[Corrected and updated, 10/28/09, 12:40 p.m.; see page 4.] Back in 2002, it must have sounded like a good idea for Orange, a fast-growing European wireless provider known more for the simplicity of its services than for their sophistication, to open an R&D center in Boston, where it could hire a troop of brainy engineers, consultants, and startup entrepreneurs to come up with ideas for new high-tech services that would continue to fuel its growth.

In practice, though, an array of barriers meant that Orange Labs—which settled near MIT in Cambridge, MA, and became home to what one former employee calls “the most talented, most passionate group of people I’ve ever worked with”—never really fulfilled its potential. Eventually, it lost the pull it needed within Orange and its parent company, France Telecom, to keep growing. And after a seven-year run, the lab will close its doors tomorrow.

France Telecom’s decision to shutter Orange Labs Cambridge is ostensibly part of a corporate consolidation effort—there’s another Orange laboratory in South San Francisco, and in tough economic times it’s hard to argue that any European company needs two U.S. research centers.

But several former Orange Labs members tell Xconomy that the Cambridge facility’s demise was so long in the making that it could perhaps have been predicted from the start. It was rooted, these sources say, both in cultural differences between the lab’s American engineers and their British and French overseers, and in textbook organizational frictions and rivalries that prevented most Orange Labs initiatives from maturing into products that could be deployed to actual Orange customers. Just as important, the former employees say, Orange’s San Francisco lab developed far stronger political connections to the France Telecom leadership, making it obvious which of the two labs was more likely to survive any cost-cutting round.

Orange Labs' facility on Second Street in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA

But while Orange Labs Cambridge may not have fulfilled its creators’ hopes, it will leave a lasting footprint on the Boston technology scene. Developers at the lab prototyped services such as push-to-talk, mobile photo sharing, localized search, and app-like “widgets” long before any of these technologies became standard on mobile phones. The lab provided a home, at its height, to about 60 brilliant hardware and software engineers, including many graduates of MIT and other local universities. And it acted as a springboard for entrepreneurs who have gone on to play other important roles in the mobile industry—the most prominent being Orange Labs’ founder and first director, Rich Miner, who later co-founded mobile software startup Android, helped transform the Android operating system into an industry standard before and after the company was acquired by Google, and now runs Google Ventures.

Still, there’s a sense that the lab could have accomplished much more. “If I were to summarize the ultimate legacy that the lab had for Orange and France Telecom, I would say ‘missed opportunity,’” says Iliya Rybchin, who was a program manager at Orange Lab from 2002 to 2004 and is now overseeing digital development projects at publisher McGraw-Hill. “The fact that [France Telecom] wasn’t willing or capable of tapping into that talent pool, with that amazing level of innovation and insight and passion, is frankly unfortunate, because the kinds of things that we were producing in the lab really had the potential to be transformative in the industry.”

Officials at France Telecom have not responded to Xconomy’s requests for comment on the shutdown, nor has Orange Labs CEO Frank Bowman.

The story of Orange Labs starts with Orange itself, formed in 1994 by a consortium of British and French companies. Industry insiders describe the early Orange as a scrappy, innovation-focused, startup-style company that …Next Page »

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For a long time, Second Life was stuck in the cyber equivalent of the silent-movie era: people communicated by typing, and their words showed up in little thought bubbles above their avatars’ heads. All of that changed drastically around 2007, when Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, hired an obscure outfit called Vivox to equip its 3-D virtual world with a voice communication system. Now any Second Life citizen who has a headset connected to their computer can simply speak, and everyone whose avatar is standing nearby will hear them in living stereo.

For the Gloria Swansons of Second Life, like myself, the changeover from typing to talking was a bit traumatic—and indeed, 20 percent of Second Life citizens still abstain from voice communication. But the other 80 percent gab for a billion minutes every month, which is a rather convincing demonstration that most people inside 3-D computer environments prefer talking to texting.

And now Vivox, a four-year-old startup based in Natick, MA, is about to introduce its technology to three new communities that could vastly increase its user base. The company announced this morning that it has formed a partnership with Redwood City, CA-based Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), the world’s largest entertainment software company, to add its voice services to several online EA games. First up is Command & Conquer 4, a continuation of EA’s hugely popular real-time strategy game that’s expected to launch early next year.

