The evolution of Constant Contact continues. The Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm (NASDAQ: CTCT) said today it has acquired Boston-based CardStar, a maker of a mobile app that lets people consolidate their loyalty and rewards cards. Terms of the acquisition weren’t given.

The deal represents Constant Contact’s first foray into mobile rewards technology aimed at helping small businesses stay connected to consumers. CardStar’s app lets people create a digital version of their physical membership cards (for retail stores, gyms, and so on) all in one place, on their smartphone. CardStar started in late 2008 and has four employees joining Constant Contact, including founders Andy Miller and Danny Espinoza. The startup says it has more than 2 million active users.

“I was a user before I was an acquirer,” says Constant Contact CEO Gail Goodman.

And acquiring CardStar makes a lot of sense for Constant Contact, which has been working to transform itself from an e-mail marketing firm into a one-stop shop for small businesses trying to reach customers through social media, online marketing, rewards programs, and other methods.

“This acquisition is at the intersection of everything we do,” Goodman says. “As we look at what small businesses are trying to do, they are trying to use every possible channel to reach customers—e-mail, social, mobile. At the core of that is a loyalty program. Andy and his team will help us weave those pieces into a really simple, really impactful application on the merchant side.”

Goodman declined to give specifics on any upcoming mobile products, but she emphasized that CardStar’s app will continue to run, and that more is on the way. “We are on a pretty aggressive product roadmap,” she says. “Much of what we’ve done has loyalty at its heart. Our customers have always wanted to take that a step further. But without mobile, it’s pretty hard.”

As for why Constant Contact chose CardStar over other companies in the mobile couponing and rewards sector, Goodman pointed to the startup’s traction with consumers and the culture fit with her team.

Constant Contact says it has more than 450,000 customers, mostly small businesses, nonprofits, and associations. Last summer, I spoke with the firm about its plans for innovating as a young public company (IPO in 2007), and about the biggest technology shift in its 13-year history (integrating Web software with existing database systems, among other things).

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Heading into the holiday weekend, I thought I’d pull out a few highlights from recent discussions I’ve had with some Boston-area tech companies that are generating buzz. None of them will be taking the holiday off, I’m guessing.

So here’s a snapshot of five companies in different fields, and at different stages (with some common themes of communication, security, and location tech):

ByteLight
This is a new Cambridge, MA-based startup that’s heading to New York this weekend for the big annual National Retail Federation expo. ByteLight, led by founders Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan (both Boston University grads), is developing technology for indoor positioning based on the circuitry in LED bulbs, together with smartphone cameras, for applications in sales automation, targeted deals, museum tours, and so on. “We view this as the next frontier in location based services,” Ryan says.

HeyWire
This Cambridge-based mobile startup makes an app for free texting and social messaging. But HeyWire has much bigger ambitions around creating a unified platform for social communications. Don’t want to give too much away here, but as engineering and marketing VPs Bill Gianoukos and Glenn Kiladis told me recently, an upcoming release from the company was inspired by the question, “How do we get Bieber to text us?”

Rapid7
This security assessment software company, based in Boston, recently raised a big $50 million venture round and is growing fast—and looking to make acquisitions. Rapid7 has well over 200 employees, and CEO Mike Tuchen says he is looking to add 100 more this year. One security tidbit he passed along: Many companies’ video conferences are surprisingly easy to hack into, because they put them directly on the Internet without security.

The Tap Lab
This Cambridge-based mobile gaming startup is working on its much-anticipated next release, which is still under wraps (but looks like it’s trying to reinvent the concept of location-based gaming—no pressure). In the meantime, CEO Dave Bisceglia is also working on a project to “increase the frequency and quality of hackathons” in Boston, he says. Stay tuned for more on this.

Vivox
This voice and communication software firm, based in Natick, MA, has been making strides through partnerships with T-Mobile and Facebook. Vivox, best known for its voice chat software that lets gamers and virtual world inhabitants talk to each other, is now applying its technology to the broader markets of social networking and messaging (see T-Mobile’s recent Bobsled voice chat app). CEO Rob Seaver told me that his company’s platform is “very scalable and stable for large-scale social interactions.” What’s more, he says, the fields of gaming and communication are “not that separate.”

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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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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Holiday shopping season is a fun time of year for a company like Daily Grommet. The Lexington, MA-based Web startup finds unusual consumer products and tells a story about one such “grommet” each day through videos and text.

This week I touched base with founder and CEO Jules Pieri, who shared some info with me on the top-selling grommets of the season so far. As someone who hates holiday commercialism, but likes warm puppies and weird gadgets as much as the next guy, I found the range of items available on the site pretty enlightening.

So in case you’re looking for an unusual-yet-personal gift for that special someone, you might want to browse around the Daily Grommet site, which includes product categories like home, food & drink, health & wellness, and green & eco-living. Sounds pretty standard, but the products you’ll find there are anything but.

Here are some examples of bestsellers (and links to the story behind each item):

—Sugru, a kind of hacking putty for real-world stuff (“fastest Grommet out of the gate, in history,” Pieri says).

