Time for an update on Boston’s marketing tech cluster. It’s one of the real strengths of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it looks like it’s getting stronger, with a couple of leaders making news this week. Here is a tale of two companies that have become competitors:

—Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), the Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm, has seen its stock price jump nearly 30 percent—from about $24 to just over $30—since Facebook filed for its IPO last week (coincidence?). Constant Contact has been positioning itself as a leader in digital marketing for small businesses across e-mail, social media, and Web platforms—especially social campaigns. The company also released some promising stats on its revenues and profits for 2011 and its most recent quarter.

—HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm, said it has hired J.D. Sherman, Akamai’s former chief financial officer (also a former IBM exec). The company says Sherman is being brought in partly to help it prepare for a future IPO. HubSpot has been hiring aggressively and working on new products, while it pares away others (like Oneforty.com, which it acquired last summer). It remains to be seen whether the company will actually make it to an IPO before getting snapped up by Salesforce.com or some other suitor.

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Today’s West Coast announcement that Oracle is buying human resources management firm Taleo for $1.9 billion—yes, billion—puts some Boston-area talent and recruiting startups in a new light. Unfortunately, one of them is no longer in Boston…

—Take the Interview, the video-based recruiting startup and former Dogpatch Labs Cambridge resident, has relocated to New York City (SoHo to be more exact). It’s not a big surprise, as the company was part of the DreamIt Ventures startup program in New York last summer. Take the Interview, led by CEO Danielle Weinblatt, raised a seed funding round last September.

—Boston-based Smarterer, a skills-test startup that’s trying to reinvent the resume, has hit a possible inflection point. According to co-founder Dave Balter, the company had 800,000 skills questions answered online over the past year, but recently that figure increased by 250,000 in just five days. Chalk it up to focusing on who wants to use the product and then who has to use the product (employers vs. job seekers). Smarterer is led by CEO Jennifer Fremont-Smith; the company raised a seed round last year.

—Senexx, an expertise-management startup based in Cambridge, MA, and Israel, has collaborated with fellow Cambridge startup PowerInbox to build a Web application that runs in people’s e-mail systems and helps them find expertise and share knowledge within their company or organization. This is an interesting partnership between a couple of early-stage startups trying to do big things in social enterprise apps, using e-mail as the platform.

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A young Canadian software startup with Boston investors is now part of a big Boston-area company. Ottawa-based Blaze Software has been acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) for an undisclosed cash sum.

What’s interesting here is that Akamai, the Web content delivery and networking giant, is making a move into Web performance optimization—basically tackling Web performance at the browser level (what some call “front end”), rather than the network level. Akamai has been positioning itself as a one-stop provider of a secure platform for businesses to reach customers via the Web, mobile, and cloud. That approach also includes, among other things, speeding up Web and mobile applications, as evidenced by the company’s recent acquisition of its California-based rival Cotendo for $268 million.

Today’s deal is no doubt smaller than that, but it could be an important sign of things to come—especially around Boston. Blaze started in 2010, and its seed funding came from local investors CommonAngels and Boston Seed Capital. So why sell now?

“You always have a choice of how you want to grow the business,” says Chris Sheehan, managing director of CommonAngels. “It made a lot of sense for the guys to partner up with Akamai, who’s so strong in the [content delivery network] space. When I made the investment, [Web performance optimization] was just beginning. The timing was sooner than I expected. But in the last 12 months, this whole thing has really started to take off.” [Disclosure: CommonAngels is an investor in Xconomy, and Sheehan is a board member at Xconomy.]

Blaze’s approach is to optimize the code on Web pages so as to speed up the transmission of content and render pages faster on whatever device the customer is browsing on—PC, tablet, or smartphone. This is particularly useful for e-commerce and media sites, which tend to get gummed up by lots of different pieces of code loading on them. The company’s technology (and team) will be integrated into Akamai’s cloud platform, said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of products and development at Akamai, in a statement.

In speeding up websites, Blaze competes directly with Boston-based companies Yottaa (which is also in Boston Seed’s portfolio) and SiteSpect. Google’s team in Kendall Square also released a free tool for Web page optimization in the fall of 2010.

It’s not just about making websites faster, however. All of the above companies have been trying to combine Web optimization with business analytics so as to help businesses track things like sales and customer behavior more effectively. Now Akamai is firmly in the game, and we’ll see how that affects the competitive landscape.

