Goby, a Boston event- and activity-based search engine startup, has raised $2.5 million in new venture financing from existing investors Kepha Partners and Flybridge Capital Partners. The news was reported today by TechCrunch, which also reports that Goby has raised a total of $7.5 million to date. Xconomy first wrote about Goby’s local-search approach to helping people find fun activities to do in their free time, back in September 2009.

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Acquisition news from big IT, Web, and biotech names, plus funding announcements for newer tech and life sciences companies, kept us buzzing with deals news in New England this week.

—Watertown, MA-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a startup developing gene-silencing drugs, raised $25 million in Series B funding. New investor Domain Associates led the round, which also included Abingworth, Oxford Bioscience Partners, and Skyline Ventures.

—Mercator Therapeutics, a Wellesley, MA-based stealthy biotech startup, raised $2 million in seed funding to put toward licensing its technology and conducting early research in cancer.

—Framingham, MA-based Boston Heart Lab raised $10 million in an offering of equity- and rights-based securities. The startup makes lab tests for measuring patient cholesterol and programs for tracking cardiovascular health.

—Boston TechStars alum Marginize brought in $650,000 in its first round of venture funding. The startup is working on technology that displays the social media buzz surrounding the website you’re viewing. The investors in the financing were Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture Partners, eonBusiness, and SOS Ventures on the venture capital side. Marginize also attracted backing from angel investors David Cohen, Dharmesh Shah, Joe Caruso, Jean Hammond, Bill Warner, Will Herman, and Michael Mark.

—Healthcare payment software maker TransEngen, of Norwalk, CT, pulled in $2.5 million in an equity financing. The company’s website lists Dallas, TX-based Carlson Capital as a board member.

—Waltham, MA-based marketing analytics firm Unica will be acquired by IBM for $480 million in cash, in a deal set to close in the fourth quarter of this year. Big Blue is rolling Unica’s (NASDAQ: UNCA) 500 employees into its Software Solutions Group and will move them into its IBM Mass Lab. The computer giant has scooped up other companies in the marketing, e-commerce, and fulfillment spaces, like AT&T’s Sterling Commerce and Coremetrics.

—Stealthy social games startup Ayeah Games raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding, from angel investors and micro VC firms like John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures and Janpieter Scheerder of Eureeka Ventures. Ayeah was started by … Next Page »

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There were, surprisingly, quite a few Seattle-area technology deals this week, breaking the typically slow summer deals trend we’ve seen recently. In the last week we’ve seen a local supercomputing company nab a pretty hefty Department of Defense grant, a cleantech startup partner with the Environmental Protection Agency, and an info commerce company settle a nasty dispute with the Washington State Attorney General’s office. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), was part of a team that was awarded a $25 million U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant to further develop supercomputer technology. The four-year research project is being led by Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), a graphics processing unit (GPU) developer, and includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six U.S. universities. The objective is to develop a new class of supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than those in existence today.

—Local IP service provider Telekenex raised $5.5 million in debt financing from Wellington Financial, a specialty firm out of Canada. Though headquartered in Seattle, Telekenex was founded in San Francisco in 1994, and is backed by a number of Bay Area firms, including Walden Venture Capital, Altos Ventures, and Industry Ventures. The funding will provide the company with the necessary capital to “continue its growth and penetration of the managed voice and data service market,” according to Wellington.

—Bend, OR-based search engine marketing company G5 closed a $15 million round led by Boston-based Volition Capital. The funding will be used to further the company’s software development platform. As part of the deal, Volition managing partner Roger Hurwitz and principal Sean Cantwell are joining the G5 board of directors.

—Bellevue, WA-based Intelius, an online background check and information commerce company, agreed to pay $1.3 million in a legal settlement with the Washington State Attorney General’s office, according to a report by TechFlash. The dispute was part of an ongoing effort on the part of the Attorney General to prevent “post-transaction marketing” tactics. Intelius has been called out in a number of class action lawsuits recently, including one case in October accused the company of violating the state’s Consumer Protection Act.