—Urban Cheesecraft, which sounds like slang or euphemism but is actually just a handy cheese-making kit.

—Soggy Doggy, a super-absorbent doormat/shammy for dogs.

—Picture Keeper, an elegant way to grab and store photo libraries from your computer.

—Ila Security, a small, portable security-alarm device, like a personal panic button (good for long board meetings).

—Drawer Décor, a custom drawer organizer for kitchen supplies and other goods (mundane but useful if you don’t like clutter).

Good luck with the shopping, readers. I’ll probably see you online.

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When you run a startup that focuses on mapping the floor plans of retail stores, there’s this inevitable question: What happens when Google, the company that has already mapped the entire world, decides to do the same thing as you? Josh Marti, the CEO of Seattle-based Point Inside, has heard it plenty of times.

“And our answer was always, yeah absolutely—whether they use our maps or their own maps, they’re going to see the value that indoor maps bring,” Marti says. His job as an entrepreneur is to make sure Point Inside is offering something more valuable.

That particular part of the job got even more important last week, when Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced that it was indeed bringing indoor layouts to the latest version of its maps application for Android.

As we’ve reported before, Point Inside thinks partnering with big players in location services can be good for its business, so I wondered whether Google’s new offering included the Seattle startup’s maps. Turns out, that’s not the case—Google appears to be partnering with retailers on its own, and also appealing to retailers to submit floorplans themselves.

Marti took this challenge head-on earlier this week during his demo of Point Inside at Xconomy’s Mobile Madness Northwest, a packed half-day forum on innovation in mobile computing. As Point Inside also detailed on its blog, the question isn’t necessarily whether Google can successfully map indoor spaces, he says—it’s whether Google’s business model of selling ads within those stores will be appealing to retailers.

To illustrate the point, Marti pulled up Google’s app and navigated over to a Home Depot store. Once there, he searched for “paint,” and was promptly redirected to a Lowe’s down the street.

That got some pretty hearty laughs from the crowd. But it’s serious stuff, both for retailers and smaller companies like Point Inside, which has some 1,300 locations using its indoor mapping service.

Marti puts it this way: Google’s overarching business model has been to index large amounts of information, attract eyeballs, and sell advertising. For a retailer, that could be a scary proposition: If Google makes the map, who owns the advertising inside your own store?

“Right now, the way it’s deployed today, it’s certainly a scenario where if you invite them in, you’d better be prepared to pay them to keep the competition out,” Marti says. “Assuming that the business model for websites is the same business model for physical locations, you’ll see that competitors are going to start buying ad words against each other and ad locations against each other.”

To be fair, that sounds like some pretty classic fear, uncertainty, and doubt from a competitor. And Marti is quick to acknowledge that this is still the very early public version of Google’s indoor mapping product—there’s no definite way of knowing how it will shake out.

But in any case, Marti says Point Inside is confident that retailers will want to retain more control over their shoppers’ trips through the aisles. That’s what the Seattle startup, which presently has about 30 employees and is seeing growing revenue, offers through a white-label service for indoor navigation apps.

“They have a real opportunity to control their brand experience as well as maintain the relationship with their customers,” Marti says. “And that’s an important, lifelong theme for the retailers—they hate to be disintermediated by anybody.”

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In the long-running debate over online sales tax laws, one of the most laughable ideas has been that calculating sales tax rates all over the country is somehow a difficult job for big e-commerce companies like Amazon.com.

You know, the same company that adds enough servers every single weekday to run a circa-2000 version of itself. The same company that knows every item I’ve ever perused, and can tell me what fellow shoppers bundle and buy. The same company that gives away streaming movies and takes a loss on full-color touchscreen tablets just to get people in the buying mood.

But that’s been the basic argument against various cash-starved states’ attempts to pass “Amazon laws” deputizing online retailers as new tax collectors. A longstanding U.S. Supreme Court decision, enacted before the Web was a force in retail, held that figuring out sales tax rates for thousands of jurisdictions nationwide would put a burden on interstate commerce. And that is something only Congress is allowed to do.

That could be happening sometime soon. As we’ve discussed, Amazon is putting its weight pretty heavily behind a new online sales tax system being debated in Congress. The latest evidence of the Seattle company’s dedication was on display today, as VP Paul Misener testified at a U.S. House committee hearing on the issue.

In his prepared remarks, Misener acknowledges the obvious fact that software has solved the problems with national sales tax collection: “With today’s computing and communications technology, widespread collection no longer would be an unconstitutional burden on interstate commerce, and Congress feasibly can authorize the states to require all but the very smallest volume sellers to collect.”

He also shouts out Avalara, the Bainbridge Island, WA-based company that has been a leader in supplying online sales tax software to retailers, particularly small and medium-sized sellers. As CEO Scott McFarlane recently told me, all the talk of sales tax collection being some kind of unfathomable dark art is frustrating for the entrepreneurs trying to solve the problem.