At the same time, Vivox is announcing the launch of Vivox Labs, an incubator-within-a-startup where the company is trying out different ways of delivering its voice services over the Web. And the first two Vivox Labs experiments are aimed at big targets: Facebook, where the lab’s “Vivox Web Voice for Facebook” application will allow members to invite their friends to instant Web voice conferences; and World of Warcraft subscribers, who will be able to use a new Vivox-powered website called Puggable to assemble teams of players for in-world campaigns. Both the Facebook and Puggable applications are in private beta testing and are expected to go public by January.

“We started the company about four years ago with the goal of making voice a seamless, natural part of every online experience,” Vivox co-founder and CEO Rob Seaver told me when I visited the company last week. “Our view at the time was that more and more human interaction would take place online, and the richest form of communication we have is talking to each other. So we thought there would be an opportunity to turn the Web from this silent, barren place into one filled with the warm sounds of human voices.”

That’s exactly what could happen if even more gaming, virtual-world, and social networking communities turn to Vivox’s services. Not bad for a company that started out as a wacky idea from Jeff Pulver, the founder of the company that became Internet phone service provider Vonage.

You’ve probably heard of Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP; it’s the technology behind Vonage and Skype, and the one that has turned the telecom industry upside down by transforming phone calls into digital data packets and routing them over the open Internet. Vivox’s system works on similar principles, except that …Next Page »

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Verivue, the Westford, MA-based maker of multimedia distribution switches for cable and telecom operators, has raised $20.1 million in an equity offering, according to regulatory forms filed yesterday. PE Hub, citing a Venture Wire report, says new investor Sigma Partners took the lead in the round. Verivue raised a $40 million Series B round in March of this year, on the heels of a $25 million Series A round in 2007.

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Orange Labs in Cambridge, MA, France Telecom’s East Coast research outpost, will reportedly close down as of October 30. Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe first reported the story this morning; a France Telecom spokesman told him the Cambridge lab duplicates the functions of other Orange labs in France, Japan, and Silicon Valley. Michael Cappelletti, the Cambridge lab’s director of operations, tells Xconomy that he can’t comment on the report. “The information has not been officially published,” Cappelletti says, but “It has been publicly discussed.”

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The IPS Group, a specialized San Diego cellular technology company, is raising $1.5 million in funding from individual investors as part of a shift to the development of high-tech parking meters. The privately held company has raised more than $1.3 million so far, according to a recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company launched its line of parking meters, which are solar-powered, wireless, and Internet-enabled, in May 2008, says Chad Randall, IPS Group’s chief operating officer. “We think we have a product that is not just unique in our space, but is also timely in the current economy as a way for municipalities to increase their revenue,” Randall says.

The funding is intended for general working capital, and investors are current shareholders, Randall says. IPS Group’s president and CEO, David W. King, also is the majority owner of the company, which has 15 employees. The meters represent a strategic shift for the IPS Group and are now the primary focus of the business, which previously specialized in wireless telecommunications equipment.

IPS meter

Randall says the company’s parking meters offer several advantages over existing insert-coin-and-twist-the-lever technology. A solar cell and rechargeable battery makes each unit entirely self-powered, and wireless capabilities give motorists the option of either inserting coins or using a credit card to feed the meter . And because each meter is Web-enabled, Randall says city officials can use a desktop computer linked to the Internet to track each meter’s revenues. The Internet also makes it far easier, logistically, for a city to increase its parking rates.

“Our meter really plugs in seamlessly to current meter operations,” Randall says. IPS Group even has designed its meter as a retrofit unit, so it can be installed on the poles of existing parking meters.

“What we’re providing is exceptional convenience to users and exceptional convenience to our customers,” Randall says. He maintains that IPS Group’s meters increase municipal parking revenue in two ways. “People typically pay for more time when they use the credit card payment option [rather than available change]. That’s No. 1,” he says. “And quite honestly, a lot of municipalities are interested in increasing their rates—but they’re reluctant to do so because of the increased inconvenience to the public, in terms of requiring them to carry more change.”

IPS sells its meters from coast to coast, and Randall says demand has been so strong that he predicts, “Our installed base in the next six to nine months will increase tenfold.”

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Mohamad Ali, IBM’s senior state official for Massachusetts, has left Big Blue after more than 13 years to join enterprise communications equipment company Avaya, Ali announced in a personal e-mail this afternoon. Ali, who started at Avaya on Wednesday with the title of senior vice president of corporate development, has responsibility for all M&A activity for the New Jersey-based company as he seeks to help it overtake Cisco as the leader in enterprise communications equipment, he said in a phone call this afternoon.

“That’s going to be my key role here initially, to drive the M&A,” he says. He also will play a leading role in Avaya’s strategic partnership activities, among other responsibilities, and report directly to CEO Kevin Kennedy.

