I have a lot of Apple gear, and I’m pretty happy with it. There’s just one problem. The better Apple’s stuff gets, the less patience I have for everyone else’s clunky hardware and software. Televisions and all the boxes we hook up to them are the worst offenders. No two TV manufacturers or set-top-box makers use the same remote controls or user-interface conventions, and they’re all painfully bad (except those developed for the hockey-puck-like Apple TV, which are decent but not great). That’s why I’m hoping that Apple will eventually follow through on Steve Jobs’ dying wish, in biographer Walter Isaacson’s words, “to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant.”

While we await that glorious day, though, there are some existing technologies that can help ease the pain. In fact, there’s no lack of innovation in the area of video entertainment, as the acres devoted to new “digital home” technologies at this week’s International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas attested. The problem is a lack of unification—meaning interfaces that would make it just as easy to find, buy, watch, and share great cable content on your TV as it is to find, purchase, consume, and share great book, magazine, or game content on your iPad.

For the last few months I’ve been following a TV technology startup called Dijit Media that’s both innovating and making an attempt at unification. They know Apple is coming, and that the Cupertinoids—unless they’ve completely lost their touch in the post-Jobs era—are likely to create a product that melds beautiful TV hardware, a slick and simple operating system, and a rich content marketplace. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based firm has built its own universal TV remote for iOS devices, and is using it to foster a new “second screen” culture.

Dijit's program listing and remote control on the iPad

The Dijit app, which controls your TV with help from a Griffin Technology gadget called the Beacon, marries channel listings from your cable operator with diverse Internet resources like Facebook, YouTube, and Netflix. It turns your iPhone or iPad into a kind of social command center for the living room—a place where you can browse listings, find out what your friends are watching, or rearrange your Netflix queue, all while sitting back in front of your big screen. It works with hundreds of models of TVs, DVRs, and set-top boxes, replacing the welter of remote controls and on-screen interfaces that come with those devices and moving all of the control and choice to the smaller but far more versatile touchscreen.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet fully integrate with Internet-TV boxes like the Apple TV and the Roku Player—and I’ll have more to say on that in a minute. But Dijit figures that the more progress it can make toward unification before Apple enters the market in earnest, the more Apple’s competitors will need to seek the startup out. “We think sooner or later Apple will come in, and it won’t be a ‘hobby,’ and it will show what’s really coming,” says Jeremy Toeman, Dijit’s chief product officer. “The Samsungs and Vizios of the world will need external technology to bridge the gap, and the only way to bridge it will be to go cross-platform. We think we can help the consumer electronics manufacturers adapt to a world where they are not as proficient at building the end-to-end ecosystem as Apple is.”

Dijit, originally known as UMEE, was founded in 2009 by former Nvidia and Riverbed Technology engineer Maksim Ioffe. It won funding in late 2010 from technology investor Alsop Louie, backer of streaming-video startup Justin.TV and mobile iOS game developer Smith & Tinker. The startup switched to its current name at CES in January 2011, which is also when it released the iPhone version of the remote-control app and announced its partnership with Griffin.

The $70 Beacon device, which is available at Apple Stores, bridges the communications gap between … Next Page »

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Some interesting developments in ad distribution and video this week. Needham, MA-based Extreme Reach, the maker of a video-ad platform for TV and Web, has secured more money for its growth and has made an important acquisition.

Extreme Reach said today it has closed a $9 million credit facility with TD Bank. The company also has acquired Spotlight Business Affairs, a commercial talent rights management and payment firm, for an undisclosed sum. The details sound kind of gnarly, but basically the deal means the company’s ad distribution system will be in compliance with existing talent and rights agreements.

The idea behind Extreme Reach, which started in 2008, is to help video advertisers and agencies distribute ads to TV stations, cable networks, and Web publishers—all with cutting-edge cloud-based storage and processing technology. Last September, I reported that Extreme Reach was growing fast and looking to raise a big financing round. Chief executive John Roland said at the time that the company was very profitable and had grown from 17 employees to about 90 in the previous two years, with 20 more hires and geographic expansion imminent.

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In a segment featured Tuesday night on the PBS NewsHour, correspondent Hari Sreenivasan brings an outsider’s curiosity to the strange, wonderful world of startup accelerators. The eight-minute report features Sreenivasan’s interviews with entrepreneurs and mentors at TechStars, AngelPad, and Y Combinator—archetypes of the venture incubator wave (or is it a bubble?) that we’ve been chronicling here at Xconomy for the last four and a half years.