“What chafes me is when people say that there’s not a solution out there, it’s too hard. The reality is, it isn’t. It’s a statutory requirement. We have the technology,” McFarlane said.

It’s encouraging to see so much progress being made on an issue that’s lingered, probably needlessly, for so long. Amazon’s sometime foe at the National Retail Federation, which represents a lot of the big brick-and-mortar retailers, also is behind the recent push to enact a national online sales tax system.

The fight for now seems to be over which businesses to exempt from such a system. The bill Amazon’s supporting gives a pass to sellers making less than $500,000 a year in revenue, and Misener’s testimony calls out $150,000 as an even better figure. eBay, in its own testimony today, wants a much bigger small business exemption—eBay’s Tod Cohen threw out several suggested thresholds, from $5 million up to $30 million.

There is the matter of a little election about a year from now, which could see big changes in who’s in charge over in the other Washington. It’s not clear whether this issue will be resolved before the political climate gets hot and heavy—if you were running for re-election, would you want some opponent running ads about how you voted for an Internet sales tax?

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This week’s wrapup of Xconomy Seattle tech headlines features two great entrepreneur/investors who will be featured at Mobile Madness Northwest, our action-packed half-day forum Dec. 6 at F5 Networks. We’re pairing up two people whose experiences span big-company products and proto-company startups: Wesley Chan of Google Ventures, and Charlie Kindel, formerly with Windows Phone (and a bunch of other products over 21 years at Microsoft).

As we found out in this profile, Chan led the projects that became Google Analytics and Google Voice—the latter of which prompted his move up to Seattle, where he’s still based today. But instead of working on big projects inside of Google, Chan is now a partner at Google Ventures, where his investments run all the way from consumer apps to life sciences.

Kindel left Microsoft earlier this year to devote more time to angel investing, mentoring and advising startups, and creating a new company of his own. The details of what he’s working on are still under wraps, but Kindel’s experience gives him an interesting and extremely informed perspective on the future of innovation in mobile.

Moderating the discussion with these two smart guys will be Chetan Sharma, the well-known mobile industry consultant and adviser. Get your tickets here—the clock is ticking on the special Saver Rate, our last discounted pricing promotion before the event on Dec. 6.

Other things catching our attention in the past week:

—Windows Phone has a lot of catching up to do if it wants to take the strong third-place competitor’s spot in the mobile platform battles. And critical to that task is getting developers to create a strong ecosystem of digital products and services. Brandon Watson, the developer team lead for Windows Phone, took a look back at the first year of WP7 on the market and reveals some of the specific steps his crew is employing to woo developers to Redmond’s side.

—The Clarisonic skin-cleansing device has been quietly piling up sales (and celebrity customers) by putting the sonic-wave technology behind Sonicare toothbrushes into a cosmetic application. And it’s paid off, now that cosmetics giant L’Oreal has acquired parent company Pacific Bioscience Laboratories for an undisclosed sum.

—Hackathons are growing up. Seattle-based Startup Weekend had quite a year in 2011, even if you don’t count the growing international footprint for its signature events. The entrepreneur education nonprofit’s potential has now been recognized by Google, which inked a new two-year global sponsorship deal. That will give Startup Weekend some cash, but it also allows Google to tap into the organization’s worldwide community of entrepreneurs, hackers, designers, and investors.

—Amazon has been getting a lot of attention in the public policy sphere for its resistance to state-by-state efforts to collect sales taxes online. The e-commerce pioneer has been staunchly, sometimes belligerently opposed to those efforts, and it may be paying off: A bipartisan group of U.S. senators is backing a new national law that would set a nationwide standard for sales tax collections online—something Amazon has long supported. Amazon and its sometime-foes at the National Retail Federation are both supporting this new bill.

—PopCap Games, the casual game maker recently acquired by Electronic Arts, sponsored a new survey that shows an increasing willingness by gamers on social networks to use digital currency and buy virtual goods. The survey shows a pretty significant change since last year, the kind of pace PopCap and others are looking for as they stake out new ways to make money in the free-to-play arena.

—Stockbox Grocers isn’t a tech startup, right? The company, a project of two entrepreneurs from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute, turns surplus shipping containers into mini corner stores stocked with cupboard staples and fresh produce. But in a profile, we showed how even something as low-tech as retail can be heavily influenced by cheap, powerful technology and “lean startup” methods.

—Meanwhile, down in Portland, the team at Urban Airship continues to make news. This week, we saw the mobile app infrastructure provider featured as one of the inaugural investments from Intel Capital‘s new $100 million app-focused fund. The deal also comes with a partnership that will make Urban Airship’s services available to developers working on apps for Windows-based notebooks powered by Intel’s processors.

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Looks like Amazon’s pugnacious bet on national sales tax reform is paying off.

The Seattle company (NASDAQ: AMZN) says it is strongly supporting a proposed national law that would force online retailers to collect local taxes on more of their sales, ending a longtime loophole originally meant to help catalog businesses. The National Retail Federation, which has battled with Amazon on the sales tax issue, also is on board with the bipartisan Senate proposal announced today (the federation represents lots of brick-and-mortar retailers).