“It’s going to make it a lot harder,” Sheehan says. “It puts a lot of pressure on the other startups.”

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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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War really is going out of style.

At least that’s what Joshua Goldstein, professor emeritus of international relations at American University, and Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last month.

Throughout the editorial, Goldstein and Pinker dissect the meaning of “war” today, its various categorizations, and the reasoning behind their sentiment that war has become passé. Among other rationales, the piece cites a lack of monetary gain as a key contributor, as the financial cost of war overshadows any acceptable gain:

“For centuries, wars reallocated huge territories, as empires were agglomerated or dismantled and states wiped off the map. But since shortly after World War II, virtually no borders have changed by force, and no member of the United Nations has disappeared through conquest.”

But is war really going out of style, or is the way it’s fought being changed?

As I wrote in a recent Threat Geek post, war is being redefined, not replaced. The battle for land in previous times has now translated into a fight over intellectual property, with nation states attempting to steal from each other using advanced, targeted cyber attacks. It’s not that war is passé, it’s that the landscape has changed. Land is no longer the primary motivator in global conflict, as the value of intellectual property has become, in many ways, priceless—just think of what China would pay for Pfizer’s next groundbreaking drug before it hits the open market.

Instead of bullets on battlefields, wars are being fought with keyboards over networks at a fraction of the price.

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Why risk billions of dollars engaging in combat with a nation when you could steal their most valuable assets with the click of a mouse? Why thrust your country into global negative light, when you could be a faceless enemy attacking from thousands of miles away?

The perception that the United States has not been attacked by a foreign government since Pearl Harbor is false. Thousands of times each day, nation states like China and Russia are engaging in cyber warfare, trying to deploy advanced persistent threats (APTs) over American networks to gain access to our most crucial information. The United States has always been upfront in flexing its military muscle as a deterrent against potential threats, but when it comes to our capabilities in a cyber war, we have been secretive.

Maybe that’s about to change.

Recently, four-star General James Cartwright (a retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) went on record as saying the United States needs to be more upfront about its cyber capabilities.

“You can’t have something that’s a secret be a deterrent. Because if you don’t know it’s there, it doesn’t scare you,” said General Cartwright.

It’s hard to argue with his logic of letting the world know of our offensive capabilities or employing a strong defense as a way to defeat cyber attacks. If a country is going to take a shot at U.S. interests, they are going to get hit back. Hard.

This is where Fidelis Security Systems and several other security companies can help to deal with these types of advanced persistent threats on a daily basis. In a way, network security companies are becoming the defense contractors of the future. What Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin were to the aerospace industry throughout the 1980s, has now been transferred to our shoulders. We can’t win the war for you, but we can equip you with the best weapons to help fight in the cyber war.

General Cartwright estimated that it could probably take hackers two to five years before they had access to disable a large percentage of the banking industry or the U.S. electrical grid. Even a smaller attack could undermine confidence in financial markets. It would appear to me that these threats are cyberspace’s version of the Cuban missile crisis.

Doesn’t sound like war is going anywhere, does it?

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The speaker list for Mobile Madness 2012 keeps getting better and better. I’m still plugging away at the agenda, but wanted to post a quick update here.

Boston’s premier conference on mobile software and devices, if I do say so myself, takes place the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Kendall Square. The theme for Mobile Madness 2012 (Xconomy’s fourth annual spring mobile event) is “total mobility”—the idea that mobile is finally everywhere in our lives, and is impacting a much wider swath of technologies, businesses, and industries than ever before.

To that end, we are assembling a cast of compelling characters the likes of which I haven’t seen before in one place. Already confirmed are folks like Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper; Lars Albright, CEO of Session M; Mike Baker, CEO of DataXu; Jeff Janer, CEO of Spring Partners; Michael Schreck, CEO of Zmags; Seth Priebatsch, CEO of SCVNGR; Greg Raiz, CEO of Raizlabs; Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook; and many more.

Here’s a sampling of new speakers we’ve just recruited for the event:

—Tom Burgess, CEO, Linkable Networks. Burgess, the former CEO of Third Screen Media (acquired by AOL in 2007), will join our distinguished panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” which will discuss our region’s rich history in mobile software and the areas in which local companies can continue to lead the world. The panel also includes the founders and former CEOs of m-Qube (bought by VeriSign), Enpocket (Nokia), and Quattro Wireless (Apple), all recent success stories.