This is a must-watch piece, for at least four reasons:

1) It’s the best short summary of the startup accelerator concept you’re likely to find—and a great example of mainstream media interest in what’s long been a fringe phenomenon, unknown to middle America.

2) Sreenivasan talked with celebrities of the startup world like AngelPad’s Thomas Korte, TechStars’ David Cohen, Blackbox Ventures’ Max Marmer, and Duke University’s Vivek Wadhwa. It’s fun to see them all on camera.

3) The piece featured a bunch of cool startups that you may not have heard of yet but probably will, including Order.In, LendFriend, and Tapviva.

4) There’s a one-minute segment featuring me. It starts at 4:45 mark in the video; in the clip Sreenivisan used, I’m talking about the technological changes that have made it so much cheaper for mobile and Internet startups to get off the ground, and the bubbly conditions this change seems to be fostering in the Silicon Valley startup scene.

PBS NewsHour Shoot at Xconomy San Francisco

Sreenivasan does a thorough job of explaining why startup accelerators exist and how they work, and he conveys authentic flavor by talking to real entrepreneurs. It’s all framed in a way that will make the accelerator phenomenon clear to TV audiences in Idaho or Vermont who’ve never heard of Y Combinator. But there’s also a savvy to the reporting that’s a clear legacy of Sreenivasan’s days as an anchor and correspondent for CNET during the first Internet boom, from 1996 to 2002.

My only role in the NewsHour report was to spend an hour talking on tape with Sreenivasan, here at Xconomy San Francisco back in early October (the photo above shows the KQED crew setting up for the shoot). Another couple of minutes from our conversation made it into a supplement to the broadcast report, published on the PBS NewsHour website under the title “What is a Startup Accelerator?” Both the main report and the supplemental clip are embedded below.

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The West Coast roll-up of Boston-area tech companies continues.

On the heels of Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca this week, networking and communications giant Cisco Systems said today it plans to acquire Boxborough, MA-based BNI Video for $99 million in cash and retention-based incentives. Cisco is one of the startup’s investors. The deal is expected to be complete by the end of this year, at which time BNI’s employees will join Cisco’s service provider video technology group.

BNI Video started in early 2009, originally known as Beaumaris Networks, to develop technology for video service providers. About a year ago, my colleague Erin reported on the company’s software, which is aimed at helping cable companies compete better with Internet video providers.

The startup’s cloud-based software manages how cable content is organized on the back end so that consumers can search and browse their programs across various Internet-connected devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The company is led by CEO Conrad Clemson.

BNI raised nearly $17 million in venture capital over two rounds, from Charles River Ventures, Comcast Interactive Capital, Cisco, TIme Warner Cable, and Castile Ventures. So this looks like a pretty healthy return for the startup’s investors. BNI had 50 employees as of a year ago.

San Jose, CA-based Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) says it plans to use BNI’s technology to advance its own Videoscape TV platform, which lets service providers deliver video to Internet-connected devices. Cisco recently acquired ExtendMedia and Inlet Technologies in the video sector, and also previously bought Starent Networks and LineSider Technologies in Massachusetts.

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Less than a year after announcing its seed financing, Boston-based Clovr Media is changing its name to Linkable Networks and is adding another big-name investor to its roster. The digital media startup is announcing today that it has received an undisclosed investment from Palo Alto, CA- and Shanghai-based Citi Ventures, a unit of Citigroup.

As its new name indicates, Linkable Networks offers technology enabling merchants to directly link offers in advertisements to credit or debit cards consumers have registered in the system for automatic redemption of the deals. The startup’s previous name stood for “card linked offers with virtual redemption.” Consumers can click on Web ads and scan or enter a code from TV, print, and outdoor ads into their mobile phone to redeem the offers to their cards.

Linkable Networks CEO Tom Burgess said the card-linked offer space is a fragmented one, and that the company’s name needed to better reflect how its technology connects consumers with advertisers and banks. “Linkables are what the advertising world started to call our capabilities,” he said in a phone call with Xconomy.

This past March, Linkable Networks inked an $8.3 million financing led by Jeffrey Glass of Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Kepha Partners, Common Angels, and angel investor Mark Wright. The new cash infusion from Citi will go to supporting demand from advertising networks, building out infrastructure, and fueling growth, according to today’s announcement. The startup’s offer platform has been operating in beta mode over the last year and it plans to make a broader commercial push with banks and media partners this fall.