So how’s that a win? Amazon has gone to some pretty extreme lengths to avoid being deputized as a tax collector for state and local governments, insisting that its shipping centers are different companies and even shutting down entire networks of third-party sellers when state lawmakers pass “Amazon tax” bills.

That behavior has caused a lot of turmoil for the ecosystem of smaller businesses that rely on Amazon. One example is the story of Shopobot, a comparison-shopping startup that relocated from the San Francisco Bay Area to Seattle earlier this year specifically because Amazon axed its affiliate program in California.

But Amazon has said for a long time that it favors a national solution, rather than a hodgepodge of different state rules. Specifically, the company has supported something called the Streamlined Sales Tax project, in which states agree to a common set of sales tax definition and practices.

The common standards are important because each state taxes things differently—sometimes wildly so.

Cue up today’s bipartisan Senate bill, which uses the Streamlined Sales Tax program as a centerpiece of any national tax system for online sales.

So, while any retailer would certainly enjoy the fact that it didn’t have to act as a big tax collector, and could price its products a little better to boot, Amazon clearly knew the days of tax-free Internet sales weren’t going to last forever. It placed its bet on a national system, and made some pretty belligerent moves to reinforce that preference.

And it looks like that strategy is paying off.

There’s no guarantee that this bill will actually become law, of course—the federal lawmaking process is both arcane and volatile, and any tax vote will be a tough one in this economic climate. But it’s got a lot of the hallmarks of something that could pass.

An interesting side note: Shoppers in Washington state already pay sales taxes on Amazon purchases, because the company’s headquarters are here. But the state also says it’s only collecting taxes on about half of the online and mail-order purchases by people living here, and that adds up to some big numbers.

If the new Senate proposal becomes law, Washington officials estimate that state and local government treasuries could raise about $242 million annually. That comes at a time when the state has been cutting billions from spending on education, health care, and other expensive government programs.

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You might not think of a grocery store inside a recycled shipping container as a technology-centric startup. But without some cheap, powerful devices and software, Web-enabled crowdfunding, and tech startup methods, Stockbox Grocers probably wouldn’t be where it is today.

The Stockbox team, which recently wrapped up the run of its first prototype store, is trying to fill a niche in grocery shopping by putting its mini stores in “food deserts,” areas of a city where good-quality staples are hard to find or too far away. The experimental store, in the parking lot of an apartment complex, attracted 20-35 customers on an average day—a performance good enough that Stockbox is already planning for a more permanent store in the spring.

So what’s that got to do with technology? Plenty. “In the end, they’re just selling fruit and vegetables and dry goods. And yet, there is this huge amount of technology underlying it that makes it possible,” says tech entrepreneur Michael “Luni” Libes, who’s serving as a volunteer adviser to Stockbox.

“The overall trend we see in the software industry is the price to start a company is trending toward zero. And it’s interesting to compare that with starting an actual brick-and-mortar retail business,” Libes says. “And for some of the same reasons why software’s going to zero, the costs of starting a brick-and-mortar businesses is getting less. It’s not going to zero, but it’s getting less.”

First of all, back when they were still working on the project as students at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, co-founders Carrie Ferrence and Jacqueline Gjurgevich were able to use Google’s SketchUp application to rough in their crucial first schematics.

“It’s what we used in all of our contract designs and our presentations and our business plan. Especially when you have a new idea and it is a different take, it was really hard for people to visualize it,” Ferrence says. “It enabled us to come up with a somewhat professional- looking image before we invested in professional architects and designers.”

That business plan, by the way, won Ferrence and Gjurgevich second place in this year’s University of Washington business plan competition. With prize money in hand, the pair next turned to Kickstarter to seek more money to get their prototype Stockbox Grocers store installed. They exceeded their goal, raising more than $20,000 from 195 backers—and nearly a third of those people were introduced to the little startup by the Kickstarter campaign, making it a useful marketing tool as well.

“This launch plan of Stockbox could not have been done 10 years ago,” Libes says. “It would have been a friends and family plan that would have raised money from, literally, friends and family, or gone back to their school and gone begging to the other students to do it.”

Once the prototype store was becoming a reality, Stockbox needed a way to process electronic payments. An obvious choice was Square, the mobile card-swipe startup from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, which allowed Stockbox to process payments on an iPad with no upfront cost.

Square also has some inventory-tracking capabilities, which were a nice additional feature for the prototype store. Stockbox might move to a more robust system to track the goods in its permanent stores, but the Square device and payment processing service was a perfect tool for getting the concept operating quickly and inexpensively.

“It’s been interesting to see customers come into the store and people get excited about the iPad and the Square,” Ferrence says. “And we explain to them that, really, it was just cheaper and easier to do the iPad and the Square than something more traditional like a big clunky cash register.”

Even the signs on the outside of the store to dress up its workmanlike exterior were done with cheap printing services that might have required hiring a signmaker a few years back.

