Today’s West Coast announcement that Oracle is buying human resources management firm Taleo for $1.9 billion—yes, billion—puts some Boston-area talent and recruiting startups in a new light. Unfortunately, one of them is no longer in Boston…

—Take the Interview, the video-based recruiting startup and former Dogpatch Labs Cambridge resident, has relocated to New York City (SoHo to be more exact). It’s not a big surprise, as the company was part of the DreamIt Ventures startup program in New York last summer. Take the Interview, led by CEO Danielle Weinblatt, raised a seed funding round last September.

—Boston-based Smarterer, a skills-test startup that’s trying to reinvent the resume, has hit a possible inflection point. According to co-founder Dave Balter, the company had 800,000 skills questions answered online over the past year, but recently that figure increased by 250,000 in just five days. Chalk it up to focusing on who wants to use the product and then who has to use the product (employers vs. job seekers). Smarterer is led by CEO Jennifer Fremont-Smith; the company raised a seed round last year.

—Senexx, an expertise-management startup based in Cambridge, MA, and Israel, has collaborated with fellow Cambridge startup PowerInbox to build a Web application that runs in people’s e-mail systems and helps them find expertise and share knowledge within their company or organization. This is an interesting partnership between a couple of early-stage startups trying to do big things in social enterprise apps, using e-mail as the platform.

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How are companies spying on each other these days? One of the surprising ways I’ve heard about recently is through the webcam in boardrooms.

That’s right, apparently it’s easy to hack into some companies’ video conference systems, because they lie outside typical security measures. Companies sometimes set up video conferences so they can be accessed directly on the Internet—leaving the door open for eavesdroppers to listen in on meetings, or even remotely monitor a conference room via the camera.

One local software company is helping organizations guard against this threat—and many others. Boston-based Rapid7 is one of the leaders in the growing cluster of IT security companies around town. Rapid7’s approach is complementary to firms like NitroSecurity (recently acquired by Intel/McAfee) and Q1 Labs (bought by IBM), which help organizations guard against security threats in their computer networks and systems.

What Rapid7 does is help organizations find security flaws throughout their IT infrastructure, and then test whether they’ve been corrected. To fuel its growth, the company raised a $50 million Series C round from Technology Crossover Ventures in November—one of the largest tech venture rounds in the Boston area lately. (Rapid7 has raised $59 million to date.)

“There’s a lot of cyber-espionage going on in business,” says Mike Tuchen, Rapid7’s CEO (see photo, left). The activity ranges from stealing sales plans, financial information, and intellectual property, to the aforementioned boardroom eavesdropping, he says. And, of course, it’s not just companies spying on each other; it’s governments and nation states as well, all trying to get their hands on everything from Citibank credit card numbers to the special sauce in Apple’s iPad design.

What’s a CEO to do? If you’re Mike Tuchen, you take a promising company and try to make it better. Tuchen joined Rapid7 as chief executive in 2008. (The company has been around since 2000.) Previously he worked at Microsoft as a group program manager and general manager of SQL server marketing. An engineer by training, he also worked at Sun Microsystems and co-founded Paramark, a dot-com-era online advertising startup.

When he arrived at Rapid7, brought in by Bain Capital Ventures (the firm’s original VC investor), Tuchen saw a company that had “a great engineering and sales team” but not much else. He says he didn’t have to tear up the company, just bring in some key additions: marketing, channel partners, new processes, and a broader product roadmap, including a more international market focus.

So far the effort seems to be paying off. The company has grown to about 240 employees (about half in Boston), and Tuchen says revenues … Next Page »

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW), the New York parent company of Maynard, MA-based Monster.com, the jobs and recruiting site, said in a regulatory filing that it has laid off about 400 employees, or 7 percent of its worldwide staff of 5,700.

The layoffs include fewer than 100 job cuts in Massachusetts, according to the Boston Business Journal. No more specifics on that were available.

In the Form 8-K, Monster Worldwide says it is taking a “series of strategic restructuring actions” in 2012 to invest in marketing and sales and “improve its long-term growth prospects and profitability.” The company says it is consolidating some office facilities as part of the restructuring.

Monster reported fourth-quarter 2011 revenues of $250 million and a $13 million profit. The company made a $46 million profit for the year, compared to a loss of $9 million in 2010. Monster’s stock is down about 13 percent to $7.80 this morning.