“Having Citi in our investment group is a nice vote of a confidence for our company and for our solution,” said Burgess.

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Deb Roy doesn’t strike me as a Jersey Shore kind of guy. Yet he can tell me exactly what viewers are saying about the estimable Deena Cortese during any episode, or how many people are annoyed by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and are tweeting about him (no, I haven’t been—too busy getting my GTL).

I’ll spare you the sordid details, but Bluefin Labs won’t. The Cambridge, MA-based tech company, which Roy co-founded in 2008, is all about understanding social-media conversations around TV programs and ads. Not just what’s being said and the sentiment behind it—as many other companies are tracking in various fields—but also the precise demographics of who’s saying it, what else they’re saying (and watching), and how their profile and comments are correlated with other people and programs, in an aggregate sense.

Bluefin Labs has gotten its share of press for its technology approach. But the company seems to be coming into its own as a business, and it has been garnering interest from TV network executives and big brand marketers as of late. So I sat down with Roy, Bluefin’s CEO, to learn more about the company’s history and approach.

Roy is a professor on leave from the MIT Media Lab. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, among other things. His company, which now has north of 30 employees, has deep computer-science research in its DNA (for better or worse). Based largely on its technology and team, it has raised more than $7 million from Redpoint Ventures, Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and other investors.

My first order of business: where did the name come from? Well, the story of Bluefin Labs (not to be confused with Bluefin Robotics, another MIT startup) goes back to Roy’s research at the Media Lab, where he has been a faculty member since 2000.

As he puts it, his research program was “built on understanding the relationship between words and context.” (Roy is known for having recorded a quarter-million hours of video of his young son’s early life, in part to understand how a computer might learn human language.) Around 2007, a PhD student of Roy’s, Michael Fleischman, was working on a project to analyze video footage of baseball games and audio of announcers talking about the games—a convenient (and fun) database for associating words and context. Conceptually, the goal was to teach a machine to understand what a “fly ball” or “home run” looks like, for applications such as video search.

A program director at the National Science Foundation happened to see an article about the baseball research. He called Roy and suggested he apply for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. Roy had no business experience—it was a “part of my brain I didn’t know existed,” he says—but he and Fleischman (who “has entrepreneurial blood running through his veins,” Roy says) wrote up a proposal. And in 2008, they were awarded a $100,000 SBIR grant. They had 48 hours to pick a name for their company, so they named it after a sushi bar in Porter Square (Blue Fin) where they had dinner. The name stuck.

Bluefin Labs started out by analyzing other types of sports programs, like football. Social media was taking off, so Roy and company ran a test with the National Football League to track what people … Next Page »

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The best way to get to know Dave Balter is over a beer. The founder and CEO of Boston-based marketing firm BzzAgent (now part of U.K.-based Dunnhumby/Tesco) is known for speaking his mind, but over a beer it’s even better. I’m not sure what he was drinking when he replied to my e-mail yesterday as he flew across the pond at 39,000 feet, but it appears to have loosened him up nicely.

I saw Balter speak at Angel Bootcamp in June, and his straight shooting impressed me then. Basically, he said that many entrepreneurs and execs have an inflated sense of themselves and their companies just because they’ve raised money and have had some success. Savvy investors should look for humble founders who are always learning, work harder than others, and have a fearless, grind-it-out mentality, he said. The following week, Balter came out with an article in Inc. Magazine in which he admitted his ego nearly destroyed BzzAgent; he implored entrepreneurs to stay humble, a process that he calls “the humility imperative.”

In addition to his CEO and angel investor duties, Balter is the author of two books on word-of-mouth marketing and the creator of numerous blogs, so he’s a bit of a polymath. He recently became a co-founder and executive chairman of Smarterer, another Boston tech startup. He’s also a newly minted Xconomist.

But his latest project (back to the beer now) is “DB Tech Prom,” a blow-out gala for the Boston tech community, to be held on October 20. There has been a lot of talk about creating a culture that celebrates entrepreneurship here in Boston, and this event seems to address that. At the same time, there’s no shortage of tech parties and gatherings these days, so I wondered what the real point was. Balter answered that, and much more, below.

Here are some highlights from our e-mail exchange:

Xconomy: Why is Tech Prom important for the Boston startup community, and what are its goals? If it’s about fostering a culture of celebrating entrepreneurship, how do we balance that with the humility imperative?

