With a kind of candor that speaks of the motivation in the startup and investment communities, angel investor Jerry Neumann talked bluntly Tuesday evening about the companies he backs. “All of my entrepreneurs are irritating,” he said jokingly during a panel discussion at the Digital Media Center event held at Times Square in New York. “They need to be smarter than me, they need to be more driven than me, they need to be people who can go the distance,” he said.

Neumann took the stage with Benjamin Wolin, CEO and co-founder of Everyday Health in New York, and moderator Dennis Kneale, senior media and technology correspondent for FOX Business Network. Wolin and Neumann spoke about the startup and investment scene during the third and final panel of Tuesday’s event, hosted at the Nasdaq Marketsite by Digital Media Center, a New York group formed in late 2011 that brings together investors, digital media startups, and other industry players.

Digital Media Center was formed by Cooley, CTPartners, Deloitte, Nasdaq, and Silicon Valley Bank.

The night kicked off with representatives from Facebook, Samsung, and EMC’s data storage division Isilon Systems discussing trends in social, local, and mobile technology—then continued with a look at the future of digital content through the eyes of Verizon and Heart Television. Wolin and Neumann later engaged in a lively conversation about funding and building up startups in the current clime.

“It’s a lot easier to raise small amounts of capital,” Wolin said, “certainly to get started it’s a lot easier than it was ten years ago.” Everyday Health operates websites for brands such as South Beach Diet.

“It’s a great time to be an entrepreneur,” said Neumann. He has been investing in … Next Page »

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When Samsung Electronics unveiled its new 55-inch screen organic LED television at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Universal Display (Nasdaq: PANL) in Ewing, NJ saw its own prospects rise. Organic LED (OLED) technology uses razor-thin layers of organic semiconductor material to generate light and electronic displays. It is an alternative to traditional LED and LCD technology and offers the potential to create devices that are lighter and use less energy. OLEDs do not use backlighting, which some LED and LCD displays require.

Universal Display develops OLED material and technology it licenses to manufacturers such as Samsung. While OLED screens have made their way into handheld-size devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy series of smartphones, production of larger displays that use the technology has been limited so far.

That seems to be changing with the debut of 55-inch OLED televisions from Samsung and a wicked thin 55-inch television from LG Electronics due for sale by the later half of this year. Steven Abramson, CEO of Universal Display, visited CES in Las Vegas but did not exhibit though his company’s technology could be found around the show. The plethora of smartphones and other devices built with OLED displays increases demand for the technology, he says. “We’ve been laboring in this vineyard for a long, long time,” Abramson says. “After sixteen years, we’re finally starting to see this take off.”

In addition to Samsung, other manufacturers tap into Universal Display’s research and development. “LG is buying material from us,” Abramson says. “We’ll eventually have a long-term agreement with them. Our revenues grow as the OLED industry grows.”

Universal Display reported net income of nearly $6 million on revenue of $21.8 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2011 compared with a net loss of $7.2 million on a bit less than $7.1 million in revenue for the prior year period. The company also … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s “Android isn’t free” campaign continues to roll along, with the Redmond software behemoth today announcing a patent licensing deal with handset maker LG to cover Google’s mobile operating systems.

With this deal, Microsoft says it’s got licenses covering more than 70 percent of all U.S.-sold smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The LG deal also covers the Chrome operating system, a web-based system for laptops.

Prices were not disclosed, as usual, but Wall Street analysts have pegged previous licensing deals at $5 per handset or perhaps more—which means that with Android’s massive market share, Microsoft is making more on Google’s mobile phones than its own, which have a sliver of the market.

It’s the 11th licensing deal covering Google OS products—previous licensees who have paid up to Microsoft include major manufacturers HTC, Samsung, and Acer. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez says in a statement.

As has become typical with these deals, Microsoft executives are on Twitter boasting about the deal. VP and general counsel Brad Smith announced the deal this morning on his feed, and quickly followed up with this gem, somewhat bizarrely inspired by the Occupy protests against concentration of wealth:

Microsoft claiming it’s the 99 percent by getting a patent licensing fee? Somewhere, a protester’s head just exploded.

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For the first time ever, the International Consumer Electronics Show created a zone called Eureka Park specifically to showcase startups from across the country. Fledgling companies have come to CES before and can still be found elsewhere at the conference, but Eureka Park is a new way to highlight them at the 2012 show. At an event where companies such as LG and Samsung occupy huge territory, startups such as Kogeto in New York and Flingo in San Francisco have space at The Venetian to stand out, albeit away from the digital carnival at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Kogeto CEO and founder Jeff Glasse made his way to CES bringing his company’s panoramic camera lens attachment called Dot iCONIC. “Of all the events we’ve attended with technology companies, this is the first place where I’m not the only hardware guy in the room,” Glasse says. “That’s kind of nice.”

