I’ve been taking in Google’s recent release of “Search, plus your world” (or SPYW as the cool kids say) over the last several days, reflecting on what it means for Wetpaint and other media companies; but perhaps even more importantly, deeply understanding what it indicates about Facebook and Google themselves. As we all know by now, these most recent changes are meant to make its search more personal by up-weighting social activity in its algorithm, and using each person’s own position within their circles to determine relevance.

You might think that I would be one of the first to jump in the game with Google. After all, my company Wetpaint has been making a massive investment in distributing our content via other social channels, particularly Facebook. We’ve been seeing massive returns. And, I’ve even gone on a limb to predict that Facebook should be implementing its own Web-wide search this year.

Still, when it comes to playing Google’s social games, so far I’ve advocated staying on the sidelines of all their social venues—even their recent business pages. That’s been because even though the stadium lights are on, no one is on the field. More specifically, even though Google has 90 million registered users of the service, we see very little activity of significance among our target audience. But with its new SPYW changes, the question is: Has Google indeed forced companies’ hands?

Unfortunately, they have. And, in doing so, it marks a milestone in the changing mentality of Google. The search company’s great innovation—using the signals of the Web to best determine what the audience really wanted—has now been subverted. The company’s originally unshakable-seeming ethos of mechanistic neutrality has slowly, slowly, slowly, and now all of a sudden given way, and the new precedent is to favor its own business interests over those of the audience.

The result, like it or not, is that companies that rely on search for traffic must hear and obey loud and clear Google’s message that Google will favor those that favor it. It’s a dirty truth, and one far more chilling than the other more technical biases of its algorithm before.

Google has already started infusing search with the content that’s been blessed via Google+. Do a search for “New York Times” and you’ll probably find the New York Times plus.google.com page as the second search result. Search for “Mark Zuc” and you’ll likely see Zuckerberg’s Google+ page (despite the irony) populate as an option in the Google Instant choices.

I haven’t seen this bleed over to news stories yet, but I believe that it’s coming. Soon you’ll do a search for the latest headlines and your search results will be chock full with musings from your friends and non-friends inside Google+.

Google+ may not take off as a real social network, but Google has indicated that it’s throwing its full weight behind it anyway to make the best of what it’s got. Even if consumers don’t adopt it en masse, whatever activity is present will pepper the famous algorithm’s search results.

The irony here is that Google’s pivot toward a social search belies how important that social data is. The company is putting its lock on search at risk to gain a chance at a foothold on social. But what really comes through to me is that a great social search can be a winning product—if it’s populated with the right social data. So far, Google’s is not.

The question is—if that’s what I’m after—won’t I still just go to Facebook, where all my friends actually are (and which Google has adamantly cut out of SPYW)?

While SPYW does force publishers to support Google’s social network, fortunately it will be a temporary sacrifice from publishers during this period of transition from these days of search to a socially wired world. And that forthcoming world looks increasingly like it will be wired not by Google, but by its arch-enemy Facebook. Indeed, by corrupting the quality of their search product, Google may have just opened up a clear product entry into search for their rival as well.

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Brett deMarrais had only been to one wedding in his life—his cousin’s—before he launched his company in 2010.

“I saw that they didn’t have a videographer, and I found out the reason why was because of the price,” deMarrais says. “My cousin always regretted that decision.”

Like so many entrepreneurs before him, deMarrais had a “there must be a better way” moment, and the idea for Detroit startup Wedit began to gel.

DeMarrais’ company offers a DIY wedding videography service that, for $199, sends couples a package containing five HD video cameras at least three days before their wedding. The bride and groom then pass the cameras out to guests with the idea that the footage they capture will be full of those candid, heartfelt moments that loved ones may have a better ability to recognize. (While your videographer, a stranger hired out of the Yellow Pages, might not understand the significance of your estranged father pulling you to the side for an emotional hug and pep talk, your best friend would, and she would presumably dive for the camera to capture it on film.)

Once the happy couple has captured their wedding on film, they send the cameras back to deMarrais in pre-paid boxes. The $199 fee includes hosting, five DVDs of the raw footage, and tools to share the footage on social networks. For an additional $200 to $500, the site’s professional editors will pare the raw footage down into a cohesive video and highlight reel. He says the national average price for a wedding videographer’s services runs roughly $1,500, but in metro Detroit (and especially wealthy Oakland County), the price jumps to double or triple that.

“My goal is to help brides and grooms share their memories in a fun, affordable, easy way,” deMarrais says.

And what if the footage that comes back is, well, crappy? He says that hasn’t happened so far, and 250 couples used Wedit in 2011 alone. He also says keeping the editing prices separate—when the company first launched, prices started at $499 for the whole package—helps mitigate risk.

“When we started, we had no idea how the footage would turn out,” deMarrais says. “I was shocked—we’ve never had footage come back that we can’t use. People at your wedding care about you, and the people in charge of filming it seem to take it very seriously. The other thing is that people are so used to using digital devices now, filming things on their phones, that this kind of comes naturally.”