“That was all done on a PC and printed out to vinyl, and done in what looks like an incredibly professional manner for almost no money,” Libes says. “It’s probably safe to say that we overlook 90 percent of the technology that’s avail to all businesses that make businesses look more professional, make everything look more polished.”

At a higher level, Stockbox is operating on some concepts that have gained a huge amount of popularity in the tech field, particularly the “Lean Startup” principles of entrepreneur and author Eric Ries—using cheap and powerful tools to distill a product very quickly, and continually tweak your path based on customer feedback.

“Startups are startups. It doesn’t matter if you’re a tech startup or a green startup or a retail startup. We should all be learning the same lesson, which is the Lean Startup method—get something out there, learn from it, measure from it, and expand upon it,” Libes says. “And there’s just this huge amount of tools, free and cheap and easily accessible, that make that possible now. It just wasn’t possible 10 years ago, 20 years ago.”

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Best Buy is looking to a local IT services firm to spruce up its business, announcing today that it is acquiring Waltham, MA-based MindShift Technologies for $167 million. The deal gives Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) more power behind its services offering as the company faces competition in its retail operation from online sources like Amazon.

MindShift, founded in 1999, is the leading managed service provider for small and mid sized businesses in the U.S. (an estimated $40 billion market, according to Best Buy). It offers cloud, data center, and other IT services to businesses for a monthly fee and has more than 5,400 business customers.

The acquisition by Best Buy resembles the retailer’s 2002 acquisition of Geek Squad, the provider of computer repair and maintenance services. MindShift will keep its company name, management team, and 500 employees spread across Massachusetts, New York, Minneapolis, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., according to today’s release.

“There’s no question that acquiring the skills, capabilities and clients of mindSHIFT has the potential to help expand Best Buy’s global services capabilities in the vast small and mid-sized business market,” said George Sherman, senior vice president of Best Buy Services, said in the announcement.  “As important, the mindSHIFT team will bring added experience, talent and resources to the remote support capability we have been building within our multi-channel tech service unit Geek Squad.”

MindShift most recently raised $18 million in venture funding and has the backing of investors such as TD Fund, Volition Capital, and Columbia Capital. The acquisition is expected to close around the end of the calendar year, subject to customary closing conditions.

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Get a bunch of prominent Boston-area founders and CEOs in a room together, and ask them provocative questions. It’s a tried and true recipe for a good discussion, and that’s exactly what we got at the end of the day on Friday at MassTLC’s 2011 unConference at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The topic was “the secrets of scaling,” and it was a fitting end to a fun and productive day.

This was the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s fourth annual innovation conference, and the event has really solidified in its “unconference” format, in which hundreds of tech entrepreneurs, investors, execs, and other business leaders meet and create organic sessions to discuss whatever is on people’s minds. Most people are there for the networking and private meetings, but that didn’t stop a few lively sessions from breaking out.

The secrets of scaling session—focused on how startups get big—was organized by journalist Scott Kirsner and was more conference-y than unconference-y, as it was planned ahead of time and had the feel of a big panel. Here are some takeaways from that (before I get to some broader highlights later).

Each of the companies on the panel could be considered a Boston success story: Constant Contact, Gemvara, iRobot, Kayak, LogMeIn, Wayfair (fka CSN Stores), Zipcar. (See photo above by Jeff Bussgang, who noted that you can distinguish the pre-IPO companies from the public companies by who’s wearing jeans.) The idea was to tap into this collective braintrust and draw out some key lessons.

Paul English of travel site Kayak said he routinely asks people, who’s the smartest person you ever met? And then he goes out and tries to hire them. He relayed the story of recruiting Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak’s chief scientist, a process that took several years but was well worth it. “It was transformational,” English said. He also talked about Kayak’s expensive acquisition of rival SideStep back in 2007. Kayak fired all of SideStep’s engineers and created a duplicate version of its site. Lesson: hire and fire ruthlessly.

Niraj Shah from Wayfair talked about his e-retail company’s bootstrapped growth, starting in 2002. Once his team figured out how to make money from niche online stores, it faced lots of competitors and had to decide whether to raise money or stay the course. It chose the latter (until this year, when it did raise a big round). “We just launched new categories as fast as we could, built out selection in each category as fast as we could,” Shah said. “We let the growth compound on itself.” The key was “not letting early successes keep us from letting that compound,” he says. Lesson: stick to your knitting.

Michael Simon from LogMeIn, the remote access and IT management firm, started with the idea of being a lifestyle business, not a public company (it now has 450 employees, about 200 in Massachusetts). The key moment in LogMeIn’s growth was when it “started giving away stuff,” he said. This was before “freemium” was a popular model. The company’s revenues started very small but grew exponentially. “If you have an exponential growth curve, the absolute number doesn’t matter,” Simon says. “You’ll get there.” Lesson: start small and get traction.

