Luminus Devices in Billerica, MA, may hold the record among Massachusetts technology companies for the shortest time between conception and launch. But the journey since then has been anything but straightforward.

One summer day in 2002, recent MIT PhD graduate Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, physicist John Joannopolous, were meeting to talk about whether Erchak should accept a lucrative job offer he’d just received, or start his own company—perhaps around the work he’d done in Joannopolous’s lab on ways to use photonic crystals to extract more light from LEDs. “John said, ‘Let’s give Ray Stata a call and see what he thinks,’” says Erchak.

Stata, of course, is the famous MIT alum who co-founded Analog Devices, and a frequent venture investor in local startups. He took the call, and said he had half an hour to talk—but only if Erchak and Joannopolous could come to his office right away.

“We flew out of John’s office, sped down the Mass Pike at 90 miles per hour—at this point I still had jeans and a T-shirt on—and we ended up at that meeting,” Erchak recalls. “We walked into a big board room totally unprepared, except for some slides I’d grabbed out of my PhD presentation. We said ‘We have no idea how to deploy this technology, but if you give us some seed funding, we’ll go figure it out.’ Ray, being a very entrepreneurial-minded person, said that was all he needed to hear.”

By the end of the day, Erchak was at an attorney’s office signing incorporation papers—and had a promise of $200,000 from Stata.

Seven years and at least three iterations of its business plan later, Luminus Devices makes the world’s brightest LEDs, using highly guarded methods based on Erchak’s research and other technologies to manufacture its own “PhlatLight” chipsets right here in Massachusetts. (The “Phlat” stands for photonic lattice.)

The company is poised to help reinvent not only portable devices such as pocket projectors, but the entire lighting industry. Retail, residential, outdoor, stadiums and TV studios, you name it—almost anywhere there’s a conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulb, Luminus’s technology offers a brighter, longer-lasting, less toxic, and in many cases more energy-efficient alternative.

“This company is a home run just waiting to happen,” says Keith Ward, a lighting industry veteran who joined Luminus five months ago as president and CEO, replacing founding CEO Udi Meirav. “LEDs are seven times more efficient than incandescent and starting to surpass halogen and metal halide, so if you can fit them into the existing infrastructure, it’s a win.”

Unfortunately, that’s a big if. The one shadow in Luminus’s outlook is that the company is entirely dependent on device makers, lighting-fixture manufacturers, and other partners to get its PhlatLight LEDs out into the world. It’s a fact that has sent the startup back to the drawing board twice—the first time shortly after Stata’s seed investment, when it became clear that the company’s initial target market, cell-phone manufacturers, weren’t ready to incorporate a new light source into their displays, and the second time just in the last two years, as an unexpectedly rapid drop in the price of big-screen LCD televisions killed off demand for rear-projection DLP televisions, an application for which Luminus’s large, bright LEDs were thought to be ideal.

But Luminus’s investors have signaled their confidence by continuing to pour cash into the company—most recently, in a $72 million Series E round led by …Next Page »

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What’s it like in the world of corporate venture capital these days? For Jeff Schrock, it’s pretty stable and good. Probably more stable than at many boutique venture firms, which are under increased pressure to raise funds and get quick returns.

Schrock is a Seattle-based tech investor with Intel Capital. In a previous life, he co-founded Seattle startup Activate—which was bought by CMGI in 1999 and then Loudeye Technologies in 2001—before becoming an executive at Yahoo and then RealNetworks. He was most recently an investor with Monster Venture Partners, until he joined Intel Capital in late 2008. Schrock is a board member of San Francisco-based Transpera and Seattle-based LearnLive Technologies, and chairman of EVO Media, the Seattle makers of the DevHub publishing platform, which recently became “ramen profitable,” as Schrock puts it.

A quick snapshot of Schrock’s current firm: Intel Capital has invested about $4 billion in some 400 companies, including a $1 billion investment in Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR). It has approximately 70 investors globally, about half in the U.S. and half international. The investment team is organized into eight sectors (including consumer Internet, digital home, and mobility) across 20 or so different geographies. Although Schrock is based in Seattle, his investment focus is not tied to the Northwest. But it’s where he has the most experience and contacts, so he has a unique perspective on the region.

In an e-mail interview, I asked Schrock about his new gig at Intel Capital, his specific investment themes, and the trends he’s seeing in consumer technologies and startups. Here’s a transcript of our interview:

Xconomy: Can you talk about your current role and responsibilities at Intel Capital, and how it fits into the arc of your career as an entrepreneur and investor?

Jeff Schrock: My job is to make profitable investments in companies which move computing and Intel forward. I am on one of our consumer investment teams—so it feels very familiar as much of my career has been in the consumer Internet. (Previously, I was an executive with both RealNetworks and Yahoo!) It is different, however, being on the other side of the table. I spent a good chunk of my early career as an entrepreneur asking, receiving, and sometimes begging for venture capital. I can empathize with the startups and entrepreneurs I have the pleasure of working with. But it’s still early in my investing career, so we’ll see if this makes me a better investor or not.

X: What is special about Intel Capital, and how does it differ from most VC firms?

JS: There are a number of things unique to Intel Capital. First, it is truly a global organization. It’s very easy to collaborate across sectors and geographies. This brings advantages to us, as investors, but also to our portfolio companies who can tap into a wealth of expertise and relationships. Secondly, because of the heritage as a manufacturing company, Intel Capital is very well organized. The decision-making process is quite transparent and structured. As an outsider who’s primarily worked in software companies, this was a welcome surprise. Lastly, Intel Capital is not a fund. Unlike our colleagues in boutique VC …Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA, venture firm General Catalyst Partners is the lead investor in a $6 million Series B funding round announced today by New York, NY-based Boxee, which makes video browser software for navigating online video offerings on the large screen of a television. Existing investor Spark Capital of Boston was also in on the round, along with New York-based Union Square Ventures. The company has raised $10 million in venture capital altogether, and plans to release an improved beta version of its software this fall.