DeMarrais, the company’s founder and CEO, describes himself as a huge film buff who graduated from the University of Michigan in 2009 without a clear idea of what he’d do next. He took a job working for the president of the Motion Picture Association in Los Angeles, but he didn’t like the city. It wasn’t long before he moved back to Michigan.

DeMarrais says he originally approached Bizdom U with an idea for a production company. Though Bizdom wasn’t interested in his first business idea, they were interested in him. They encouraged him to come in and flesh out a new business idea, and the rest is Wedit history.

On Monday, the company announced it has been recognized with two industry awards: a Best of Weddings 2012 award from the Knot and a Bride’s Choice 2012 award from Wedding Wire. DeMarrais says it’s a big honor to be recognized for awards based on bridal satisfaction with customer service, value, and quality.

“Brides have a reputation for wanting everything to be perfect,” he says. “I take great pride in four- and five-star reviews across the board from one of the most particular client bases out there.”

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First things first: Yes, Facebook engineering director Jay Parikh has some thoughts about Google’s move to boost Google Plus above other social sources in its search stream. And no, he can’t say anything about it.

Twitter has been out front in criticizing Google’s newest social-signals revamp—named Search Plus Your World—and Facebook Seattle adviser Hadi Partovi said on his personal Twitter feed that he “used to love new @google search improvements with joy and even a bit of awe. This new social-results rollout is the opposite.”

But Facebook itself, which has a separate search arrangement with investor Microsoft’s Bing search engine, hasn’t made any sort of public pronouncement about the Google changes. When politely reminded about that by a public relations guy, I prodded Parikh a bit: Surely you must have some thoughts about it?

Jay Parikh

“Possibly,” he said, with a bit of a smile. “He wiped my brain. I know nothing.”

That particular brain-wipe would probably be a big job. Parikh, who joined Facebook in 2009 from Ning, heads up the social network’s infrastructure team, which spans everything from software that keeps more than 800 million users tied together to the nuts-and-bolts datacenter designs of the Open Compute Project.

Parkih was visiting Facebook’s Seattle engineering office to give a technical talk on the company’s projects—the kind of appearance that serves as a recruiting tool for engineers that Facebook might want to woo away from Microsoft, Amazon, or Google’s own sizable Seattle-area offices.

We’ve previously heard about some of the more user-facing projects that Seattle engineers have worked on, including messenger features, the iPad app, and the integration of Skype. But Parikh notes that there’s a good contingent of infrastructure engineers in Seattle too.

“We do have a growing presence up here for our infrastructure engineering team,” with about four groups who have a presence in Seattle of “a couple to a lot of engineers.”

That continued growth is the driver behind the Facebook office’s impending move to new, more spacious Seattle digs—double the size of the office near Pike Place Market, which held about 60 last time we heard. “We’ve been aggressively trying to build the set of projects and thus the set of engineers up here working on those projects,” Parikh says.

And perhaps counter to the Silicon Valley cliché of twentysomethings working all hours and passing out at their desks, Facebook is looking for a range of experience in its hires, Parikh says. That’s partly a necessity, since there aren’t enough new computer science graduates to fill all the technical jobs available, and an enormous number of digital startups are … Next Page »

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Nearly two years after it was founded within Internet company IAC (Nasdaq: IACI) in New York, social scrapbook Proust.com will be no more. E-mails sent out Wednesday announced the website will shut down on Jan. 31.

Proust, for now, is an online scrapbook that lets users selectively share personal stories along with photos and videos from important moments in their lives. The website went public last July and got its name from French writer Marcel Proust. Co-founded in February 2010 by Tom Cortese and Jason Fotinatos, Proust operated as a startup within IAC.

The online personal scrapbook field has hefty rivals such as Ancestry.com and its MyFamily.com subsidiary. Facebook’s new timeline profiles, which chronologically organize users’ photos, videos, and status updates along with personal milestones, may have also put pressure on Proust.

IAC maintains a number of subsidiaries such as comparison shopping site Pronto, video sharing website Vimeo, and dating websites Match.com and OkCupid. IAC declined to comment when asked why Proust was set to shutdown.

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Merry Christmas, Boston. You asked for it, and you got it. A big, publicly traded consumer tech company to put us on the map alongside the Silicon Valley bad boys and uppity New Yorkers. I present to you: TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP).

Sure, we already have Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and privately held but well-established companies like Wayfair, Kayak, and Harmonix. But TripAdvisor is different. Although the online travel firm is not new—it’s been cranking here in Boston for more than a decade—it has become one of the biggest consumer-focused Internet companies on the East Coast, with more than 1,100 employees; 50 million-plus unique visitors a month checking out hotel, restaurant, and travel reviews; and, oh yeah, a market cap north of $3 billion. Yet it hasn’t received as much media coverage or tech-community-adulation as you might expect over the years. (An exception to the former would be this in-depth story by my colleague Wade Roush; the latter would be this commentary from investor Chris Dixon.)