—Ernie Cormier, CEO, Nexage. Cormier previously ran mobile gaming startup Zeemote, and before that was chief commercial officer of Virgin Media. He will bring his deep perspective on advertising platforms to bear on the recent explosion of business opportunities in mobile ads and marketing. Nexage is an up-and-coming company that represents some of Boston’s strengths in this sector.

—Chris Lynch, CEO, Vertica (acquired by HP last year). Lynch will talk about the intersection of mobile software and “big data” analytics—a hot topic as pertains to the business of mobile apps and advertising/marketing platforms. Lynch, a veteran of DEC, ArrowPoint, and Acopia, sees big data as one of the trends that will lead a resurgence in the Boston tech scene—and he’ll tell us how mobile businesses can harness this trend.

—Chuck Kane, Director, One Laptop Per Child Association. Last but certainly not least, Kane (who is OLPC’s former president) will give a special demo of the new OLPC XO-3 tablet computer that made such a big splash at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this month. Kane says he’ll also show us the XO-1.75 model (also a tablet), which is shipping now.

We’ll have more updates on Mobile Madness 2012, so watch this space. If you register by February 1, you can take advantage of the early bird rate.

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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There’s been very little change in top-level internet domains (like .com, .org, .us, etc.) for a long time. But a number of years ago I started thinking about the possibility of having a new .data top-level domain (TLD). And starting this week, there’ll finally be a period when it’s possible to apply to create such a thing.

It’s not at all clear what’s going to happen with new TLDs—or how people will end up feeling about them. Presumably there’ll be TLDs for places and communities and professions and categories of goods and events. A .data TLD would be a slightly different kind of thing. But along with some other interested parties, I’ve been exploring the possibility of creating such a thing.

With Wolfram|Alpha and Mathematica—as well as our annual Data Summit—we’ve been deeply involved with the worldwide data community, and coordinating the creation of a .data TLD would be an extension of that activity.

But what would be the point? For me, it’s about highlighting the exposure of data on the internet—and providing added impetus for organizations to expose data in a way that can efficiently be found and accessed.

In building Wolfram|Alpha, we’ve absorbed an immense amount of data, across a huge number of domains. But—perhaps surprisingly—almost none of it has come in any direct way from the visible internet. Instead, it’s mostly from a complicated patchwork of data files and feeds and database dumps.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was some standard way to get access to whatever structured data any organization wants to expose?

Right now there are conventions for websites about exposing sitemaps that tell web crawlers how to navigate the sites. And there are plenty of loose conventions about how websites are organized. But there’s really nothing about structured data.

Now of course today’s web is primarily aimed at two audiences: human readers and search engine crawlers. But with Wolfram|Alpha and the idea of computational knowledge, it’s become clear that there’s another important audience: automated systems that can compute things.

There are product catalogs, store information, event calendars, regulatory filings, inventory data, historical reference material, contact information—lots of things that can be very usefully computed from. But even if these things are somewhere on an organization’s website, there’s no standard way to find them, let alone standard structured formats for them.

My concept for the .data domain is to use it to create the “data web”—in a sense a parallel construct to the ordinary web, but oriented toward structured data intended for computational use. The notion is that alongside a website like wolfram.com, there’d be wolfram.data.

If a human went to wolfram.data, there’d be a structured summary of what data the organization behind it wanted to expose. And if a computational system went there, it’d find just what it needs to ingest the data, and begin computing with it.

Needless to say, as we’ve learned over and over again in building Wolfram|Alpha, getting the underlying data is just the beginning of the story. The real work usually starts when one wants to compute from it—so that one can answer specific questions, generate specific reports, and so on.

For example, in our recent work on making the Best Buy product catalog computable, the original data (which came to us as a database dump) was perfectly easy to read. The real work came in the whole rest of the pipeline that was involved in making that data computable.

But the first step is to get the underlying data. And my concept for the .data domain is to provide a uniform mechanism—accessible to any organization, of any size—for exposing the underlying data.

Now of course one could just start a convention that organizations should have a “/datamap.xml” file (or somesuch) in the root of their web domains, just like a sitemap—rather than having a whole separate .data site. But I think introducing a new .data top-level domain would give much more prominence to the creation of the data web—and would provide the kind of momentum that’d be needed to get good, widespread, standards for the various kinds of data.