—DepotPoint, a Bellevue, WA-based Web company that develops a tracking platform for the real estate foreclosure market, raised $2 million in equity out of a $4.5 million offering. In 2008, as the mortgage meltdown accelerated, the company launched a free site that provided access to street addresses for some 1.2 million properties undergoing foreclosure across the U.S. In the same year, it raised a $7 million Series C found led by OVP Ventures Partners and Trident Capital.

—Woodinville, WA-based Calico Energy Services  told  Xconomy of an recent partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star program. Although the energy management company hasn’t officially announced the deal yet, Calico chief marketing officer Thomas Doggett said the partnership, which has no financial terms, validates the company and acknowledges its ability to help utilities companies and energy providers “meet Energy Star certification goals.”

—San Francisco-and Seattle-based Jambool, the virtual currency and virtual goods management developer, was acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. The four-year-old company behind the Social Gold platform, has raised $6 million in venture financing to date from Palo Alto, CA-based Bay Partners and Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group.

—A brand new online travel venture here in Seattle—AirlineTickets and Airport Parking—received $90,000 in startup financing out of a $200,000 round. A number of local angel investors contributed to the round, including Andy Liu and David Niu of BuddyTV, Geoff Entress, Bob Senoff, and Fred Hsu, the co-founder of oversee.net. The sites, led by former Internet marketer and first-time entrepreneur Sujan Patel, will take a new spin on the online travel searching and booking market—making the process of traveling easier and more enjoyable, Patel says.

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Lycos, a Waltham, MA-based maker of online search and media tools, was bought for $36 million by Ybrant Digital, the companies announced today. Ybrant, a digital marketing company headquartered in India, purchased Lycos from Daum Communications, a Korea-based company that in 2009 reorganized Lycos, which had been one of the most trafficked and most profitable Web portals during the Internet boom of the late 1990′s. Ybrant says the purchase of Lycos will help it provide new products for local advertising.

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Bend, OR-based G5, a search engine marketing company for mid-size companies, said today it has closed $15 million in first round financing led by Boston-based Volition Capital. As part of the deal Volition managing partner Roger Hurwitz, and principal Sean Cantwell, will join the G5 board of directors. The funding will be used for the further development of G5′s software platform, among other things. G5 currently serves over 160 clients and 2,400 properties in the self storage, multifamily housing, and senior living sectors. The company said its second quarter this year marked its 20th consecutive quarter of record revenue.

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Boston-based DirectoryM hasn’t been living up to its name for a few years now, and the company is re-branding itself today with the name nSphere.

Its aim is “connecting databases and making them available to users searching for information online,” says chief operating officer Jean-Eric Penicaud. The company’s technology pulls information from about 10,000 databases and 1,700 media sites and compiles it in a single Web page that can be hosted on sites such as financial advice publisher Kiplinger or New Lifestyles, a publisher of information on senior citizen residence and care options.

For example, if you were to search the Web for information on retirement planning in Boston, you could find a page on Kiplinger powered by nSphere’s engine that includes the data and expert articles produced by the publication, as well as listings for financial services firms in the area. The company isn’t out to replace search engines like Google, but instead organize the information that could show up at multiple sites as a result of a search on specific topics, particularly those with a hyper-local focus.

Average users may not know to search Kiplinger directly as a source on this content, but the information nSphere gathers helps it more precisely match search terms and show up on search engine results pages, Penicaud says. NSphere also enlists experts such as subject enthusiasts or local correspondents to provide information to be featured on a subject’s nSphere results. Its revenue comes from the local advertisements that its content partners provide, so nSphere doesn’t have its own advertising sales team.

Because it’s in the back-end business, the company has largely been able to operate with the name that more accurately reflects its old focus of providing online directories. Its new branding is designed to represent its aim of organizing spheres of data, especially as the company aims to grow and acquire new partners, Penicaud says. “We want to reflect what we do all day,” he says.