I spoke with TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer on Wednesday, the day his company officially became independent from Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) and started trading on the Nasdaq under its own stock symbol. Here are my takeaways from our chat:

1. TripAdvisor wants the spotlight now. “We have generally been very, very surprised at how little attention the press have paid to TripAdvisor,” Kaufer said. He pointed to his company’s size, number of employees, traffic, revenues, and profits, calling it “the $3 billion company in our own backyard.” On the local training and ecosystem front, he says college interns are turning down offers from Facebook and Google and working at TripAdvisor instead.

2. TripAdvisor is global. Seventy-five percent of the traffic to the company’s branded websites comes from outside the U.S. Think about that for a minute. “We’re almost unchallenged in most countries in the … Next Page »

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Boston-based Skyword is moving up in the world. The startup, which makes a software platform for brands to create Web content, said today it has closed $6 million in financing from Cox Media Group.

The company says it helps publishers—which is marketing-speak for retail and industry brands, as well as media companies—create online content “for a search and social driven world.” In other words, Skyword farms out marketing content to writers with experience in everything from medicine to investing to parenting, and tries to make the content discoverable by consumers via search engines and social networks. (Depending on whom you talk to, this is either one of the savviest or most annoying ideas ever. Or possibly both, if you view marketing as a necessary evil.)

Skyword is led by founder and CEO Tom Gerace. The company started up about a year ago, out of the news and social-networking site Gather (which still exists). Skyword’s customers include Procter & Gamble, Everyday Health, and ImpreMedia.

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San Diego-based VMIX has been revising its strategy, which was originally focused on providing a technology platform that enables TV stations and other media companies to stream online video. Earlier this year, VMIX began rolling out technology that allowed consumers to use the company’s video streaming technology on social media sites like Facebook.

Now the six-year-old startup is launching Givit, a new consumer-oriented business that makes it easy for users to share video privately. In contrast to posting a video on Facebook, where just about anyone can see it, Givit users can selectively send a private video link to designated friends and family.

After introducing a beta version of Givit last month, VMIX says today that users can download the Givit app for use on the iPhone and iPad. The technology was previously available as an app for Windows or Mac OS-based laptops and desktop PCs.

Basic Givit service is free; service that provides additional video storage capacity is available as a subscription. While there are plenty of competitors that already enable consumers to share videos online, VMIX says Givit is the only video-sharing service designed to restrict the people who can watch a video.

“One of our big value propositions is private video,” VMIX CEO Greg Kostello told me earlier this week. “There already are a number of ways to share video publicly through Facebook. But everyone who sees it is not necessarily a friend. They just friended me.”

In a statement from the company today, Kostello says, “Smartphones are now the camera of choice for recording everyday moments, but sharing mobile video is often a frustrating process. Givit makes it easy-and most importantly, by default we share securely and privately, rather than broadcasting your personal content across public social networks.”

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As more people turn to social networks for a video game fix, they’re also getting friendlier with the idea of forking over real cash for in-game virtual currency and items, according to a study commissioned by Seattle’s PopCap Games—the recent Electronic Arts acquisition that’s providing a lot of fuel for EA’s transition into more online and mobile games.

Digital transactions are the key to making money in social gaming, where free-to-play games are very common and revenue comes from charging for add-ons and extras that bring a player some special status, abilities, or even just decorations.

The online survey, conducted by pollster Information Solutions Group, shows two compelling statistics: First, more people are buying digital currency this year, compared with a similar survey in 2010. That measure went from 14 percent in last year’s survey to 26 percent in this year’s version, which is based on responses from roughly 1,200 social gamers in the U.S. and U.K.

If you extrapolate that response out to the broader population, Information Solutions Group says you’ve got about 31 million players buying virtual currency.

And secondly, people seem to be warming up to the idea—even if they haven’t taken the plunge in buying digital items yet. When asked how likely they were to pay for virtual items, about 46 percent said they were “very likely” or “somewhat likely” to open up their wallets. That’s up from about 32 percent of respondents in the 2010 survey.

Also significantly, the staunch holdouts who said they were “very unlikely” to pay for digital items showed a significant drop: In the 2010 survey, 47 percent of respondents showed that level of resistance. But in this year’s edition of the survey, the “very unlikely” fraction was down to 33 percent.

All the usual caveats about surveys apply, and fellow polling geeks can read the detailed methodology statement from the pollsters here. But this would generally track with what the games industry is chasing as it evolves from a fixed-production studio model into a digital-service industry with different revenue streams.

Exhibit A in that transformation is Zynga, which has rocketed from founding in 2007 to the verge of a $1 billion IPO. Zynga’s games, largely tied to Facebook, have traditionally made money by getting players to pay for little accoutrements that gussy up their game-play—so if you’re building digital barns in FarmVille, you might buy the nails and lumber to complete that project.

The lucrative potential for this revenue stream is a big reason why Facebook insisted that Zynga and other developers use its proprietary Credits system for such purchases, with Facebook getting a 30 percent cut. Facebook is now testing those credits outside the social network proper, with the GameHouse division of Seattle’s RealNetworks serving as a a key guinea pig.

This overall consumer trend shows why Redwood Shores, CA-based EA was willing to pay $750 million in cash and stock up front for PopCap (with earn-outs, the price could reach $1.3 billion). EA is a pioneer and longtime leader in traditional, hardcore console gaming, but is charging after Zynga in the digital sector, with acquisitions like PopCap providing a lot of the fuel.

