As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Expedia Worldwide president Scott Durchslag has abruptly resigned, according to media reports (first spotted at TechFlash).

GeekWire reports that a spokeswoman declined to say why Durchslag left Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) about a year after joining, and there wasn’t an SEC filing reflecting the departure before word got out, which indicates it wasn’t a planned exit. Durchslag previously was chief operating officer at Skype.

Expedia president and CEO Dara Khosrowshahi will reportedly take over Durchslag’s duties, which were described on the company website as “managing the overall strategy and operations” for Expedia’s flagship online travel-booking business, including expanding worldwide and into new channels.

Khosrowshahi’s regular job is overseeing the entire Expedia portfolio of services, through a multilayered management structure that dates back to Expedia’s former days as an inside property of Barry Diller’s IAC holding company.

Expedia, one of the original dot-com success stories for the Seattle region following its spinout from Microsoft, recently broke its TripAdvisor business off into a separate, publicly traded company.

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Boston has a pretty well-known cluster of tech companies—young and old—that are focused on aspects of travel like booking flights and hotels. Kayak, TripAdvisor, and ITA Software (now part of Google), just to name a few, fit that mold. But there’s another area player that’s helping customers to experience a city once they get there, via an interesting marketing proposition.

That would be Boston-based Smart Destinations, which is looking to provide a Disney World-esque experience to hitting tourist and historical sites in 12 cities such as Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It’s not a new idea, as you’ll see, but it has a modern twist.

For Boston, adult travelers can buy a three-day “Go Card” from Smart Destinations for $109, and gain admission to more than 70 attractions, like the New England Aquarium, Salem Witch Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, and even Cape Cod activities like whale watching. That price can be adjusted in wintertime (when people don’t want to be out on a boat), and, naturally, a kids’ Go Card costs less. The card also enables users to skip lines at tourist attractions, says CEO and founder Kevin McLaughlin. That, and the one-stop-shopping aspect give it the amusement park pass feel.

“It makes it really easy for families to go to big cities,” he says.

McLaughlin recognizes that not every customer may be looking for a 72-hour-straight, nonstop tourist-attraction-hopping vacation, though. Smart Destinations also offers a Go Select pass, with which consumers can pick certain spots they’d like to see. For each attraction they add to the pass, the amount of the discount at each individual spot grows.

McLaughlin started the company with travel industry veteran Cecilia Dahl in 2003. The inspiration came from a Paris tourist service, which sells a card giving visitors access to all of the city’s museums. This is McLaughlin’s sixth tech startup. His past ventures include Delphi Internet (acquired by News Corporation), Netspoke (acquired by Premiere Conferencing), and exchange.com (acquired by Amazon). Smart Destinations is now up to around 32 employees, and has raised three rounds of funding from investors such as North Hill Ventures.

Smart Destinations is now making a bigger push into the mobile sphere, says McLaughlin.The company started by selling physical cards with a smart chip through its website. Consumers can get still get that card via snail mail or participating kiosks in their destination cities, or they can access it via their mobile phones. Starting first quarter of this year, consumers can also create, purchase, and customize the Go Select pass right from their phones, adding tourist destinations and racking up discounts as they make their way through a city. A small … Next Page »

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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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It’s probably the quietest Boston-area public offering of the year. But why? Maybe because it’s a spinoff from an already public company, and the deal was announced back in April. Or maybe because New England doesn’t go wild for its consumer-focused tech companies the way some other regions do. Or maybe everyone is just sick of online user reviews (and planning holiday travel).

For whatever reason, tomorrow’s first trading of Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor’s stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol “TRIP”—and the company’s official spinoff from Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE)—doesn’t seem to be getting talked about or celebrated that much in local tech circles. And that’s probably just fine with TripAdvisor, which has always been understated when it comes to PR. (Its stock has already been trading under “TRIPV” for the past couple weeks.)

The company, which has more than 1,000 employees (doubled in the past two years), is a major international force in online travel and has been raking in the cash for the better part of a decade. TripAdvisor made $486 million in revenue in 2010 and is on pace for more this year. From what I can tell, the firm has never been particularly chummy with Boston media, marketing, or trade organizations. It does recruit heavily in the area though.

TripAdvisor started in 2000 as a search engine to help people find reviews of travel destinations. The company quickly became a destination in itself for user-generated reviews, and it figured out the lead-generation model before most people had even heard of lead-gen. The company makes money from advertising and referral fees when consumers book flights and hotels through its partner sites. One tidbit: Founding CEO Stephen Kaufer told my colleague Wade last year that TripAdvisor was “a couple months shy of going out of business” in late 2001 before it figured out its revenue model.