The company’s founders re-acquired the startup from its VC investors in 2007, in order to better shape it into a business focused on organizing data and information on the Web, rather than remaining a source of online directories, says Penicaud. It officially relaunched in 2008.

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Location, Inc., a provider of online real estate research tools, launched in 2002 with the intent to objectively measure which neighborhoods are the best fit for a particular customer, based on criteria such as school quality, crime rates, home appreciation values, and the prominence of upwardly mobile singles. The housing matchmaker service has been available on the Woonsocket, RI-based company’s website, NeighborhoodScout.com, since then, to help consumers determine which pockets around the country best fit with their lifestyles. Its search engine also helps people find neighborhoods most similar to the ones they already know they like.

Last week the company launched a new service, hosted at NeighborhoodScoutReports.com, to produce neighborhood-specific documents akin to the vehicle history reports offered by the Web service Carfax. “There isn’t any comparable product for what is obviously and vastly the largest purchase for most Americans,” says Andrew Schiller, the company’s founder, CEO, and chief scientist. “The largest risk for people buying a home is rarely the condition of the house, but the location of the house.”

The aim of Location’s new product is to provide information on the surroundings of a particular house or property that has already caught your eye. “It isn’t about showing me the best neighborhoods for this criteria, but rather showing me a detailed report for the neighborhood that contains this property,” says Schiller.

He says the website’s data-crawling algorithms scan multiple, disparate sources of information to create one comprehensive report, which sells for $19.99. The reports pull data from roughly 70 sources, and use patented or patent-pending data engines built by the company’s in-house geographer-statisticians. The product is also fully available on mobile browsers. That way customers can get on-the-spot neighborhood information on a property with their iPads or iPhones when … Next Page »

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We saw news of several local acquisition deals by technology powerhouses in the past week.

—Watertown, MA-based Dicerna Pharmaceuticals, a developer of RNA interference drugs, raised $5 million in an offering of debt and options. The startup previously raised $21.4 million in Series A funding from Abingworth Management, Skyline Ventures, and Oxford Bioscience Partners. Former Oxford general partner Doug Fambrough resigned from his post in May to become CEO of Dicerna.

—Google paid about $700 million to acquire Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, and in turn has entered the travel search space. ITA’s technology powers the online itineraries and pricing data systems for big airlines, as well as travel comparison sites like Orbitz, Kayak, and Farecast (Bing Travel). Early this week, Greg wrote a piece about what the deal could mean for the Cambridge innovation scene and others in the travel search engine space.

—Cambridge-based Alnara Pharmaceuticals was bought by drug giant Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY). The companies didn’t reveal financial terms of the acquisition. Alnara, which has applied for FDA approval of its enzyme supplement liprotamase, a treatment for the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis, has raised about $55 million in venture capital financing in its two-year history, from investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, Longwood Founders Fund, MPM Capital, and Third Rock Ventures.

—Geo-location firm Skyhook Wireless announced an agreement that brings its technology, which determines a device’s location based on the identities of nearby Wi-Fi networks, to Samsung mobile devices. No financial details were disclosed for the deal, which adds another big name to Boston-based Skyhook’s roster of heavy-hitting technology partners, including … Next Page »

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The usual sequence for high-tech entrepreneurs is to study, get a degree, get a job, then start a company and build a product. But a star-studded team of instructors for Linked Data Ventures, a graduate-level class premiering at MIT this fall, hopes to mix that up a bit. They envision the course as a direct launching pad for commercial efforts around linked data, a technology that World Wide Web inventor and course instructor Tim Berners-Lee is hoping will transform the way we glean meaning from the Web.

“It’s not about theory,” says K Krasnow Waterman, another member of the Linked Data Ventures teaching team. She says the class is designed to really force students to get practical—and commercial—in a hurry. ”We are just really excited to see people get out on the forefront and lead the way.”