When it bought PopCap, EA cited analyst figures showing that worldwide social game revenue would grow from about $2.4 billion in 2010 to $7.5 billion in 2014. PopCap’s 2010 revenue was just over $100 million, and EA recently said the unit’s sales  would grow more than 30 percent for 2011.

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Facebook’s Seattle office, the social networking giant’s biggest engineering presence outside its Palo Alto, CA headquarters, is doubling its footprint to make room for more engineers. Facebook Seattle opened in August 2010 with three employees, and has grown to about 60 people in the year-plus since then, the company says.

Some key early projects that Seattle engineers have tackled include a revamped chat feature and the integrated Skype video calling service rolled out this summer, which was led by Facebook Seattle’s Philip Su, a former Microsoftie. Facebook says Seattle engineers also work on the iPad and other iOS functions, along with general site stability and reliability.

Leon Dubinsky, a Facebook Seattle engineer who worked on the long-awaited iPad app, described working in the remote office in this recent post recounting the project.

After starting during his “bootcamp” orientation in Palo Alto, Dubinsky wrote that he took his chunk of the app project home to Seattle, “and a few of my Seattle teammates joined me to help continue improving the product. It now feels a little more like the typical structure of Facebook Seattle—three or four people working up here, and three or four of your teammates down in Palo Alto.”

Facebook Seattle is led by Ari Steinberg, an engineer who was a fairly early Facebook employee. The company also counts on advisers like Hadi Partovi, formerly of iLike (and MySpace), and Peter Wilson, formerly of Google (and Microsoft).

The new 27,000-square-foot office will be at 1730 Minor Avenue. The original space is down by Pike Place Market, at 101 Stewart Street, and was clearly getting to capacity the last time I dropped by in June. The move is expected early next year.

The office has held pretty regular “tech talks,” which service as outreach and recruiting events. The biggest one of those came in late June, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg (and engineering head Mike Schroepfer), held an an invitation-only Q&A with developers, just before the Skype video calling announcement.

At that time, Zuckerberg praised the quality of talent in Seattle: “I just think there’s so many good engineers up here, largely from Microsoft and Amazon traditionally, and Google a bit more recently, and there’s a really good startup scene up here.”

Facebook Seattle posted this enticing photo of the view from its new digs, which has the city looking its non-drizzly best—only partly cloudy, Space Needle on display, and some sparkling water in the distance. (This is the Seattle I was dreaming of yesterday evening, when I got soaked waiting for the bus).

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Updated 11:30 am 11/3 with slides
Sorry, experts: Information consumers don’t particularly care about all your highfalutin’ degrees and special titles. For a surprisingly large swath of online queries, friends and other real-world users are the key sources of opinions, says Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s director of search.

“People don’t know who to trust. They don’t know who experts are. I can claim to be an expert in search, but you have to believe me,” Weitz said Wednesday in a presentation at the first Seattle Interactive Conference.

Like a true data geek, Weitz had a truckload of statistics, research, charts, and graphs to illustrate the importance of social signals in influencing user behavior online. But the short version is summed up well by this quote: “Humans crave other humans inside of search.”

There is an exception to the no-experts finding—when it comes to technical problems, people online actually want to see expert opinions, Weitz says.

But for every other example of some very common queries that Microsoft studied, the opinions of friends or other regular users were vastly preferred. Here’s that key slide from the presentation, and the rest is embedded below via Slideshare:

That’s significant for Microsoft, of course, because of the company’s deal with Facebook that gives Bing access to public Facebook data. Bing now incorporates that information into its search results.

“The bottom line is people are using social networks, in this case Facebook is the dominant one, to pose questions, to get opinions from people they know,” he said. “And in case you didn’t know, Bing has a relationship with Facebook.”

It’s an interesting relationship. Facebook hasn’t gone full-force into Web search, instead relying on its Bing partnership. Some who study the sector, though, say Facebook will eventually do search itself—potentially leaving Microsoft behind.

That would be a big letdown for Bing, which is growing in share of the search market (and powers search for poor old Yahoo) but is still well behind the search market leader, Google.

For his part, Weitz said the tracking of quality social signals will become even more important over time, as the amount of information online and the volume of search traffic increases, Weitz said.

For instance, search in general still expects people to put the right combination of keywords into the search box when they’re looking for something they don’t know anything about. “If you think about that, it’s chaos,” he said.

And while search gurus are trying to figure out how to make algorithms better at answering questions, Bing finds that users are going to their social graph when they want to ask a question and get an opinion.

If your garden-variety Internet user gets entrenched in that kind of split—social networks to answer questions and search to gather raw data—you can see how hard it might be for straight-up search tools to break Facebook’s hold and truly catalog all the valuable information out there.

“The cold math that we have used for 15 years now to help refine results to your particular keyword is not something which was sustainable long-term,” Weitz said. “You need that emotional connection to actually help you rationalize your way through the decision you have to make.”