The Dot iCONIC attaches to smartphones’ camera lenses and lets users capture panoramic 360-degree video. The lenses went on sale last October for the Apple iPhone 4 and 4S. Glasse also brought to CES demo versions of lenses for Android phones, which he expects to release within the first half of this year.

Glasse says grouping startups together at CES is an interesting move by the conference hosts to keep the event relevant as the dynamics of innovation change. “I felt like, as a [CES] outsider, that place’s days are numbered,” he says. “I think they’re adapting to a world where there are things like TechCrunch Disrupt.”

Compared with the show floor at the convention center, Eureka Park looked a bit barebones with its small booths and tables, but Spartan aesthetics tend to go hand-in-hand with startups. Some startups at CES could still be found outside of Eureka Park. Shodogg from Valhalla, NY, for example, set up a more elaborate display in another part of The Venetian to debut its technology for sharing video across Web-connected devices. Shodogg has raised $1.7 million from angel investors, and its backers include actor Seth Green, known for such roles as Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies and co-creator of the “Robot Chicken” television show on Cartoon Network (he’s the voice of Chris Griffin on “Family Guy” too). Green dropped by the company’s display to meet with Shodogg CEO Herb Mitschele (see photo above).

While some big electronics players such as Samsung have proprietary platforms to share video among their own devices, Shodogg is agnostic. Shodogg users can share content regardless of the brand of television, computer, or smartphone. “It’s a validation of our model,” says Rajiv Lulla, Shodogg’s chief innovation officer, regarding the moves by major electronics makers.

Back in Eureka Park, MIT spinout Lantos Technology, a startup in Cambridge, MA which raised $4.1 million last August, set up … Next Page »

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At his curtain call—for the moment anyway—at this year’s International Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hyped his company’s efforts to innovate and compete across multiple platforms. Microsoft announced previously that after 2012 it will no longer give the keynote at CES. As they waited for seats Monday evening, some members of the press corps voiced doubts about the weight of Ballmer’s anticipated final keynote. But the Microsoft boss still drew a throng that came to see if the company had any new tricks up its sleeve.

CES, hosted by the Consumer Electronics Association, is an annual conference held in Las Vegas where device makers, software developers, and others in the consumer technology world present their newest offerings and give a glimpse of what is in the works. Though many hopes are raised at each CES, not every gadget or promised innovation arrives on schedule or meets expectations.

For the past 14 years, Microsoft has delivered the keynote address that gets the week-long conference under way. But even though Consumer Electronics Association CEO Gary Shapiro said that Microsoft would “take a break” from the keynote stage, he added that the association would continue its relationship with the company. “I would be shocked if a Microsoft leader does not return to the stage in the next few years,” Shapiro said.

Ballmer, with some help from “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest, chatted about the development of the upcoming Windows 8 operating system and ways Microsoft wants to compete across phones, televisions, PCs, and other devices. “Nothing better than good competition,” Ballmer said.

Perhaps in an effort to shake up the stodgy feel and look of the Windows desktop, Microsoft is taking a new approach in its next version of the platform. “The Windows PC has constantly changed and reinvented and spurred other technology innovations,” Ballmer said. While he talked up the ubiquity of Windows among computers, he noted that users want new features and options. “With Windows 8, we’ve reimagined Windows from the chipset to the user experience,” he said.

Much of that change is being borrowed from the mobile world. It is called the Metro … Next Page »

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Illinois-based Baxter International (NYSE: BAX) is tapping into Cambridge, MA-based Momenta Pharmaceuticals’ abilities as a generic drugmaker in a new collaboration deal focused on developing so-called biosimilars, or knockoffs of biologic drugs.

Momenta (NASDAQ: MNTA) will receive $33 million upfront in the deal, according to an announcement yesterday, and could receive another $419 million in potential milestones and option fees. The companies will develop up to six biosimilar compounds under the agreement.

Last year Momenta nabbed FDA approval for a generic version of Sanofi’s anti-clotting drug enoxaparin (Lovenox). That product is being marketed by Sandoz. And the FDA is currently reviewing Momenta’s generic form of  glatiramer, a multiple sclerosis drug marketed today by Teva Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Copaxone.

The Momenta-Baxter deal is the latest we’ve reported in a string of activity around biosimilars. Just this week, Thousand Oaks, CA-based Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), which has R&D operations in Cambridge, announced a $400 million partnership with New Jersey’s Watson Pharmaceuticals to develop biosimilar cancer drugs. Earlier this month, Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Korean conglomerate Samsung formed a $300 million joint venture focused on biosimilars. And Merck (NYSE: MRK) has been fine-tuning its own biosimilars strategy in preparation for guidelines the FDA is expected to release on how to develop the generic biotech drugs.