Last spring, Monster.com spoke with me about its recent efforts in mobile apps and social media partnerships. The company has been investing heavily in R&D to keep up with a slew of newer, hip competitors.

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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“Money is money, anyone can do that,” says Brian Zimmerman, managing director of Boston-based OpenView Venture Partners.

Go on.

“We have this idea of providing real value to our portfolio companies. If we’re going to call ourselves partners, we really need to be partners.” he says. Plenty of venture capitalists say they like to take that partner approach to their investments. But OpenView is backing that statement up with staff and infrastructure dedicated to sales growth and more.

That comes in the form of what the venture firm calls OpenView Labs. At first mention, OpenView Labs sounds like it would be the name for an incubator arm at the firm. But, as my colleague Greg has written, OpenView brands itself as an “expansion-stage” venture firm, eyeing investments in the more complex business-to-business and cloud computing software spaces. Its target companies already have annual sales between $2 million and $20 million, so, no, its Labs aren’t about helping young mobile or consumer software startups develop their technology or roll out a beta version of their product. Instead the unit is focused on helping its startups tackle the more grown up challenges of recruiting and hiring talent, identifying key markets, and generating sales leads.

To that end, the company has four full-time recruiters, who have filled about 100 jobs across OpenView’s portfolio companies in the last few years, says Zimmerman, who oversees the Labs operation. The goal is to fill another 200 this year.

We said the OpenView Labs is past helping startups toy with their technology. But sales and marketing strategy are another story. Startups at the expansion stage need to work in refining exactly which market their targeting as their customer base, says Zimmerman.

“They’ll say, ‘we sell to small businesses.’ That’s not enough,” he says. So Labs has an entire research and analytics team focused honing and refining exactly which sub-markets and customer segments portfolio companies should be targeting. It starts with Internet research and goes all the way through calling and surveying customers in the potential markets, says Zimmerman.

Once the Labs gets the companies primed with staff and a market to go after, it helps them build their marketing message around those customers, and then find specific sales leads. That third component is what Zimmerman calls the Labs’ “go-to-market” team.

Zimmerman puts companies in three categories: startup (figuring out the technology and idea), expansion (building revenue and refining a target market), and growth (preparing for an exit). “We’re focused on everything it takes for … Next Page »

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From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

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Since when is naming your startup and posting a job ad news? When your name is Ray Ozzie, that’s when.

The former Microsoft chief software architect and Lotus veteran has surfaced after a year of working behind the scenes. Ozzie reached out to the Boston Globe‘s Scott Kirsner with a teaser about his new project: a startup called Cocomo that he has co-founded in Boston and Seattle. The company is developing communications software and tools for social interaction, and it is recruiting engineers—in particular, a lead user interface/experience designer with mobile chops. That’s about it for specifics so far, though Kirsner reports that the company doesn’t yet have office space, and that ex-Microsofties Matt Pope and Ransom Richardson are part of the team.

Ozzie left Microsoft at the end of 2010 after four years on the job (a move that I foreshadowed a year earlier). He had joined Microsoft with its acquisition of his collaboration software firm Groove Networks. Ozzie was Bill Gates’s handpicked successor as software architect, and he led Windows Azure among other projects, but ultimately Microsoft wasn’t a great fit for his talents. We’ll be watching closely to see what he builds at Cocomo.

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I guess Werner Vogels changed his mind. Amazon.com’s chief technology officer told me a couple years ago that his company had no intention of opening a Boston office. MIT engineers, he said, had no problem moving out west to Seattle to join the e-retail technology giant. I thought that was kind of strange, but Amazon has always done things its own way.

Now it appears the company (NASDAQ: AMZN) is about to establish a beachhead in Cambridge, MA. According to a report by Scott Kirsner in Boston.com, Amazon is in the process of hiring engineering and research talent and is looking for about 40,000 square feet of office space in the Kendall Square area, slated to open in February. The company has not confirmed any of this publicly, and will probably try to keep it quiet as long as it can. Kirsner speculates that the timing might have to do with changes in sales tax laws.

We’ll have more on this developing story as details surface. If the report is accurate, the impact on the Boston area, and Kendall Square in particular, could be really significant.