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Facebook is testing its virtual currency system, Facebook Credits, on sites across the broader Web—and the first public guinea pig is GameHouse, the casual-games division of RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) that is going full-bore after a bigger slice of the social-gaming sector.

Facebook Credits allow players to buy “virtual goods” within games they play. So, if you’re building barns in social-game leader Zynga’s FarmVille, you can buy some nails and boards to complete the task. And that’s turned into a sizeable business: One analyst has predicted that Facebook’s 30 percent cut of Credits sales will bring it $400 million this year from Zynga alone.

Matt Hulett

But bringing credits outside Facebook’s garden has implications well beyond a few candy-colored time-wasters. Matt Hulett, Real’s senior VP of games, says it’s a major step in building a revenue platform that developers and studios can use to tie games together, regardless of where they’re played.

With Facebook Credits enabled outside of the social network, two GameHouse games that were previously only available on social platforms—Collapse! Blast and Uno Boost—can be played on GameHouse’s website. And any purchases made or progress achieved by a player will show up when they switch platforms, between website and Facebook, or vice versa.

That’s a big deal because it helps usher in the future of casual-type games, where you might start playing one on your connected TV, switch over to your smartphone or tablet while riding the bus to work, and then continue on your work computer during the day.

Hulett says that frictionless gaming experience will help make social games even more mainstream, and potentially break down the idea that “social game” only means something that’s played on a social network (Google+ also offers games, and GameHouse is on that nascent platform too).

“I think we’re a little cro-magnon in the game space when we talk about social games as this alien thing,” Hulett says. “It’s huge, and we know its growing. But when we talk about anything other than Facebook, people shut their brains off and stop thinking.”

The arrangement also will help GameHouse in its drive to become a leading social publisher, Hulett says, because players who work within the Facebook Credits system on GameHouse’s sites will be counted as daily users of Facebook games overall. That allows GameHouse—and Facebook—to draw more players into the social network’s territory.

“For us, with 15-20 million unique users on these dot-coms, we know those same consumers are playing games on Facebook or downloading in app stores,” Hulett says.

The Facebook Credits experiment reflects just how driven GameHouse is in social games, Hulett says, and also showcases the division’s technological expertise in working on different platforms, from online to social to mobile. About half of the GameHouse division’s roughly 300 employees are now devoted to social games, and the unit turned profitable a year ago as it got out of underperforming lines of business and refocused on social games.

“I’m highly confident that we’re going to be growing in to a top-10 developer of social games very, very soon,” Hulett says.

While the company doesn’t break out virtual currency revenues as a separate item in public financial reports, Hulett says it’s the clear target for growth: “I’ve seen growth rates that say it’s going to be as big as console gaming,” which is still a roughly $20 billion annual business, Hulett says. “I think it’s going to be the main thing that we do.”

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On a dismal day in Boston, here are a few tech-related company financings worth mentioning (one in mobile/social, one in video, and one in education):

—BetterLesson, a Cambridge, MA-based startup that helps teachers organize and share lesson plans and curricula online, has closed a new $1.6 million financing round from Highland Capital Partners, General Catalyst Partners, New Markets Ventures, NewSchools Venture Fund, and angel investors. BetterLesson says it has built up a Web community of tens of thousands of K-12 educators. Any education company led by a Teach For America alum (founder and CEO Alex Grodd) is worth paying attention to, I say.

—Earlier this week, Wikets, a social commerce and recommendations startup, said it raised a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, and angel investors, according to TechCrunch. (Xconomy reported on the round back in June, but without information about the investors.) The Boston-area startup, which is working on its mobile app, is led by founders Andy Park, Vijay Manwani, and Ravi Reddy.

—PeerApp, a Newton, MA-based online video delivery firm, raised $8 million in growth financing led by Summit Partners. Cedar Fund, Evergreen Partners, Pilot House Ventures Group, and other investors also participated in the round. PeerApp started in 2004 and is led by CEO Robert Mayer, a former EMC exec.

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You know the type. He’s at every tech startup event, every investor event, and every incubator and early-stage mentorship session (at least every good one). He’s talked to every entrepreneur in the area and has had a hand in the development of many of their companies.

He has been a fixture of the local software scene for some 30 years, even though he doesn’t look nearly old enough for that. Worst of all, he comes across as a genuinely nice guy and doesn’t seek the limelight or talk a big game.

That would be Reed Sturtevant—and his reputation is as distinguished as his name. He is one of the Boston area’s most active and respected techies, known especially for his technical prowess and product experience. He’s also an Xconomist—one of our informal advisors who helps keep Xconomy plugged in to the innovation scene—so I wanted to take some time to catch up with him in more depth.

Sturtevant grew up outside of Washington, DC, and is a self-professed MIT dropout (we need more of those, don’t we?). He started his career as a programmer at Strategic Planning Institute in the late ‘70s and went on to work at Graphic Communications, maker of Freelance Graphics—which was bought by Lotus Development, where he stayed for about 10 years. During the ‘90s, he co-founded Radnet and RadioAMP before taking a senior role in 2000 with Idealab, where he was responsible for new company development in Boston. There he helped start six companies: Refer.com, Compete, Picasa (bought by Google), Newbury Networks, Paythrough, Pathspace, and Newbury Payments.

