Here in Boston, we fret about losing tech talent and leadership to the West Coast. So today, let’s celebrate the return of one of our own.

Michael Schreck has joined Boston-based digital publishing firm Zmags as its new CEO, as of earlier this month. Schreck, a prominent investor and entrepreneur, has spent the past eight years in the cultural wasteland of Orange County, CA, as CEO and managing director of Equity Pacific Group, a private equity shop. Before that, he made his name in Boston as a co-founder of a number of startups including m-Qube and Upromise, and a co-founder and general partner at venture firm General Catalyst Partners. He originally came to town in the early 1990s to work at Monitor Group and then attended Harvard Business School; now he’s moving back.

These things come full circle. Ten years ago, Schreck was helping recruit big-name CEOs to run companies. Now he is the big-name CEO.

But why Zmags? My colleague Wade wrote about the company back in 2009, when it was best known for its platform for publishing digital magazines (hence its name). Over the years, Zmags also has been focused on digital marketing—helping brands design and develop interactive catalogs for the Web and mobile devices. The firm started in Denmark in 2006 and moved its headquarters to Boston in 2008. This month, Schreck succeeds former CEO Jens Karstoft, a co-founder who is staying on as vice president of strategic innovation.

Zmags is also rolling out a new digital merchandising and e-commerce service today, called CommercePro. The basic idea is to help brands optimize their catalogs, marketing materials, and shopping analytics across iPad, iPhone, Android devices, Web browsers, and other channels. A key feature: the new software lets consumers make purchases directly from within a Zmags catalog or magazine (on a Facebook fan page, say), and also helps brands keep track of what’s working and what’s not.

“You can imagine it, architect it, test it, and get the data back,” Schreck says.

It sounds like an intriguing opportunity for Schreck (see left), who has some deep perspective on digital and mobile marketing. In the early 2000s, he helped start m-Qube, which grew out of a previous startup called Proteus Mobile. Back then, Schreck says, the question was, “Is texting going to be big in the U.S.?” Major wireless carriers thought no—that consumers would leap-frog to an enhanced messaging system—but m-Qube stuck with its plan, keeping mobile-marketing content simple and short via SMS. But marketing via text messages severely limited what brands and marketers could do on mobile devices.

What’s changed in the interim? In a word, the iPad/iPhone. Schreck calls it “the great leveler—nobody could imagine that device [iPhone] until it appeared in our palm.” Schreck’s epiphany for his new job came to him during a boardroom meeting with a bunch of public-company CEOs. Apparently it’s a faux pas to have your laptop open during such meetings. But “we all had our iPads out,” he says. “It was weird, I’ve never seen anything like it.” There were different age groups represented in the room, from junior to senior execs, he says. “It was everybody. You could have an iPad there, it was this sort of information appliance. You couldn’t have a laptop. I thought, ‘This is amazing.’”

Indeed, according to Jeff Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, who worked with Schreck … Next Page »

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On the day a Magnitude 9 earthquake and major Tsunami struck Japan, customers of MIR3 used the San Diego company’s automated notification system to transmit more than 650,000 real-time messages around the world.

“The minute it happened, I checked with engineering and our customers were using every modality of communications—SMS [text messaging], e-mail, phone calls,” CEO Amir Moussavian told me in a recent interview. MIR3 later determined its system had been used to deliver more than 346,000 e-mails; 167,000 automated phone messages; 137,000 text messages; 2,200 pager messages, 1,100 faxes, and even 291 BlackBerry PIN-to-PIN messages—sent mostly by U.S. companies to large numbers of their employees, customers, and partners.

Moussavian, who joined MIR3 in 2002, says it sometimes takes a tragedy for institutions to realize that how critically useful the Web-based messaging system can be. He says the company has been getting more inquiries about its blitz messaging service since the March 11 disaster in Japan—especially from companies and agencies in China.

Amir Moussavian

Likewise, scores of U.S. colleges and universities rushed to sign up for MIR3′s software-as-a-service following a shooting rampage that killed 32 people at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007. Five months later, when a disturbed gunman was arrested on the Queens campus of St. John’s University, school officials used the new MIR3 system for the first time to transmit the warning: “From public safety. Male was found on campus with a rifle. Please stay in your buildings until further notice. He is in custody, but please wait until the all-clear.”