Matt Lauzon from Gemvara, the online custom jeweler, represented the younger generation of entrepreneurs on the panel. Although it’s still fairly early for Gemvara (which started as Paragon Lake in 2006), the company seems to be on an impressive growth trajectory. “We didn’t want to … Next Page »

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The ideas have been pitched, the public cast their votes online and through social media for the semi-finalists, and now the Hatch Detroit retail business contest is in its final stage. This is the hard part, where we choose the winner. Will it be the wine bar or the tea room? The pop-up furniture store or the storefront laboratory for local fashion designers?

Through Wednesday, November 2, Detroiters are being asked to vote for one of four brick-and-mortar startups that Hatch Detroit’s contest organizers hope will be yet another piece in the city’s revitalization. At stake is $50,000 in seed money, as well as an estimated $25,000 worth of in-kind services from contest sponsors and a marketing campaign hammered out by Team Detroit.

The contest began in July, when organizers Ted Balowski, an account executive at Troy, MI-based CareTech Solutions, and Nick Gorga, an attorney at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn in Detroit, began receiving more than 200 business-idea submissions. The 200 were then narrowed down by the public to 10 semi-finalists through online voting.

“You always hear about crowdfunding,” Balowski says, “and we wanted to give the community the opportunity to participate. The response and the amount of positive feedback has been overwhelming. People got behind it very quickly.”

Though the crowd isn’t funding it per se—Balowski and Gorga put up a chunk of the prize money, with individual and corporate sponsors contributing the rest—they have chosen the winners at every step of the way. On October 21, the four finalists gathered for a “Hatch Off,” where they went before judges Torya … Next Page »

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The fashion, advertising, and finance sectors are teeming with startups, but it takes more than a catchy gimmick to impress Laura Sachar, general partner with StarVest Partners in New York. She says her venture capital firm this year has made new investments across the country in prosaic but solid companies such as Seattle’s Lucid Commerce, a television media agency; NewComLink, an Austin, TX-based provider of retail credit services; and Xignite, a financial market data cloud provider in San Mateo, CA, with offices in New York. (A new investment is also in the works, Sachar says, but it’s too early to discuss details.) StarVest Partners has invested $30 million so far this year, and its follow-on investments include fast-growing fashion flash sales website ideeli in New York, which raised $41 million in a Series C round in April.

In a recent interview with Xconomy, Sachar said StarVest focuses on proven management teams in need of expansion capital, and that it makes a point of seeking out companies that can benefit from the firm’s network of relationships in New York.

Xconomy: How does your experience with New York’s industries relate to the country as a whole?

Laura Sachar: The companies we are talking about can be attractive and build customers throughout the U.S., but they really leverage something unique that New York brings. That’s why we have a robust investment community and that’s why so many companies are being … Next Page »

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Life is not good when you lose your notes from one of the best keynotes you’ve seen in a while. In fact, life kind of sucks. Nevertheless, I will recount my top five takeaways from Bert Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of Life Is Good, the Boston-based apparel maker and retail brand. He spoke at last night’s MassChallenge awards gala, wearing a T-shirt and cap, and throwing Frisbees into the audience over great distances.

Maybe it’s better that I don’t have my notes to fall back on. Jacobs said a lot of entertaining, inspiring stuff over the course of the story of his company, but what I can remember now is ultimately what will stick with me (and others, I imagine):

1. “Life was good” even when Jacobs and his brother (and co-founder) John were living out of a van for weeks at a time, hawking T-shirts on the road. That was in the early ‘90s. Life was good because they were pursuing their dream and believed in what they were doing, despite the hardships and not selling much.

2. “People will give you the answers if you listen.” The Jacobs brothers went with their signature stick-figure smiley “Jake” design (see image above) in 1994 after it resonated with a bunch of their friends. The design turned out to have incredibly broad commercial appeal. So listen to people, don’t just talk all the time, he said. The best ideas will usually come from other people.

3. “Do what’s in your heart.” That sounds obvious, but it can be hard when you’re worried about getting customers and making money every day. Jacobs found that organizing benefit events for children and worthy causes have come back to help his company a hundred-fold.

4. “All our culture needs is a little leadership and an opportunity.” Life Is Good exists in part to counteract what Jacobs sees as rampant negativity in popular culture and the media (who, us?). He wants the brand to stand for all that is positive and optimistic in the world. And really, that’s why he is so inspiring to the startup community and especially to entrepreneurs, who must believe in their business against all odds.

5. “We do what we like, and we like what we do.” This is pretty much the motto of Life Is Good. The company has grown to $100 million in annual revenue and has no plans to go public or be acquired, Jacobs said. Rather, the firm is trying to go global, take risks in new product areas, and become a billion-dollar business. (Though Jacobs said, “I don’t even know what 100 million is. After my brother and I got new mountain bikes, we didn’t know what to do.”)

Overall, a really fun talk, and perfect for the evening. A broader theme I’ve been noticing is that entrepreneurs never know what they’re doing from the start. Really, nobody knows. The successful ones figure it out over time, with a little help. But each journey is different. So startups, keep fighting out there…

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Another year, another MassChallenge class. The sophomore edition of the startup accelerator and $1 million business plan competition did not disappoint. Nor did the final event of the program. Tonight was the big awards gala, held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in South Boston—a cavernous and sprawling, impersonal space—but it did the job.