Dave Balter: After some very non-scientific poll-taking and survey-manipulating, we found that most individuals in Boston’s tech scene didn’t have the perfect prom experience. Some of this is of course due to intense, paralyzing high-school-nerdiness and less-than-impressive early-development social skills (see Sixteen Candles for widely referenced examples), but oh how things have changed. Now the techies have inherited celebrity status, and nerdiness…well, it’s in baby, it’s in.

This event should be a watershed moment that allows Boston to strut its stuff. And we’re not talking about flail-dancing during some Def Leppard song, but rather the celebration of how current … Next Page »

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Extreme Reach is going through some extreme growth—and it’s about to get very interesting, very fast. The Needham, MA-based video-ad distribution startup is rumored to be raising a large investment round, one that could fuel its rise to become one of the Boston area’s top software startups.

OK, advertising tech companies can be deadly boring to write about, but Extreme Reach isn’t one of those. For starters, its chief executive envisions a future in which you will walk down the street and see JumboTrons playing all sorts of video ads, “Blade Runner”-style. Naturally, he wants Extreme Reach to provide the technology to deliver those ads to every screen. And it’s not just JumboTrons—it’s also TVs, laptops, mobile devices, and whatever they invent next to distract us from real life.

“We really want to lead the market in fusing online advertising and TV,” says co-founder and CEO John Roland.

Xconomy first profiled Extreme Reach back in 2009, when the firm was just getting off the ground with its product. Roland and the founding team came from FastChannel Networks, an ad-tech company acquired by DG Systems in 2006. Extreme Reach is essentially using cloud-based technologies to go after a “superset of the same business” as FastChannel, which is now called DG FastChannel (and is a competitor to Extreme Reach, particularly in TV ad distribution).

But the recent performance of Extreme Reach warrants a major update here. The company has been “very profitable for the past 18 months,” Roland says. And check out this growth curve: $2 million in revenue in 2009, $7 million in 2010, and on target for $20 million in 2011, he says. The startup has gone from 17 employees to about 90 in the past two years, spread roughly evenly across Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle. And it’s looking to hire about 20 more staff, and to open offices in new cities over the next couple of months, Roland says.

This trajectory has “big expansion venture round” written all over it. Extreme Reach previously raised a total of $12 million from Greycroft Partners, Village Ventures, and Long River Ventures. But the company has only used about $5 million of that, Roland says. He acknowledges that the team is “considering” raising a $30-50 million round, but he declined to give any more details about prospective investors and so forth.

It sounds like the company is preparing to go big—and it could have a huge impact on the advertising and video tech cluster, especially around Boston, which is home to many complementary companies such as DataXu (ad analytics and optimization), Brightcove (video hosting), Nexage (mobile ads and publishing), Celtra (mobile ads and analytics), and Nanigans (social ad optimization), to name just a few.

Extreme Reach’s competitive advantages include its relationships with ad industries and its “domain expertise around video,” says Roland. Technologically, the company uses cloud-based Amazon Web Services and Nirvanix to store and serve video ads.

Roland calls the ad distribution sector “a very big space with a lot of room for different players.” But he acknowledges that he would like to see Extreme Reach “be the one place to go—the central clearinghouse” for video ads to be distributed. We’ll be watching to see if the company’s imminent expansion is successful in that regard.

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Seattle-based Lucid Commerce, an advertising tech company focused on TV marketers, said today it has raised $8 million in Series C financing led by Rho Ventures. StarVest Partners, Positec USA, and previous investors OVP Venture Partners and Greycroft Partners also participated in the round. Lucid Commerce was founded in 2005 and is led by CEO Tyson Roberts. Lucid’s TV analytics agency, Proceed Media Group, is based in Seattle and New York.

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When Dave Long first started pitching movie studios on a new way to market their old titles, he encountered a fair bit of skepticism. After all, what could a boardgame entrepreneur from soggy Seattle possibly teach Hollywood about selling its own stars?

Nearly 10 years later, the “Scene It?” brand—which builds trivia games around movie and TV clips—has been adapted to iconic titles like Seinfeld, South Park, James Bond, and Harry Potter. The company that Long co-founded, Screenlife, was acquired by Paramount in 2008 and has sold some 20 million games worldwide.

And Hollywood’s major players, Long says, have a different feeling about visitors from up north. ”There is a little mystique around Seattle,” he says. “I’ve had big executives say ‘Hey, what’s in the coffee up there? It seems like there’s a lot of creativity up there.’”