Moussavian says the company was … Next Page »

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Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures have contributed $12 million to a Series B venture round for Clickatell, a Redwood City, CA-based startup offering software that helps wireless operators deliver SMS messages across different networks in hundreds of countries and territories. The company also introduced a new SMS marketing service for small businesses called Communicator 2; for about $25 per month, businesses can send up to 1,000 text messages to customers.

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There have been countless times where I’ve started a conversation on Facebook, expanded on it via e-mail, and wrapped it up through text messaging.

For me, it’s not really a big deal, as I’m usually discussing weekend plans or roommate issues and not anything subject to examination by a federal agency. But for entities that have to remain accountable to the government—say financial institutions or other big public corporations—it’s a bit more of a problem.

Enter Cambridge-based Dexrex Gear (Xconomy’s downstairs neighbor), a maker of software and servers for capturing instant messages, social media updates, and SMS messages for compliance and archiving. The startup’s software grew out of a “universal inbox” for instant messaging that Derek Lyman and Richard Tortora developed when they were students at UMass Amherst. The technology caught the eye of SECCAS, a maker of e-mail compliance and long-term storage software. The firm asked the college students to rebuild their technology for capturing instant messages inside financial institutions for regulatory compliance.

“We created it for their use and they rode shotgun the whole way,” says Lyman, a co-founder and now director of the company who left college in 2007 to run Dexrex full-time.

Dexrex’s ChatSync software platform has expanded over the past two years to capture social media conversations, and this fall introduced the capability to capture messaging on BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, and Symbian mobile phone platforms, The software works by plugging into a company’s fleet of devices, extracting and encrypting what was said, and sending it to a server (which can be hosted by Dexrex or on customer premises, Lyman says). The system pulls the different records of communication into a database, and then threads them into one conversation. So, if employees are discussing a single issue via multiple platforms like text messaging, Facebook, and instant messaging, ChatSync makes it all appear together as a single conversation.

It might sound invasive, but in industries like financial services, employee communications are subject to examination if an agency like the SEC is examining a firm for wrongdoing, occurrences that really came to light as Dexrex was developing the product in the wake of the big banks’ crash in 2008. If companies aren’t archiving these communications all along, electronic discovery can be a huge expense, Lyman says. “If [companies] weren’t systematically doing it, they had spot solutions, and would … Next Page »

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Varolii, a Seattle-based company that develops tools for automated business communications, laid off an undisclosed number of employees this week. The story was first reported by TechFlash. Varolii’s director of public relations and customer programs Robin Rees confirmed the layoffs with Xconomy, citing ongoing corporate strain due to the downturn in the economic climate.

“While the economy has improved somewhat, it continues to be a challenging environment,” she wrote in an e-mail. “At the beginning of the economic downturn, we made some adjustments, even as our revenue continued to grow in early 2009. But since the economic slowdown has lasted longer than expected, our growth has slowed, and the company needed to right-size its operations and costs in order to maintain its market leadership and continue its investment in its product and services offerings.”

The adjustments Rees was referring to came in the form of an initial round of cuts made in January 2009, when the company laid off eight percent of its employees. Even after downsizing, the company still had more than 300 people on staff, though they never clarified exactly how many were let go.

“We did have a layoff in January 2009. We made targeted cuts within a few areas of the company, amounting to a small number of employees. We never stated publicly how many employees were let go or what percentage of the workforce was affected,” Rees said.

It was Varolii’s software-as-a-service business model that kept the company somewhat insulated up until this point, Rees said. “We have historically enjoyed double-digit year-over-year growth, and we’ve invested in our people and infrastructure accordingly. Our headcount, in particular, increased dramatically from 2004 to 2008,” she added.

Despite its prior growth, the company has not been immune to economic pressures over the last year and a half. While Rees acknowledges that cuts were made, she wouldn’t comment on specific numbers—then, or now. TechFlash, however, has cited two anonymous sources who say the number was around 50. Rees did confirm that Varolii still has “more than 250 employees on the active payroll.”