In 2004, TripAdvisor was bought by Internet giant IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) and became part of Expedia, which itself was spun out from IAC the following year. TripAdvisor the company has grown to encompass nearly 20 travel sites (including TripAdvisor.com, SeatGuru.com, and BookingBuddy.com) and is expanding aggressively in Europe, China, and other locales.

It sounds like going public should raise TripAdvisor’s international profile, but being independent of Expedia won’t change things much. The companies basically operated separately over the past seven years. One broader trend to watch: whether user-generated content for travel, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses remains a lucrative property to own, or whether it ends up getting lost in the noise of bigger and badder marketing devices of the coming decade.

Locally, there’s an interesting juxtaposition of TripAdvisor with other prominent travel tech firms. Just as TripAdvisor is going independent, Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software is being integrated into Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) as the search giant ramps up its own travel-site capabilities. And Kayak, the Connecticut-based travel meta-search company with a strong Boston presence, filed for an IPO late last year but has been waiting out the market and evolving its own offerings in this super-competitive sector.

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I didn’t know the full extent to which the Boston area has a thriving data and analytics startup scene.

I had always associated the city primarily with biotech innovation. My company, Chart.io, provides hosted business dashboards to help companies visualize their database data. We’re based out in San Francisco (we were part of the 2010 Y Combinator class), but our investors, Avalon Ventures, call Boston home. When my friends at Avalon-backed Kinvey (mobile backends as a service) and Boston-based SessionM (a platform to spark deeper consumer engagement with mobile content and ads) and I decided to co-host a data visualization and analytics meetup for the local community, we expected to get 20-30 RSVPs at most. Instead, we broke 100 in a flash and saw a steady torrent of emails from data enthusiasts pleading for admission.

In fact, a deeper look into the Boston tech scene reveals quite a rich history of data and analytics companies, including Netezza, Endeca, ITA, EMC, and other giants. And it turns out, the startup scene is equally rich, with companies innovating around NoSQL, data storage, search, healthcare, and a variety of cloud computing ventures. Here’s a quick tour of the Boston- data landscape. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.

As data volumes have exploded in the past decade, so have the number of companies building tools to store, retrieve, analyze, and generally manage the deluge of data.

Two Boston-area companies, Cloudant and Basho, are tackling the big data problem through non-relational databases (NoSQL), designed to handle hundreds of gigabytes and even terabytes of data and enable applications to elastically scale out to meet the demands of millions (or hundreds of millions) of concurrent users. In this vein, Cloudant offers tools to help companies use Apache CouchDB, while Basho developed its own data store called Riak.

Meanwhile, other local firms are focusing on the next generation … Next Page »

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Into the lair of beasts strode Adam Goldstein. Armed only with his wits and a mean set of slides, he descended on the Boston area on a warm, early winter day. He was no stranger to the premises. Goldstein had been an MIT undergrad before moving to San Francisco to participate in the Y Combinator startup program with his online travel company, Hipmunk.

Goldstein, the startup’s CEO and co-founder, spoke at Xconomy’s “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” conference earlier this month, representing the Bay Area. I say he was among beasts because Boston is the land of heavyweight travel firms such as ITA Software (now part of Google), Kayak, and TripAdvisor, and upstarts like Hopper, WaySavvy, and SilverRail (now based mostly in the U.K.). And Goldstein has been on record saying other travel sites “have really dropped the ball on flight search.” (On the other hand, Hipmunk formed a licensing partnership with ITA about a year ago.)

Indeed, the whole culture of Hipmunk is about coming “into an established industry with a focus on usability,” says Goldstein, in a polite-but-firm jab at the big players who don’t seem to care as much about being user-friendly. (As for the company’s name, let’s just say the cute-animal logo is its main justification.)

I must confess, I was skeptical at first. Since part of me still lives in the ’90s (the early to mid-‘90s, mind you), any bluster from new travel sites tends to fall on numb ears. Most travel sites seem pretty much the same, and even the worst ones are still more convenient than what people like me used to do, which is call up travel agents and individual airlines, get some options, and repeat until settling on a purchase. Hipmunk is about making the whole search process simpler, more intuitive, and more visually interactive.