That kind of reception from entertainment bigwigs is helping to fuel an emerging cluster of Seattle companies that are taking innovative approaches to selling entertainment’s products and personalities. These entrepreneurs are building on the area’s traditional strengths in digital media and gaming, with hopes of helping the entertainment industry navigate the fundamentally shifted economics of the digital age.

The roster includes Hark, a startup that aims to spread bite-size chunks of content through the social sphere; Hypershow, a quietly profitable company enabling richly layered digital movies; and Giant Thinkwell, an incubator-stage company that wants to help celebrities of any stripe reach their fans through quirky social games.

Dave Long is back on the job as well. His new company, Exponential Entertainment, is working with the studios to develop promotional digital games—and this time, they’re starting with some major first-run movies.

Building bridges to the star-studded streets of Hollywood still has its challenges, even in a highly networked age. It’s simply harder to build relationships and keep your finger on the pulse of an industry when you’re hundreds of miles away from Sunset Boulevard.

But there are also advantages to being based in the Northwest, says David Aronchick, the founder and CEO of Hark.

“It’s far more cost-effective to work out of Seattle, and you obviously have an incredible depth of technical talent here that allows you to execute very quickly comparatively, and do some really cool things,” he says. “We’re not unique, but we certainly have a lot of cross-pollination because we’re a very migratory city. We pull in a lot of people from all over the place, especially people from on the West Coast. And this is a great place to set up shop.”

Here’s a deeper look at the startups I identified as part of Seattle’s emerging entertainment innovation cluster. I didn’t include folks who produce entertainment-themed content of their own, like the blog publisher Wetpaint, for example. The focus here is mostly on companies that are aiming for business partnerships with the entertainment industry.

Also purposely left off the list was a major name—the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb, which is owned by Amazon.com and headquartered in Seattle. Although it might seem kind of odd to think of … Next Page »

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Santa Clara, CA-based Peel, which has developed a personalized TV recommendation system that uses the Apple iPhone and a device it calls the Fruit to substitute for traditional remote controls, said May 2 that it has raised $16.7 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to about $25 million. New investor Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which was joined by Series A investor Redpoint Ventures and several seed-round investors. The company said it would use the funds to place the Peel device in more retail stores, improve the Peel mobile app to include additional content sources, and port the app to other mobile devices.

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Successful businesses take pride in knowing their customers, listening to them, and exceeding their expectations. They evolve their products, services, pricing, terms, and distribution based on what the market is looking for and how the landscape is changing—not on what worked in the past. This quality has never been more important than in the past two years of jarring recession and slow recovery.

Yet most businesses are not prepared for a momentous shift in their customers’ behavior, one that transcends any particular product or industry. This shift affects not only customers but employees, suppliers, partners, and investors—in fact, every audience companies need to reach, motivate, influence, and satisfy in order to survive and thrive.

We are changing the way we consume information, more profoundly and rapidly than most of us realize. The explosion of online and mobile video is the catalyst, and the future of corporate communications clearly will hinge on the ability to exploit this shift smartly enough to gain and keep the attention of the people whose impressions, decisions and behavior determine a company’s fate.

“Enterprise Television” will be the 24×7 media identity of successful businesses. With video as the dominant vehicle for nearly all communications, Enterprise Television can significantly increase the ability to:

• Market and sell products and services;
• Increase employee engagement and commitment;
• Build and enhance brand identity and loyalty;
• Project and protect corporate reputation and image; and
• Pro-actively manage and contain all forms of crisis.

The numbers are astounding. In November 2010, 172 million Internet users in the U.S. spent an average of almost 30 minutes per day watching online video. That’s 40 percent more time per day than in 2009. Also during November, Americans viewed 5.4 billion online video ads, which reached 49% of the total U.S. population. YouTube, the most popular online video site, is experiencing more than two billion playbacks a day (150 million of those through smart phones and other mobile devices), as 35 hours of new content is uploaded to its site every minute. The number of people watching video on their mobile phones is growing at a 40 percent annual clip. As broadband pushes rapidly into even more homes, businesses and wireless communications networks, these trends will only keep rising. Cisco, the leading provider of the communications gear that keeps the Internet humming, estimates that within four years, 90 percent of the traffic moving across the Web will be video.

The opportunities for business leaders and marketers may sound familiar: reaching audiences on their terms, targeting them more narrowly and efficiently, and reaping the benefits of interacting with them constantly. Sounds like the call of the Internet, right? The dominance of online video will enable these benefits, to be sure, but also will introduce an entirely new level of possibilities—for good or ill.