Varolii is cleverly named after the Pons Varolii, a neural pathway in the brain. The company specializes in building tools to help businesses better communicate over multiple channels, including voice, SMS, fax, Web, and e-mail, to name a few. It has been an interesting company to watch over the last few years. After reporting $68 million in revenue in 2007, the company filed for an IPO and planned to raise $86 million, only to shelve its plans to go public a year later “due to the difficult market conditions for initial public offerings.” The company was named one of Washington State’s 100 Best Companies to Work For by Seattle Business magazine just last month.

As for what’s in Varolii’s future, Rees says the company is in “a good position to weather this economic downturn.”

“Our software helps companies cut costs, collect more revenue and improve customer loyalty—three key strategies forward-thinking companies are using to maximize results during the recession. We believe our ongoing efforts to carefully manage our business and maintain control of our own destiny will help us emerge from this downturn a stronger, more successful company,” she said.

Rees also said, however, that there are never any guarantees, and while the company hopes to make a speedy recovery, it all depends on the health of the economy.

“Of course we want to bounce back and get back into hiring mode. We’re just going [to] have to see how quickly the economy rebounds. When it makes sense for us to do so, we’ll definitely be looking for quality employees that will help us grow and expand,” she said.

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Interactions, a Franklin, MA-based provider of software for customer service operations, has raised a $6.3 million Series D funding round, according to a press release. The investors in the round are Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, North Hill Ventures, Sigma Partners, and Updata Partners. Interactions, founded in 2002, makes software that is designed to improve companies’, well, interactions with their customers via telephone, SMS text-messages, and the Web.

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It’s an exciting day for Joe Lauer. The Seattle entrepreneur and founder of Cloudhopper, a mobile messaging service, just told me his startup has been acquired by Twitter, the micro-messaging giant based in San Francisco. Financial terms of the cash-and-stock deal weren’t released, but Lauer and fellow employee Kristin Kanaar have joined Twitter full-time. Lauer says he will stay in Seattle and commute to San Francisco regularly.

Lauer couldn’t give any specifics about the purchase price, but he says, “I’m super happy with it. It’s a great early exit. It was good enough to get me to exit early, let’s put it that way.” The deal is Twitter’s fourth acquisition overall, after Surmise, Myxer, and the Tweetie iPhone app. It is Twitter’s first Seattle-based purchase.

Lauer founded Cloudhopper in late 2008. Previously he had co-founded Simplewire, an SMS text-message aggregator, in 2001. That company was bought by Seattle-based Qpass in 2006. Lauer stayed there for two and a half years before using the money he made from the acquisition to start Cloudhopper.

Cloudhopper makes software and infrastructure to help optimize how text messages flow, so that companies can make SMS programs that work at huge volumes and across different geographies. “As Twitter grows around the world, if we want to service Indonesia really well [for example], we want to keep SMS and tweets localized in a data center in Asia,” Lauer says.

In other words, Cloudhopper handles the routing through data centers in an efficient way, with a focus on international mobile operators. “We’re going to really aggressively expand and keep adding on carrier partnerships overseas,” he says. “It’s going to become more and more important as we add more countries around the world.” Currently people can tweet via SMS in about 30 countries. Lauer says that “about 100 operators are coming up over the next year.”

Lauer’s connection to Twitter actually dates all the way back to his days at Simplewire. “We were Twitter’s first SMS aggregator years ago,” Lauer says. At that time, Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams were running Odeo, and that’s how Lauer knew them.

Twitter has been using the Cloudhopper service for the past eight months. “I had no plans of selling now,” Lauer says. “It was kind of a coup when I won the Twitter business.” The bulk of his business before that was in wireless consulting for companies including Seattle-based Ground Truth (another “Qpass mafia” connection, as Ground Truth is led by former Qpass president Sterling Wilson).

Lauer says Cloudhopper was handling a billion SMS messages per month on behalf of Twitter. “With those numbers, they’re the single largest mobile program in the world,” he says—much bigger than, say, “American Idol” SMS voting. (Which is interesting, because until recently nobody really knew how big Twitter was.)

Cloudhopper had seven employees before it was acquired, some of whom will be joining Twitter full-time. Lauer now works in Twitter’s mobile group, which has a dozen people. He reports to Twitter’s head of mobile, Kevin Thau, who also used to work at Qpass, out of Atlanta.