Ali, our newest Xconomist, says he has also joined the board of Boston-based Ember, which makes wireless mesh-networking chipsets for communications between devices such as thermostats and utility meters.

Joining Avaya, an AT&T spinoff, offers “an opportunity to participate in and shape a whole new era of intelligent communications for healthcare, financial services, government and other industries,” said Ali in his note. Avaya was taken private after agreeing to an $8.2 billion buyout by Silver Lake and TPG Capital in June of 2007. “This represents a unique opportunity to potentially participate in one of the largest IPOs in the coming years,” Ali said in his e-mail.

Ali’s departure takes away one of IBM’s most visible and eloquent representatives in the Bay State. He has built a reputation as a leading thinker on innovation, taking an active role in how Massachusetts can position itself for further technology leadership—and drew accolades for his appearance last month on IBM’s half at XSITE, the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Leadership.

He also led IBM’s worldwide software M&A activities, and last year his group accounted for more than half of IBM’s entire M&A efforts. Additionally, Ali’s team was behind IBM’s 2007 acquisition of Canadian business intelligence software firm Cognos for just under $5 billion, the largest deal in Big Blue’s history.

He will continue wearing his M&A hat at Avaya. The whole communications market is in turmoil, and old players are in trouble, he says—and Cisco, the leader in enterprise communications equipment, is clearly in his sights. “There’s a tremendous opportunity for Avaya to come out of this as the strongest player in this market space,” he told me.

In addition to his M&A responsibilities, Ali says he will be in charge of Avaya’s strategic partnerships, as well as organic emerging products. “That means home grown ones that aren’t necessarily part of the core offering today—so adjacent space expansion,” he says.

Even though Avaya is based in Basking Ridge, NJ, Ali will be remaining in the Bay State, working initially out of Avaya’s Waltham offices (the company also has offices in Chelmsford). He will continue to serve on the board of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, among other non-profit activities.

“I’m so passionate about the Boston area. There’s this tremendous asset base, all this capability. And turning that into a powerhouse, it seems like we’re always just missing it a little bit,” he says. “And there’s no reason for it. I really want to help that transformation.”

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Led by the Bay State’s strong healthcare sector, Massachusetts startups attracted just over $145 million in investment in June. That’s the tally from our new partner, ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company developing tools for investors, startups, and aspiring entrepreneurs.

Health care companies—spanning drug development, medical devices, and consumer health and wellness—were the focus of 9 of the 17 deals done during the month. But the investment activity ran the gamut from telecommunications and semiconductors to social media and online marketing.

Leading the pack in terms of dollars raised was Cambridge-based biopharmaceutical company Aileron Therapeutics, which pulled in $40 million in a Series D round led by GlaxoSmithKline and Excel Medical Ventures. But that still left more than $100 million for the remaining 16 deals spotted by ChubbyBrain, 14 of which were, like Aileron, venture investments, and two of which involved debt financing. Notably, with all the recent talk (including at the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship) about early stage deals going by the wayside, 6 of the 15 venture financings were Series A rounds.

The complete June deals list is below. But here are a few other observations from the ChubbyBrain data:

—The most active area venture firm was Polaris Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, which took part in a trio of deals. Flagship Ventures, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, and Baird Venture Partners were in two deals apiece.

—Of the 9 healthcare deals, four involved medical device companies.

—Not a single deal involved cleantech or energy. That is consistent with a nationwide falloff in cleantech investment in the first quarter noted by the National Venture Capital Association.

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According to regulatory documents filed today, Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures has handed over $5.3 million out of a planned $6.8 million Series A venture round for Beaumaris Networks. The documents, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, list the Waltham-based stealth-mode startup as a telecommunications company. The company’s president and CEO, Conrad Clemson, is a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Charles River. According to Beaumaris’s LinkedIn profile, the company has six employees, all of whom, including Clemson, are former Motorola engineers. The company has websites registered at www.bninet.tv and www.bnicom.org, and judging from several Chinese-language online job listings, it is in the process of hiring offshore software engineering talent.

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Sycamore Networks (NASDAQ:SCMR), a Chelmsford, MA-based provider of telecommunications software, plans to reduce its total workforce by 30 percent over the next several fiscal quarters because of a slowdown in the global telecom market, the company reported yesterday. The job cuts, which will impact employees in all fuctional areas and at multiple offices, are expected to cost the company $4 million to $5 million in restructuring charges over the next several quarters and lower annual operating expenses by $17 million to $18 million once completed. The company employed 492 people at the end of 2008. We’ve updated the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker to reflect the expected layoffs.