Consider GE. An iconic brand with a history of polished marketing campaigns, GE wanted younger audiences (its future customers, investors, and employees) to relate to its Ecomagination green initiatives. Rather than producing slick ads and buying expensive spots on traditional … Next Page »

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Brooklyn, New York-based SocialGuide, where TV viewers go to talk about TV shows as they air, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding, according to a press release. The seed round was run by Alex Zubillaga and angel investors. The company will use the money to build out its site, which is designed to foster social engagement between consumers and networks. “With more than half of the nearly 300 million Americans who watch TV having a second screen experience, the market is ripe for a social TV product that connects with consumers and networks,” said Alex Zubillaga in the statement.

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We saw acquisitions in the life sciences, Internet, and mobile sectors, as well as financings for startups spanning high-tech industries in New England.

—Akiban Technologies, a Boston database software maker, added another $3.2 million to its $6.5 million financing from 2009. The company, whose previous investors include North Bridge Venture Partners and Foundation Capital, used to be called Akiba.

—World Energy Solutions (NASDAQ: XWES of Worcester, MA, said it was selling 1.5 million shares of common stock (at $3.60 per share) to several institutional investors, to put toward new investments and acquisitions in the energy management sector.

—Google’s $700 million acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, a developer of airfare pricing and shopping software, can now go through, thanks to a proposed settlement by the U.S. Department of Justice that includes stipulations requiring Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) to play fair with other travel site competitors. The settlement comes in response to a coalition of other travel technology companies opposing the deal last fall. The Department of Justice said Google must continue to license ITA’s software, and must offer it to other companies in the field, among other things.

—Cambridge-based Blueprint Medicines raised $40 million in a big Series A financing led by Third Rock Ventures. The stealthy company is focusing on personalized cancer treatments, using molecular and cancer genome data and a proprietary chemical-compound library.

—Zixi, a Waltham, MA-based maker of software enhancing the delivery of HD content over the Internet, said it raised $4 million from Schooner Capital, and TV execs Sidney Topol and Maurice Schonfeld.

—nSphere, a Boston firm focused on connecting users with relevant content from databases online, acquired Boston-based mobile couponing startup Peekaboo Mobile, for a sum reported to be seven figures.

—Digital Lumens, a Boston-based company combining LED lighting with networking software to lower commercial energy costs, got $10 million from its existing investors, Black Coral … Next Page »

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File this under “one to watch more closely.”

Before I tell you about the company or its news, consider a few trends. People are watching more videos on their iPads and other tablet devices. Broadcasters, cable companies, and video content owners are starting to focus more on how to deliver TV shows and other entertainment “over the top,” directly to Internet-connected devices. Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is now competing in cloud-based entertainment (online music and video); one of its advantages over Netflix, Hulu, and others is that it’s an early adopter of using graphics chips (GPUs) for cloud-computing applications like video processing.

Speaking of video processing, there has been some interesting activity in that sector. In the last month, North Carolina-based Inlet Technologies was acquired by Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO) for $95 million. And the Irish Times reported a rumor that San Francisco-based online video firm Envivio plans to file for an IPO in July (with a valuation between $280-$340 million). That might leave Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies, one of the few independent companies left in the sector, in a good spot.

And Elemental has some news today: PBS, the broadcasting network, is using Elemental’s software, together with a system from Redmond, WA-based RadiantGrid, to convert video files to the right formats quickly and efficiently for distribution. The significance to Elemental is that the startup now counts seven of the 10 biggest media networks as customers, including Disney/ABC, CBS Interactive, and Time Warner Cable.

“It’s a sign you’ve been approved by someone willing to bet on new technologies to lower their cost and provide a better experience for consumers,” says Elemental CEO and co-founder Sam Blackman. He adds that PBS will save millions of dollars per year by switching to file-based video delivery. (If you know what a transponder is, the PBS system can now use one instead of seven of them, Blackman says.)

A quick update on Elemental: The company, which started in 2006 with the idea of reinventing how people watch video online, now has 39 employees, and its revenues this quarter are “very significantly greater” than in the same period last year, Blackman says. He declined to give more specifics about revenue growth or profitability.

Given some of the ongoing consolidation in online video companies, I asked him about possible exits for Elemental—but he didn’t take the bait. “Elemental is completely focused on creating great products for our customers,” he says. “Our focus is on not getting distracted.”