What is the relation of all this to the semantic web? The central notion of the semantic web is to introduce markup for human-readable web pages that makes them easier for computers to understand and process. And there’s some overlap here with the concept of the data web. But the bulk of the data web is about providing a place for large lumps of structured data that no human would ever directly want to deal with.

A decade ago I suggested to early search engine pioneers that they could get to the deep web by defining standards for how to expose data from databases. For a while there was enthusiasm about exposing “web services”, and now there are all manner of APIs made available by different organizations.

It’s been interesting for me in the past few years to be involved in the emergence of the modern data community. And from what I have seen, I think we’re now just reaching a critical point, where a wide range of organizations are ready to engage in delivering large-scale structured data in standardized forms. So it is a convenient coincidence that this is happening just when it becomes possible to create a .data top-level domain.

We’re certainly not sure what all the issues about a .data TLD will be, and we’re actively seeking input and partners in this effort. But I think there’s a potentially important opportunity, so I’m trying to do what I can to provide leadership, and further help to accelerate the birth of the data web.

[This post also appears on Stephen Wolfram's blog---Eds.]

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What is the future of electronic books and digital publishing in Boston? We might be getting a glimpse of it today.

The news is that Safari Books Online, a joint venture between O’Reilly Media and Pearson Education, is acquiring Threepress, a Boston-area software and consulting shop specializing in tools for digital publishing. Terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but it’s probably fairly modest in size.

What makes it interesting is that it’s a story of homegrown, bootstrapped talent in a burgeoning field—e-book reading and publishing—that has finally come of age.

Safari (not to be confused with the Apple browser) provides an on-demand digital library of thousands of books and videos on software, IT, professional development, and other techie and business topics. The 10-year-old company, which has just under 100 employees, is headquartered in Sebastopol, CA. But it started in Boston, and some of its leadership team, including CEO Andrew Savikas, is based here.

As part of the Threepress acquisition, Safari is planning to move into a new office space in Boston that will have about 10 employees. “We are looking at space with room to grow,” says Savikas, an O’Reilly Media veteran. “I expect we’ll be hiring in Boston, especially on the technology side.”

Threepress is a profitable, four-person tech shop founded by Web developer Liza Daly in 2008. Daly previously worked at Digitas and iFactory, and she originally started Threepress to do consulting and build tools for academic publishers and websites. As is often the case for startups, she found an unexpected niche. [Disclosure: Daly is married to Dan Schmidt, my longtime Honest Bob bandmate.]

Daly entered the e-book world by writing Bookworm, an open-source, browser-based reading system for e-books using the EPUB format. At first, she saw books as just part of the content of academic websites. But her work got the attention of Savikas at O’Reilly Media, which decided to host Bookworm on its site in 2009. That year Savikas also recruited Daly to speak at a big … Next Page »

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[Updated 1/5/12] The first week of the new year is a good time to take stock of where venture capital firms are in their fundraising progress. No question that unless you’re a top-tier firm—and even then, in some cases—raising a sizeable new fund has been very challenging.

Back in August, I ran a summary of a few Boston-area VC firms that were in the process of raising new funds. Here’s an expanded update on how said firms are doing. Some of my info might be a tad stale, because VCs are not exactly transparent about their funds in progress. Nevertheless, here’s where things stand to the best of my knowledge. (Let me know if you have any new information, or if I forgot anyone.)

—General Catalyst Partners has raised a $500 million sixth fund, according to a regulatory filing from last week. It’s not immediately clear if this fund is meant for investing in growth-stage deals as well as early-stage companies, or whether there will be a separate growth-stage fund (as was previously reported).

—Summit Partners said this week it has closed a $520 million venture capital fund, to go along with a $2.7 billion growth equity fund. [This item was added on 1/5/12---Eds.]

—Excel Venture Management is in the process of raising a $150 million second fund, according to documents filed last week.

—OpenView Venture Partners raised $99 million out of an unspecified total fund size, as of last month. (See an interview with founder Scott Maxwell from last fall.)

—.406 Ventures raised $95 million towards a target of $175 million for its second fund, as of late November.

—Flagship Ventures closed $137 million out of a targeted $250 million for its fourth fund, as of November.