Lauer says there are now a handful of Twitter employees based in Seattle, but no local office space as of yet. “Twitter’s hiring like crazy,” he says. “There’s a lot of good momentum in the area.”

Meanwhile, at San Francisco headquarters, where Lauer was today, late-night TV personality Conan O’Brien stopped by to meet and greet the staff (see photo; Lauer is on the right, Kanaar on the left). “It’s more like a media company these days,” Lauer says.

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Every startup has a defining moment from its early days. Its first big customer. Its first outside funding round. Its first big change in strategy or revenue model. For Urban Airship, I would say it was its first big developers conference. And the company didn’t even make it in the door.

You might think the Portland, OR-based mobile software firm would be defined (at least so far) by its first round of venture funding—$1.1 million last month, led by True Ventures in Silicon Valley, with Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op also participating. But no. In my mind, at least, the startup’s defining moment was how it originally connected with the iPhone app developer community.

First of all, here’s what Urban Airship makes: software infrastructure that allows mobile publishers to do important things like send “push notifications.” These are messages that look like SMS texts except they travel over the data network instead of the voice network, so they’re cheaper. Customers can receive these messages even if the publisher’s particular app isn’t open on their device. This is for things like news alerts, sports scores, and peer-to-peer messaging between devices.

Urban Airship’s CEO, Scott Kveton, a former Amazon.com, Vidoop, and JanRain employee, tells the story of how he and his co-founders got together in May 2009. “Our previous company [Vidoop] had folded. What do we want to do next?” he says. They wanted a good business model from day one. They looked at push messaging in mobile and decided “there’s a great service here” and also, crucially, a good business. Within a month, they had a live product. But they needed a way to reach lots of customers (app publishers) quickly.

The scene was the Moscone Center in San Francisco last June. The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was about to begin. This is the huge week-long expo where iPhone and Mac developers camp outside in the middle of the night to get the best seats for the Steve Jobs keynote and other Apple presentations. (Jobs didn’t actually present this time, as he was on medical leave.) The iPhone 3GS and iPhone OS 3.0 operating system were about to be unveiled to developers and publishers for the first time.

Kveton says his team couldn’t afford to attend the conference. So they got creative. They went to a nearby Costco and bought $1,500 worth of donuts and danishes. They brought the treats out to the 3,000 to 4,000 developers who were waiting in line for several hours before the expo began. In chatting with all these developers, they got to know what their potential customers wanted in terms of mobile messaging capabilities—and these customers got to know what Urban Airship had created.

This kind of “on the ground” relationship building, Kveton says, is so often missing at companies that think they have great technology, but don’t really understand their customers. It’s particularly telling that staying in touch with customer needs is still the key to building a strong business, even in this age of texting instead of talking face to face (maybe more so).

Urban Airship now boasts some 1,600 customers. They range from independent developers to Fortune 50 companies, and they include Universal Music Group, Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Tapulous, Gowalla, and Z2Live. Urban Airship is actively hiring; it currently has six employees, and will be up to eight by next month, Kveton says.

The company’s biggest challenge is keeping up with the smartphone market, which has only existed in its present form for two years (essentially post-iPhone), Kveton says. “What will this be like in 18 months? There will be a lot of opportunities, and we need to execute as quickly as possible,” he says. “The PC market took quite a while to get going, and was very, very lucrative. Microsoft provided a whole bunch of value in service providers and third-party applications. We’ll see the same thing happen in smartphones.”

With one difference, he says. “This will be significantly larger than the PC ever was.”

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Today San Diego-based TelCentris is announcing at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona that it has incorporated a new free offering—a “universal translator”—as part of VoxOx, its free, cloud-based, unified communications service.

Some online services, such as Babelfish.com, currently enable users to copy and paste in foreign language text to get a translation. But TelCentris says its VoxOx Universal Translator is the first translation service built into messaging and VoIP messaging software—making VoxOx the first to provide an instantaneous foreign language service that automatically translates e-mail, text messaging, Internet chat, and certain social networking messages.