But there’s only so far that can take you as a business, as my colleague Wade probed a few months ago. What stood out to me most about Hipmunk is its strategy of building a business by focusing first on getting lots of loyal customers—not trying to cash in on every eyeball.

“The entire world, especially in the world of travel, has become sort of addicted to the idea of making as much money as possible from each time someone visits their website,” Goldstein said. “What that’s led them to do over time is bombard their customers with advertisements and pop-up windows and all sorts of other things that just distract them.” Conclusion: Hipmunk won’t make money from ads, just referral fees when people book trips. But it does need to gain users—lots of users.

Here’s a short video interview with Goldstein, conducted by my colleague Lilly O’Flaherty. I like the part at the end where he references a talk by Northrop Grumman’s Bill Walker, also at 6×6, on high-altitude UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). Heck, maybe someday an entrepreneur will pitch an idea for a company that’s a “Hipmunk for UAVs.”

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What exactly does 6×6 come out to? A half-day of understanding a bit more about how geniuses run companies; listening to innovators share new ways to tackle Web publishing, marketing, travel search, cloud IT, unmanned aerial vehicles, and more; and catching on to new startups. Oh, plus some very high-quality networking. That’s what we saw at the Xconomy Forum last Thursday, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas,” hosted graciously by the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston.

Stephen Wolfram (aforementioned genius) kicked off the event with a keynote talk about taking on seemingly impossible projects and making them succeed. The program followed up with presentations from six companies across the Xconomy network with six potentially transformative ideas: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (representing Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

Shorter “burst” presentations from emerging Boston-area startups (Krush, Jana, Apptegic, Crashlytics), and an interactive demo of emotion-analyzing tech from Affectiva rounded out the day.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our event sponsors, Turnstone and Windstream Hosted Solutions, for making this day possible. Thanks also to our event partner, MassTLC, and our design sponsor, Mixtur, and to all of our underwriters and venture capital members.

We can’t fully do justice to the thought-provoking presentations and incredible mix of guests and speakers here, but we’ve boiled it down as best we can with a 25-picture photo gallery. You can click through below to get a glimpse of the presenters and snapshots of our audience.

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	6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas – Audience listens in as the program kicks off
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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Ann Arbor, MI-based startup Mobiata is growing, both in size and location. The Expedia-owned company, which develops mobile apps designed to make travel go more smoothly, just opened offices in San Francisco and the Minneapolis-St. Paul area—which is where the company started out in 2008 before relocating to Ann Arbor. Founder and General Manager Ben Kazez says Mobiata is now looking to add 20 employees for open positions at all three locations.

Speaking of new hires, Mobiata just named Reed Martin as its director of design. Martin, who spent five years working at Apple, is someone Kazez hopes will in turn hire “all of his designer pals.”

“This is huge, huge news for us,” Kazez says, emphasizing that design is a company priority. “We’re in the process of this expansion to work on apps and emerging platforms for Expedia,” Kazez says.

Mobiata was acquired by Internet travel empire Expedia.com in November 2010, in a deal that was referred to as Expedia’s “most significant investment to date in addressing the mobile travel market.” In April, Mobiata launched the Expedia Hotels app, which Kazez says allows users to book a hotel room on the fly “in four taps” and covers 130,000 hotels in 20,000 cities.

“It’s kind of changed the way I travel,” Kazez says. “I used to book hotel rooms in advance.”

In addition to the Expedia hotels and Mobiata apps teams, the company has added an Expedia flights team and an incubation team. The incubation team is charged with creating a new app every two months.

“There’s no product roadmap” for the incubation team, Kazez says. “The goal is to let the team pivot as often as possible. Users love when we frequently update our apps—they feel well taken care of. If we’re launching new versions, it maintains the connection and keeps things exciting.”

Kazez adds that, despite the expansions, the Ann Arbor office remains a critical part of the operation. In fact, Mobiata recently hired a University of Michigan architecture professor to spruce up the Nickels Arcade location. Included in the renovations were the transformation of most of the walls into giant dry-erase boards so employees can brainstorm an idea anywhere they happen to be standing.

“We don’t want people to get bored working on one app for too long,” Kazez says.

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VCs are wrong most of the time—and often it’s because they over-think a deal. That’s just one of the points I took away from our event this past Monday night, Xconomy Xchange: Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond — New Rules for Innovation. If you want to catch some more themes from the panel—which featured venture capitalists Rich Levandov, Jeff Fagnan, and Larry Bohn, and moderator David Patrick—read this. For pictures of the speakers and attendees milling about the great WilmerHale venue, work your way through the slideshow below.

