The explosion of faster networks, connected crowds and mobile computing has made millions of Americans into astonishingly fast and efficient consumers. But when the weekend’s over, too many of us walk back into a technological time-warp of email chains, conference calls and endless meetings.

Bellevue-based LiquidPlanner is among the companies trying to break down that wall. Founded in 2006 by two veterans of Expedia and Microsoft, the startup is trying to make productivity software sexier—and just plain better—by incorporating elements of social networks and app-based computing.

It’s one example of an emerging trend in business software. Author and venture capitalist Geoffrey Moore, the guy behind the classic business text “Crossing the Chasm,” describes the change as a migration from “systems of record” like databases to “systems of engagement,” allowing workers to collaborate and share more information.

“The next big wave of investment in enterprise IT will be around this consumerization of enterprise IT,” Moore told us in an interview last month. “And it’ll be around, in particular, helping companies communicate, coordinate, and collaborate across company boundaries.”

Charles Seybold, the co-founder and CEO at LiquidPlanner, couldn’t agree more. The company is trying to overhaul boring old business software by including the features and visual language that people already use in their private lives—and that younger workers will increasingly demand.

“Our whole design was built around this concept of social management. It’s about people working together to get things done,” Seybold says. And he says that is a big change in the world of project management, a multibillion-dollar market where software has traditionally focused on technical rather than social solutions.

“A lot of our competitors are involved in what I like to call the kitchen sink wars—they’re trying to add more features. But it’s not really about adding more features. It’s about making them easier to use,” Seybold says.

LiquidPlanner’s story is a classic: Techies frustrated by the bureaucracy of a larger company set out to solve a nagging problem. Seybold and co-founder Jason Carlson both worked at Expedia before it spun out of Microsoft, and were with the company as it grew into “one of the Four Horsemen of the Internet,” as Seybold puts it.

“From an insider’s perspective, this was a company that grew really fast,” Seybold says. “And its process, inside the company, became quite a challenge.” Seybold got to see that firsthand as he worked to set up Expedia’s first project management system. After spending millions on consultants and … Next Page »

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Mountain View, CA-based MerchantCircle, which provides local merchants with online social networking tools, said yesterday that it has acquired TimeBridge, maker of a Web app for business meeting scheduling. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “The TimeBridge team has developed innovative scheduling technologies and we are very happy to bring them on board to MerchantCircle,” MerchantCircle co-founder and chairman Ben T. Smith said in a statement. “Their offering will provide a previously missing piece to our suite of free marketing tools that help local businesses maximize their online presence and build greater conversations with customers.” Based in Berkeley, CA, TimeBridge was backed by venture firms Mayfield Fund and Norwest Venture Partners.

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Shiftboard has managed to stay under the radar for quite some time, despite a slew of big name clients, but that is starting to change.

The Seattle-based scheduling and dynamic workforce management software developer, founded in 2002, has started to come out of stealth mode, so I figured it was time to sit down with CEO Rob Eleveld to hear the story. Turns out that Shiftboard really got going with one prominent local customer back in 2005—the Seattle International Film Festival, which practically runs on volunteer efforts, was the first organization to use Shiftboard’s software-as-a-service platform to manage its complicated employee and volunteer scheduling. Five years later, the company now has more than 500 customers around the world, including nonprofits, to academic institutions, to government agencies, and small to large companies.

Through the Shiftboard system, organizations can easily manage their employee and/or volunteer databases—whether they range from 25 to 10,000 people—oversee shift availability and scheduling, initiate online recruitment campaigns, communicate with employee and volunteer groups online and through mobile devices, and view coverage and schedule reports in real time.

While online, mobile scheduling and workforce management may not sound like the most exciting software being developed out there, Eleveld says the market is booming, largely because of growth on the Internet. Online, self-service scheduling could only be useful to companies if at least 80 percent of its employees had adequate access to use this service, according to Eleveld, a mark that has only recently been met. And as broadband access and email have become more readily available to people across all socioeconomic climates, the market has evolved.

Rob Eleveld

“Companies are scheduling in almost every time zone worldwide through Shiftboard,” Eleveld says.

Though the company has stayed outside of the spotlight, its clients certainly haven’t. Its customer pool boasts more than a few big names, including the American Red Cross, National Public Radio, the Los Angeles Film Festival, and Harvard University are just a few of the national names using Shiftboard services. Here in the Northwest, Shiftboard’s services are used at the City of Mercer Island, KEXP 90.3 FM, Centerplate at Safeco Field, the Puget Sound Blood Center, Bumbershoot, Teatro Zinzanni, and the Family 4th at Lake Union, to name a few. I have even used the Shiftboard system without realizing it (back in college I used to stack up summer volunteer hours with One Reel, the local nonprofit arts and events production organization behind Bumbershoot and other local events).