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In case you missed it over the holiday, an electrical fire and power outage at Fisher Plaza near Seattle Center late on Thursday night disrupted a number of websites and services, including those of local tech companies Redfin, Survey Analytics, and Big Fish Games, as well as Microsoft’s Bing Travel site (formerly Farecast), Verizon’s DSL service in the Seattle area, and local television and radio stations including KOMO.

There were no injuries, and most operations were back to normal by the weekend, though Bing Travel was down until late Saturday morning. The news was reported by local and national outlets, including TechFlash, The Seattle Times, The Seattle P-I, and CNET.

Internet companies were directly affected as far away as Marlborough, MA-based Authorize.net (now owned by CyberSource), a credit-card service for online merchants that uses a data center at Fisher Plaza. And there was a ripple effect from there. Annette Tonti, the CEO of Rhode Island-based MoFuse, a network of build-it-yourself mobile sites, says her company’s service was disrupted on Friday because it uses Authorize.net to process credit cards. “The issue for us was getting customers signed up,” Tonti says. “However, we were not affected too long and everything appeared to be working fine by later in the day.”

“Companies should have servers at various physical locations, spread far apart, to keep isolated incidents like a fire from taking down a service,” says David Berube, MoFuse’s founder and chief architect. “I’m sure Authorize.net does have a redundant system, and their quick response to get service back up shows to me that they do have some sort of redundancies in place.”

Closer to home, there has been quite a lot of discussion about what went wrong, and how companies can better prepare for such outages, which seem rather inevitable. The cause of this particular fire is still under investigation.

Praerit Garg, co-founder of Symform, a data storage startup in Seattle, agrees it’s important …Next Page »

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If you read Xconomy, chances are that digital information is a big part of your day. You spend quite a bit of time absorbing, manipulating, and repackaging it. So here are a few questions for you: How many different devices do you use to channel all those bits? Is the number going up, or down? And if—as I suspect—it’s going down, what’s the minimum set of devices that you think you could get along with?

Here’s my current list:

1. Apple iPhone 3G
2. Apple MacBook, OS X 10.5
3. Dell Inspiron 8600 Windows XP laptop
4. Amazon Kindle 2 e-book reader
5. Sharp Aquos 32-inch HDTV
6. Microsoft Xbox 360
7. Canon PowerShot S5 IS digital camera
8. Roku digital video player

Note that I’m not counting the key infrastructure devices, like the Comcast-provided cable modem and my Netgear Wi-Fi router, that support several of the devices above.

But even without those two indispensable items, there would still be 12 or 13 devices on my personal list, if it weren’t for the Internet and the creative geniuses at companies like Palm, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. I’m betting the same thing is true for many readers.

Here’s my tale of the disappearing devices:

Ah, the good old days. In 2005, just for fun, I arranged this group picture, which includes every device I owned containing a microchip.

The PDA. I used a series of Palm devices to manage my calendar and contact lists from 1998 until 2003, when Palm folded those functions into its Treo phones, allowing me to say goodbye to the standalone organizer.

The MP3 player. In 2005 or so, I had a running debate with a fellow tech journo named Eric Hellweg about whether there would ever be a successful music phone—meaning a cell phone with a built-in music player. At the time, the only examples were devices like the Motorola ROKR, which, to put it politely, was a piece of horse pucky that could only hold 100 songs. I argued that not only was the technical problem of building a more capacious music phone too hard (what manufacturer was going to put a hard drive into a mobile phone?), but people didn’t want such a device anyway, since they already seemed perfectly happy to be carrying around separate devices for these two purposes—an iPod for music and a cell phone for communications. Well, obviously Eric won that debate in the end. The Apple iPhone, which came out in 2007, is arguably a better iPod than the iPod itself, thanks to its larger screen and a multi-touch interface. And even the low-end models can hold four times more music in their solid-state memories than my first disk-drive-based iPod.

The DVD player. No need for it after I got the Xbox 360, which also plays DVDs.

The DVR. When I jettisoned premium cable TV back in March, I had no more need for the Comcast set-top box, which also functioned as my DVR. I now get all of my video entertainment through Internet video sites like Hulu, Netflix DVDs, and the …Next Page »

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Thanks to ongoing advances in liquid crystal display and plasma screen technology, flat-panel TVs keep getting flatter. Sharp’s new 46-inch Aquos X model is only 1.35 inches deep—thinner than three iPhones stacked together. But while all this thinness may be sexy, it comes at the cost of decent sound: the less room a conventional loudspeaker has to resonate, the less volume and fidelity it can manage. So millions of people are taking home their giant new 1080p HDTVs, hooking them up to their Dish Network receivers and Blu-Ray disc players, and discovering to their discontent that the built-in speakers sound like tinny little laptops.

But what if the screen itself could double as a TV’s loudspeakers? Then manufacturers could build televisions as wide and as thin as their display technology allows without sacrificing a decibel of volume or a hertz of frequency range. And this, in fact, is exactly the idea that a startup called Emo Labs is pitching to the likes of Sony, Samsung, Sharp, LG, and Toshiba.

I went out to Emo headquarters in Waltham, MA a couple of weeks ago to meet the company’s executives and see (and hear) their prototypes, and I’m here to report that if the idea takes off, it could completely change the way we experience DVDs, cable TV, satellite TV, and console video games. You know how when you go to a theater, the dialogue and music sounds like they’re coming from the movie screen? That’s because the screen is perforated, and the loudspeakers are actually right behind it. You get the same effect from Emo Labs’ “Edge Motion” technology—except that the sound in Emo’s device is coming from a thin, transparent layer of plastic between you and a TV’s display. The plastic vibrates like a drumhead, driven by actuators on either side, producing bright, room-filling, and very loud stereo sound.