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	Xconomy Xchange 9/26 – Networking at Consumers, the Cloud, and Beyond—New Rules for Innovation
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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Fresh Mangoes: HTC, the handset maker with North American headquarters in Bellevue, WA, has unveiled its first phones running on Microsoft’s new “Mango” version of the Windows Phone operating system.

The phones are named the Titan and the Radar—guess which one is bigger—and gadget geeks can check out a thorough demo via Engadget, which features a hands-on video tour. The phones are headed for the overseas markets first, starting next month. Windows Phone VP Joe Belfiore was particularly excited about one feature:

Unfollow: Meanwhile, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has been sued in federal court here in Seattle by a Michigan resident who claims the company tracks Windows Phone users’ locations through a phone’s camera software, even after consumers explicity reject sharing of that data. The lawsuit is seeking class-action status, but a judge has made no ruling on that request yet. Microsoft has declined comment to various media outlets, which is standard procedure in legal cases, especially fresh ones.

Traveling On: Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) chief financial officer Michael Adler plans to step down after six years minding the company’s numbers. In a news release, Expedia said senior vice president of corporate development Mark Okerstrom would take over the CFO’s job. Expedia said Adler would remain during a transition that includes completing its spin-off of Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor into a separate public company.

Game Ahoy: Bungie Aerospace, the iconic console game developer’s new mobile and social imprint, has released its first title: “Crimson Steam Pirates.” The game was developed by industry veteran Jordan Weisman’s Harebrained Schemes, and built using Moai, the mobile platform from Seattle startup Zipline Games.

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This week we’ve seen financing news for a mix of New England IT and life sciences startups.

—Massachusetts startups raised $250.5 million across 34 deals in July, down from about $564.7 million the month before. The July drop in funding is a pattern we’ve observed before, thanks to data from our partner CB Insights, provider of FundingFlash, a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding.

—Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm HubSpot bought also Cambridge-based Oneforty for an undisclosed sum, scooping up the Oneforty team and bringing the merged company’s head count to 285 employees. Oneforty provides social media marketing tools and a directory of social media apps.

—Hopper, a Montreal-based travel startup looking for office space in Cambridge for the fall, announced it pinned down an $8 million funding round led by Atlas Venture with participation from Brightspark Ventures.

—Natick, MA-based cloud data storage provider TwinStrata nabbed $5.7 million in equity funding from 27 investors. The financing could hit $8.7 million, according to an SEC document.

—Two Cambridge diagnostics technology startups raised money this week. Quanterix—previously funded by Bain Capital Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, and Flagship Ventures—raised $6 million in new equity financing. And Foundation Medicine, a provider of cancer genomics testing, pinned down about half of an equity round that could hit $20.5 million.

—Our VentureDeal feed pulled another slew of New England financing headlines: $1 million for Newton, MA-based TenMarks, $500,000 for Boston-based Nyx Devices, $3 million for Pittsfield, MA-based Nuclea Biotechnologies, $7 million for Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma, and $1.5 million for Glastonbury, CT-based PayVeris.

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I first covered Hipmunk on August 18, 2010, the day after the online travel startup debuted its innovative time-based flight search interface. One year later, how’s the Y Combinator-backed company faring? Spectacularly well, actually.

In an announcement marking its first birthday last week, the startup said that users are conducting a million combined flight and hotel searches every month, and that the number of searches is growing at 15 percent per month. About 30 percent of flight searches now happen on Hipmunk’s iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch apps, which it introduced in February.

The company now has 10 employees and a groovy office in the old Hamm’s Brewery in San Francisco’s Mission District, and has rounded up $4.2 million in venture funding from Seattle’s Ignition Partners and a long list of other investors, including SV Angel, Real Networks’ Rob Glaser, former Expedia CEO Rich Barton, Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit, WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg, and actor Ashton Kutcher.

Hipmunk’s growth has “wildly exceeded our expectations,” says CEO Adam Goldstein, 23, who co-founded the startup with Reddit founder Steve Huffman. One key to that growth was the addition of a hotel search capability this spring, again drawing on clever visualization techniques to show hotel choices in the context of other important data, such as location.