After Idealab, he became chief technology officer for Eons, the Jeff Taylor-led social networking site, and stayed for almost two years. He left Eons and helped found Microsoft Startup Labs in 2007, where he directed a team that developed the user experience for Bing Twitter search, among other projects. He left Microsoft in late 2009 to focus on startups and investing—which brings us to what he’s doing today.

Sturtevant currently co-runs Project 11 Ventures, a seed-stage investment fund (co-founded with Katie Rae) that works together with angel investors to back young tech startups. He tells me that since last fall, Project 11 has invested in seven companies—Locately, Scriptpad, peerTransfer, GreenGoose, and three undisclosed startups. In his spare time, he is a mentor for TechStars Boston, a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a founding member and trustee of the Awesome Foundation.

I caught up with Sturtevant over e-mail this week, asking him a variety of questions ranging from the state of the economy to the challenges of building a consumer-focused tech company (especially in Boston), to the most important trends to watch in computing. Here are his answers:

Xconomy: Let’s talk about the broader economic backdrop for what you do: startups and investing. How does the bleak macro-outlook for jobs and the stock market affect your strategy?

Reed Sturtevant: Obviously we’re all better off in times of economic tailwinds, but I’m seeing a couple of effects on the very early stage startup arena.

First, job security in established companies and industries is clearly an illusion. I teach at MIT and this week I asked our students whether they expect to work in, or found, a startup. Two-thirds of … Next Page »

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Ben Kartzman wants banner ads to do more than sit and wait to be clicked. As common as that mode of marketing has become, he believes his company, Spongecell, can more efficiently engage the public by weaving rich content—video, social media, or interactive features—into typically idle ads.

“We don’t think static ads should exist anymore,” says Kartzman, CEO and co-founder of Spongecell in New York.

A heavyweight in the online world seems to agree with him. In June, Spongecell raised an undisclosed amount in a Series A2 round led by Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google. The recent funding is helping to expand the technology and sales staff at Spongecell, according to Kartzman. Other investors in the round included Jim Pallotta, chairman of the Raptor Group; Brian Rooney, who serves on the board of directors for the Pittsburgh Steelers; and SilverHaze Partners.

Five-year-old Spongecell adds functions such as Twitter feeds and rotating deals to banner ads for more than 200 brands such as fashion label Emporio Armani, ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s, and automaker Volvo. Features embedded into the ads include video, streaming audio, and connections to social networks. For example, Kartzman says consumers watching video within these ads might pause the content and … Next Page »

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San Diego’s innovation community saw some new startups and new money emerge last week. We’ve got it all wrapped up for you, and our briefing begins now.

—Following a global-and-local Web 2.0 strategy, San Diego-based Eventful is now hosting roughly 5 million local events for roughly 20 million users, who can search the website by category, performer, or venue to find events in their local markets. Eventful helps users track concert tours, live shows, sports, political rallies and other activities.

—-U.S. venture investments in cleantech and alternative energy amounted to almost $1.1 billion during the second quarter ending June 30, according to a cleantech investing report released by the Ernst & Young accounting firm. That was up slightly from more than $1 billion that cleantech raised during the previous quarter, but 44 percent less than the $1.9 billion invested in cleantechs in the year-ago quarter. Just over half of the $1.1 billion total went to cleantech deals in California, but 14 of the 15 biggest deals were in Northern California.

—Terry Moore, a longtime venture advocate in San Diego, is raising a venture capital mini-fund to help what he contends is an underserved startup community in San Diego and Southern California. Moore wants to raise between $10 million and $15 million for Moore Venture Partners, which recently participated in a $15 million C round for Daylight Solutions, a San Diego solid-state laser maker.

—San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital led a $6 million venture round in San Diego’s TakeLessons, a five-year-old startup that operates a Web platform that connects people to certified music instructors in more than 2,800 U.S. cities.

—Malama Composites, a San Diego cleantech startup that uses green materials to make structural foam, has raised almost $696,000 of equity funding in a round that is targeting almost $1.2 million. Malama Composites intends to close its Series A Round in coming weeks.

—At an afternoon conference at the … Next Page »

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That dang Rich Barton is one busy dude. Fresh off the public-market debut of Zillow (NASDAQ:Z), the Seattle uber-entrepreneur (he also founded Expedia) is trying to boost the user base of another one of his ventures, the location photo-tagging startup Trover.

Yes, indeed—another location/mobile/photo/social play.

As we saw with yesterday’s news that Seattle’s PhotoRocket had downsized, the zone has quickly become flooded with apps and Web services trying to hit a sweet spot with all of those smartphone-enabled tricks. Do it right, and you could theoretically attract a huge user base of people sharing tons of data about what they like, where they are, and who they know.

Most infamous of them all is Color, the Silicon Valley photo-sharing startup that landed $41 million in venture capital and reportedly turned down a big buyout offer from Google before it even had a serious app in the field. It didn’t turn out so well. And there are plenty of other players.