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How annoying is the Web? I’m not talking about the nonstop distractions, the social-media window into human stupidity, or even the endless pop-up ads that block your view of the screen. I’m talking about the utter loss of privacy that most consumers have suffered online, yet rarely think about.

Sure, the Web is a net positive (we hope), but there are costs. When you visit any website, you leave a record of who you are, where you are, and what you looked at. That by itself might not be traceable to your specific identity, but over time, sites can track you via social media, share buttons (Facebook “likes,” even if you don’t click them or log in), check-ins, and other online activities. Companies can then show you personalized ads based on your product preferences, zip code, and history of Google searches. Worse, they can create a profile of your activities, often combined with data from public records, and sell it to other companies to do whatever they want with it.

Trying to combat all of this is a small Boston tech startup called Abine (pronounced “uh-BEAN”). Its name stands for “A Bit Is Not Enough.” The company is working to give consumers more control over their personal information on the Web. I’ve heard a fair amount about this startup over the past year, but I recently had a chance to meet co-founder Andrew Sudbury and CEO Bill Kerrigan over a beer.

The timing seems good for Abine, what with the massive flak Facebook has been taking over user privacy lately. As Sudbury points out (along with others), Facebook treats its users not as customers, but as products. Meaning that each social network member’s profile, with its likes, recommendations, and social connections, can be thought of as just part of a $100 billion machine for marketers.

“We don’t want our users to be our product,” Sudbury says. Instead, he says, consumers pay Abine to help shield them from Web tracking and other misuses of their personal information. “We want to sell privacy services,” he says. “We want to be at the point of contact between the user and the net. We want them to use the Web without worrying that all their data is flying out the door.” For example, “users think they’re going to Boston.com, but they’re really going to 10 other websites,” Sudbury says. (That’s because their browser fetches different pieces of the website from other sites—things like ads and snippets of code that let advertisers know a little bit about who each visitor is.)

So what does Abine do about it? The company makes add-ons for browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome; at the moment, different pieces of its software work for different browsers. The software, called Do Not Track Plus, blocks unwanted tracking by detecting all tracking requests … Next Page »

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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Is there anything worse than a Silicon Valley VC coming to Boston to poach talent from the startup ecosystem?

OK, that’s not really what Greg McAdoo is about. The Sequoia Capital partner was in town last weekend, in part for the Startup Bootcamp event at MIT (and related meetups), which featured talks by a number of founders backed by Sequoia, including Drew Houston of Dropbox (an MIT alum), Paul English from Kayak, and Nathan Blecharczyk of Airbnb.

McAdoo is a busy guy, serving on the boards of Airbnb, Bump Technologies, Clustrix, Greplin, Loopt, Achates Power, and other firms. He has been with Menlo Park, CA-based Sequoia since 2000 and is involved with the Y Combinator seed-stage startup program. He was also involved with Sequoia’s investment in Isilon Systems, now part of EMC, the whole story of which we know well.

We met for coffee on Saturday, and I got a download of McAdoo’s thoughts about the startup ecosystem and what he was hearing from local entrepreneurs—ideas on everything from smartphone security for enterprise to the prospects of nuclear fusion for energy production. I also took notes on his advice to entrepreneurs (which I found particularly insightful), and some important trends in consumer-tech and cleantech startups in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and beyond.

While Sequoia isn’t about to open an East Coast office, McAdoo says, there is certainly enough going on—think raw talent, ambitious entrepreneurs, and a few company investments—to draw its partners out here regularly.

Here are some highlights from our chat:

Xconomy: People talk about the consumer tech ecosystem, or lack thereof, in Boston and other cities vs. Silicon Valley. But you’re telling me there’s a bigger trend going on than whether or not we have enough role models here.

Greg McAdoo: There are a host of applications that appeal to folks that live in dense urban centers. The big shift is towards a startup community in urban centers. That, by the way, affects the San Francisco Bay Area every bit as much as the New York metropolitan area or the Chicago area. Whereas the suburbs of the Bay Area have a very well established startup community, I think everybody’s on equal footing to some degree in that major urban centers don’t really have that startup community. They used to many years ago.