Nevertheless, the market is opening up to the mainstream, which could bode well for a fundamental technology play like Elemental. “The space is definitely heating up,” Blackman says. The trend towards Internet video delivery to devices like tablets, he says, is “a wave that’s growing very fast right now and lifting companies in the space.”

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It used to be that purchases began depreciating in value the moment you bought them. A new car, for example, might as well come with a little Kelley Blue Book countdown under the odometer showing its declining resale price. Indeed, the idea that property depreciates is so universal that it’s built into our accounting methods and tax codes. Traditionally, there have been only a few categories of things that don’t automatically drop in value over time, such as homes (up until 2008 anyway), precious metals, and maybe fine art and other collectibles.

But in the realms touched by software and the Internet, something different is happening. These days, many of the tools that modern consumers depend on, such as computers, smartphones, and entertainment devices, actually grow more useful and more valuable over time, thanks to a) the constant stream of new applications that exploit the devices’ capabilities in innovative ways, and b) the relatively new tradition of free updates for applications or operating systems you already own. In fact, when it comes to digital technologies, we’ve entered what you might call the Age of Appreciation. You can buy a gadget like an iPhone, an Android phone, or an iPad, and then sit back and watch it get more powerful without having to spend another cent.

It’s true that hardware itself still ages, breaks, grows obsolete, or loses its luster. Lord knows that my iPad, which seemed so shiny and magical just a year ago, looks a tad antiquated in my eyes now that the iPad 2 is out. I’m definitely not arguing that we can or should stop buying new stuff.

But I do think it’s worth slowing down to acknowledge the amazing situation we’ve created for ourselves, only 70 or so years into the era of electronic computers. In the Appreciation Age, objects containing computers grow in value because their value resides mainly in the software code they run, and that code can be so easily replaced, supplemented, or upgraded.

What got me thinking about all of this was a pair of relatively routine upgrades to Apple TV, the little black box that lets you play TV shows and movies from the iTunes Store on your big-screen TV. Last November, Apple updated the firmware inside the Apple TV from version 4.0 to version 4.1. And then, just a couple of weeks ago, it upgraded again to version 4.2. We’re so accustomed to such decimal-point changes these days—and they usually happen so automatically, quickly, and painlessly—that they often pass unnoticed. But these two updates definitely came with enough goodies to catch my attention.

The biggest change was the addition last November of something Apple calls AirPlay. This feature connects different devices over a home Wi-Fi network so that, for example, a music or video file stored on a Mac or a PC can be streamed to your TV. I like this feature because it has turned my TV into the sound system for my whole apartment. I can start an album playing on iTunes on my Mac or my iPhone, tap the AirPlay button, and throw the audio over to my TV, which (thankfully) has decent speakers. I also like to buy season passes for a couple of TV series on iTunes and download the episodes to my iPad. When I’m at home, AirPlay lets me watch those shows on the big screen, where they belong.

The more recent 4.2 update came with a big bonus for sports fans: Apple added the ability to watch live, on-demand Major League Baseball and National Basketball Association games for people with … Next Page »

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A seemingly insatiable demand for technology that can process TV signals and accommodate proliferating technical needs is helping to drive the growth at MaxLinear (NYSE: MXL), according to Kishore Seendripu, chairman and CEO of the Carlsbad, CA-based semiconductor design company.

In a presentation yesterday afternoon at Roth Capital Partners growth conference for small cap companies, Seendripu said demand for MaxLinear’s wireless and “system-on-a-chip” semiconductors is being driven by a host of forces in broadband video and cable TV, including:

—The continuing conversion from analog to digital television broadcasting, which requires integrated circuits that can process either signal.

—The increasing availability of high-speed broadband and wireless connectivity, which is driving demand for wireless TV receivers in chipsets targeting a host of devices.

—Rapid improvements in display technologies.

—The transition from standard to high-definition TV

—The proliferation of multimedia content about programming, actors, sports, and movies, which is accessible through terrestrial broadcast digital TV, satellite, cable, and telecommunications carrier services.

MaxLinear competes in with such U.S. chipmakers as Irvine, CA-based Broadcom (NASDAQ: BCOM) and San Diego’s Entropic Communications (NASDAQ: ENTR), although MaxLinear sells nearly all of its chips to consumer electronics and device makers in Asia.

Seendripu told investors and analysts that consumer electronics manufacturers, cable TV operators, and others want to integrate more TV receivers and the ability to process data from multiple channels in the chipsets they are designing for set top boxes, personal computer TVs, and other devices. “For us, the opportunity is to take these multiple-channel boxes and dramatically scale down the size, power, and cost requirements, Seendripu says.