Trover’s pitch is that it’s tying together the location-tagging features of a Foursquare, the photostream sharing idea of an Instagram, and the crowd ratings of something like Yelp into one package. Users are supposed to leave a trail of virtual breadcrumbs behind for others to discover as they explore different locations.

So, if I had used it while writing this story, I’d have taken a picture of the BBQ pork sandwich I was enjoying at Xconomy’s Ballard bureau and described its finer features for my pals to check out later if they come by this same spot.

Trover has been in a beta mode for three months, testing out its product with about 70,000 users. That’s not a huge pool, but CEO Jason Karas says the experimental users have been responding well, including some self-policing of newbies who post photos of non-locations, which Trover actually bans to keep the activities focused.

“That was always our challenge—no baby pictures,” Karas says with a laugh. “We’re doing a lot just from a social engineering standpoint about what Trover’s used for. … That’s been painstaking, but successful.”

Is that enough to survive, much less stand out, in a forest of mobile photo applications? Who knows. There’s clearly something in the behavior itself that people are glomming onto—Instagram famously has about 1.25 million users per employee right now.

Trover is funded in kind of a weird way. It spun out of TravelPost, an earlier Barton startup that Karas worked for, which was a website where people could share travel experiences such as hotel reviews.

TravelPost raised $9.8 million last year from investors including General Catalyst, Ignition Partners and Benchmark Capital. But there doesn’t appear to be much going on over at TravelPost right now, and Karas says the leaders took “a sizable chunk” of the money to work on Trover, which is technically owned by TravelPost. TravelPost is technically still alive, but most of the resources are being poured into Trover now, a spokeswoman says. Whew.

Trover was just open to people with Facebook logins during the trial period, but as of today the whole shebang is being opened up—people who want to try it out can sign in with Twitter accounts, email addresses, or download the iPhone app.

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If you’re like most people, you do a lot of your personal communicating via Facebook and text messages, but you handle most of your business matters over e-mail. In fact, you probably spend far too much of your workday on e-mail (some estimates say 30 percent), and you wish you could be more efficient and productive with that time.

Well, what if you could do a lot more stuff directly from your inbox? Instead of clicking on e-mail links that take you somewhere else, for instance, what if you could watch videos, comment on people’s updates on Facebook and Twitter, and browse daily deals, all from the friendly confines of your e-mail account?

That’s the idea behind a young Cambridge, MA-based startup called PowerInbox. OK, maybe it won’t make you more productive at work or cut down on time spent in your inbox just yet. But the idea actually leads to something bigger, involving the future of e-mail as a unified platform for social apps.

First, some news. PowerInbox is rolling out its private beta platform today—you can try it out here using our access code. The free download works across Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook. Basically, it lets you do things like comment on Facebook, view photos, see and send tweets, and get information about local deals from Groupon (see screenshot below)—all without leaving your inbox.

The core idea behind PowerInbox, as founder Matt Thazhmon explains, is “let’s make e-mail interactive.” What he means, really, is adding social features to e-mail that will connect users more efficiently to the services they use every day.

PowerInbox was co-founded last year by three Electronic Arts veterans (including Thazhmon, who worked on Madden football and other games). The startup raised a $1 million seed round earlier this year from Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture Partners, Correlation Ventures, and angel investors. The four-person team, originally from Orlando, FL, by way of the San Francisco Bay Area, recently moved to the Boston area. The company has found office space for the coming year near Central Square in Cambridge.

There are plenty of e-mail-related companies out there, of course. They include—just to name a few—Baydin, Gist (now part of RIM), Help Scout, Mimecast, Rapportive, Taskforce, Senexx, SMTP, Sonian, and Yesware, to go along with Constant Contact, HubSpot, and a whole host of marketing tech companies. Some of these are trying to make your inbox more productive and efficient, while others use e-mail as a platform for other applications. And each e-mail system, like Gmail or Outlook, has its own add-ins and gadgets. But where PowerInbox is different is in its vision for the future.

The company’s long-term goal is for developers to create new apps on top of the PowerInbox e-mail platform. Anyone from Facebook to travel and deals sites (left) to video services (Netflix, anyone?) to recruiting, dating, or meeting-scheduling sites—indeed, any entity that interacts with customers by e-mail—could conceivably build an app that helps people interact with content through an inbox.

One emerging focus is on forming partnerships with gaming companies—such as social-network game giant Zynga, but also smaller developers—to let users play games within their e-mail, and make it that much easier to start playing. “We think this is going to be huge,” Thazhmon says.

But making big changes to e-mail tends to be hard because it’s an open platform, … Next Page »

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In the six months or so he spent building Skype video chat into Facebook, Philip Su had a particular person in mind: your mom. Well, not just her—when you’ve got a user base 750 million strong, there’s a big contingent of folks who aren’t early adopters or tech geeks. And even though video calling has been around for several years, lots of people probably haven’t used it yet.

The big hurdle? Setup and installation—for every download, new username, term of service, and on and on, you lose handfuls of mainstream users. And that puts a real crimp on those made-for-TV marketing moments where a grandparent coos over the newest member of the brood from thousands of miles away.