I’ll have more on the ceremony tomorrow. But in the meantime, here’s the news from the evening:

Three of the MassChallenge finalist teams won $100,000 each. They are:

—Alkeus Pharmaceuticals, a biotech company working on new treatments for blindness

—Sanergy, a green tech company developing sanitation services for urban slums

—Tinfoil Security, a startup working on Web security software for small businesses

And 14 teams won $50,000 each:

—Artaic, a custom tile mosaic company

—ArtVenue, a marketplace that connects artists with local businesses

—Casa Couture, which makes shoes for pregnant women

—Cocomama Foods, a gluten-free food brand

—Drync, a wine search and ordering service

—EverTrue, a startup that connects schools and organizations with donors

—Her Campus Media, an online magazine and marketing firm targeting college women

—Invup, which makes a Web platform for managing volunteer and donation programs

—Lynx Sportswear, which makes better-fitting sports bras

—Resolute Marine Energy, a seawater desalination company

—SmarterShade, a window-darkening tech company

—SocMetrics, a Web startup that helps businesses engage key influencers

—Therapeutic Systems, a company developing a sensory vest for autistic kids

—UberSense, which makes video software to analyze sports techniques

Rounding out the field of 26 final startups:

—ARO Medical, which makes an implantable brace for back surgery patients

—Bioarray Therapeutics, a cancer diagnostics company

—Circumventive, a stealthy security tech startup

—Driveway, which connects drivers with auto insurance providers

—Finalta, a company specializing in software for institutional asset managers

—PK Clean, a plastic waste-to-energy company

—Privy, a Web marketing platform for local merchants

—Pintley, a beer website and app for brewers and consumers

—The Tap Lab, a mobile location-based game startup.

Congratulations to all the finalists and participants, whose journeys are really just beginning. All in all, this is becoming a pretty cool tradition for the Boston startup community. We’re looking forward to next year already…

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[Updated 10/14/11. See below] And then there were 26. Startup teams competing for $1 million in cash prizes, that is. Welcome to the final stage of MassChallenge 2011.

MassChallenge, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a Boston-based startup accelerator program now in its second year. It may very well be the world’s largest incubator of its kind. The nonprofit program and business competition kicked off in May with an announcement of the 125 finalist teams (out of 700-plus entrants). After a three-month mentorship program, it is now down to 26 teams who are giving their final pitches this week. The whole competition culminates in an awards ceremony on October 24.

The goal of MassChallenge is to spur Boston-area innovation by attracting entrepreneurs and connecting them with peers, mentors, funding, and other resources. It’s one of several big efforts to rally the local startup community and make it more competitive as an innovation hub. “We are on the verge of a renaissance,” MassChallenge CEO John Harthorne told me earlier this year.

If this year’s crop of finalists is any indication, the program has become more effective at engaging founders, connecting them with mentors, structuring their mentorship, and generally managing and communicating the logistics of such a huge (and hugely ambitious) program. Startup founders I talked to in recent weeks said the program was “really well organized” and that there was “nice camaraderie” amongst the teams. That seems to have helped them with the difficult work of early-stage company building.

“Technically I’m pretty strong, but I’ve never run a startup before,” says Bruce Robie, the founder and CEO of ARO Medical, one of the final 26 teams, based in North Andover, MA. ARO has developed an implantable device to help stabilize the spine of back-surgery patients.

Robie credits MassChallenge with improving his pitching skills and introducing him to key advisors. “Working with our mentors was a really positive thing,” he says, and “each brought a different perspective”—whether it was how to talk with potential partners or how to brand the product. “I’m an engineer by training, so my ability to name stuff is not going to set the world on fire,” he says.

Roy Rodenstein, the co-founder of Cambridge, MA-based SocMetrics, another finalist, says, “I’ve been very impressed this year. Last year was pretty good, but it was the first year. It’s progressing well as far as the level of support.” Rodenstein, who served as a mentor in the 2010 program, adds that “the quality of companies is up a bit,” similar to the recent trend for other incubators like Y Combinator and TechStars.

Several other finalist teams say the program helped provide the foundation and … Next Page »

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Updated 11 am Pacific
The tech world is going into hype-tastic overdrive today with the release of Amazon’s new tablet computer. If the predictions and previews are correct, the new device could be a big competitor to the market-defining Apple iPad and cement Amazon as a major player in the computing game.

But this isn’t really about the chunk of hardware that Amazon will be showing off. The reason Amazon’s entry into the tablet market is such a big deal has much more to do with all the merchandise and media that Amazon can put in your hands, without having to pay Apple some pretty hefty tolls for the privilege.

I’m not saying that competition with Apple in the tablet market isn’t a major piece of this story. Plenty of others have come out with me-too devices to follow the iPad, just as millions of people own smartphones from some other company. But none of those tablets has done much to dent the iPad’s hold on the market. Amazon’s move into tablets, however, is the only effort so far to fundamentally copy the Apple playbook, bringing a unified software, hardware, and application experience to the user.