—Kepha Partners closed $74 million out of a planned $100 million for its second fund, as of early last fall.

—And on the micro-VC front, ex-Polaris partner Mike Hirshland is looking to raise $25 million for his new fund, Resolute.vc.

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Even though our local economy is far from strong, I am pleased to report that at the Northwest Energy Angels, we continue to see and invest in interesting deals across the spectrum of clean technologies.

In the past year, we’ve seen and closed deals in virtually every segment of the cleantech industry, including more efficient lighting, purer water technologies, and more productive renewable energy. Contrary to the popular press, our shrewd entrepreneurs are doing it with little reliance on special subsidies or government funding.

For 2012, there are several trends that I expect to see emerge and develop in these segments (borrowing the category definitions from the Cleantech Open):

Air, Water, and Waste
For the last few decades we have been wrestling with the need to develop alternatives to fossil fuel reliance and are now clearly on a path to consider water and its shortages in a similar vein. In many respects, the clean water segment is where the energy industry was a couple of decades ago. We will continue to see companies looking to develop ways to use water more efficiently, measure water and its cleanliness more precisely and cost-effectively, and recoup water that was previously thought unusable.

Domestically, vigilance in air quality makes opportunities for dramatic improvement difficult. Obviously, carbon dioxide emissions are a huge exception to this, but uncertainty over government mandates and/or incentives will make CO2 control a market that startups will have a hard time making a dent in.

The area of waste will continue to offer a wide variety of disparate, but valuable opportunities as cost of disposal and potential value of the refuse continues to be recognized.

Energy Efficiency
The Pacific Northwest has been blessed and cursed in this segment. The ethic of the region is very pro-conservation but our energy costs are among the lowest of any region, which gives priority to other faster-paying investments in this economy. As we look at efficiency technologies, the key questions are, first, will it sell in California (and elsewhere) and second, is there any way for a local company to deploy, test and further develop its technology for commercial roll out?

Given recent predictions for climbing energy costs, the second question is most often the decider for investor involvement. As I’ll explain below, I see a very positive trend here and am bullish on this sector for our local companies for the first time in a long while.

Green Building
As in the case of efficiency, our region enjoys quick consideration for new green building products here and enthusiasm for early winners. Status quo materials and practices are, unlike our energy, on par cost-wise with the nation, giving local solution providers an excellent chance to gain early market traction.

Renewable Energy
This segment of the cleantech world is seeing the biggest changes. The sunsetting of many U.S. government incentives is causing entrepreneurs to rethink their prospects. Opportunities will continue for those companies that have a “mine the miners” strategy to help established renewable energy equipment manufacturers to improve their product offerings—especially when products are aimed at the world market, which is expected to see much less retrenchment in 2012.

One area of exception to the slowdown is renewable transportation fuels, aviation fuels in particular. Our region has a leg up with Boeing and military interest in the subject as well as the nation’s largest operating biodiesel producer, Imperium Renewables. While it won’t be built overnight, I do see more and more opportunities for companies that can contribute to the success of this industry.

Smart Power, Green Grid, and Energy Storage
The Smart Power, Green Grid, and Energy Storage category encourages links between information technologies and electricity delivery that give customers greater control over when and how their energy is delivered and used.

In many regards, startups in this space have a chicken-and-egg problem: Utilities and regulators want to see products before using these new technologies at scale, while startup companies (and their investors) want to see buyers ready to write checks before gearing up for production.

Our region is rich in the technologies needed to implement the smart grid and its cousins—we have a tradition of progressive utilities that have implemented its precursors. But I remain skeptical of a fast market uptake in 2012.

Our Secret Weapon
Military installations. The local cleantech community has been sought out by representatives of the Navy (Naval Base Everett) and the Army/Air Force (Joint Base Lewis-McChord) to help them achieve some truly remarkable sustainability goals for waste, water, and energy.

Don’t get me wrong—this isn’t to say that the procurement floodgates have opened. They haven’t. The military is on a downward budget trend and they know it. But what they do have is a long view and a willingness to invest in projects that will pay off over a longer term than most homeowners or businesses would.

These military installations capture a complete subset of our local economy: industrial operations, commercial/office buildings, residences, and more. In some cases there are also financial partners who will step in alongside military sustainability initiatives, to provide funding where others wouldn’t.

