streaming Internet radio stations.

The company, launched less than a year ago, gives advertisers access to over 500 Internet radio channels, including many owned by CBS Radio and Entercom Communications, two of the nation’s top five radio networks. TargetSpot’s Web-based platform allows advertisers to upload their own audio ads or record new ones; choose which stations, geographies, time of day, or audience demographic they wish to reach; and manage how much they spend on each campaign, starting at as little as $50.

“Surveys have shown that online radio’s listener base has expanded 27 percent annually since 2000,” said Bain partner Jeffrey Glass, who is joining TargetSpot’s board, in an announcement of the funding round. “This has had a phenomenal impact on both terrestrial radio stations and internet-only stations, and has resulted in the spawning of many new web 2.0 music networks. TargetSpot has figured out a way to solve the one major problem with online radio, namely how to monetize this burgeoning field and turn it into a profitable revenue stream.”

Also participating in the funding round were Union Square Ventures, CBS Corporation and Milestone Venture Partners.

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