So far, the company has built prototype “Edge Motion” membranes that measure up to 42 inches diagonally. Allan Evelyn, Emo’s vice president of business development, says the company is six or seven meetings deep into negotiations with certain Asian consumer electronics companies, talking about ways to get Emo’s technology built into future flat-panel TVs. If Emo wins a contract, it could not only help TV manufacturers start to reverse the trend toward tiny, tinny speakers, but it could lead to a nice payoff for the five-year-old startup, which is backed by Polaris Venture Partners, the Venture Capital Fund of New England, and a handful of angel investors.

But it’s an uphill battle, especially at a time when manufacturers beset by price wars and economic crisis are averse to anything that would make their products more expensive. Emo estimates that building in its membrane would add 10 to 15 percent to the cost of a television, making a $1,000 device into an $1,150 one. “If you have a choice between a quarter-inch-thick TV that sounds like a notebook computer, or a TV that sounds really good, I know what most consumers will choose,” says Jason Carlson’s, Emo Labs’ CEO. “But in what [the manufacturers] are doing, from a product planning point of view, I wouldn’t say they have fully embraced that yet.”

Emo Labs has gone through its share of twists and turns to get to this point. The company is a 2004 spinoff of Natick, MA-based Manifold Products, a “venture engineering” firm that helps to build businesses around novel electromechanical technologies. Lewis Athanas, a 20-year veteran of the Boston-area audio technology companies like Boston Acoustics, had approached Manifold in 2003 with an idea for a transparent plastic sheet that would fit over the screen of a computer monitor, producing sound under the influence of piezoelectric actuators along the sheet’s left and right edges.

Piezoelectric materials produce electricity when a stress is applied—and conversely, they change their shape when an electric field is applied, which is why they’re widely used in loudspeakers. By vibrating in a direction perpendicular to the plane of the plastic sheet, the actuators in Athanas’s system cause the sheet itself to flex slightly, moving the air in front of the sheet and producing sound waves. By moving independently, the actuators on the left and right sides of the sheet can give rise to stereo sound.

Manifold helped Athanas turn his lab concept into a prototype, and raised angel funding for a company to commercialize the idea. As the startup’s original name, Screenspeaker, suggests, …Next Page »

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Boston-based Backchannelmedia said this week that it’s moving from an extended period of beta testing to launching commercial operations in the New York area. The company, whose motto is “TV and the Internet finally just click,” has created a system that allows TV viewers to click using their remote controls in response to special onscreen offers and Web addresses, bringing additional information to their e-mail inboxes. Backchannelmedia says it hopes the “Clickable TV” technology will become a mainstream tool for targeted interactive marketing. The company was founded in 2000, has 29 employees, has raised $15 million in funding, and is expecting a full launch by mid-2010 with more funding.

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Amazon.com wants your brain. Well, actually it wants your creative ideas for a television advertisement. The “Your Amazon Ad Contest” announced yesterday is giving customers of the Seattle, WA-based internet retail giant a chance to send in their own ads for the website. Two winners, one picked by Amazon and one voted on by people on the site, will win $10,000 in Amazon.com gift cards each. The ads will be shown in a to-be-announced movie festival and may end up on national television.

“User-generated content is the hallmark of Amazon from the very start,” said Steven Shure, the company’s vice president of global marketing, in an interview. He says he considers the contest an expansion of other opportunities customers have to add to the site—if a bit more formal than book reviews. “We believe customers know and care about Amazon,” he says.

It’s unclear how many and what quality of entries Amazon will receive by the July 17 deadline, which is why there is no guarantee that the ads will appear on TV. “We’re not going to air bad ads,” Shure says. If the same ad is picked by both the Amazon jury and the audience vote, its creator will receive the full $20,000—nothing to sneeze at, between Amazon’s constantly growing range of goods and the current economic climate. The prize money was picked as an “amount that would be meaningful to an individual,” Shure says.

Five finalists will be announced on August 24, and people will be able to vote for the audience prize winner until September 6, with the final winners revealed on September 21. (To submit an idea, go to www.amazon.com/yaac.)

Depending on the success of this contest, it may be repeated, Shure says. It also may be adapted for foreign markets, as a global outlook is the overall focus of Amazon’s marketing, he says. “If something works, we’ll keep trying it.”

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If you’re watching a movie, a commercial, or a TV sports promo and you see a special effect with an especially stunning glow, glint, flash, flare, light ray, starburst, sparkle, explosion, or atmospheric wave, there’s a good chance it was created using software from Cambridge, MA-based GenArts. The venture-backed startup, launched in 1996 by MIT computer scientist Karl Sims, is one of the leading makers of visual-effects plug-ins for mainstream graphics packages such as Adobe’s After Effects and Apple’s Final Cut Pro, with tens of thousands of media customers around the world. Yet it’s a secretive and little-known presence around Boston that won’t reveal how much capital it’s raised or how many employees it has. (”Between 25 and 500″ is all I could get out of chief marketing officer Steve Bannerman.) Even the company’s white-on-white logo seems designed to be invisible.

The low profile is intended partly to keep competitors guessing. But it may get a little harder to maintain, thanks to a major partnership announced today with San Francisco-based Lucasfilm, whose Industrial Light & Magic division is probably the world’s most famous source of high-end special effects sequences for the movie and TV industries.

Lucasfilm has been using GenArts’ technology here and there since 1997’s Titanic. But under the new agreement, LucasFilm will license copies of GenArts’ software for every compositing system in the company, including machines at ILM, Lucasfilm Animation, and most significantly, LucasArts, the firm’s video game development house. In addition, Lucasfilm and GenArts plan to work together to develop advanced visual effects and compositing technologies, in an effort to put ever more intricate effects at digital artists’ fingertips.

Those effects aren’t always designed to blow viewers’ minds. Sometimes, in fact, the glows, reflections, or flares that artists can insert using GenArts’ plug-in packages (which go by the names Sapphire, Monsters, and Raptors) are there mainly to satisfy viewers’ expectations or tug at their emotions—as with the lens flares in computer-generated beauty shots of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise, for example. Visual effects plug-ins “are used to create reality almost as often as they are used to create things you would normally think of as ’special effects,’” says Katherine Hays, GenArts’ CEO.