VoxOx client

It’s a cool feature, kind of Star Trek-y, and the announcement is tailor-made for the wireless industry’s biggest international conference, which just happens to be held this week in a big international city. TelCentris spokesman Erik Bratt tells me the VoxOx Universal Translator is an ideal application for companies that do a lot of international business. The company’s cloud-based translation software currently supports 50 languages for instant messaging, e-mail, and social media; it also supports 37 of those languages for text messaging.

In a statement issued by the company, TelCentris president Michael Faught says … Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based SinglePoint, a mobile messaging software company, announced today it has acquired M2Junction, a leading mobile advertising startup based in Hyderabad, India. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. The move should make it easier for SinglePoint to connect with and sell its services to content publishers, mobile operators, brands, and ad agencies in India.

It looks like a significant step in SinglePoint’s global expansion strategy. India is one of the fastest growing text-messaging markets in the world, with some 525 million mobile subscribers as of December 2009. And in general, text messaging (SMS) is considered one of the most powerful channels for brands to reach new audiences and do mobile marketing. M2Junction, for its part, is already a SinglePoint partner, and a collaborator in terms of market positioning and knowledge of the Indian mobile ecosystem and culture.

Gowri Shankar, SinglePoint’s new CEO, noted in a statement that there is “an incredible mobile advertising opportunity” in India. “We at SinglePoint want to be a part of this growth and revolutionize the Indian industry with our offerings,” he said.

SinglePoint makes a Web-based software platform for handling transactions in contextual mobile advertising—delivering things like brand messages and interactive coupons within text messages. With its move into the Indian market, the company says it is looking to deliver more than a quarter of all the mobile advertising opportunities in India in its first year, and within two years, to become the nation’s biggest player in SMS advertising.

That sounds pretty ambitious, given what must be fierce competition among local companies in India. But in the past few years, SinglePoint has become a leader in helping publishers and brands reach mobile subscribers, and it has expertise in the Indian market. The company, formerly called Wireless Services, was co-founded by former Microsoft and McCaw Cellular veteran Steve Wood in 1996. It has been backed by a slew of venture investors and private equity firms including Ignition Partners, Madrona Venture Group, SeaPoint Ventures, Intel Capital, Northwest Venture Associates, and Rally Capital.

Last week, SinglePoint announced that Swedish mobile giant Ericsson had bought its mobile aggregation business, and that Shankar has become chief executive. Shankar succeeds Rich Begert, who led the company from 2004 until this year and remains on the board.

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Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace. Those companies’ products spread over the Internet like a virus. But why hasn’t there been a runaway hit like those in the mobile software world? Why does it take so much longer to build value, and a strong customer base, in mobile companies than in certain Internet startups?

Dan Shapiro had some entertaining thoughts on this yesterday, as he spoke to the Mobile Northwest 2009 crowd in Seattle. Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile imaging startup, and he’s a veteran of RealNetworks and Microsoft. I won’t do justice to his presentation, but here’s the gist.

Hotmail was one of the first examples of viral marketing. By appending the message, “Get your free e-mail at hotmail.com” (or some such) to the bottom of each e-mail, Hotmail helped pioneer a new method of promotion that was “basically free, highly measurable, and ridiculously effective,” Shapiro said. Its number of new subscribers jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands per day.

Maybe there’s something about the viral distribution model that doesn’t fly in the mobile world, Shapiro thought. In epidemiology, he pointed out, researchers use a parameter called the basic reproduction number to gauge whether a viral outbreak will spread or die out. The corresponding number in the Internet world tells you how many people a given user will “infect,” on average: Shapiro gave some estimates for Facebook (6), Gmail (5), MySpace (4), and Twitter (1.5). He argued that Twitter hasn’t been spreading virally; it has used more conventional marketing through word of mouth and the press.

“Heterogeneity in the target population is the best protection to keep you from being infected by viruses,” he said. That means some people have different levels of resistance, different behaviors, different types of contacts, and so forth, so not everyone will get infected by, say, the latest flu bug.