Perhaps most importantly for our entrepreneurs, these bases are looking for good, early commercial products to test, demonstrate and embrace to achieve their goals.

The Road Ahead
While I don’t think that cleantech is in for any 1990′s-style boom, I do think we will continue to see a wide variety of clever entrepreneurs with great market insights and technological breakthroughs in 2012. And the Northwest Energy Angels will continue to be ready, willing, and able to fund them.

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A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

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[Editor’s note: As a New Year's exercise, we asked a select group of Xconomists to answer this question: “What’s the craziest idea out there that just might succeed?” ]

After nearly twenty years of failed attempts, I’m still a believer in the potential transformative power of the “crazy idea” of alternative Internet payment systems, particularly micropayment engines and alternate currencies.

Payment systems are simply mechanisms to streamline and calibrate the exchange of value. It’s easier to assess the relative worth of cloth from India and tobacco from America if you can translate both into standardized European coinage. Modern payment systems also provide simplicity and security through the use of trusted third-party settlement agents such as banks and credit card associations. But none of these mechanisms are built into our DNA, and there’s no reason to think that today’s systems are the final word.

In fact, the Internet brings with it the potential for so many innovative payment mechanisms as to threaten chaos. This chaotic prospect, combined with the inherent conservatism of payment system users and the understandable desire of payment providers to protect their turf, has so far doomed nearly every new payment system enabled by the Internet. The few exceptions—most notably PayPal—have survived in large part through a strong alliance with the existing players in credit cards and banking. PayPal is (like First Virtual before it) largely a security-conscious overlay on the existing credit card and banking systems.

That kind of limited innovation is more than enough for the powers that be—the large financial players who are more interested in maintaining their near-monopolies than in enabling new kinds of economic activity. Not surprisingly, however, the interests of the banks and card associations are not necessarily in sync with those of the rest of us.

From Digicash to Cybercash to BitCoin, there have been plenty of demonstrations of the technical feasability of alternative Internet payment mechanisms. And in the physical world, alternative currencies such as Ithaca Hours have hinted at the potential for a community to revitalize itself by taking control of its own money supply. In times of economic hardship like today, the poor and unemployed have traditionally reverted to barter to exchange goods in the absence of currency, but those transactions have been limited by geography and personal circles of trust. With Internet-based alternative currencies, however, … Next Page »

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‘Tis the season to reflect on the past year and take a look at some of Xconomy Boston’s top stories.

As usual, these aren’t necessarily the highest-traffic stories (though in some cases they are). They are stories that exemplify what we are trying to deliver to our readers every day—narratives about the people, companies, and ideas that are shaping the future of technology, life sciences, and cleantech in our region, and across the country.

It was very hard to pick just 20 stories, like I usually do. I guess that’s a good thing. So I fudged it and actually picked slightly more—a dozen tech stories, and a dozen life sciences and cleantech stories.

In any case, our editor’s picks for 2011 span the fields of software, mobile, Internet, security, health IT, biotech, life sciences, energy, and hardware/materials.

They range in topic from people stories (Adriana Jenkins, Steve Jobs) to company strategies (Acme Packet, Vertex) to trends and analysis (big data, biotech risks); from universities (Harvard accelerator) to startups (MedicalRecords, Harvest Power) to big companies (IBM, Pfizer, Biogen Idec); from Q&As (Rob Day, Jim Baum) to company profiles (EnVivo, MC10) to news features (testing the nation’s first car collision-avoidance system); and from big community projects (Entrepreneur Walk of Fame) to cheeky area clusters (top 10 “boring” tech companies).

Here they are in their full glory, our top 20-ish stories of the year, sorted by sector:

Top 12 Tech Stories

Adriana Jenkins, Boston Biotech PR Maven, Dies from Breast Cancer at 41

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What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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Gadget girl walks in carrying a red umbrella. It’s not just any red umbrella, though. This one is a “blunt” umbrella. It has round tips, instead of pointy ones, so you don’t poke people in the eye as you walk down a crowded street. It also has what looks like a special tensioning system along the underside of its edges, to withstand high winds and keep the thing from blowing inside-out.

Gadget girl also has touchscreen gloves with her. These are fashionable-looking items with special conductive fingertips—it’s all in the threading—so you can use your iPhone, iPad, or other capacitive touchscreen device in cold weather. (Plus, with the gloves, you can save on your home heating bill so you can afford more gadgets.)