So while it’s “fabulous” to have a customer like ILM, Hays says, “what’s really exciting about this is the validation around our vision of where the industry is going, in terms of how critical visual effects are becoming to storytelling, and the benefits our customers can gain by standardizing and having our technology available to all of their artists.”

Bannerman says getting GenArts’ software into LucasArts is an especially important coup; it will be the startup’s first major step into interactive media. “One of the primary focuses of the agreement is …Next Page »

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Portland, OR-based SplashCast has been making news in the past day or so, after a report surfaced in TechCrunch that it has discontinued its original product—user-generated content software—and is looking for a buyer after failing to raise a Series B funding round. Rick Turoczy, of the Portland-based blog Silicon Florist, pointed out that when it comes to a startup being for sale, “Who isn’t?”

I caught up with SplashCast chief executive Michael Berkley this morning, and while the TechCrunch piece is essentially on target, he had some important clarifications to the broader story. For one thing, SplashCast is not going out of business—it is refocusing. “The real story was that the product we originally launched with in 2007 was a user-generated content system that we are taking offline, and we’re focusing all our resources on the product we’ve been developing in the past year,” Berkley says. “We took a shot at user-generated content. It’s a really difficult product. It’s a difficult play in general to monetize. Now we’ve found something really easy to monetize.”

That something is “social television”—software that syndicates TV shows directly to viewers’ social-network pages on the Internet. And the money comes from big advertisers. Back in December, we reported on SplashCast’s partnership with video service Hulu to distribute TV shows on Facebook and MySpace. “The value we’re giving advertisers is a way to get their branding and messaging into Facebook and MySpace in a really authentic way by using premium television content as the vehicle,” Berkley says. “For large brand advertisers like car manufacturers or cereal companies, they’re very concerned about what social network users will say about their brand. But they want to be part of Facebook and Myspace. So if there’s a way for them to do it by associating themselves with predictable content, in the context of Facebook and MySpace, that’s what we’re offering.”

As for the other half of the story—the part that has some observers worried about another startup going belly-up in Portland (Vidoop recently closed)—Berkley was reassuring. “We’ve been struggling with raising a series B round of funding,” he says. “In the meantime, we’ve been approached by a couple of larger companies looking to buy us, and we’re evaluating those opportunities. The truth is, we’re on the M&A market.” He adds that any acquisition will play out in the next two or three months.

SplashCast currently has eight employees. It was founded in 2006, and raised $4 million in first-round funding from angel investors. “That’s one of the reasons it’s been hard to raise the series B,” Berkley says. “We don’t have a VC in the Series A to help with the introductions and provide the validation a lot of series B investors would look for.” He adds that an ongoing discussion locally is that “it’s very hard to raise money in Portland. There isn’t the VC establishment here.”

(Sounds like an opportunity for Seattle and Silicon Valley to me.)

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The great thing about the Apple iPhone is that it’s a powerful miniature computer, with a screen that can be retasked to look like almost anything and do almost any job—it can switch in a moment from being a scientific calculator to simulating an airplane cockpit ti acting like the slide of a trombone. One obvious way to employ such a versatile information device would be to turn it into a universal remote control for home appliances. There’s only one problem—the iPhone doesn’t have an infrared port, so it can’t communicate in the only language known to most home appliances, including TVs, DVRs, stereo systems, and cable boxes.

A Waltham, MA, startup called ThinkFlood has set out to correct that flaw. It’s built an accessory for the iPhone and iPod Touch called RedEye that translates one of the wireless languages these devices do know—Wi-Fi—into the infrared signals that make sense to an appliance. The name may be unfortunate, seeing as it calls to mind two unpleasant things at once—exhausting overnight jet flights and those beady devil-eyes that show up on people in flash photographs. But the idea itself is cool, and seems likely to appeal to gadget hounds like me who enjoy seeing how many different things they can do with their iPhones.

ThinkFlood launched the device as a “beta” product yesterday, meaning it’s available at a reduced introductory price ($119, going up to $149 later) to a limited number of customers. As the beta tag suggests, the software that drives it is still a work in progress.

“Bringing universal remote control capabilities to the iPhone has been the goal of many in the industry since the device first became available,” ThinkFlood founder and president Matthew Eagar said in an announcement yesterday. “Beta participants will find that RedEye delivers the design and functionality of a high-end remote control at a fraction of the cost.”

Specifically, the RedEye device (and the iPhone software app that goes with it) let you do things like changing the channel on your TV or the volume on your stereo. It’s not an accessory in the usual sense of an attachment; while you can sit your iPhone in it like a cradle if you want, you can mainly just leave it on a table, as long as it has a line of sight to your appliances. It communicates with your iPhone by radio, which means you no longer need to near your audio/video equipment to relay commands—in fact, you can be in another room or on a different floor.

From watching a demo video at the ThinkFlood site, it appears that the RedEye software allows you to use flicking and multitouch gestures. So the device could make channel surfing as easy as flipping through albums using the iPod CoverFlow feature.

That “fraction of the cost” thing that Eager mentions depends on how you look at it, of course. An 8-gigabyte iPhone 3G costs $199, not counting a wireless calling plan, so if you add the cost of the phone to the cost of the RedEye, you get $318. That’s more than even the slickest universal remotes such as the Logitech Harmony 880, which retails for $249. On the other hand, ThinkFlood plans to upgrade the RedEye software regularly, meaning you’re really buying a device that will evolve into something more powerful over time. And hey—it doubles as a charging stand for your iPhone or iPod Touch.