Shiftboard isn’t the only company in the Web-based scheduling space. Tustin, CA-based WhenToWork also offers online employee scheduling software, as does Austin, TX-based HotSchedules, though the latter focuses on the restaurant industry. Montreal-based Tungle offers a similar online calendar scheduling application, but for the consumer market, rather than for businesses. What sets Shiftboard apart, Eleveld says, is that the system is compatible with a number of mobile and online systems, is highly customizable to meet the needs of organizations and businesses across a variety of markets, and works from the workforce back to the organization, rather than the other way around.

“The vast majority [of competitors] are desktop systems directed at niche markets,” he says. And while most systems give the employee capability to assign schedules top-down online, Shiftboard is “direct to the workforce,” building from the employee or volunteer in. The employee or volunteer selects their schedule, and that information is sent back to the organization. The system is unique in that it “lets folks decide when they want to work and volunteer,” Eleveld says.

Bryan Lhuillier

Company founder and chief product and technology officer Bryan Lhuillier says the company kept a low profile in its early days but is ready to be more transparent now that it is primed to expand internationally.

To date Shiftboard hasn’t raised much venture capital, Lhuillier says (according to regulatory filings, the company brought in $460,000 in equity in May 2009, and another $750,000 this last April). But they haven’t seemed to need it either.

At a time when many companies “were forced to streamline”—faced with cutting costs, or laying off employees—Lhuillier says Shiftboard is doing well. He couldn’t comment on the specifics of the companies financials, but did say that it has seen triple digit growth rates, both in customers and finances, over the last two years.

“Many times we think the economy has actually been good for us,” he says, noting, with a laugh, that “The jury’s still out…the investor community is much more gun shy than it was a few years back.”

Nevertheless, Eleveld says Shiftboard has more than enough work to keep the around 25-person staff (split between half full time and half contract/part time) busy. This fall the company plans to roll out a “big push” in its application programming interface (API) offering, including making a product available on the Google App exchange, and offering the Shiftboard software as a white label product so that customers can package it under their own brand. The company is also looking to expand its brand through partnerships, and is actively hiring in all areas to meet growth demands.

“One of the big focuses here is we don’t want to do everything ourselves,” he says. “We want to partner and build out a partner ecosystem of folks who are incented to sell Shiftboard.”

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We saw a few contributions in the life sciences sector, but for the most part, Internet and software companies have been dominating with deals headlines in the last week.

—Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) got $69 million in cash from Merck, for revising a 2007 agreement with a unit of the drug giant. The revisions give Merck (NYSE: MRK) an exclusive license to develop, produce, and sell Ariad’s experimental cancer drug ridaforolimus, and Merck will cover all future costs related to these activities. Cambridge, MA-based Ariad has already collected $128.5 million in fees and milestones for the collaboration, which initially had the two companies splitting the development responsibilities and marketing rights of the drug.

—Sanofi-Aventis, the giant Paris-based drug developer with a Cambridge research site, announced it will contribute $500,000 over two years to Massachusetts’ initiative for accelerating the life sciences industry in the state, according to the program’s administrator, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.

—Cranston, RI-based DormNoise, a developer of online interactive calendar systems for college students, announced it has raised $500,000 in Series A financing. The investment came from online education website PRESENT e-Learning Systems, and DN Ventures, an investor group formed by DormNoise director Alan Jacober.

—InstallFree, a Stamford, CT, maker of application virtualization software, brought in $3 million of a planned $3.76 million equity-based round of funding. Richard Fade of Ignition Partners, Peter van Oppen of Trilogy Partnership, and Microsoft veteran Yuval Neeman are listed as company directors on the SEC disclosure of the financing.

—WordStream, a developer of software for enhancing online marketing, said it pulled in $6 million in Series B financing, with contributions from Egan-Managed Capital and Sigma Partners. The cash will go toward the Boston-based company’s growth and expansion of products, which aim to improve both search-engine-optimization and pay-per-click marketing.

—Just call it software week. Redline Trading Solutions, a Woburn, MA, maker of software for getting financial market data to trading applications, raised $7.45 million in equity, according to an SEC filing. The money came from … Next Page »

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DormNoise.com, a Cranston, RI-based maker of online interactive calendar systems for college students, announced that it has raised $500,000 in Series A funding. The financing, which was led by DN Ventures (an investing venture group formed by DormNoise director Alan Jacober) and online medical education and social networking company PRESENT e-Learning Systems, will go to DormNoise’s sales, marketing, and product development. The company, which was founded by 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania student Jay Rodrigues, has previously raised $450,000 in three rounds of funding from friends and family. In 2008 Wade profiled a similar company in the college student collaboration and scheduling space: Cambridge, MA-based Wiggio.