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It’s hard to believe that two companies that have spent the last three years suing each other really mean it when they say that together they will be stronger. I’m talking about speech recognition competitors Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo and Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications.

The two software makers announced Tuesday that Nuance would acquire the younger, smaller Vlingo. It came as a shock, just months after Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo hit Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN) with a lawsuit that included allegations like commercial bribery and unfair competition.

On the surface it looks like a potential last resort option for the smaller startup after years of costly legal battles (covering patent infringement, false advertising, and more). But the marketing machines of Apple and Google and their newest voice-controlled smartphones, such as the iPhone 4S, could mean a host of new threats in the speech software space, causing the formerly embattled companies to join forces to survive, a number of Boston mobile experts have said.

All pending lawsuits between the companies are now “stayed,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan told me, meaning that they’ll be put in limbo until the acquisition closes, at which point they’ll be officially dismissed. Grannan has previously said he’d be open to an acquisition by Nuance if the terms were favorable. In a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, Grannan declined to discuss how much Nuance paid for Vlingo, but did want to talk “the timing of the transaction.”

The shotgun marriage of Nuance and Vlingo comes two months after Apple introduced its iPhone 4S with the built-in voice-controlled virtual assistant Siri, which can handle everything from searching for weather information to calling a cab.

“That has caused just a legion of new competitors to enter the space,” Grannan said. His company makes voice-recognition software that exists as a standalone application sold in the Google Android, Blackberry, and Apple iTunes app stores, and built into devices like Samsung mobile phones.

Facing other voice recognition startups doesn’t seem as menacing, but confronting one major Internet giant does. “It’s more scary for us that Google is going to double down its investment to try to catch Apple’s Siri,” Grannan said. “Both sides realized that we’ve long since passed the value of competing. If we’re going to survive in this marketplace we need to cooperate.”

Mountain View, CA-based Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) recently acquired Clever Sense, the maker of a mobile assistant app called Alfred that makes recommendations on nearby bars and restaurants. The purchase has been pegged as part of Google’s strategy to take its share of the voice-enabled virtual assistant space.

“Rather than spend the next year in legal battles, [Nuance and Vlingo] decided to join forces on this,” said Mark Lowenstein, managing director for the consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem. The acquisition … Next Page »

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Drugs, conglomerates, medical nutrition companies, and biotechs dominated the New England life sciences news this week.

—EnVivo Pharmaceuticals of Watertown, MA, said its experimental schizophrenia drug EVP-6124 demonstrated statistically significant improvements in patient cognitive function in a Phase 2b study. Patients also demonstrated improvements in what are known as negative schizophrenia symptoms, such as inability to experience pleasure and to carry on normal social interactions.

—Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec is forming a $300 million joint venture with the Korea-based conglomerate Samsung to develop biosimilars, which are low-cost versions of biotech drugs that are losing their patents. Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) will get a 15 percent stake in the operation for the $45 million it’s putting in, and Samsung is fronting $255 million.

—Cambridge, MA-based Momenta Pharmaceuticals bought the assets of Virdante Pharmaceuticals, a nearby biotech that raised $30 million in venture capital and is apparently winding down its operations. Virdante was developing technology for increasing the anti-inflammatory properties of antibodies. Momenta (NASDAQ: MNTA) paid $4.5 million for the assets, with potentially $51.5 million more to come in milestones, and plans to plug the technology into its discovery platform.

—I profiled Cambrooke Foods, an Ayer, MA-based maker of low-protein foods and metabolic formulas for patients with conditions such as phenylketonuria (PKU), which can be treated with proper diet. Read here about the company’s founders, growth, and latest products.

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[Updated 12/6/11 10:35 am. See below.] Today Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Seoul, Korea-based conglomerate Samsung announced that they are teaming up to develop and market biosimilars—low-cost versions of biotech drugs that are losing their patent protection. The two companies will form a joint venture, based in Korea, which will be funded by $255 million from Samsung and $45 million from Biogen. Biogen, based in Weston, MA, will take a 15 percent stake in the venture.

[Material added to provide further details on Eidetica.] Biogen has long hinted at its interest in biosimilars. In 2009, Xconomy reported that the company had quietly set up a Swiss subsidiary called Eidetica to develop and manufacture biosimilars. A spokeswoman for Biogen told Xconomy today that the company started Eidetica to explore biosimilars but discontinued the initiative. “We are not currently pursuing any biosimilars strategy on our own outside of this [Samsung] joint venture,” she says.

Biogen hasn’t said much else about its biosimilars strategy, but in January of this year, CEO George Scangos told Bloomberg that he expected them to constitute “a meaningful revenue stream” and that the company was working on several biosimilar molecules. Biogen said today that the Samsung joint venture would not pursue biosimilar versions of proprietary Biogen drugs.