Gadget girl is Fatma Yalcin, a recent MIT Sloan School grad and startup CEO. She found both of the above items on Curisma, the gadget-discovery site she started with Eugene Gorelik earlier this year.

The idea is to provide a social platform for finding and sharing new technologies and products. Users can sign in and post gadgets they like—everything from inkless pens to a “magic cube” that projects a keyboard onto any surface—and others can follow them, recommend products, see the most popular items, and sign up for a personalized feed. The site sends users to other retailers if they want to buy a gadget, but Curisma plans to make money by working with brands and eventually enabling people to make purchases through the site itself.

“It’s the power of community meets personalization, and it’s all determined by you,” Yalcin says. “Within a year, we’d like to reach half a million users.”

Curisma, which operates out of Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge, MA, has some features in common with personalized product sites like Pinterest, Daily Grommet, Krush, and Stylefeeder (acquired by Time), as well as private sales … Next Page »

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I read the book and found it quite enjoyable.

And with all due respect to Eric Ries and all of the VCs out there chasing lean startups, I recognized one simple truth. I still like my startups Phat.

A phat startup aims to solve a very big, very difficult problem that will transform an industry. They typically take many millions, or even tens of millions and 1-3 years to get the first product out the door. They are big ambitious bets on deep technology and market transitions that are difficult to predict. They require invention and problem solving and risk, yes risk. They are a venture in the true sense of the word.

But my goal is not to dismiss the good ideas in the Lean Startup bible. There are many, but some simply don’t apply.

For example, in Phat startups, the challenge is not whether customers will want it (or whether you need to pivot or iterate or some other euphemism). The challenge is whether it can be built in the first place—will it work at all? Will it perform to spec? Will it scale? Will it be reliable? Can it be manufactured? Will it hit the price point?

Very frequently, the last question is whether customers will buy it. I know this sounds “unconventional” and decidedly old-school, but in many of these cases, if you CAN build it, they WILL come.

Why? Because phat startups often address problems that simply can’t be solved any other way, and customers are in dire need of solutions—from cancer treatments to robots for bomb disposal to switches capable of handing exponential growth in mobile data.

And that’s why, once the product is proven, phat startups have been many of our region’s, and our country’s fastest growing and biggest winners. All of these were $1B market cap companies:

*These are my estimates based on VentureSource.

And there’s a new generation of New England companies following in their footsteps:

Demandware (on-demand e-commerce), QD Vision (display color enhancement), 24M (grid storage), 1366 (direct solar wafer), Plexxi (10 GB networks), Affirmed (4G Mobile), Actifio (secondary storage), Qualtre (smartphone components), Xtalic (electronic components), Akiban (scale out databases).

But a key question comes to mind: Are phat startups riskier than lean startups? It depends how you measure risk.

One of the great virtues of lean startups is that they … Next Page »

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This year’s MassTLC Innovation UnConference, in Boston on Friday, was as overwhelming—and inspiring—as ever. Apart from the “secrets of scaling startups” session, which I recapped in a separate story, there was a lot going on. Far too much for any one person to take in.

There were sessions on picking the right startup accelerator; building the right company culture; choosing board directors; common mistakes startups make; the talent and recruiting crunch; and the interplay between the New York and Boston innovation scenes, as well as sector-focused sessions on gaming, big data, analytics, mobile cloud, social marketing, and so forth.

To keep track of the main themes this year, I benefited from random chats with Lawrence Schwartz of Tokutek; Michael Raybman of WaySavvy; Gus Weber of Dogpatch Labs and Polaris Venture Partners; Semyon Dukach of SMTP; Vineet Sinha of Architexa; Jeremy Levine of StarStreet; Josh Bob from Textaurant; Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot; and many others. My colleagues Erin Kutz and Lilly O’Flaherty roamed the halls and sessions as well, so I will include some of their observations too.