Linked data is the idea of assigning Web addresses to individual chunks of information, rather than just to documents, so that these chunks can interlink and lend meaning to one another. (Wade wrote about one example, True Engineering’s “truenumbers,“ last summer.) It’s an offshoot of the effort to build the semantic Web, which Berners-Lee has also championed vigorously, where more data would be described with metadata that automated agents or other software can use to interpret or re-use the information more intelligently.

The linked-data ethic hasn’t quite caught on yet in the marketplace, which is why it makes a great subject for this style of class, says Waterman, who will be teaching alongside a team of instructors heavy on Internet, IT, and entrepreneurial experience. In addition to Waterman and Berners-Lee, who has emerged as a primary force behind the linked data movement (as he was for Internet standards such as HTML and HTTP), that includes Lalana Kagal of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, as well as Reed Sturtevant, and Katie Rae, both Microsoft Startup Labs veterans who have since co-founded business accelerator Project 11 Ventures.

“We seem to be at a really great tipping point,” Waterman says. “As the demand [for linked data] is rising in the marketplace, you’ll need some way that more people know what it is.”

The teaching team did a weeklong, condensed version of the program during MIT’s January Independent Activities Period (which offers ad hoc, sometimes off-the-cuff sessions while school is out for winter break) that resulted in seven teams producing prototypes rooted in linked data technology. One company came out with graphing software that culls numbers from any published data source to create graphs on the fly, Waterman says.

The instructors judged the finished products on their potential to play a part in the real world, and be sustainable as an independent business or open-source code. The champion team from the January session was … Next Page »

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[Updated, 6/16/10] We’re excited about our full-day Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship coming up this Thursday, June 17, which will be packed with presenters from all slices of the tech and startup space in the Boston area. And we’ll be capping off the day by bringing you a dozen young companies that we believe are poised to transform the life sciences, IT, and energy/cleantech sectors. They’ll each give a three-minute rundown on what they’re out to do, after which the audience will vote on the most transformative in each category. Talk about high pressure!

So here I am to introduce you to the 12 companies who will take the stage for the rapid-fire Xpo. They’re a diverse bunch, even within each individual category. For example, our life sciences track features a company out to bring open-sourcing to drug discovery, a stealthy startup making a device for better skin grafts, an award-winning maker of medicine packaging technology aimed to intercept counterfeit drugs, and a maker of a sleep-tracking device that’s captured the heart of Regis Philbin. Read on to learn a bit about all the companies in each of the track, and sign up for XSITE 2010 so you can hear more about each of these fascinating ventures straight from the folks who are bringing them to life.

Energy
Difra
Digital Lumens
Levant Power
Promethean Power Systems

Life Sciences
Ligon Discovery
MoMelan Technologies
Sproxil
Zeo

Information Technology
Goby
Marginize [Updated: Marginize will be replacing Prysm as an IT Xpo presenter]
OmniStrat
Vgo Communications

Difra
Allston, MA

The Difra team made it into the energy track of our Xpo because they’re out to democratize the building and customization of homes, and make construction more environmentally friendly in the process. Co-founded by MIT graduates, the company is using computer-aided design and manufacturing software to model homes in 3D and translate those models into 2-D pieces that can be cut out of engineered wood with a laser device and assembled using only a rubber mallet and (optionally) glue.

The company’s co-founders see its technology, which they say results in less waste than traditional construction methods, translating into personalized homes for people who wouldn’t normally be able to afford them. The system could also enable the construction of basic housing in the wake of floods or earthquakes. “Building a home is like laying out a giant 3D-puzzle,” co-founder Morris Cox told Xconomy. “It is the perfect community project. Most of it can be done by ordinary people. We see it as a rewarding and socially enriching project for neighbors, relatives or other groups.”