Biogen is the latest in a string of companies to aggressively pursue biosimilars. In October, Michael Kamarck of Merck (NYSE: MRK) told Xconomy that his company had embarked on a multifaceted plan to develop biosimilar versions of several blockbuster drugs, including Amgen’s filgrastim (Neupogen) and pegfilgrastim (Neulasta). Kamarck reiterated Merck’s commitment to biosimilars at the company’s R&D briefing for analysts in November.

Samsung may seem an unlikely partner for Biogen in this latest endeavor. But in fact, in May 2010, Samsung declared biotech to be one of five new strategic businesses that would drive its growth going forward, and it committed to invest $2 billion into the sector by 2020.

Biogen Idec did not immediately respond to a request for comment on today’s announcement. The price of Biogen’s stock, at $11.79 per share, was unchanged in pre-market trading.

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Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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Intellectual Ventures is stepping up its position in the mobile patent wars, suing Motorola Mobility in federal court today for allegedly infringing on a range of patents covering hardware and software.

Irony alert: Google, which is in the middle of acquiring Motorola Mobility for about $12.5 billion, has been listed in previous court filings as an investor in Intellectual Ventures, possibly through a licensing agreement. Motorola’s own patents were a major reason behind the acquisition—they were touted specifically by Google CEO Larry Page in this August blog post.

Patent expert and blogger Florian Mueller writes that, even though Google’s financial stake is in an IV subsidiary fund that’s not involved in the new Motorola suit, the development amounts to an “own goal” on Google’s part. (He’s also got some critical analysis of Google’s willingness to defend the Android ecosystem).

In a blog post announcing the lawsuit, Intellectual Ventures lawyer Melissa Finocchio writes that IV has “a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license.”

“Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business,” Finocchio writes.

As Ina Fried at AllThingsD points out at the end of this post, this suit just adds to the long list of patent claims being tossed around between technology heavyweights, including Apple, Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft. One thing of note, however: I wouldn’t say this really constitutes Intellectual Ventures “joining” the mobile patent wars, since it already has publicly cut licensing deals with both Samsung and HTC, among others.

Intellectual Ventures was co-founded and is led by Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. The court filing says Intellectual Ventures has “a portfolio of more than 35,000 assets,” with more than 3,000 patents or applications the result of the firm’s in-house invention lab or its network of contract inventors.

Intellectual Ventures also reiterates that it has earned more than $2 billion so far from licensing patents, and has paid more than $400 million to “individual inventors.”

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San Diego-based Qualcomm has traditionally been known as the world’s biggest maker of mobile phone chips—with most of that technology coming out of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, the company’s “QCT” division.

But Qualcomm crossed a kind of tipping point three years ago, when the software engineers at QCT began to outnumber the hardware engineers, according to Sayeed “Sy” Choudhury, a QCT director of product management. With wireless access accounting for an increasing share of Internet use, Qualcomm’s growing contingent of software developers has likewise expanded to tackle different facets of the wireless Web. “Some of these folks work on device drivers, others on enabling graphics, multimedia, telephony, data connectivity, the various [operating systems] platforms,” Choudhury says.

Web technology development, in particular, has become an increasingly important focus of the work done at Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, as well as at company outposts in Toronto, Raleigh, NC, and Haifa, Israel.

The overarching goal is to deliver what Choudhury likes to call “best-in-class browsing”—by optimizing the browser to work faster and better over a wireless connection. Qualcomm has organized this effort by distributing different blocks of work, so development of the software engine that executes Javascript code is done in San Diego, along with the way a Web page gets laid out in memory. Coding for the way the different components of a Web page get downloaded is handled in Haifa, and the software needed to render everything to the display screen is done in both Raleigh and Toronto.

Sy Choudhury

“Part of the reason we distributed the team was simply a hiring strategy, so there are enough skilled workers to grow these areas of competence in parallel.” Choudhury says. The goal with each functional block is to take the Android OS and Windows Phone operating system, and find ways to optimize key operations. Qualcomm then takes its chipsets, with the optimized code embedded in the operating system, and hands the lot over to its mobile device partners—the mobile phone manufacturers like Kyocera, HTC, Motorola, Sharp, Sanyo, LG, and Samsung. “Every three to four months, when there is an update for the operating system, Android for example, it’s necessary to go back again to make sure that each part is still optimized,” says Choudhury. He offered three examples:

—To take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) capabilities, Qualcomm’s software developers created a two-step process that chops a Web page into sub blocks, which can be stored in a device’s memory. As a result, the device can … Next Page »

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At Google Ventures’ summer barbeque in the Googleplex parking lot a couple of weeks ago, I was talking with an engineer from the Android team. I confessed to him that I’m an iPhone/iPad user. But I also said that because I write a lot about Android and mobile apps in general, I feel like I should get an Android phone as well, if only so that I can try the latest apps from the Android Market. Which one, I asked, did he recommend?