“Like my parents, right? I bought them a little laptop, and it has a little webcam. And I bought this two years ago. And they didn’t even know the thing had a webcam—it was just like a little black thing on the top,” Su says. “But [now] you video call them, and they’re like, ‘Oh this is magical! I can’t believe it! This is so cool!’”

Of course, there’s plenty of work behind all that magical stuff. I stopped by the Facebook offices in Seattle recently to talk with Su about the Skype project, which was announced earlier this month at a big press event down at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.

The debut of video calling was the biggest public showcase yet for Facebook Seattle, the collection of roughly 40 engineers who represent the social networking behemoth’s only significant engineering office outside of Silicon Valley. The flat-topped Su represented the Northwesterners at the Skype project unveiling in Palo Alto, wearing the Seattle office’s distinctive Space Needle-logo T-shirt (which got some love of its own in the tech press).

Facebook-Skype video calling still isn’t live for everyone in the Facebook universe. Like most things in the social network, it’s being rolled out in stages, and Su continues to quarterback the process. He was the only full-time Facebook engineer on the project, although some others chipped in with part-time help.

As GigaOm’s Ryan Kim detailed in this piece, the big problems for Skype were paring down its service to work inside a Web browser, making sure the back-end connections with Facebook were smooth, and getting ready to handle a flood of traffic—Skype CEO Tony Bates said the Facebook deal is tied directly to Skype’s goal of getting to a billion users.

On the Facebook side, Su says, the huge user base meant working through a rat’s nest of different configuration scenarios and making sure the video calls stayed “magical,” stable, secure and easy to use.

“For instance: users running Windows XP SP3, with user access control on, that are non-admins—what happens in their case, when they install in a home where a husband and wife share a machine, but have two different logins? And both are logged in at … Next Page »

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A short holiday week still left us with plenty of good tech news to chew over in the Puget Sound region. Here’s the quick version of the headlines and deep dives from the past seven days here at Xconomy Seattle, from big players and VCs to startups and researchers:

—Cue the circa-2000 sock puppet jokes—Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) subsidiary Quidsi debuted Wag.com, a new online portal for pet products. Quidsi, which was acquired by Amazon in November for $500 million, already operates sites like Diapers.com and Soap.com. Amazon, of course, owned about a third of Pets.com, whose microphone-wielding doggie puppet mascot became a much-lampooned symbol of the dot-com bust. A few days after bringing us that news, Xconomy New York’s Arlene Weintraub wrapped up what looks like a flurry of recent pet-related tech tidbits.

—Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the “awesome” product announcement he alluded to during a recent visit to Facebook’s Seattle office, bringing up Skype CEO Tony Bates to show off the new video-calling feature embedded in the world’s largest social network. The Facebook side of the work was done mostly in Seattle, with just one full-time engineer in charge (he did have some part-time help). That would be Philip Su, who sported the Space Needle-logo Facebook Seattle T-shirt as he gave the new Skype feature a test run during the news conference.

—On the startup side, I offered this look at what Seattle’s Iota is planning for the next-generation consumer RFID sector. Iota’s team is made up of T-Mobile veterans who want to get fun, fashionable non-phone mobile devices into the hands of the roughly two-thirds of Americans who are still packing around feature phones—especially teens. Iota’s plan is to get ahead of the Googles of the world in deploying a fast, easy, cheap network of RFID tags that can be read through “near-field communication” technology.

—Seattle mobile game startup Zipline revealed that its Moai platform, which lets developers quickly build and host mobile games, was being used to develop the first game for Bungie Aerospace—the new mobile label from the makers of the Halo game franchise. Moai is based around Lua, a common programming language for games, and offers a single open-source platform for both the front-end and the infrastructure of a mobile game. Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes imprint is using Moai to develop stealthy title “Crimson” for Bungie Aerospace.

—Over in Boston, Xconomy’s Greg Huang got a look at what the gang at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center have been up to for the past three years. It’s one of several R&D labs around the world for Redmond, WA-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), but the details of just what they’re cooking up behind the doors of the NERD haven’t really been aired until now.

—Xconomy’s Bruce Bigelow checked in from our San Diego office with this report on a pair of studies gauging the health of the venture capital industry in 2011. As Bruce wrote, the surveys—from Dow Jones, and Thomson Reuters/National Venture Capital Association—show that VC fundraising is up, but the kitty is split between fewer funds. That means the industry is contracting around the name-brand funds out there.

—Finally, a trio of quick financing updates from the Seattle tech scene: Zillow amended its IPO paperwork to add an estimated share price range of $12-$14; compensation data provider PayScale raised $7 million in VC to expand sales and marketing; and mobile security software company Finsphere raised another $1.75 million from undisclosed investors.

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Newton, MA-based online travel giant TripAdvisor said today it has acquired Where I’ve Been, a social travel software company based in Chicago. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the entire product team from Where I’ve Been will join TripAdvisor, according to the press release. Where I’ve Been is best known for its Facebook application that lets people create travel maps and share stories and photos from their trips.

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