If you wanted to get a consumer Internet startup off the ground in 1995 or ’96, you needed to have fabulous product sensibilities and a wonderful front end engineering and design team. But if you were building anything at scale you also had to have some hardcore technologists in the back end and be able to rack and stack servers. Fast forward to 2011, and much of that back end expertise is provided by service providers—cloud guys like Rackspace or Amazon. Also some of the hardcore back-end technology is open source software now. So you don’t have to worry about being in SoHo in New York and trying … Next Page »

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Score one for video-based recruiting and marketing. (Yes, there are a lot of startups in this sector, plus Skype and Google.)

Cambridge, MA-based Take the Interview has closed $775,000 in seed funding this week from angel investors, as well as partners and limited partners of DreamIt Ventures, the startup incubator in New York City in which the company participated this summer. It was the first New York class of startups for the program, which is based in Philadelphia.

Take the Interview makes a video-based platform for companies to screen job candidates, and for job seekers to market themselves to employers. The goal is to use self-recorded video clips to make the hiring process more efficient for all involved. Take the Interview rolled out its private beta this summer and says it has more than 100 users.

The startup, which is based at Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, is led by co-founder and CEO Danielle Weinblatt. I first mentioned the company in a story back in February.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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Smarterer, a Boston-based tech startup, is generating some buzz this week, having demoed its product at the WebInno meeting last night.

The company started in the fall of 2010, founded by Dave Balter, Jennifer Fremont-Smith, and Michael Kowalchik. It provides crowdsourced skills tests on digital, social, and other techie tools—think Twitter, Ruby, Matlab, Photoshop. Job seekers and other curious folks can sign up, take multiple-choice tests in under 60 seconds, and get a score that they can promote on their resume (or bury with shame, for us dumb and dumberer folks).

Although some media outlets are reporting it like it’s news this week, Smarterer raised a $1.25 million seed round, led by True Ventures and Google Ventures (and a bunch of angels), before April.

In honor of the company’s 10-question test format, here’s Smarterer in 10 points:

1. The problem: “There’s no smart way for professionals to validate that they have [certain technical] skills and articulate it to the world,” says Fremont-Smith, the company’s CEO.

2. Goal: “To completely reinvent the skills section of the resume of the world,” she says. “Our mission in life is to take that skills section—which is completely wasted, it’s like a joke—and give it meaning.”

3. Context: “The tools people are using today did not exist a few years ago, and there will be a bunch more new ones tomorrow. The pace of change is actually accelerating. So we use the collective intelligence and experience of the crowd.”

4. How it works: Any user can go in and create a test about any topic. (But to get in, you have to be invited by another user.) Then others add to the test questions. When people take the test, Smarterer’s software figures out which questions are harder or more relevant than others, and the tests get “smarter” over time.

5. Approach: “This will be a very powerful tool for employers…but I’ve got the whole team focused on building for consumers.” (Eventually the trend-spotting of which skill sets are becoming important could be valuable too.)

6. Business strategy: “Not chasing revenue right now, we’ve got a lean team. We’ve got some time to get it right for the consumer.”

7. Biggest challenge: “Getting engineering talent. It’s definitely an arms race.”

8. Impact: “We’re building it for professionals to show the world what they know—what they know, instead of who they know. Think about all those people who have a lot to offer, but they’re not natural self-promoters.”

9. Deeper idea: There’s a “core craving” to show people “this is what I know, this is why I’m important.” “That’s for everybody,” she says.

10. Why Google Ventures: “It makes perfect sense for us to be partnered with Google Ventures because these guys [Google] make all the tools. And Google hires the top 1 percent. Our system is designed to identify the top 1 percent.”

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Jobvite, a Burlingame, CA-based maker of “social recruiting” software for companies looking to hire new workers, said today that it has raised $15 million in Series C financing. New investor Trident Capital led the round, which was joined by existing investors CMEA Capital and ATA Ventures. Jobvite said the funding would go to support continued “rapid growth” for the company, which has sextupled in size since 2009; the startup says its applications are used by over 500 customers, including Groupon, Shuttefly, Starbucks, Tivo Twitter, Whole Foods, Yelp, and Zappos.

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Please…not yet another recommendation engine for telling me where I should eat, what clothes to buy, or which places to visit on my trips. Didn’t StyleFeeder get acquired by Time Inc. last year? Didn’t Where just get bought by PayPal? But I guess that’s why startups keep trying to innovate with recommendations—if they do it right, there will be a big payout coming.