“If you want to experience Android the way we intended it, you should get a Nexus S,” he replied without hesitation, referring to the phone co-developed by Google and Samsung. The Nexus S, you may recall, is the successor to the Nexus One, built by HTC, which Google attempted to sell from its own online store. The Nexus One wasn’t much of a hit—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) shut down the store in July 2010, admitting that it had “remained a niche channel for early adopters.” The Nexus S was the first smartphone to use the improved 2.3 version of Android, code-named Gingerbread, and it’s the device that you see Google engineers and third-party Android developers using when they want to demonstrate advanced features like near-field communication.

Google’s had an amazing run with Android, going from a zero-percent share of the mobile operating system market in 2007 to the dominant share today. (Some 39 percent of smartphones sold today run Android, compared to 28 percent for Apple’s iOS and 20 percent for RIM’s Blackberry—the figures are from Nielsen for the second quarter of 2011.) But Android’s main strength—the fact that it’s available to all handset makers under a free, open-source license—is also its main weakness. Manufacturers are free to use whatever version of Android they want, and to bolt their own software and user-interface tweaks onto it. The result has been fragmentation. In contrast to iOS or Blackberry, you never quite know how an Android phone or tablet will work. And that’s the frustration the Android guy at the barbeque was implicitly voicing.

To show the world what it’s really trying to do with Android, Google has had to talk HTC and then Samsung into releasing unbranded, unskinned devices running the latest, unadulterated versions of the operating system. That’s a suboptimal solution for both Google and the handset makers, since the official “Google phone” ends up vying in the marketplace against the same manufacturers’ other phones; HTC, for example, came out with a Nexus One-like phone called the Desire, and the Nexus S is pretty hard to tell from the Samsung Galaxy S and Galaxy S II.

Today Google CEO Larry Page announced that the company will acquire Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI) the only major Android handset maker that it hasn’t yet partnered with to build a reference smartphone. The surprise $12.5 billion purchase, which will add 19,000 employees to Google’s existing base of 29,000, has already spawned a frenzy of analysis and punditry. Many observers are focused on the deal’s implications for the current patent arms race—and Page did emphasize in his own blog post this morning that the purchase of Motorola, which owns 17,000 patents and has another 7,500 pending, will strengthen Google’s patent portfolio and “enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”

But if you ask me, this purchase is really about one big thing: control, and the old truism that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. How annoying it must be for Google’s Android engineers to depend on outside manufacturers to get Android to market, even when they promise not to muck up the latest version with their own twists. If you can afford it—and Google, with $39 billion in cash on hand, clearly can—why not just buy your own handset maker?

If you’re going to do that, Motorola is the obvious choice—and not just because of its impressive patent portfolio. The company went all-Android back in 2008. It makes both smartphones and tablets (Motorola’s Xoom is considered one of the leading Android tablets, though it has a long way to go to catch up with Apple’s iPad 2). And it already sells 28 percent of all Android smartphones, compared to Samsung’s 21 percent—only HTC has a bigger market share, at 36 percent. Just as important, Motorola is a U.S. company, and it’s affordable—even Google isn’t big enough to buy Samsung (market capitalization $104 billion) or HTC ($34 billion).

Google says it plans to operate Motorola Mobility as a separate unit, presumably with current CEO Sanjay Jha still in charge. But it would be ludicrous to imagine that Android mastermind Andy Rubin and Page himself—who’s known for his focus on product development details—won’t be closely involved in the design of future Motorola Android devices. When Page says that the Motorola acquisition will “supercharge the entire Android ecosystem,” he has to mean that Google will finally be able to set the example itself, creating devices that spur makers of other Android devices to up their games.

Of course, how Samsung, HTC, and other smartphone and tablet makers of Android smartphones and tablets will feel about about the operating system now that they’ll be competing directly against Google is the big open question. Google is like the banker at the poker game who’s suddenly dealt himself in. The other players may be too deep into the game to step away—or they may decided to cash in their chips and go to another casino.

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Finding the best answers to big problems can mean looking to an outside party with bright ideas. The trouble is finding those fixes immediately. New York’s ChallengePost, a Web-based platform for running competitions, gives organizations and individuals a way to attract contenders who think they have got the right stuff.

Brandon Kessler, CEO of ChallengePost, says he created the three-year-old startup to be a central place for community groups, government agencies, companies, and others to call attention to issues they want help resolving. Users of ChallengePost include First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to improve school lunches and the World Bank, which shared data with developers via the platform in an attempt to help meet United Nations Millennium Developmental Goals such as fighting disease and poverty. “Large organizations use our platform to solve big problems through technology,” Kessler says.