The actual data and prices Hipmunk displays are pretty much the same as those you’ll find at any other travel search site; the startup’s main pitch is that it can simplify the trip planning process by sorting the results using intuitive measures such as “agony” in the case of flights (the length of the flight, the number of connections, etc.) and “ecstasy” in the case of hotels (proximity to good food, nightlife, convention centers, and other attractions) and providing easy search customization options.

I caught up with Goldstein last week; an edited summary of our conversation follows. Three especially interesting themes: the difficulty of building a business around flight search alone; the growing importance of Hipmunk’s mobile apps; and how the startup is acquiring users without spending a lot of money to do so.

Xconomy: What are you most excited about right now?

Adam Goldstein: Hotels are really big for us. They are interesting for a bunch of reasons. The fact that we didn’t have hotels before meant that we were sending customers to other services not just for hotels but for flights, because people like to shop for both at the same time. The other side of it is that hotels are just a wildly lucrative business. There is a big multiple [in the commission] per hotel book versus flight booking.

X: Why is that?

AG: There are a bunch of reasons you can point to, but they’re all theories. Only a few airlines control most of the market in the U.S., so the airlines have a fair bit of negotiating power by virtue of scale. Whereas if you are searching a website for a hotel and a particular chain is missing, you might not even notice. The big guys know they are going to be losing tons of money if they aren’t showing up in the search results. They’re willing to pay a whole order of magnitude more, as a percentage of the booking price. So the name of the game in online travel, for better or worse, is … Next Page »

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In Baltimore, a “hopper” is a young, street-level drug dealer (as devotees of The Wire can tell you). In Montreal, Hopper is a young travel search company. In Boston, well, we’ll see what happens in Boston.

Hopper is announcing today an $8 million financing round led by Atlas Venture, with previous investor Brightspark Ventures also participating. The company started in Montreal in 2007 but says it is moving its headquarters to Cambridge, MA, soon. The reason?

“We’re making a big bet on the talent pool,” says co-founder and CEO Frederic Lalonde. The company is currently scouting office spaces around Kendall Square and Central Square, and is looking to hire about 15 people, mostly engineers, he says. With a local ecosystem that includes online travel companies such as Kayak, TripAdvisor, Goby, and Google/ITA Software, and “big data” firms like IBM/Netezza, HP/Vertica, and EMC, (my examples, not his), Lalonde hopes to find a “particular kind of programming geek” well-suited for Hopper’s technology challenges.

The idea behind Hopper is to take natural language travel-search queries—things like “best beaches in Spain” or “scuba diving in the Caribbean”—and return a list of places, as well as flight and hotel options for each place, ranked according to measures of quality, convenience, and cost. It’s a more open-ended, “discovery” type of search than what has become standard on itinerary comparison sites like Kayak, Bing Travel, Orbitz, and newer sites like Hipmunk, InsideTrip, WaySavvy, and Yapta.

In other words, if you’re looking for a flight from A to B (and a hotel to stay in), there are plenty of other sites to help you do that. “Travel is a complex discovery process,” says Lalonde. “We’re working on the depth, quality, and intelligence of the search.”

He certainly knows the sector. Lalonde and co-founder Joost Ouwerkerk came from travel firm Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), which bought Lalonde’s previous company, Newtrade Technologies, in 2002. Together with co-founder Sebastien Rainville, the Hopper team plans to move to Boston, but they aren’t saying exactly when yet. They will also keep some operations in Montreal—notably the technical infrastructure and servers that crunch the firm’s travel data—because it’s much cheaper to do it there, Lalonde says.

Here’s a little more about how Hopper works. Say you type in “scuba diving Caribbean.” The site will access a “giant statistical grid of user information” that takes into account all mentions of relevant scuba spots—from articles, blogs, forums, reviews, social media, and so forth—and returns a list that’s ranked according to those mentions, but also things like distance, flight costs, and time of year, Lalonde says. The goal is to do all of that in less than a second, he says.

The whole approach requires some serious computing power. Hopper’s database includes … Next Page »

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Wine aficionados can be rather choosy about what they will imbibe. The casual drinker may simply pair any red wine with steak, but New York’s Lot18 wants to serve those with highly discerning tastes.

Lot18 is a members-only website that sells wine and gourmet food products that are available in limited supply. Though the website might not sell Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon—which typically costs several thousand dollars per bottle—it does offer wines from fellow California winery Jonata, which is hard to find in stores. “[Jonata] is not a $1,000 wine, but it’s a $100 wine,” says Lot18′s Philip James.