And that same kind of variety that makes individuals different is exactly why mobile isn’t viral, he argued. He cited some survey stats to explain how fragmented this market really is: There are roughly 500 different types of handsets, about 30 per carrier; about two-thirds of people (65 percent) don’t have a data plan; three out of four people (75 percent) are on a different carrier from you; almost that many (70 percent) don’t have a smartphone. And despite all the attention it gets, 98 percent of mobile users don’t have an iPhone. (iPhone apps are definitely not spreading virally, Shapiro said. He also argued that Tegic’s T9 predictive texting did not spread virally; it was pushed out by carriers and handset manufacturers in a dedicated partnership.)

“We will not see the Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo of mobile until this changes,” Shapiro said. He added that he’s not advocating one standard mobile platform; he’s just saying how it is right now.

So his advice for mobile entrepreneurs and investors was:

—Be skeptical of anyone peddling viral marketing in mobile.

—Build a business model that doesn’t require big adoption.

—Pick a market segment that’s homogeneous. (Examples: BlackBerry corporate users, Silicon Valley techies.)

—Use ubiquitous technologies like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and SMS texting.

—Wait… (“Things are getting better,” he said.)

Afterward, Shapiro said he thinks “Europe holds the future of the U.S.” Over there, wireless carriers have influence, but only about half of consumers get their services directly from carriers, versus about 90 percent in the U.S. “I think you’ll see the carrier role diminish,” he said, when it comes to mobile software.

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LegiTime Technologies, a Farmington, CT-based developer of software that organizes and secures text messages on mobile phones, has raised $1.5 million in equity financing, according to an SEC filing. Company executives could not be immediately reached this morning. The regulatory filing does not identify the investors in the round, but the firm’s website says that it is backed by Connecticut Innovations and iNovia Capital, of Montreal.

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San Diego’s TelCentris is announcing an upgrade to its VoxOx universal communicator service that includes a personal assistant feature, a virtual service that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your personal preferences. With the technology, you can direct phone calls from a family phone to reach you on your cell phone, office phone, or home phone—and you can send phone calls from that pesky sales rep to your voicemail.

The company says VoxOx is meant to solve your personal communications overload by unifying all the different methods that you use to communicate into a single user interface. While the startup faces a number of larger rivals—such as Google Voice—that offer unified communications service, TelCentris executives maintains that its service represents a different proposition than Google Voice or Skype. “There’s really no other product like it that’s out there,” says TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz.

TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz

Before today’s announcement, Hertz told me that while some rivals have combined communication services, most “unified communications” are usually done within the limits of an enterprise software application. Microsoft Exchange Server, for example, enables users to get audio voicemail messages, faxes, and e-mail delivered in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from their cell phones or wireless devices.

In contrast, Hertz says VoxOx is “technology agnostic.” Unlike Google Voice, Hertz says VoxOx can be used to integrate a variety of communications services from a variety of third-party providers. So a VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their Gmail or Microsoft e-mail service and an outside instant messaging provider such as Yahoo, AIM, MSN, as well as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. “We’re not necessarily here to replace them, but we are here to organize them,” Hertz says.

The new VoxOx service—which is free—also aggregates the user’s list of contacts from different sources into a universal address book that is part of an iPhone-like graphical user interface. “We go much deeper than any of these other tools do individually,” says Hertz.

For example, if you use the VoxOx desktop display to update … Next Page »

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Woburn, MA-based Integra5 announced today that it has changed its name to MediaFriends, a move intended to underscore the startup’s focus on technology that lets people communicate across multiple devices, including phones, PCs, and televisions.

Under the Integra5 brand, the 10-year-old company was known mainly as a supplier of “converged services” software to cable, phone, and wireless operators—think cell-phone text messages that show up on PCs, or Caller ID information for incoming land-line calls that’s displayed on a TV or a cell phone. Its specialty was devising software that bridged the traditional gaps between the infrastructures that deliver data to land-line phones, cell phones, PCs, and TVs.

The new name, MediaFriends, reflects the company’s move toward technologies that allow two-way or multi-way commmunications alongside video content. It’s the same name the company has been using since August 2008 for its latest package of social media applications, including one that lets TV viewers see the SMS and instant-messaging conversations they are having with friends on the same TV screen with network programming.

“The name Integra5 was meant to refer to the integration of lots of services, or taking the flat plane and moving it to the fifth dimension, but to be honest with you it doesn’t properly reflect our focus around communities that are using multiple devices,” CEO Meredith Flynn-Ripley told me last week.