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At a luncheon that followed the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit on Friday, I sat with Bob Dynes, the former President of the University of California system, who began talking about the formation of CalIT2 (Cal-IT-squared) almost a decade ago.

These days, the research center also known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is playing an increasingly central role in multi-disciplinary advances that span academic departments, campuses, and even industries. The prevalence of CalIT2’s influence was evident throughout presentations made at the summit, which was organized for venture investors as a showcase of San Diego’s innovative capabilities. Sony Electronics, for example, used an algorithm developed at CalIT2’s machine perception lab as the basis for the “shutter smile” technology in the company’s latest generation of consumer digital cameras.

“Who would ever have guessed that CalIT2 would look the way it does today!” exclaimed Dynes, who spent 22 years at Bell Labs before arriving at UC San Diego as a physics professor in 1991. Dynes became UCSD’s chancellor in 1996, and told me he began working to create the institute—and to recruit founding director (and Xconomist) Larry Smarr—in 1999.

CalIT2 is one of four institutes for science and innovation that California Gov. Gray Davis officially launched in 2002 by signing legislation that provided $308 million in lease-revenue bonds. Since then, CalIT2 has come to embody Smarr’s ambitious vision for tackling daunting, large-scale problems.

“What we’ve succeeded in is this idea of institutional innovation,” Smarr said in an interview. By using the power of high-speed networks and high-performance computing, Smarr said CalIT2 can take on seemingly intractable problems in everything from molecular biology to atmospheric science by assembling multidisciplinary teams of the best minds, whether or not they are on UC campuses. He calls it a “persistent framework for collaboration.”

New buildings for CalIT2 were built at …Next Page »

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Two private telecommunications providers that keep businesses talking and using the Internet are combining forces. Carousel Industries of Exeter, RI, said today it has acquired San Diego’s Daycom Systems. Daycom was founded 1992 by Richard Day, has approximately 50 employees, and annual revenue of approximately $20 million. “Through this acquisition, we are able to …offer national service delivery,” Day says in Carousel’s press release. Carousel has annual sales of over $100 million and about 500 employees in New York, Washington D.C., Connecticut, Boston, and Rhode Island areas.

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Marlborough, MA-based ThinkEngine Networks, a telecommunications company whose media servers unify traditional circuit-switched and Internet-based voice signals, has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in U.S. bankruptcy court in Worcester, MA, according to reports today in the Boston Business Journal and the Boston Herald. The American Stock Exchange delisted the company last March due to underperformance.

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The phrase “preaching to the choir” came to mind as I listened to the speakers today at the 3G CDMA North America Regional Conference, which is being held this year in downtown San Diego at the U.S. Grant Hotel.

Seated in the audience around me were representatives of wireless carriers, equipment makers and device venders that have all based their products on CDMA, the digital wireless technology also known as Code Division Multiple Access. Many listened while scrolling casually through the electronic messages on their presumably CDMA-based gadgets, their faces illuminated by the light from their hand held devices.

The conference, organized by CDG, the CDMA Development Group, has always been a CDMA family affair—focused exclusively on the proprietary digital wireless technology developed by San Diego-based Qualcomm.

James Person, CDG’s chief operating officer, kicked off the conference by announcing there are now 475 million worldwide subscribers to the CDMA family of technologies. While that number has been growing, it represents about 18 percent of the global market because most of the world uses rival wireless technologies based on GSM, or the Global System for Mobile Communications. In North America, there are about 140 million CDMA-based subscribers, who account for 51 percent of the wireless market—with most of those customers using CDMA-based networks operated by Verizon Wireless and Sprint.

Considering how competitive the U.S. market has been over the past 20 years, it seemed like Person was over-reaching—or perhaps just talking to the CDMA faithful—when he said, “In North America we are the dominant technology, and we think it will continue that way.”

Such comments reflect a confidence in the future of CDMA technology that is frequently expressed by CDMA insiders. They also say that it’s easier for CDMA-based networks to make the transition to next-generation technologies such as EV-DO (Evolution-Data Only)—which also provides superior bandwidth for data-intensive applications, such as Web-browsing and online gaming.

It’s reminiscent of arguments that Sony’s Betamax videotape format was technically superior to JVC’s VHS standard, and we all know how that ended.