Digital Lumens
Boston, MA

This Boston-based startup is combining more efficient LED lighting with networking and energy monitoring software to enable commercial facilities to light up their operations for a tenth of what it used to cost. The company makes devices that contain strips of LED lights and a mini computer processor designed to network with other devices in the same vicinity. Facilities managers can program the devices to work in zones, and collaboratively turn on and off depending on the functions of the building. Digital Lumens’ system also includes a software interface that tracks energy usage, to inform managers on how to more efficiently program the lighting in the future. A typical 250,000 square-foot commercial facility using traditional incandescent lighting (think warehouses or big-box retailers) costs about $1 per foot to light annually. Digital Lumens aims to bring that cost down to a dime per foot.

Goby
Boston, MA

Goby’s website, which was recently unveiled after more than a year in stealth mode, is out to help users find fun things to do. You plug in what kinds of activities you like, where you’d like to do them, and when you have the time to do them, and Boston-based Goby’s search engine scans data from a slew of Internet travel sources. It arranges the options in order of distance from a central point, offers information on driving directions and photos, and displays the results on an interactive map. The company has designed its site to give users much of the information they need to make travel plans without actually having to leave the site.

Levant Power
Cambridge, MA

It’s no shock that engineers and the auto industry are looking to all sorts of sources as avenues for going green, but shock absorbers are one I just hadn’t heard of yet. Until I read about Levant Power, an MIT spinoff that is out to harvest energy from the bouncing of vehicles as they drive down bumpy roads. Levant is testing its shock absorbers on buses, trucks, and military vehicles and aiming to get the technology to production in 12 to 18 months, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Zackary Anderson told Xconomy earlier this spring. The plan is to first retrofit heavier vehicles, then take the technology to smaller passenger cars after one to two years. Levant’s product is more expensive than traditional shock absorbers, but is designed to pay for itself in less than two years.

… Next Page »

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If you’re in an industry where you depend on suppliers from across the globe, searching the Web for a part or a collaborator isn’t exactly as easy as trying to figure out where you should eat dinner. Josh Green discovered this around 2005 when he was a Harvard Business School student interning at E Ink, the maker of the screen behind Amazon’s Kindle, and needed to find a supplier for an electronic component.

It wasn’t easy. So he started talking to MIT computer science student Jim Psota, who he had already been working with on putting together a startup. In 2006 they incorporated Panjiva, a Web company that aims to simplify the supplier search process for businesses of all sizes. Their product is out to tell manufacturers and retailers everything from who they can order parts from, to whether or not a potential supplier is stable enough to work with, to what their top competitors are shipping.

“We’ve built a Google-like product, but we’re organizing information specific to the global trading space,” says Psota, the co-founder and chief technology officer, who I spoke with at the company’s Cambridge, MA, headquarters (CEO Green leads the operations in New York).

Panjiva (a play on the name of the supercontinent Pangea) is based on a system of data mining algorithms, machine learning, and natural language processing that culls numbers from more than 10 sources, like U.S. Customs. After Green and Psota found their initial inspiration for the business, they spent a few years developing the product, and raising angel and venture financing. Its backers include Battery Ventures and angels like eBay veteran and Stanford professor Michael Dearing, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, and David Frankel of the Founder Collective, Psota says. Panjiva’s Web-based, industry-comprehensive search tool launched in April 2009. Home Depot was its first customer.

The core of the Panjiva product is its search engine, where users can find suppliers by searching for parts, or get more information on a particular supplier they have come across by searching their name. Panjiva’s database has more than 1.5 million companies (including suppliers and customers) from more than 190 countries. Its interface is made to allow users to sift through that deep set of data to find a short list of potential partners. Panjiva customers use drilldown menus based on variables such as country, certifications, shipping date, or the health of the supplier’s business.

“The raw data that we get in is very messy, it provides disparate data points that are not that interesting in and of themselves to helping the user,” explains Psota. “The secret sauce is taking the disparate and messy data sources and boiling them down and cleaning them up.”