New funding from investors is helping ChallengePost meet some of its own goals. Kessler says the company raised $4.1 million in a series A round, announced Tuesday, led by Opus Capital. Other participants in the round include … Next Page »

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The patent litigation between Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) and Cambridge, MA-based Vlingo is nothing new.

A false advertising lawsuit is, though. Earlier this week, Nuance filed such a lawsuit against Vlingo in Suffolk County Superior Court. The suit asserts that Vlingo, on its website and elsewhere, “makes numerous false and misleading representations of fact to induce consumers to purchase or use Vlingo products and services,” according to court documents provided to Xconomy by Vlingo.

[Disclosure: the brother-in-law of Xconomy Boston editor Greg Huang is a co-founder of Vlingo. Mr. Huang was not involved in the planning, directing, reporting, or editing of this story.]

These allegedly false and misleading claims include the statement that Vlingo’s technology achieves unprecedented accuracy, that it applies “automatic adaptation” to pronunciation and vocabulary, that it learns for example, “over time that a particular user tends to ask for Mexican food,” and that the adaptation process is “new technology.” Nuance calls these claims unfair and deceptive—for instance, at one point the suit says “Vlingo claims that certain technology is ‘new’ when in fact it is not”—and has sought unspecified monetary damages for the harm Vlingo has caused it as a result. Nuance also states that the claims “harm the consuming public and are contrary to the public interest.”

A representative from Nuance said that the company does not comment on matters of litigation.

Here is the PDF of Nuance’s false advertising complaint against Vlingo and supporting documents.

Nuance says in its suit that it became aware of the false advertising as part of the discovery process—specifically when it deposed key Vlingo employees—in one of the pending patent infringement cases. Nuance says a protective order issued in that case prevents it from using at least some of the information in the new false advertising suit at this time, but that it is seeking ways to do so.

“To me it looks like a real sign of desperation,” Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan told me on a call Thursday. “It’s just a measure of the fact that they’re trying to increase our legal expenses and create some sense of uncertainty and doubt against our customer base.

“It’s continued to be part of the Nuance strategy to compete in the courtroom rather than in the market,” he says.

Vlingo offers a mobile app that consumers can buy themselves and also powers voice recognition features for device makers like Samsung. Grannan says his company has recently inked some big customer deals —which he didn’t name—in which it went head to head with Nuance. “Every time we have a market victory, they sue us again,” he says.

The false advertising lawsuit is the latest step in the three-year legal wranglings between the two software companies. Earlier this month, Nuance hit Vlingo with … Next Page »

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I’ve never been particularly fond of the term “killer app,” which has thankfully receded from the lexicon of tech writers—no doubt from heavy overuse.

But during Qualcomm’s Uplinq conference for mobile app developers earlier this month, I was struck by the potential “killerness” of the wireless giant’s initiative in mobile augmented reality, or AR. What initially seemed like an amusing kind of virtual curiosity last year (when Qualcomm and Mattel demonstrated an AR version of the game “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots”) struck me this year as a far more pragmatic and relevant technology—with a broad range of potential applications. What Augmented Reality really represents is a potential revolution in the mobile user interface—by simply aiming a camera-equipped mobile device towards an object (or anything, really) and seeing a layer of relevant data, images, or apps superimposed over the real world.

The combination of AR software and hardware that Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has developed makes it possible to overlay 3-D virtual images and video content on top of the real world, as viewed through the camera of a smartphone or tablet computer. While there are some AR mapping technologies that use GPS and internal compass inputs to provide virtual labels (visible in the field of view) for shops along a street, say, Qualcomm has focused its R&D efforts on a different approach, called vision-based AR.

Jay Wright

“It’s a different set of technologies that require computer vision technologies that are capable of recognizing things in the field of view,” says Jay Wright, Qualcomm’s senior director for AR business development. While Qualcomm’s technology lies mostly in its proprietary software, Wright says the company is also integrating its AR software closely with its mobile chipsets.

Wright says the AR field traces its roots back to the aircraft maintenance business, as part of an effort to make the complexity of aircraft maintenance and repairs easier for mechanics. The idea was to devise a see-through display that would be head-mounted, so mechanics could superimpose the manufacturer’s schematic for a wiring harness while peering inside a panel at the real thing. “It makes a lot of sense,” Wright says, “because wires need to go in the right place inside of airplanes.”

Qualcomm is now working to make its AR technology the preferred software worldwide, in the tradition of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft.  “What we are doing commercially is we are taking this software technology for vision-based augmented reality and we are making it broadly available [for free] to all Android developers, and we also just announced that we’ll be making it available to iOS developers as well,” Wright says.