The key to CDMA’s future only became clear to me after presentations by executives for Sprint and Verizon Wireless, who laid out their efforts to create “open ecosystems” for encouraging other “third party” developers to invent new CDMA-based products and services.

“Rather than us defining where we want our customers to go, our customers now have the choice to decide where they want to go in an open ecosystem,” said Kevin Packingham, Sprint’s senior vice president for product and technology development. By enabling third parties to develop new applications for Sprint’s wireless customers, Packingham said, “I don’t need to create a new messaging portal for our customers. All I need to do is make it possible for our customers to plug into their own messaging system.”

Since Sprint launched its strategy in 2001, Packingham says the carrier has registered more than 135,000 software developers and certified more than 200 wireless devices for use on its networks.
Verizon started a similar effort a year ago under Tony Lewis, Verizon’s vice president for open development, who proclaimed yesterday, “My job is to fuel innovation, to get out there with the partners.”

It seems like a smart approach, although it could take years to play out. It’s also hard to tell if it’s really going to work when everyone in the audience is nodding their head in approval.

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Sutus, a Vancouver, BC-based telecommunications company, said it has raised $2 million in venture funding from BDC Venture Capital, the Working Opportunity Fund managed by Growthworks Capital, and an additional $2.5 million in debt financing from MMV Financial. The company also hired Mike Donnell as CEO, a 25-year veteran of the software and telecom industries. Sutus will use the cash to boost sales of its Sutus Business Central product for small businesses, which it began selling in late 2007.

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In case the word hasn’t quite gotten around, things are not pretty on the San Diego investment scene. As Greg wrote on Saturday, venture capital outlays in the third quarter fell to just $178.4 million, a 52 percent nosedive from the previous quarter and the most dismal quarterly showing for the region since Q1 of 2005, according to the new quarterly MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.

What’s more, whereby the region had ranked 5th in the first quarter and 6th in the second, it fell to 13th place in the third quarter out of 18 regions tracked by the study. Only 22 venture deals were done in San Diego in the quarter, down from 38 the previous quarter and 41 for the same period a year earlier. This was also the lowest deal total since Q1 of 2005.

The nearby Los Angeles/Orange County region fared much better, with $572.5 million invested in 54 venture deals for the quarter, down just a bit from the $593.8 million from the previous quarter and up over Q1. The area ranked third in the nation for the quarter, behind only Silicon Valley and New England.

However downbeat the situation in San Diego, though, some big deals were done—starting with San Diego’s own The Active Network, which raised $80 million to help it provide online registration and other services for a variety of sporting events and activities. In fact, five area firms, in fields as diverse as energy, personal transportation, and security for pay TV, closed rounds of $20 million or more.

Following is a list of the area’s top 10 venture deals for the third quarter —and the venture investors behind them.

— The Active Network, San Diego, CA — $80 million
Investors: Citi Alternative Investments, Credit Suisse Customized Fund Investment, Good Energies, PCG Asset Management, US Renewables Group

— Sapphire Energy, Del Mar, CA — $40 million
Investors: Arch Venture Partners, Cascade Investment, Venrock, Wellcome Trust

— PowerGenix Systems, San Diego, CA — $30 million
Investors: Angeleno Group, Bessemer Venture Partners*, Element Partners, Granite Ventures, MILCOM Technologies, OnPoint Technologies, Technology Partners

— Aptera Motors, Carlsbad, CA — $24 million
Investors: Google, Idealab, Individual Investors

— Verimatrix, San Diego, CA — $20 million
Investors: Cipio Partners, Crescendo Ventures, Goldman Sachs Ventures*, JK&B Capital, Mission Ventures, SunAmerica Ventures

— ISE, Poway, CA — $17.5 million
Investors: DTE Energy Ventures, Inc., NGP Energy Technology Partners, RockPort Capital Partners, Siemens Venture Capital

— Sequoia Communications, San Diego, CA — $10.1 million
Investors: BlueRun Ventures, Tallwood Venture Capital

— Daylight Solutions, Poway, CA — $5 million
Investors: Not available

— Legend Films, San Diego, CA — $5 million
Investors: Augustus Ventures*

— AndroScience, San Diego, CA — $4 million
Investors: Grand Cathay Venture Capital, Industrial Bank of Taiwan

* lead investor

Source: Dow Jones VentureSource

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Sprint Nextel, which is spending billions to blanket major U.S. cities with super-high-speed wireless networks based on the new WiMax standard, turned on its first city—Baltimore—last week. Now there’s a report from the blogosphere that Sprint’s so-called XOHM network is up and running—though not officially launched or supported—in six additional locales, including Boston.