Once users get a manageable list of suppliers they could potentially purchase from, they can select a particular company to view a complex profile, which includes information such as … Next Page »

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Microsoft announced the integration of real-time status updates from Twitter and Facebook into its Bing search engine this morning at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi and Online Services Group president Qi Lu confirmed the company’s non-exclusive partnerships with the two social media networks on stage, followed by a short demo, discussion, and audience Q&A.

According to Mehdi and Lu, the new deals are part of Bing’s ongoing plan to join “the emerging hot area of real-time information” with search engine technology to create a new kind of socially focused reader.

“We think about search holistically,” Lu said. “It’s about user intent…You are trying to build a mind-reader.”

During his speech, Mehdi demoed Bing.com/twitter, which went live in beta form only minutes after the announcement. “We are going to get access to all the Twitter information in real time,” he said, while organizing the tweet index by quality, relevance, and social significance to make searching easier and more efficient.

“We look at the people who are tweeting and we assign a social relevance score,” Mehdi said. The tweets are ranked by relevance, range, popularity, and interest, with stronger emphasis on tweets that are considered to be the most trustworthy and prolific. “If a particular tweet is being re-tweeted several times, you know it’s hot,” he said.

The new Twitter integration also includes a spam filter to improve searchability in the Twitter stream, a “tag cloud” of hottest Twitter topics, tweet ranking abilities, and top tweeted links. Bing will also automatically expand shortened URLs, like bit.ly and tinyurl, so that searchers will be able to see where the links will take them before clicking.

Meanwhile, the Facebook deal will allow Bing access to all publicly shared information from the social network’s users. According to Mehdi, this will launch “at a later date.”

The deals, described by Mehdi as “strategic partnerships,” come at the height of the “real-time search” competition between Microsoft and Google—efforts to help consumers get up-to-the-minute information about the world around them. In the last several months, Bing also has been on a partnership blitz, making a deal with PayScale to edge into the job search market, and signing a 10-year, $150 million agreement with Yahoo that gives Microsoft control of both companies’ search engine technologies.

And this is not Bing’s first attempt at going social, either. With Google now infiltrating what was Microsoft’s core client base—corporations—and dominating personal Web browsing and e-mail, Bing has been running a campaign to outpace the search giant in other areas. Both companies have been actively developing social media capabilities—Google using iGoogle to integrate content sharing, games, and communication tools into its users’ individualized homepages, and Bing utilizing already established social media. Facebook now employs Bing for the site’s search feature, and back in July, Bing began including popular Twitter feeds—like those of Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest—into its search results, in an attempt to get a leg up on the competition.

Google is said to be in similar partnership talks with both Twitter and Facebook. And although Microsoft’s deals are non-exclusive and do not preclude any future deals between the two social media groups and Google, it was clearly a sprint on the part of Microsoft to get in first in the social media race.

Passing over financial and operational details, Lu made it clear that this was not the last we’d hear of Microsoft’s forward-thinking, social media push. “A real-time corpus like Twitter…is still evolving and emerging,” Lu said. “This is just the beginning.”

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Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, is growing faster than its rivals, including Google, according to Nielsen Online. The report says Bing’s share of the Web search market was 10.7 percent in August, up from 9.0 percent in July, representing a 22 percent increase in its total number of searches. Google’s market share increased slightly to 64.6 percent, while Yahoo’s dropped to 16.0 percent. Bing was launched at the beginning of June, and has received generally positive reviews. Earlier this week, Bing rolled out a “visual search” feature, which lets you browse results by pictures instead of text.

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Microsoft announced today the beta release of a new image-based interface for its Bing search engine. Called “visual search,” the feature lets you browse pictures of search results—like celebrities, cars, and other products—instead of text links. It requires Microsoft’s Silverlight Web software, and so far works only for predetermined categories, but will be in full release by the end of September. Microsoft senior vice president Yusuf Mehdi unveiled the interface at TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco.

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It’s been quite a summer here in Seattle, with record droughts and a heat wave that left us all panting in line for an iced coffee. But despite a cool economic climate, Microsoft managed to stay as hot as the temperature outside its Redmond, WA, headquarters, with a series of big deals and other announcements that kept everyone sweating to keep up.