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Bedford, MA-based TimeTrade, which makes a personal appointment scheduling system called TimeDriver, is expected to announce tomorrow that its software has been integrated with Salesforce.com’s suite of Web-based customer relationship management applications. TimeDriver for Salesforce will be unveiled next week at Salesforce’s DreamForce conference in San Francisco and will be available to users of Salesforce’s Force.com AppExchange by the end of the year, the company will announce.

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Waltham, MA-based Commonwealth Capital Partners is the lead investor in a $5 million Series A venture round for Tungle, a maker of free Web-based calendar groupware, the Montreal-based startup announced today. Existing investors JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital also contributed to the round, which will be used to—you guessed it—”accelerate the company’s marketing and engineering activities.”

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You get home from a big business trip to San Francisco, you’re talking with a friend from out of town, and you find out that he was just there too. If you’d known, you could have met up! It’s a common scenario—and it shouldn’t happen as often anymore.

After all, you probably keep an electronic calendar that includes details about your upcoming trips. And most calendars these days allow you to share your appointment data with other people’s calendars, over the Web or corporate networks. There ought to be a central exchange where your calendar program can go to find out whether any of your friends (or colleagues, or potential clients or customers) are going to be in the same area as you at the same time.

Well, now there is. It’s called LuckyCal, and it’s being built by a Lexington, MA-based startup that’s one of the first 10 companies to receive a grant from Facebook’ $10 million “fbFund.” Announced last year, the fbFund is run by Facebook with money from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, and is designed to support independent developers working on applications for the Facebook Platform (the subject of my interview last week with Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin). LuckyCal got the largest possible grant from the fbFund: $250,000, to be doled out in installments as the startup meets usership milestones.

But, while LuckyCal’s Facebook application is an important part of its offerings, you can use the service even if you don’t have a Facebook account, by giving it access to your desktop- or Web-based calendars and address books and inviting friends to share their own data. LuckyCal’s matching algorithms suck in all this information, along with public event listings from sources such as Ticketmaster, and spit out what the company calls “lucky” events: confluences that you can then decide whether to act upon. Say you’re going to Minneapolis-St. Paul next weekend. LuckyCal might see from your address book that you have a cousin there, and suggest that you give her a call; and it might know from the interests you’ve listed on your LuckyCal profile that you love public radio, and send you a link to purchase tickets to a live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

When I first heard about LuckyCal’s service, it reminded me of 1990s-era predictions about “intelligent agents” that would scour the Internet, making your travel arrangements, negotiating appointments, doing your holiday shopping, and the like. A full-blown agent would require a level of artificial intelligence that’s still way beyond what computer science can accomplish. But LuckyCal does something very similar, just by crunching together the standard data that can be extracted today from productivity applications like Outlook and iCal and Web platforms like Facebook and Gmail.

It’s a no-brainer, in a way. But nobody had done it. “Calendars have been around for a very long time,” observes LuckyCal’s 37-year-old CEO and co-founder Sanjay Vakil, a Canadian-born entrepreneur and software architect who’s a veteran of local startups like Ambient Devices and PatientKeeper. “Electronic calendars have been around for a reasonably long time. And online calendars have been around for 8 to 10 years now. Yet nobody has tried to do this—to solve the simple problem of ‘Here’s where I’m going, show me what’s available while I’m there.”

Facebook, where members are already eager to make connections, is an obvious place to try out the model—and so far, a couple hundred Facebook users have signed up for LuckyCal. But ultimately, Vakil sees the software as something that could go beyond the social-networking crowd to become a money-saving tool for big organizations whose employees travel regularly. The fbFund grant comes at a key moment, helping the startup get its idea working first in a friendly environment (and perhaps helping it to earn a bit of money on Ticketmaster commissions along the way). But long-term, Vakil says, the business model is more about licensing LuckyCal’s services to big corporate customers.

Vakil says he’s been thinking about better ways to interact with event information for several years—ever since he worked at Ambient, a Cambridge, MA, startup that sells wireless information displays such as the Ambient Orb, which glows red or green according to the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Ambient Scorecast, which shows the progress of baseball games, hit by hit. (Vakil wrote the code for the latter device.)

“LuckyCal came out of a meeting with David Rose,” Ambient’s director and chair, Vakil says. “We had this idea for the Ambient Clock—a device that would take calendar information and show it on an analog wall clock. If you had an appointment between 2:00 and 3:00 it would fill in that pie piece. But we looked at the data real people put into their calendars, and on average it’s only about one event per day. What do you do with the rest of the clock? Why not try to … Next Page »

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