The automotive electronics website MP3Car.com reported yesterday, based on a conversation with a XOHM representative working at a booth at Baltimore’s Fells Point Festival, that the XOHM network has been turned on for testing purposes in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and northern Virginia. The network is “not supported,” the reports said, but computer users who have bought the Samsung Expresscard, one of the first WiMax wireless cards certified to work with XOHM, should be able to get onto the network.

We’re seeking confirmation of this news from Sprint Nextel, which hasn’t yet responded to our inquiries. The XOHM website says that the network is “coming soon” to Chicago and Washington DC and that it’s “in the works” in Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Providence, and Philadelphia.

XOHM is a so-called 4G or fourth-generation wireless network that delivers data to subscribers’ laptop or desktop PCs at speeds of 2 to 4 megabits per second. That’s a lot faster than 3G wireless: while 3G speeds vary depending on signal strength, I get downloads on my iPhone 3G at about 800 kilobits per second (0.8 megabits per second). But XOHM isn’t as fast as most cable Internet connections—here at Xconomy, our Comcast cable Internet service tops out at around 13 megabits per second. Sprint’s introductory prices for XOHM service in Baltimore are $10 for a day pass, $25 per month for home service, and $30 per month for “On-the-go” or mobile service.

So, Bostonians—if you have a WiMax card and the XOHM network is working for you, let us know. (Leave a comment or write to editors@xconomy.com.)

Update 5:15 pm, 10/6/08: John Polivka, a public relations representative for XOHM, sent the following note just now. I had asked Polivka whether XOHM is working in Boston for people who have WiMax cards. He didn’t offer a direct answer, so draw your own conclusions:

“XOHM service is commercially available in Baltimore only, though we have a number of other cities where the 4G mobile broadband network is in various stages of development or implementation. Chicago and Washington DC are furthest along and developmental work is in process in Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, Dallas and Ft. Worth. No timetables have been announced, and the privilege of doing so will likely fall to the new Clearwire—expected to be formed sometime this quarter from the merger with Sprint’s XOHM WiMax once all approvals are received. There has been a phenomenal response to our launch, so additional interest is certainly understood.”

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Billerica, MA-based NextPoint Networks, the telecommunications equipment maker just formed last December from the merger of Billerica’s Reef Point Systems and Gaithersburg, MD-based NexTone Communications, has been acquired by Plano, TX-based GenBand, the company announced yesterday. GenBand, which is paying an undisclosed sum for NextPoint, makes devices called session border controllers (SBCs) that are used to set up calls in voice-over-Internet networks; as an article in Mass High Tech explains, the acquisition puts GenBand into more direct competition with other Boston-area SBC makers such as Acme Packet and Starent Networks.

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Overland Park, KS-based Sprint, which is building a nationwide WiMax network called XOHM, has picked Boston’s uLocate to power the local information and mapping services for XOHM subscribers. XOHM, a so-called “4G” network, will cover entire metropolitan areas with broadband wireless data at speeds approaching those of cable Internet service. In an announcement yesterday, uLocate said developers will be able to use its Where platform to build information services that use the location information built into WiMax signals.

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Vanu, the Cambridge, MA, company whose “all-software radios” allow wireless operators to broadcast using multiple standards such as GSM and CDMA, has raised $32 million a stealthy Series B venture round, Dan Primack of Private Equity Hub is reporting today. Waltham, MA-based Charles River Ventures, which led a $9 million Series A round for Vanu last year, has returned for the new round, which also included Norwest Venture Partners of Palo Alto, CA, and Tata Capital of India.

Vanu, founded in 1998 by MIT computer science PhD Vanu Bose, the son of Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose, isn’t publicizing the funding round. But Andy Beard, the company’s chief strategy officer, told Primack that the company will use the funds to expand operations in the United States and India. The company “will talk later this year about the motivation behind the round and what it means for our future plans,” Beard said.

Software radio technology uses computer software to emulate functions such as mixing and amplification that are handled by separate hardware components in traditional radios. Software-defined radios can communicate using multiple radio protocols that would normally require separate chips. In Vanu’s implementation of software radio, the software runs on standard Linux PCs rather than the specialized hardware used by most manufacturers of cellular base stations, making the systems easier to upgrade.

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Netcracker Technology, a Waltham, MA, company that makes software used by telecom companies to manage order fulfillment and other operations, announced today that it will be acquired by Tokyo-based electronics and communications giant NEC. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.

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