Here’s a rundown of the most important news from the software giant’s eventful summer:

—Microsoft started the season off with a bang, or rather a Bing, when it launched its new search engine at the end of May. Bing didn’t stop making headlines with its launch, forming a partnership with salary comparison technology startup PayScale in June and adding a limited Twitter search feature in early July. As Bing clambered up the search engine ladder, Greg spoke with Harry Shum, the vice president who runs the engineering team that created Bing, about why Bing is already doing so well.

—Bing’s debut had even stronger echoes than might have been expected. It appeared to help close a long-rumored deal with Yahoo in July that puts Bing technology behind Yahoo search for at least a decade. Microsoft had already hired away three search executives from Yahoo at the end of June before the partnership, which leaves Yahoo in charge of sales and distribution of advertising for both websites, as well as receiving a fair chunk of change.

—Microsoft expanded further into a new area this summer: life sciences, with the purchase of the Seattle-based assets of Rosetta Biosoftware from Merck, integrating it into its new Amalga Life Sciences platform. Rosetta’s technology analyzes how genes turn on and off, and will be added to Amalga’s genomic data analysis program. This represents Microsoft’s first real push into biotechnology after years of looking for ways into the market, as Luke reported. In another research-related move, Microsoft unveiled Trident, a scientific analysis tool to help researchers and businesses sort through and make sense of massive amounts of information quickly.

—In a deal as big as any launch this summer, Microsoft sold its digital advertising company Razorfish to French advertising firm Publicis just a few weeks ago for about $530 million, and signed a five-year strategic alliance with Publicis. Razorfish executives are looking forward to the more global reach that Publicis assures them, while Publicis gets a huge leg up in the digital marketing arena since Razorfish is already the largest company of its kind in the world. Online strategy expert Warren Gouk told Greg that the partnership could help out Microsoft a lot too, pushing up its advertising business.

—Microsoft made another European friend this summer, teaming up with Finland-based Nokia to adapt Microsoft programs to Nokia’s smartphones. The Symbian operating system created by Nokia has been a rival to Microsoft’s mobile OS, but putting its programs on Nokia’s phones helps Microsoft compete against Google, whose own mobile productivity programs have been chipping away at Microsoft’s market share.

—On a lighter note, Microsoft generated a lot of excitement at this year’s E3 expo with the demonstration of Natal, a new motion-capture system for the Xbox 360 that works without needing any goggles or other special equipment. There was also an announcement and demonstration of how players can use Facebook and Twitter on their consoles to communicate with friends while they play.

And looking ahead, Microsoft seems to be just warming up, with the upcoming October launch of Windows 7, which promises to fix Vista’s woes and improve upon its good qualities. It remains to be seen how well the new OS will be received, especially considering the chilly dismissal of Windows 7 as a rival by Apple in its announcement of its own new OS, Snow Leopard, set to launch just a month before Windows.

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It might all turn out to be anticlimactic. After a tumultuous year of on-again, off-again talks to strike an Internet search and advertising deal, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) are about to tie the knot, according to several media outlets. The Wall Street Journal‘s All Things Digital blog, citing multiple sources close to the situation, says a deal will be announced within 24 hours. A separate report in Advertising Age says Microsoft’s Bing will become the default search engine on Yahoo, and Microsoft’s AdCenter is expected to be the technology platform for selling online ads.

The specifics of the deal are still speculative at this point. There will probably be no upfront payment made to Yahoo, says Advertising Age, which cites executives with knowledge of the discussions. Instead, the deal is to be structured as a revenue share from the sale of search ads. So, it appears Microsoft will handle the search technology and infrastructure end of things, leaving Yahoo to focus on ad sales, marketing, and media.