ThinkFlood was founded in 2007 and RedEye is its first product. According to the company’s history page, the firm first set out to create an easier way to share and display digital photos, but switched gears after discovering that a standalone photo viewer would be too expensive to make and market. The company then settled on the idea of building iPhone accessories—specifically, accessories that would use hardware to amplify the power of the iPhone’s user interface. And that led to the idea of a combined hardware-software product that would turn the phenomenally popular Apple device into a substitute for the pile of remote controls laying on most people’s sofas.

With a bit of help, the ThinkFlood founders realized, the iPhone could become “the only [remote control] you will ever need, one that you will carry with you wherever you go, customized for each activity. And since the iPhone is missing the ability to record and send infrared signals, there was our opportunity to complete the picture with hardware.”

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[Updated April 25 with this behind-the-scenes video clip of the Oprah interview]

I just got off the phone with Justin Esch of South Seattle-based Bacon Salt. He and fellow founder Dave Lefkow went on The Oprah Winfrey Show this morning, and were in their office watching the 7-8 minute segment, which just aired on the East Coast. (It airs today at 4 pm in all U.S. time zones.)

“It’s crazy how much interest there’s been,” Esch says. “It’s been phenomenal.”

Bacon Salt makes zero-calorie vegetarian seasonings, condiments, spreads, and even a lip balm that make everything taste like bacon. (And coming soon…Baconlube.) Last fall, we reported on the company’s use of social media like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to promote their brand and product. But after trying it myself (and putting it on my sandwich for the past five months), I have to say the main reason it’s successful is really simple—it just tastes really good.

The interview with Oprah, done via Skype, was “totally softball,” Esch says. The show had four panelists taste Baconnaise, the company’s mayo-like spread. Esch says the highlight of the segment was when Oprah proclaimed, “It tastes like bacon,” and she said she liked it.

Like most overnight successes, this story actually goes back a ways. Back in late November, Bacon Salt first got in touch with the Oprah show. “We’ve mailed product to them four times now,” Esch says. But it took a sequence of escalating media attention to seal the deal, beginning with a segment on The Daily Show on February 25, in which host Jon Stewart made fun of Bacon Salt (specifically Baconnaise). CNN took that clip and carried it worldwide.

From there, the local and national media piled on. ABC sent reporter Neal Karlinsky to do a story. While he was there, an Oprah representative called Bacon Salt, saying they’d seen a story about Bacon Salt in The Seattle Times by Mark Rahner. Esch casually mentioned that ABC World News was there filming a segment, and it turned out the Oprah rep knew Karlinsky. Fast forward to earlier this week, when The Daily Show used Baconnaise as a prop, Stewart calling it “capitalism’s greatest triumph.”

Also this week, Oprah’s show asked Esch and Lefkow to mail them 500 pounds of Baconnaise overnight. Then they sent Bacon Salt a Skype kit, and told the founders to stand by this morning. “We didn’t know if we’d be on until 60 seconds before we were on,” Esch says. (Oprah wouldn’t let anyone from Bacon Salt go on the air wearing one of their trademark foam bacon suits. “They made it really professional,” Esch says.)

Now the Bacon Salt guys are gearing up to handle the inevitable spike in demand. “We’re just kind of freaking out right now,” says Esch. “It’s like someone saying there may or may not be a hurricane coming.”

“I’ve had too much caffeine today,” he adds.

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I’ve been writing World Wide Wade for almost a year now; this is the 44th installment. A year is a long time in the technology world—long enough for many of the gadgets, services, and websites I’ve covered in the past to evolve cool new features. So I thought I’d revisit a few of my previous columns and fill you in about what’s changed.

1. Beyond megapixels. In my April 4 and June 6 columns, I wrote about the Gigapan community site, where you can upload super-high-resolution photos stitched together from lots of regular digital shots. In January of this year, a new company called GigaPan Systems introduced a $379 robot camera mount that puts gigapixel imaging within the reach of hobbyists. It takes care of the tedious part of gigapixel imaging by guiding your camera through hundreds or thousands of individually-angled shots, with just enough overlap to give the stitching software something to work with.

2. News aggregators on steroids. Last April 11, I wrote about my favorite news-tracking tools on the Web, including Netvibes and Alltop. Netvibes hasn’t changed much in the last year, but Alltop, a cool aggregator that uses pop-up windows to squeeze a lot of news onto a single page, has exploded beyond all bounds. It had about 55 categories of RSS feeds when I last wrote about it; now there must be well over 500, on everything from Atheism to Zoology. And for tech-news enthusiasts, there’s a site called TechFuga that recently got a nice overhaul that makes it more competitive with the uber-popular but somewhat tired TechMeme. The new features at TechFuga include Twitter searching, reflecting the fact that more and more people are getting their news from each other via the red-hot microblogging service. (Speaking of Twitter, you can follow me there at “wroush“.)

3. Earth as you’ve never seen it. On April 18, I wrote about Google Earth 4.3, which featured improved navigation and a larger crop of 3-D buildings. The latest version of the world’s most popular geo-browser, Google Earth 5.0, came out in the middle of last month. The coolest improvements: a fantastic view of the ocean floor, the ability to delve back in time and see aerial imagery from the 1980s and earlier, and imagery for Mars as well as Earth and the Moon.

4. An art museum in your living room. If you’ve got an HDTV already, there’s no reason to buy one of those expensive digital photo frames. My April 25 column talked about GalleryPlayer, a company that provided software and imagery for turning your TV into a digital art exhibit. Unfortunately, GalleryPlayer went out of business in July (though founder Scott Lipsky, an ex-Amazon exec, hinted that it had merely been sold and might re-emerge). Luckily, there are still plenty of ways to find and display high-resolution images on your big screen. DeviantArt is a great place to browse and download free HD-resolution images created by professional artists and photographers. And if you hook up your computer to your TV, you can use software like Slickr or FlickrFan to display those images—or your own—in the form of animated slide shows.