Because vision-based AR apps are very computationally intensive, Wright says, they take a lot of processing power. So Qualcomm has optimized its AR software to perform especially well on the company’s higher-end Snapdragon chipsets. By making its software widely available to app developers (Wright says more than 7,000 so far), Qualcomm is both driving demand … Next Page »

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InterDigital (NASDAQ: IDCC), a company that invents new wireless technologies and counts Samsung, Research in Motion, and HTC among its biggest customers, has opened a satellite R&D lab in San Diego. The new facility is initially focused on developing technologies to improve the capacity of wireless networks, according to Bill Merritt, the company’s CEO.

Merritt, who plans to be on hand for InterDigital’s open house in San Diego Thursday evening, describes the move as a kind of homecoming for the wireless innovator based in King of Prussia, PA. InterDigital was known as a “TDMA Company” during the 1990s and a counterweight to Qualcomm’s rival CDMA-based wireless technology standard. Merritt says InterDigital’s first wireless R&D program was based in San Diego in 1985, and the inventions created as part of that project were used in GSMs around the world. (For the wireless-jargon-impaired, TDMA stands for Time Division Multiple Access; CDMA is for Code Division Multiple Access; and GSM is for Global System for Mobile Communications.)

Through its 1992 acquisition of SCS Mobilecom/Telecom, which specialized in Spread Spectrum CDMA technology, InterDigital says it became one of the few wireless technology developers with expertise in both TDMA and CDMA technologies.

Like Qualcomm, InterDigital generates much of its revenue from licensing its technologies throughout the wireless industry. The two companies followed sharply different trajectories, however. Today Qualcomm ranks as the largest wireless chipmaker in the world, with net income of $3.25 billion on revenue of nearly $11 billion in fiscal 2010. In comparison, InterDigital posted net income of $153.6 million on 2010 revenue of $394.5 million.

Nevertheless, InterDigital says it plays a fundamental role in developing core technologies for mobile devices, networks, and services. Merritt, who has overseen the growth of InterDigital’s patent licensing business, says the company’s current strategic focus falls into what he calls three general categories of “bandwidth crunch.” He describes those categories as “building wireless pipes” through spectrum optimization, “connecting more pipes” through inter-network connectivity and mobility, and using developing “better pipes” through improved compression algorithms and what the company calls intelligent data delivery.

“We bring technologies into the worldwide standards bodies that create the standards for the next generation wireless.” Merritt says. “It’s basically a giant joint R&D process among many, many companies. And they build and design the specifications for these new systems, which are used to make sure that a Nokia handset can talk to an Ericsson base station.”

As for the new San Diego facility, Merritt says, “We’re following a … Next Page »

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I spent a couple of days at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco last week, but unfortunately the news didn’t slow down to accommodate my absence from the office.

—Our marquee infotech event of the spring, Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, is coming up tomorrow at SRI International in Menlo Park; you can get your ticket now. One of the panelists coming in to help explore the long-range future of consumer computing is Dan Reed, head of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group (XCG); on a Q&A published last week, I asked Reed how he compensates for the inevitable uncertainties in technology forecasting and where he thinks cloud computing, mobile computing, and AI research are heading.

—Staffers at PARC published a blog post taking issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article last week about Apple, Xerox, and the nature of innovation. PARC argued that Gladwell’s picture of innovation at the legendary lab is outdated, and that if Steve Jobs were visiting PARC today, he wouldn’t be allowed to walk away with the lab’s best ideas—there’d be a collaboration informed by the philosophy of open innovation.

—The tech world buzzed with discussion over Microsoft’s $8.5 billion takeover of Skype, which has major operations in the Bay Area. My colleague Curt up in Seattle rounded up blog reaction to the acquisition, Microsoft’s largest ever, while Greg reported on his conversation with Microsoft online services president Qi Lu, who said Skype’s Internet calling functions will enhance existing Microsoft products like Xbox Kinect, Windows Phone 7, and Lync instant messaging.

—I was one of 5,000 attendees at Google I/O to pick up a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Android tablet computer. I’m a committed iPad fan and will remain so, but as I reported in my Friday column, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (which hits stores in the U.S. on June 8) comes closer to matching the iPad 2 than any other tablet on the market. In fact, it bests the iPad 2 in some respects—it’s thinner, with a larger screen and much better cameras, for example.

… Next Page »

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Apple may be the world’s largest electronics company as measured by market capitalization, but Samsung is the largest by sales. So it makes sense that the Seoul, Korea-based giant—not Microsoft, not HP, not Motorola, not Dell—would the first to compete seriously in the market that Apple invented last year with the introduction of the iPad. If Samsung wants to stay on top, it needs a tablet device that compares well not just with the iPad, but with the sleeker, more powerful iPad 2.