All in all, it sounds like the deal is smaller and less dramatic than many outsiders had envisioned. (Yahoo was said to be looking for an upfront payment of hundreds of millions of dollars.) But the partnership—assuming it goes through—will still represent a huge step in the two companies’ struggles against Google in the search and online ads space. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo’s share of the search market is about 30 percent, while Google’s is about 65 percent. Stay tuned…

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Microsoft and Yahoo, after complicated negotiations and a few false starts, may be very close to announcing a deal wherein Redmond, WA-based Microsoft will take over the search advertising business run by Sunnyvale, CA-based Yahoo. The latest news, from a report on All Things Digital (and many other subsequent articles), indicates a formal announcement could be made as soon as next week. Microsoft executives are currently meeting with Yahoo in California to discuss the deal, possibly worth billions of dollars, and one that could give Microsoft an edge in dealing with its main search rival, Google.

According to reports, the discussions include notable Microsoft execs Satya Nadella, head of research and development in the online services division, senior vice president of the online audience business group Yusuf Mehdi, and president of the online services group (and former Yahoo executive) Qi Lu.

The latest round of talks between the two companies began in March, although they have nearly fallen apart several times due to the sheer complexity of the arrangement. But both sides have a lot to gain from settling those details. The money gained by Yahoo, both directly and in savings, would be a help as its search market share is attacked by both Google and Microsoft’s own new engine, Bing. And with Google so dominant, Microsoft needs all the leverage it can attain in the search arena.

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Twing? Beet? There may have to be a new word for the sound of Twitter results showing up on Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing. Launched just last month, Bing has begun indexing popular Twitter feeds. This means that a search of the names of a few thousand famous people will bring up their Twitter feed on the results page in addition to the more standard search results. In an announcement about the new feature on the Bing blog last week, Microsoft said the tweets will be indexed based on popularity and profligacy of tweeting, and include technologists as well as more well-known names like Al Gore and Ryan Seacrest.

To compete with more established search engines like Google and Yahoo, which currently don’t have a similar Twitter feature, Bing has been running an aggressive campaign of advertisement, new features, and partnerships. Facebook recently announced that search on the social media site would be through Bing, and Bing formed a partnership with PayScale to appeal to those comparing jobs. Features like video searches, and travel-price prediction also add to Bing’s appeal, although it is currently far behind Google in market share.

The blog post mentioned that the current Twitter indexing plan is only a first step and could eventually include every person on Twitter. More immediate access to tweets, essentially real-time individual news updates, could be just what Bing needs to drown out the sound of its competitors’ success.

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Amazon.com has purchased SnapTell, a mobile image matching startup, according to a release by SnapTell yesterday evening.  Amazon bought the company through its Palo Alto, CA-based subsidiary A9 for an undisclosed price.  A9, created by Amazon in 2003, runs advertisements on Amazon as well as providing a search engine and developing technology like OpenSearch.  SnapTell, also based in Palo Alto, was founded in 2006 and is best known for its iPhone application which can match a photo of a product with online retail listings of the product.

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Although Microsoft made the official announcement about its new search engine Bing last week, the site won’t be fully functional until this Wednesday.  Here are some tidbits about Bing collected from the Web to tide you over until then.

—In his early test drive of Bing, The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley concluded that the upstart search engine won’t replace Google.  However, he did say that the video searching and travel price prediction capabilities will give the big G a run for its money.

—On a more historical note, CNET’s Ina Fried wrote the story of the development of Bing, why search matters, and why one of the major developers built a boat in China.  Nautical pursuits aside, the most important nugget of information may be that Bing is meant to continue to develop and grow—by adding more information to the search results, for instance—after Wednesday.

—Qi Lu, Microsoft’s head of online services (who came over from Yahoo in January), gave a rare interview to Peter Burrows of BusinessWeek that conveyed a similar idea.  He described Bing as just a small part of a long journey.  Lu also said he expects other competitors to arise, which will ultimately benefit end-users of search technologies.

My favorite bit of Bing-ology?  Typing “Bing” into Google brings up “Bing Surfboards” directly below the listing for the new search engine.

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