5. An elephant never forgets. My July 18 column was about Evernote, a fantastic cross-platform system for storing and tracking all the info-flotsam in your life: Web pages, photos, receipts, you name it. I still add material to my Evernote account every day, and the company just keeps making the software better and better. There’s now a version for Android phones (on top of the existing Web, Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile, and iPhone versions). In December, Evernote (whose logo is an elephant) added a file synchronization feature, so you can use it to keep copies of important Word files, PDFs, PowerPoints, and other electronic documents, and more recently, it rolled out a vastly improved version of its Web Clipper, which is the tool I use most often. A feature I plan to try soon is the recently-announced Shoeboxed, a service that will scan that pile of business cards and receipts on your desk and put them right into Evernote. And if you used Google Notebooks—which Google gave up on in January—you can easily import all of your notes to Evernote and pick up where you left off.

6. Cutting the cord. In my July 25 column, I threatened to give up my cable TV subscription and switch to watching my favorite shows online, via video aggregators like Hulu. Well, it took me a while to gather up the courage, but last week I finally made good on the threat, and dropped my $80 digital cable package at Comcast in favor of a $10 lineup of about 23 local channels (which I kept just in case I ever feel the need to watch live news). While I was at it, I canceled …Next Page »

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These days, there’s no sense in producing video for just one platform, like cable TV. Media companies also want to get their content out to consumers via the Web, mobile phones, game consoles, video-on-demand networks, and other platforms. The problem is that all of these channels use different video formats, protocols, and resolutions, which makes transcoding and managing video content a pain.

But this week Westford, MA-based Verivue unveiled a system designed to ease that discomfort. It’s a media distribution “switch”—a combination of servers, solid-state storage devices, networking hardware, and media applications inside a single big chassis—that can stream video and other media files to any type of end device over any Internet Protocol-based network.

Aimed at big customers like cable operators, telecom companies, Web video providers, and content distribution networks, the so-called “MDX 9000″ series is the company’s first product. It’s been under development behind closed doors since Verivue’s founding in November 2006. Aside from its cross-platform capabilities, the device’s big advantage, according to Verivue, is that it uses Flash-based storage with no moving parts. That means it can stream data faster, and use less energy, than server racks using traditional hard drives.

The first switch in the MDX 9000 series will be available in the second quarter of this year, the company says. The company plans to resell the machines through Arris Group (NASDAQ:ARRS), a Suwanee, GA-based maker of broadband networking equipment.

At the same time, the 85-employee company revealed that it has collected a sizable $40 million Series B funding round. Comcast Interactive Capital led the round, which also included Matrix Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Accel Partners, and Arris. The round closed last July, according to a company spokesman, but it wasn’t announced until this week. The $40 million comes on top of a $25 million Series A round, provided by Matrix and Spark Capital, that was one of the 10 largest venture deals in New England for the second quarter of 2007.

Light Reading’s Cable Digital News has a good overview of Verivue’s strategy.

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People seem to eat up the platefuls of food-related programming fed to them by cable networks like Lifetime, The Travel Channel, and the Food Network. Will cell phone owners do the same?

The folks at SnapMyLife, the mobile photo-sharing community run by Needham, MA-based Mobicious, hope to find out. Last year the company formed a partnership with Zero Point Zero Production, the company behind curmudgeonly cook Anthony Bourdain’s popular Travel Channel show “No Reservations,” to post backstage candids from the show on SnapMyLife. Already the show’s crew has posted some 340 photos to SnapMyLife’s free public albums, which are advertising-supported and optimized for browsing and viewing on mobile phones. Most of the photos show Bourdain visiting countries around the world and—as he does on the show—trying a variety of exotic foods in the company of local chefs or families.

It’s all intended as a way for food and travel lovers to keep up with the show and learn about locations that will be featured in upcoming episodes. David Chang, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Mobicious, says it’s the first time a TV show has turned to mobile photo-sharing to help form connections with viewers. “The problem they were trying to solve is that they’ve got this great program, and they wanted to use mobile devices to reach people—whether to involve existing viewers, to send them alerts about new episodes, or to recruit brand new viewers,” he says. “And since SnapMyLife users come from all over the world and just eat up any content about travel, it was a really good fit, from our standpoint.”

Some 440 SnapMyLife users have signed up to receive alerts when the crew posts new pictures from “No Reservations,” which is now in its fifth season; users can choose to see the alerts on the mobile website or receive e-mail or text messages. (Overall, SnapMyLife has signed up nearly 700,000 registered users since Mobicious launched the service last April, Chang says; users browse 15 million photos every month.)

For all the novelty of a television production company using a mobile photo-sharing network to share behind-the-scenes views, though, the “No Reservations” photo stream is curiously unsocial. It’s a one-to-many enterprise: Zero Point Zero crew members post photos that are then viewed by SnapMyLife users, but there’s no way for users to contribute their own food- or travel-related photos to the stream. And users can comment on the photos, but Zero Point Zero doesn’t engage with users by responding to the comments. (I could only find four comments from the “No Reservations” crew, for 340 photos.) The photos themselves, while less staged or scripted than the show itself, still have the look of studio-produced publicity shots.

There’s an explanation for that. According to Chang, the images that show up in the “No Reservations” photo stream have been extensively vetted by both Zero Point Zero and the Travel Channel, mainly to make sure they don’t show anyone who hasn’t signed a legal photo release.

“Dan, the camera guy, has a camera phone, and he could snap a picture and just use that—which was initially what we were pushing for,” says Chang. “But because Dan is employed by the production company, there are legal constraints in terms of what they can show.”

It’s all an interesting case study in the frictions and ironies that can crop up when traditional media enterprises like TV production crews try to adapt their content for more social, less controlled channels. When you friend Anthony Bourdain on SnapMyLife, there may not be quite as much distance as there would be if you friended, say, Barack Obama on Facebook. But it’s still a case of social networking minus the social.

“We are still trying to navigate these waters,” Chang acknowledges. “This is just stage one—taking content that we know has gone through this vetting process and getting that out to users. Stage 2 will be capturing live media on the spot in a way that is more spontaneous.”