OK, well, having a cute fish logo doesn’t hurt either. Last Tuesday, Boston-based Goby released a new, overhauled version of its iPhone app, and it represents an important shift for the three-year-old startup. That’s right—Goby, which started in 2008 as a “deep Web” search engine focused on helping consumers find events and activities near them—is now going hard after recommendations.

“It’s a big shift away from search and browse,” says Mark Watkins, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Goby already had a mobile app on iPhone and Android devices, but the new app’s emphasis is on understanding consumers’ preferences and showing them a short list of relevant activities, instead of just helping them search through long lists. (Goby made the change in part because of user feedback, but you can still search in the app as well.) Before last week’s release, Watkins said the company had some 750,000 mobile-app downloads, and that its user base was split about 50-50 between mobile and Web. Reached by e-mail yesterday, Watkins says the new app had about 70,000 downloads in the past week, and that about half of the new users have created personalized “fun feeds” (more on that in a minute). Overall, not a bad start for the new Goby app.

Mobile has been a big focus at the 10-person startup over the past nine months. Goby, along with a lot of other companies, seems to have adapted quickly to the reality that mobile is a better business opportunity for its technology than the Web. “People are hungry for mobile apps, and advertisers are hungry to reach them,” Watkins says.

The new app is all about showing people five to 10 activities that interest them, Watkins says. Goby scans users’ Facebook profiles and uses semantic text analysis to create a “topic map” of things people like. The categories include sporting events, live music, museums, food and drink, and so forth. Goby also has access to a huge database of events and activities, culled from a variety of sites around the Web. By personalizing your own feed, you can do things like get alerts for heavy-metal acts playing in Worcester, MA, or jazz artists coming through Boston. The app also makes it easy to share the info with your social network through Facebook and Twitter, Watkins says.

The technology sounds simple—but it’s not. One issue is that semantic analysis and … Next Page »

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As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

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Looks like Microsoft is officially tired of having people poached by the Silicon Valley raiders setting up shop in its backyard. CEO Steve Ballmer’s new memo on employee compensation changes, in wide circulation this morning, looks somewhat like the Redmond, WA-based software giant’s version of Google’s abrupt companywide raise-and-bonus combo of late last year.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is making this move after several years of watching San Francisco Bay Area companies establish beachheads in Seattle to recruit talent. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been in the Northwest since 2004 and keeps on growing, saying that it ended 2010 with about 800 people in the Puget Sound area.

Salesforce.com, a direct Microsoft competitor on certain business software, recently moved into expanded offices and has been tied up in a non-compete lawsuit with Redmond over its hiring of a Microsoft employee. Meanwhile, IT infrastructure company Splunk started its Seattle offices with Microsoft veteran Brad Lovering, and two of the first hires at Facebook’s Seattle office were from—you guessed it—Microsoft.

Ballmer’s memo does what we in the news business call “burying the lede”—he starts off talking a lot about rejiggering the review process. Let’s face it: Most employees in any large company will eventually come to hate their reviews, and probably will no matter how you structure them. The real meat of the memo—first reported by GeekWire from what I can tell—is in the take-home pay.

Ballmer’s email, which Microsoft has confirmed as authentic with ZDNet, said the company is “increasing our investment in compensation across the board.” Ballmer called the changes, which take effect in September, “the most significant investment in overall compensation we have ever made.”

Specifically, Ballmer wrote that all employees would see some of their stock compensation converted into up-front cash—probably welcome, considering that a Microsoft stock is still well below its roughly $37 high of a few years ago, and isn’t making anyone rich in the way it did 15 years ago. The changes also would mean possible merit raises for all employees, raises targeted at specific job categories and cities “where the market has moved the most,” and more money overall set aside for raises and stock awards. Also, don’t forget that in 2013, Microsofties are going to have to start paying for part of their healthcare benefits for the first time.

Also significantly, Ballmer ended with a bit of rah-rah that seemed intended to quell the criticism that Microsoft is a lumbering behemoth that can’t get out of its own way enough to do inspiring things: “Through our history, we have been THE place people came when they wanted to make a difference in the world through software, hardware and services. This is as true today as it has been at any time in our history, and the changes we’re rolling out today will help ensure Microsoft continues to be the place that top talent comes to change the world.”

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