Here’s a quick sampling of what we all learned about:

1. There are about 100 “big data” companies around Boston. That was the count given at one of several sessions focusing on big data and analytics, led by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek of Endeca (nice exit). For comparison, earlier this year MassTLC estimated the huge mobile/wireless cluster around Boston to be about 400 companies strong. Big data encompasses big companies like Netezza (part of IBM), Oracle, EMC, ITA Software (Google), Vertica (HP), and Progress Software, as well as upstarts like Hadapt, Jana, Ginger.io, Hopper, Kyruus, and Tokutek. The common thread is technology to help people and companies manage and make sense of tremendous amounts of data so they can make better business decisions.

2. If you’re tired of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile media) as a tech theme, try SoMoClo…the social mobile cloud. In case your eyes just glazed over, think of it this way: Google is mobile plus cloud (see Android). So is Apple (more mobile than cloud, but getting there). Facebook is social plus cloud. Whoever gets all three wins. Beyond consumers, an emerging sector for this technology is healthcare. Jeffrey Tingle of PolyRemedy talked about opportunities in making electronic medical records accessible by patients and doctors—along with the major challenges of privacy, security, and compliance.

3. Web content and advertising are becoming much more interactive—and that interplay leaves an opening for startups. “Traditional church-and-state separation of content and commerce is dying,” says Michael Raybman from travel site WaySavvy. “Sidebar display ads are totally 2005. Commerce and advertising are becoming personalized and contextual, while content is becoming increasingly actionable, where ‘share with friends’ is not the only action. This brings immense opportunities for the travel vertical.”

4. Just when you thought the engineering talent crunch couldn’t get much worse: Undergrads aren’t coming out of school with the right coding experience, and startups can’t afford the time or … Next Page »

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All this talk about quarterly earnings and venture stats reminded me: I never posted my favorite stories from Xconomy Boston’s third quarter.

Yes, I know it’s almost the end of October, and the third quarter ended a month ago. I must have been traumatized by the collapse of the Red Sox or something (is baseball still going on?). Go ahead, run me out of town like Theo and Tito.

This time, I’m not consulting with my colleagues. I’m a rebel, a maverick. I work alone. Without further ado, here are my favorite stories from July through September:

Top 10 Tech Stories:

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Life is not good when you lose your notes from one of the best keynotes you’ve seen in a while. In fact, life kind of sucks. Nevertheless, I will recount my top five takeaways from Bert Jacobs, the co-founder and CEO of Life Is Good, the Boston-based apparel maker and retail brand. He spoke at last night’s MassChallenge awards gala, wearing a T-shirt and cap, and throwing Frisbees into the audience over great distances.

Maybe it’s better that I don’t have my notes to fall back on. Jacobs said a lot of entertaining, inspiring stuff over the course of the story of his company, but what I can remember now is ultimately what will stick with me (and others, I imagine):

1. “Life was good” even when Jacobs and his brother (and co-founder) John were living out of a van for weeks at a time, hawking T-shirts on the road. That was in the early ‘90s. Life was good because they were pursuing their dream and believed in what they were doing, despite the hardships and not selling much.

2. “People will give you the answers if you listen.” The Jacobs brothers went with their signature stick-figure smiley “Jake” design (see image above) in 1994 after it resonated with a bunch of their friends. The design turned out to have incredibly broad commercial appeal. So listen to people, don’t just talk all the time, he said. The best ideas will usually come from other people.

3. “Do what’s in your heart.” That sounds obvious, but it can be hard when you’re worried about getting customers and making money every day. Jacobs found that organizing benefit events for children and worthy causes have come back to help his company a hundred-fold.

4. “All our culture needs is a little leadership and an opportunity.” Life Is Good exists in part to counteract what Jacobs sees as rampant negativity in popular culture and the media (who, us?). He wants the brand to stand for all that is positive and optimistic in the world. And really, that’s why he is so inspiring to the startup community and especially to entrepreneurs, who must believe in their business against all odds.

5. “We do what we like, and we like what we do.” This is pretty much the motto of Life Is Good. The company has grown to $100 million in annual revenue and has no plans to go public or be acquired, Jacobs said. Rather, the firm is trying to go global, take risks in new product areas, and become a billion-dollar business. (Though Jacobs said, “I don’t even know what 100 million is. After my brother and I got new mountain bikes, we didn’t know what to do.”)

Overall, a really fun talk, and perfect for the evening. A broader theme I’ve been noticing is that entrepreneurs never know what they’re doing from the start. Really, nobody knows. The successful ones figure it out over time, with a little help. But each journey is different. So startups, keep fighting out there…

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