Chang says the Mobicious team is in early discussions with the Travel Channel and other big media companies about mixing photos from users with professionally-produced content, where appropriate. “They recognize that users have mobile devices, and that it’s a great way of capturing content when they are in places that are interesting and relevant,” he says. So while the snapshot of the blowfish-testicles entrée from your last trip to Tokyo probably won’t show up on the Travel Channel itself, it might just be included in its photo stream.

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Boston’s Backchannelmedia, whose “clickable TV” system embeds links in broadcast TV signals that consumers can activate with their remote controls to receive information about a program or a product via e-mail, said today that Gray Television (NYSE: GTN) of Atlanta will roll out the Backchannelmedia system to its 36 local broadcast stations.

That brings the total number of stations participating in Backchannelmedia’s system to 68 (including New England stations WCVB, WJAR, WTNH, and WCTX), covering more than a sixth of all U.S. broadcast viewers.

“This is our first paying contract for clickable TV—a huge milestone for us,” says Backchannelmedia marketing director Eric Martin. “The market trials continue up here in the Northeast but the fact that a broadcast group is on the record and willing to pay for it demonstrates that it has actual monetary value to broadcasters.”

We’ve profiled Backchannelmedia here and here.

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If you were watching the Superbowl yesterday, you may have seen the tongue-in-cheek ad in which down-on-their luck celebrities Ed McMahon and MC Hammer hawked Cash4Gold, a Pompano Beach, FL-based metal refinery that sends customers checks for mailing in their unwanted gold, silver, or platinum jewelry. An e-mail about the ad circulated this weekend by a partner at General Catalyst provides the first public acknowledgement that GC is an investor in Cash4Gold, confirming—at least in part—a report earlier this month from Dan Primack at Private Equity Hub.

Primack reported in the January 6 edition of PE Hub’s daily e-mail newsletter, PE Week Wire, that GC and Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital Partners had just put more than $40 million into the company. Primack didn’t reveal his sources, and neither GC nor Highland would confirm or comment on their involvement.

But in a general e-mail this weekend, Bilal Zuberi at General Catalyst wrote: “If you are watching the Superbowl, look out for ads in the pregame and 3q for our portfolio company ‘Cash4Gold’ :) …And pull out your baggy pants in anticipation of MC Hammer on the screen.” Below, I’ve embedded the YouTube version of the ad—which earned an “A” from Time Magazine in its round up of the best and worst Superbowl ads of 2009.

When I contacted Zuberi today, he said he wouldn’t call his note an official confirmation that General Catalyst was in on the Cash4Gold deal. “It was kind of a joke e-mail,” he said. “It’s one of those investments where everybody talks about it. I don’t know anything about that area [of GC's business]. It was just a note to my friends saying you’ve got to check it out.”

I’ve got a call in to Michelle Daubar, GC’s communications director, requesting the firm’s official word about the investment. I’ve also requested comment from Dan Nova at Highland, whom Primack identified as that firm’s lead partner on the Cash4Gold deal.

Offering consumers cash for their precious-metal objects, especially at a time when gold prices are relatively high, may be a canny way to make money during a downturn. But one obvious question is whether partners at GC and Highland were aware of, and/or signed off on, Cash4Gold’s decision to put its own money into Superbowl advertising. According to a story on ESPN.com last week, NBC charged advertisers $3 million for each 30-second spot during the big game. That’s almost twice as much as companies paid back in 1998-1999, when so many dot-com companies were accused of profligacy for buying Superbowl spots.

I’ll let you know if I hear back from anyone.

Update, February 3, 2009: VentureBeat has picked up the Cash4Gold story, reporting on consumer complaints about the company, which apparently center on payment delays and “misplaced” packages that result in insurance payments below the value of the enclosed jewelry.

Update, February 6, 2009: The Economist’s Free Xchange blog reported this week that Cash4Gold has attempted to buy off a blogger who was critical of the company. If you search for “Cash4Gold” on Google, this blogger’s post claiming that the company pays customers for mailed-in gold at rates far below the market price appears at or near the top of the results. According to The Economist, he got a letter offering him cash to take down the post or “de-optimize” it for the search engines.

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I outed Ben Karlin. Not that way: he’s straight, at least judging from his mom’s foreword to Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me, the 2008 essay collection Karlin edited. I mean I outed him as the creator of WonderGlen, a painfully funny comedy website that appeared out of nowhere last October.

Purporting to be a real company intranet, the site chronicles a small Los Angeles TV production studio working on such misbegotten ideas as “Hobbit House,” a pilot reality show where the homes of unsuspecting families are made over to look like Bilbo Baggins’s burrow. WonderGlen caused a stir among Internet literati, who diagnosed it as some type of viral mockumentary along the lines of the The Office or the notorious Web-based video series lonelygirl15, but who couldn’t pinpoint the fiction’s authors.

Through no special effort on my part—I got a note out of the blue offering me a scoop—I learned last month that WonderGlen is the work of SuperEgo Industries, the production company Karlin formed in partnership with HBO in 2007. Karlin, 38, was born and raised in Needham, MA, and was a writer and senior editor for the satirical newspaper The Onion from 1993 to 1996. He jumped from print into film and television, eventually winning eight Emmy Awards as executive producer of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. He’s now working on several big movie projects, and says he and SuperEgo partner Will Reiser started WonderGlen as a relatively low-cost experiment in online comedy.

Having broken the WonderGlen story, I wanted to grill Karlin about the origins and intentions of the genre-busting project, which isn’t a website so much as “an independent ecosystem of hilarity,” to quote radio host Jesse Thorn’s perfect description. While the WonderGlen intranet functions as a core repository of vacation snapshots, company policy memos, audition videos, grousing message-board posts, and the like, the world of WonderGlen leaches far out into the Internet, including items like a James Franco YouTube tribute to WonderGlen founder Aidan Weinglas, the website of Aidan’s boyfriend Dr. Dean Payne (a “multi-modality therapist”), fake job ads on career sites, and links to the real (I think) erotic furniture ordered by WonderGlen’s employees. This is comedy on a scale nobody’s really tried before—an interactive smorgasbord that’s meant at least in part to underscore the way the Internet has “virtually obliterated” the line between fiction and reality. That’s a quote from my interview with Karlin—which I finally scored this Tuesday, and which is presented here in full.