MediaFriends is pitching the TV chat technology as a way for cable, phone, and Internet companies to cater to the media habits of younger viewers, who—as any parent of teenagers will attest—are often using their cell phones or laptops to chat with their friends via SMS or instant message while they’re watching “Lost,” “American Idol,” or “The Simpsons.” The MediaFriends system, which Flynn-Ripley demonstrated for me at the company’s office in Woburn, puts a stream of messages on the same screen with a TV show, with the goal of making such conversations simpler to manage.

At a time when subscription-based video providers are worried about audiences migrating to free Internet video sources such as Hulu, adding the MediaFriends technology could be seen as a way to retain customers. In fact, the first paying customer for the MediaFriends TV chat technology is about to go live with the service, and a second company is installing it now, Flynn-Ripley says. (She said she couldn’t yet name the companies.)

“Communications is what drives technology adoption, and today people are fundamentally communicating differently, based on a generational divide,” says Flynn-Ripley, who joined the company in 2006. “SMS is a huge phenomenon that isn’t going away. If you are in the business of delivering communications services, you had better be aware of this, and meet the needs of this growing group of consumers.”

MediaFriends has engineering operations in Israel and is backed by Benchmark Capital, which has offices in both Menlo Park, CA, and Herzeliya, Israel. Gary Lauder, the founder of a Los Gatos, CA, interactive TV company called ICTV, is also an investor.

MediaFriends added cross-media chat capabilities to its existing platform when it saw how prevalent texting-while-watching was becoming among younger TV viewers, Flynn-Ripley says. She cites research by youth marketing company Ypulse showing that 78 percent of teens and “tweens” (8- to 12-year-olds) say they’re often using a computer while they’re in front of the television. About 66 percent say they’re sending SMS text messages while watching.

Media analysts argue over whether this form of multitasking is a good thing, and whether it poses a threat to traditional media revenue models. In an “ADD culture,” to use a term coined by Interbrand CEO Andy Batement, brand experiences are greatly attenuated, since … Next Page »

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A year ago this week, Cambridge, MA-based speech software company Vlingo released its first study of the texting-while-driving phenomenon, finding that 28 percent of all survey respondents admitted to sending text messages while behind the wheels of their cars. It’s a hazardous habits that, with the recent Green Line trolley accident in Boston (linked to alleged texting by the trolley’s driver), has been in the local news recently. The good news in Vlingo’s second annual study, released today, is that texting-while-driving is down slightly nationally: only 26 percent of drivers admitted to engaging in the behavior this year. The bad news is that drivers in Massachusetts are apparently texting more from their cars than last year (or are at least admitting to it more openly): the state ranked 23rd worst in the nation in the 2008 rankings, but advanced to the 11th worst slot this year, with 30 percent of respondents saying they text while driving.

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Tapioca Mobile wants to see your cellular phone play more videos, and the San Diego-based wireless media company has the know-how to do it—no matter what phone you use. Tapioca has created a unique video-transcoding process and has, according to co-founder and CTO Chas Wurster, “the largest footprint of addressable video mobile devices in the U.S. We can get video into the hands of more consumers than anybody else.”

Tapioca is helping users gain access to video in a couple of different ways, by using multimedia messaging (MMS) or text messaging (SMS). Its customers include Univision, NBC, FOX-TV stations, and Border Media, a chain of radio stations previously known as BMP. These customers send video or audio clips of weather reports, news reports, and special messages to Tapioca, which uses its technology to distribute the clips to cell phone users who have signed up to get the broadcasters’ content.

Mass messaging is a technology and market that still has plenty of room to boom, as more video-capable devices come to market and prices come down. But any company attempting to provide such a service faces a daunting technical challenge: it’s not possible to use a single technology to transmit video that can be received by the multitude of cell phones.

For example, when Tapioca gets a video clip from Univision, the Spanish language network, the company processes the video so that it can be used with different messaging technologies. So video of a breaking news event can be sent to Univision’s subscriber base as an MMS message with the video clip or as an SMS message with a link that can be opened using the phone’s net browser. Different phones, bandwidths, carriers, transcoding, and video standards make this … Next Page »

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You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat … Next Page »

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[Update 12:00 pm 3/20/09: We were swamped with hundreds of e-mails in response to our offer of 100 free Google Voice beta accounts this morning. Thanks everyone! We'll be in touch with the winners as soon as possible with details about their new accounts.]