And that, I can now tell you first-hand, is exactly what the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 does. When you hear “Galaxy Tab,” erase any thoughts you may have of the awkward, plasticky, overgrown phone that Samsung brought out under that name last September. The 10.1 is so different from its predecessor that it really deserves a new name rather than a number (the “10.1″ refers to the screen’s diagonal size in inches, which is slightly larger than the screen on the iPad 2). My vote would be to call it the “Me2Pad”—that’s how similar this device is to its Apple cousin, at least in outward appearance and physical characteristics. The software inside is another matter: the Galaxy Tab’s Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” operating system couldn’t be more different from Apple’s iOS. But more on that in a moment.

The Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be available in U.S. retail stores starting June 8, at price points that match Apple’s: $499 for a 16-gigabyte unit, $599 for 32 gigabytes. (There’s no 64-gigabyte version.) I’ve been testing the device since Tuesday, when I was one of 5,000 attendees at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco who were given free units, courtesy of Google and Samsung.

Don’t worry, we haven’t changed our policy on gifts at Xconomy—we don’t accept them, and as soon as we’re done reviewing this unit, we’re probably going to give it away to someone in our community (stay tuned for the details). Meanwhile, though, I wanted to describe some of my early impressions of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and tell you why I think it’s the first device worth considering as a serious alternative to the iPad 2. I’m not necessarily saying you should spend your $499 on a Galaxy Tab rather than an iPad; I’m just saying it’s the first iPad rival that can’t be dismissed out of hand.

Let’s start with the hardware. With its aluminum rim and its black bezel, the Galaxy Tab 10.1 can easily be mistaken from a distance for a black iPad. Once you get closer, though, you notice that the screen has a different shape: it has a widescreen 1.6:1 aspect ratio, in contrast to the iPad’s 4:3 ratio. I think that gives the Galaxy Tab an advantage in some situations, such as watching a wide-screen movie in landscape orientation or reading long Web pages in portrait orientation.

In most other physical respects, the Galaxy Tab and the iPad 2 are effectively identical. The Galaxy Tab weighs slightly less (595 grams compared to 601 grams) and is thinner by a hair (8.6 millimeters compared to 8.8 millimeters). Its screen has a few more pixels, meaning the resolution is slightly higher—1280×800 compared to 1024×768.

But a tablet computer is really just a magical glass touchscreen; it’s the apps that run on it that count. And in this department, Apple still has a huge advantage. There are more than 80,000 apps designed specifically for the iPad, compared to … Next Page »

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It’s no secret that some big West Coast players have shown interest in Boston’s homegrown mobile technology lately. In the past few weeks, San Jose, CA-based eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) has bought Where, a location-based mobile advertising and recommendations provider, and mobile payments startup Fig Card, to roll into its PayPal division.

But Boston-based Skyhook Wireless has a slightly different relationship with a Bay Area Internet giant. It’s been wrestling in court with Mountain View, CA-based search engine giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), around its location-finding technology for mobile phones. Skyhook has sued Google for alleged patent infringement, as well as alleged interference by Google with deals Skyhook had inked with Motorola and Samsung for devices running on Google’s Android smartphone platform. (You can read more about the lawsuits here and here.)

It looks like there’s still a long way to go for that case to be resolved—last week lawyers from both sides met before a Suffolk County Superior Court. Google’s lawyers asked for the judge to throw out the case, on the basis that Google had pre-existing agreements with device makers, in which some of its standard apps automatically collected location data. Meanwhile, Skyhook’s lawyers re-emphasized their claim that Google road-blocked Motorola and Samsung from following through on agreements to ship smartphones with Skyhook’s XPS software, which determines a user’s location using WiFi, cellular, and GPS access points.

Yesterday, the judge denied both Google’s motion to dismiss the case and for a summary judgment, court documents show. The case will now to go into full discovery to gather the necessary documents and depositions, a period that could take six months—a timetable suggested by Google lawyers last week.

So it’s a small victory for Skyhook, but its legal work is just beginning. “Their goal is to try and bleed us out and our goal is to try and make sure we get the facts brought to light,” Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan told me this week.

Meanwhile, Skyhook has been nabbing some bigger victories out of the courtroom. This week it announced that MapQuest, the San Francisco-based mapping division of AOL, will use Skyhook’s technology in an upcoming turn-by-turn navigation app for Android phones. Skyhook has inked similar deals with UberMedia, Citysearch, and Priceline over the past few months.

“In the meantime what we’re doing is going after all the top Android apps that offer location,” Morgan says. “That way we’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers.”

Google’s and Apple’s impending appearances before a U.S. Senate committee also shed some positive light onto Skyhook’s technology, he says. Lawmakers have expressed concern over reports that Apple logs user location data on mobile devices. Google, which has claimed that … Next Page »

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