That’s hugely significant as a piece of business strategy, because it signals that one of the more innovative companies around is truly dumping the old Microsoft view of the world, where companies specialize in one area (like software, or retail) and get others to build around that brand. It’s another vote—a big one—for Apple’s approach, and if it catches on, you’re going to see more movement in that direction. That’s surely part of the reason why Google would pay billions for Motorola.

But something much more basic is going on here. Amazon isn’t putting out tablet computers because it wants to be a computer-maker. It’s doing so because Amazon is fundamentally a retailer, and the tablet is the new digital store.

“People leaning back on their sofas, buying things from Amazon, is another tailwind for our business that I’m very excited about,” CEO Jeff Bezos said during this June’s shareholder’s meeting.

Let’s look at some of the offerings that Amazon has in its quiver, either already announced or pretty solidly reported by journalists covering the beat, which would make sense to consume over a tablet:

—Movies and TV: Amazon already has a Netflix competitor, Amazon Instant Video, that beams programs to your computer. Significantly, this has been offered as essentially a loss-leader for Amazon’s Prime membership program, which previously was mostly about free shipping. That seems … Next Page »

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In one corner: Larry Bohn, General Catalyst Partners. Rich Levandov, Avalon Ventures. Jeff Fagnan, Atlas Venture.

In the other corner: Apperian’s David Patrick.

Tonight, starting at 6pm in downtown Boston, the VCs and startup CEO square off in Xconomy’s first event of the fall season, a venture chat called Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation. The focus of this intimate conversation will be the changing climate for investors and entrepreneurs, new (and old) business models, and generally what it takes for startups to succeed today—and what it all means for consumers and society.

We have just six tickets left (as of the 13th inning of the Red Sox game late last night), so get yours right away (by going here). Online sales are open until 3 pm, and tickets cost $30 more at the door.

OK, we confess we got a bit carried away with the boxing metaphor—since the two sides won’t be fighting or even arguing (maybe arguing…), but rather engaging in insightful discussion. There is no animosity here, but there is curiosity. As Patrick says, “Since I am usually on the other side of the fence, I will try to ask a few questions from the entrepreneur’s perspective. Obvious areas include how companies are ramping up using SaaS models, cloud services, and other innovative tools. How much company progress are you looking for to consider funding a company? Are there certain check box items you need to check before moving forward and what are they?”

And that isn’t all—in addition to the chat, which will have lots of room for questions from you, the audience, we will have short “burst” presentations from four cool young Internet startups: Yottaa (Website performance optimization), OfficeDrop (digital filing and sharing), CustomMade (mass customization), and Hopper (travel search and discovery).

After the presentations, there will be food and beverages (we especially like those), and plenty of time for networking.

We hope to see you there—so get your tickets now, while you can.

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The worlds of founding and investing in startups seem to have turned almost upside down in recent years—at least in the Internet space. Suddenly, in this age of the cloud and mobile apps, it’s possible for hopeful entrepreneurs to create a hugely profitable company, not out of their garage, but from their desktops—and they might be able to bootstrap things themselves or get the money from a friendly angel rather than a big venture firm.

But can things really be so simple? Don’t you have to have, say, a business model and access to customers and potential partners and acquirers? And putting such questions aside, if you are an aspiring Internet or cloud company, and especially if you are focused on the consumer rather than the enterprise, is Boston even the place to be?

Well, we are hoping to shed some real light on such issues at Xconomy’s upcoming venture chat on Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation, which will take place the evening of September 26 in downtown Boston.

We are extremely fortunate to have a great group of investors to address them—Larry Bohn from General Catalyst Partners, Jeff Fagnan of Atlas Venture, and Rich Levandov of Avalon Partners—and an experienced startup CEO to moderate. That would be David Patrick, CEO of Boston-based Apperian, which is developing a mobile-app platform and has raised a fair bit of venture money.

Patrick says he is looking forward to turning the tables a bit on the VCs—and being able to ask questions of them, rather than the other way around. And he is especially focused on bringing out what entrepreneurs need to know.

“Since I am usually on the other side of the fence, I will try to ask a few questions from the entrepreneur’s perspective. Obvious areas include how companies are ramping up using SaaS models, cloud services, and other innovative tools,” he says. “How much company progress are you looking for to consider funding a company? Are there certain check box items you need to check before moving forward and what are they?”

Patrick says he will also be asking about valuations, both East and West Coast, and “a personal question: does a deal have to have a billion-dollar exit potential before an A-level firm will consider it?” And if so, he says, he wants to bring out some real thoughts from his guests on where smaller success stories in the Boston area can turn.

“My thinking here,” Patrick says, “is to help ramp up the tech sector in Boston and combat the perception that it is easier to get funded out west than in Boston.”

It promises to be a fun and illuminating evening. We hope to see you there. Get your tickets here.

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