Wade Roush: Thanks for making time to talk, and thanks for directing that scoop my way. A lot of people had been speculating about who was really behind WonderGlen.

Ben Karlin: It was never the intention for it to be that big of a secret. It was more of an experiment to see how something can develop a life, absent any traditional media push. There wasn’t supposed to be any big reveal or anything. But you can’t control that shit. You can get to a point where it seems like the point of it is to be a big mystery, but that wasn’t really the point. The point was more just putting something out there, this Internet flotsam if you will, and just see what happens as it’s going through the universe. But it just grew into something where I thought it would be the wrong idea if we tried to keep everything secret.

WR: But all the mystery about who was behind it certainly helped the buzz.

BK: A little bit. I would much prefer—any creative person would prefer—that the buzz be about how good something is, rather than who’s behind it. But you can’t really manage buzz.

WR: Part of your problem managing the buzz may be that it’s so hard to categorize what WonderGlen is. It doesn’t fit into any existing genre. Where did the idea come from?

BK: It’s definitely either a terrible idea, or so ahead of its time that it might take several generations to appreciate it—if that day ever comes, which it still may not. The idea was kind of a weird evolution. It started with the simple idea that I was going to be doing stuff for HBO, and I wanted to do some stuff for the Web as well. I thought, well, what if I took some of the TV stuff I was developing and created this intranet site, because I’m in New York and a lot of the executives are in L.A., so they could see samples of what I was working on—script editions, shorts, things that would serve as mini-pilots for potential TV shows. A development platform, basically.

Then as I started thinking of it more, I thought what if the site had two purposes—one, to show HBO all this stuff, but two, as a comedy site. Then it started to get more complicated and layered. The thing that it started out for, to show HBO our work, ended up getting scrapped, and we said ‘Let’s do a comedy site, and maybe some of this stuff we do will have a life in some capacity.’ Then as we got further into the narrative of this company and all these people and these fictional productions and projects, the conversation about having it function as an actual platform for actual people kind of went away.

WR: Do you think the original concept of a dual-purpose site really could have worked?

BK: It might have. But those two things are at such cross purposes. One of the things we discovered early on was that for it to be a site that had actual functionality for internal purposes, you’d have to have things on there that you wouldn’t necessarily want the general public to see. And then if we did this totally transparent thing with budgets and advertising, you’d open up legal problems like you wouldn’t believe. So we doubted we could do that and we started to look at it from a different angle. I had some experience doing websites before, but most of it involved translating an existing thing like The Onion or The Colbert Report, where the conversation was more about how does something that has an existing format work on the Web. With Colbert, for example, we came up with this idea that the website was all going to be from the point of view of an obsessed fan.

WR: Right, but nobody is fooled by that—they get the shtick right away. Was that also the idea with WonderGlen, or did you really set out to fool people?

BK: As we were developing the site, we started out with the idea that at the beginning, a percentage of people were going to think it was an actual company that had actually left its back door open, and people could get into this intranet and see this stuff they weren’t supposed to be seeing. But once we started getting into the content, we realized that it was so funny that …Next Page »

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Video ads are showing up in so many places now—on the Web, on mobile devices, as part of on-demand programming, and of course on regular network TV—that managing all those video files, in all their various formats, is getting to be a bit of a nightmare for advertisers and their agencies. Extreme Reach, a new startup in Needham, MA, hopes to solve that problem with software that tracks, manages, and delivers video ads across several media.

Extreme Reach is expected to emerge from stealth mode tomorrow, and to announce a $1.5 million Series A venture investment from Village Ventures in Williamstown, MA, and Long River Ventures of Hadley, MA, and Worcester, MA. The company says it already has several Fortune 500 companies on its client list, although it hasn’t yet named them.

Behind Extreme Reach are a group of former executives from Belmont, MA-based FastChannel Network, which went through a staff reduction after its 2006 merger with DG Systems. They include CEO John Roland, COO Tim Conley, CTO Dan Brackett, and vice president of sales Patrick Hanavan.

The company says its Web-based software stores video commercials on a unified platform where they can be accessed with equal ease by an agency’s interactive division or broadcast division and converted for playback on the Web, on TV, or on demand.

“The goal is to offer the breadth and scale of TV with the inherent accountability and measurability of the Internet,” Roland says in a company statement due to go out tomorrow. “Our SaaS video platform simplifies the process for advertisers and agencies managing video campaigns across all media allowing them to overcome the problems created by media fragmentation and a lack of standards.”

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Kirkland, WA-based Neural Audio, a digital sound company, has been acquired by DTS (NASDAQ: DTSI), a technology and entertainment firm in Agoura Hills, CA. The purchase price was $7.5 million in cash, with DTS also agreeing to pay up to $7.5 million more over the next five years if certain conditions are met. No other terms were disclosed. The deal closed on December 31.

Neural Audio focuses on audio signal processing for playback of music, movies, broadcast programs, and video games. Its main markets are digital TV, satellite radio, consumer electronics, and gaming. “The acquisition of Neural Audio strengthens DTS’ position in the important broadcast and automotive markets while also providing immediate access to the evolving satellite and HD radio industries,” said Jon Kirchner, president and chief executive of DTS, in a statement. “We are acquiring an extremely talented team of professionals who we expect will enhance our technology expertise and market knowledge.”

No word yet on the fate of Neural Audio’s Kirkland office, or its employees. The company was founded in 2000 by engineers Paul Hubert and Robert Reams, with the goal of commercializing signal-processing techniques to improve the quality of music files and other audio programs.

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