Brace for impact, again. Google is about to change the way you think about telephones.

The information giant has a pattern of setting its sights on an existing technology, moving in with overwhelming software-engineering force, and upending all of our old expectations. We didn’t know we needed ads alongside our search results, and Google turned keyword-based advertising into a multi-billion-dollar industry. We all thought e-mail was something we could only access and manage using desktop programs like Outlook, then along came Gmail. We thought we had to go to libraries to find out-of-print books, then Google went and created Google Book Search. We imagined cell phone platforms would always be controlled by a few elite carriers and handset makers, then Google started Android.

To be clear about it, Google didn’t invent keyword-based advertising, Web mail, book scanning, or open-source software. It just figured out how to apply such technologies more cleverly and pervasively than anyone else. And that’s what it has done once more with Google Voice—the renovated version of Grand Central, the phone-number-unification service it bought in 2007.

Grand Central was a startup that allowed users to sign up for a single phone number for life. A call to that number would automatically ring through to any or all of the other phones the user designated, meaning they no longer had to give their acquaintances separate home, office, and mobile numbers. Google paid somewhere north of $50 million for the technology, then spent more than a year and a half rebuilding it to work with its own infrastructure. Starting March 12, Google upgraded old Grand Central’s existing users to Google Voice accounts, and started inviting in a few beta testers. It plans to open up the free service to anyone in the U.S. starting “soon“—in a few weeks, by all accounts.

I’ve been testing Google Voice for the last couple of days, and I’m impressed. I think the service will mark a kind of tipping point in public perceptions of telephony. Before this, it was still possible to think of the phone system as something predating the Internet and therefore distinct from it, surrounded by its own set of customs and usage patterns. After this, we’ll think of phone calls more as if they were audio e-mails—finding their way through the uber-network to their intended recipients wherever those recipients may be located, and leaving a digital record that can be stored, searched, and manipulated on the Web.

There are a lot of features to Google Voice, which makes the overall concept a bit hard to explain, as I’ve realized over the past couple of days as I’ve talked with friends and colleagues about it. So I’ll try to simplify things. You start by signing up for a new phone number in your area code of choice. Google provides a search page where you can look for numbers that spell out mnemonics like “617-IM2-COOL.” In practice, there aren’t that many numbers available, so you might have to search for a while before you find one that spells out something that appeals to you, and that won’t embarrass you five or 10 years from now. (Google could do a better job explaining the number selection process—and it wouldn’t hurt if they showed a picture of a phone keyboard, to remind you of what letters go with what numbers.)

In the same way that an e-mail address doesn’t correspond to a single computer, your Google Voice number doesn’t correspond to any single phone. Indeed, that’s the beauty of the whole system. So once you’ve picked your number, the first thing to decide is which actual phones should ring when someone calls it. You can tell Google Voice to route calls to your office phone, your home land line, your mobile phone, your vacation rental, your Aunt Minnie’s house where you’re staying for the weekend, or all of the above.

The next big decision is about how Google Voice should handle voicemail messages, for those times you can’t answer or don’t want to. As soon as someone leaves a message, it goes into your Google Voice inbox, which you can access by calling the service or by directing the browser on your computer or your mobile phone to the Google Voice website.

If you like, you can simply let messages pile up in your inbox, and check them once in a while by calling in or visiting on the Web. Or you if you want to know about new messages right away, you can set Google Voice to notify you via e-mail or SMS text message.

Now here’s the really cool part. Rather than just notifying you that you got a voicemail the way your cell phone does, Google Voice can—if you choose—send you a text transcription of the message itself. Transcriptions are created automatically using speech recognition software, so they aren’t as accurate as one might like, but they … Next Page »

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Charles River Ventures of Waltham, MA, is one of the lead participants in an $11 million Series A funding round for Mumbai, India-based Webaroo, according to several reports this week. The mobile software company sells SMS-based systems for group messaging. Charles River was joined in the round by Helion Venture Partners.

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