One-year-old Lot18, co-founded by James and Kevin Fortuna, has more than 400,000 registered consumers all eager to satisfy their cravings for unique vino and repasts. James says Lot18 lists select wines from small wineries, as well as large producers such as Robert Mondavi Wines. “Maybe it’s a prized vintage, a special blend, or an incredibly high-scoring wine,” he says. “We don’t have 2,000 products on the site; we have five to 10 [at a time].”

Lot18 has been quick to find financial backers. The company has already raised $13 million in funding—including $10 million in April—and as of March was generating more than $1 million in average monthly sales. (James declined to offer more current sales stats.) Investors in Lot18 include … 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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Apparently, the world is full of people who own homes or condos but would rather rent them out than actually live in them. And it has an equal number of people (perhaps the same ones) who’d rather bunk in someone else’s home when traveling than stay in a hotel. That’s the basis for the burgeoning success of Airbnb, the San Francisco-based vacation rental clearinghouse that announced today that it has collected a stupefying $112 million in Series B funding from Menlo Park, CA-based Andreessen Horowitz, Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst, and Moscow-based DST Global.

The startup, which emerged from the Y Combinator venture incubator in 2009, had previously raised about $7.8 million from Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Ron Conway’s SV Angel, actor Ashton Kutcher, and Youniversity Ventures. The Series B haul, which is more than 14 times the size of the A round, could become the new archetype for what they call an “up round”—an investment round based on a much higher valuation than earlier rounds. The talk, as reported today in The Financial Times and elsewhere, is that Airbnb is now valued at $1.3 billion.

It’s a startling leap for a company that, less than three years ago, was reduced to selling collectible cereal boxes to stay afloat, as CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky recounted in this Startup School talk last October. (Chesky and co-founder Joe Gebbia are graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, RI; the third co-founder, Nathan Blecharczyk, is a computer science graduate of Harvard.) The “Air” in the name is a reference to the air mattresses that the site’s earliest users often slept upon, but today the typical Airbnb rental is an urban loft, luxury apartment, or houseboat; prices of $1,600 a night are not unheard of.

Airbnb says it has listings in more than 16,000 cities in 186 countries, and that it’s booked over 2 million nights, a million of them in the last four months alone. The backbone of the service is a website where owners can create free rental listings in minutes by uploading photos and other information. The site handles booking and payment, and both owners and renters can leave reviews. Airbnb collects a 3 percent fee on all stays from property owners and a 6 to 12 percent fee from renters.

“Over the past three years, we’ve built a community marketplace for unique properties and brought it into the mainstream and into almost every country on the planet,” Chesky said in today’s announcement about the Series B round. “Today is a watershed moment—both for Airbnb as a company and for our community—that will enable us to touch new markets and expand our vision to make the world’s most interesting and inspiring places accessible to our users.”

The company says it plans to use its new capital to bulk up its team and expand internationally, especially in Europe and South America. In Europe, it will face competition from the likes of 9flats and Wimdu. The latter raised $90 million in financing last month.

Jeff Jordan, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a veteran of eBay’s early years, says in a blog post today that “Airbnb reminds me more of eBay in its early days than any other business I have ever encountered,” and argues that ”Airbnb is to spaces what eBay is to products.” The implicit hope is that Airbnb is poised for eBay-scale growth, given that it’s connecting buyers and sellers in a formerly inefficient market, helping property owners to earn income, and, in Jordan’s words, winning “passionate users who evangelize the service.”

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Seattle-based Yapta, an online airfare and hotel rate tracking service, has a new partner: Concur (NASDAQ:CNQR), the online expense and travel management service for businesses, is making a $5 million strategic investment. The deal includes Concur using Yapta’s price tools for its TripIt Pro service, which helps business travelers manage their itineraries. Concur bought TripIt earlier this year for up to $120 million. Concur has made several other deals this year with an eye to expanding its travel footprint.

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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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Room 77, the Sunnyvale, CA-based hotel room search startup profiled by Xconomy in February, said today that it has raised $10.5 million in Series B financing. The round was led by a new investor, Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst Partners. Existing investors PAR Capital Management, Sutter Hill Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Expedia founder Rich Barton, and former IAC Travel CEO Erik Blachford also participated. The startup, which has raised $13.5 million all told, said the new funds will help it “increase its proprietary index of hotel rooms globally and expand its core search platform to offer more ways to help travelers shop and book hotels online and via mobile devices.”

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