Last year MaxLinear’s sales increased 34 percent (to $68.7 million from $51.6 million in 2009); Seendripu says he expects the company will continue to experience annual sales growth between 30 percent and 50 percent over the next three years.

The company also went public just over a year ago. While MaxLinear had what Seendripu called “a great IPO,” he told investors and analysts that market conditions were very bad. “We executed on our quarters, but the overall market came down,” he said, adding that the market for mobile TV has not met expectation.

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Littleton, MA-based ZeeVee has reinvented itself again. The startup launched four years ago to provide hardware for “bringing Internet television together and into the living room,” says CEO Vic Odryna. The ZvBox device didn’t exactly catch on in homes, but has found a niche in commercial settings like hotels, restaurants, and casinos. ZeeVee later introduced a PC, then Mac, software program called Zinc for browsing video content from the Web—from sources like Hulu, Amazon, and Netflix—to watch on TVs that connected to computers.

Today, ZeeVee is introducing a glammed up, cloud-powered Zinc to consumers, and is out to help smaller cable content providers better make sense of content on the Web for customers. So rather than offering Zinc as downloadable software, the service is now entirely HTML- and Javascript-based and accessible via any Web browser thanks to cloud-powered storage. The idea is to unify the Zinc experience across a number of connected consumer devices—from tablets to smartphones to laptops and of course, TVs.

“There’s no killer app, no killer device—it should all work together,” Odryna says.

With this update, for example, consumers can research a show or movie on their smartphones, put it in a queue on their customer account, and later watch it on their tablets, laptops, or connected TVs. Zinc also has a mode called “leanback” that can be better navigated through a TV remote’s arrows, rather than a computer or tablet mouse.

ZeeVee has also revamped the way content can be browsed and accessed on its site, Odryna says. Most users don’t naturally think of which platform they want to view a particular show or movie on (i.e. “I want to watch Glee on Hulu and The King’s Speech on Amazon”) but rather the actual content they want to consume. The new Zinc platform aggregates all of the information so users can simply browse it based on a title, in a “simple, clean, kind of Google-esque search bar,” Odryna says.

“Our new system is built to be completely aware of where all the content lives,” says Odryna. It also allows users to filter out Internet content sources that charge money, and enables them to filter content by the type of device they want to consume it on.

Individually, most of these features can be found in other technologies for connecting the TV to Web-based content (like Boxee), or for aggregating Internet video (like CBS’s recently acquired Clicker or Rovi’s Sidereel), Odryna admits. But Zinc is also focused on providing sophisticated content curation that goes beyond simple recommendations, he says.

And the big kicker is what it can do for smaller cable and telecom companies. Cable giants have been able to cut deals with content providers to deliver integrated Web TV and video to home cable devices like set top boxes and connected televisions, but the smaller providers don’t necessarily have the money to build that capability from the ground up. ZeeVee can provide all of the Zinc capabilities to cable service providers, who can then brand the service as their own and decide what functionality and content they want to offer their subscribers.

“Our intent here is we’ve rebuilt this as a platform for service providers,” who are “trying to find their customers an easier way to get to way more video content than they can offer,” Odryna says.

This is going to be the real moneymaker for Zinc, which has so far been offered for free to consumers, Odryna says. ZeeVee can’t name its cable provider customers, but Odryna says the company has gotten “quite a few” to buy its service.

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Santa Clara, CA-based Rovi (Nasdaq: ROVI), a provider of entertainment guide information and copy protection technology, announced yesterday that it has acquired San Francisco-based SideReel, a startup that provides personalized guides to online television content. Rovi said SideReel’s data will complement its new AllRovi film and music search and recommendation service. “By adding the SideReel.com website to our online portfolio, we believe Rovi can be the go-to source for finding and enjoying online content,” said Rovi vice president of marketing Dave Jordan in a statement. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Xconomy profiled SideReel and its founder Roman Arzhintar last month.

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It’s a great time to be a cord-cutter. Thanks to Internet companies like Amazon, Apple, Boxee, Google, Hulu, Netflix, and Roku, it’s getting easier every day to cancel your cable or satellite TV subscription without giving up on your favorite TV shows. There’s just one problem. If you do cut the cord—as I did two years ago—it gets a lot more complicated to figure out where to watch your shows, and when new episodes are available. These are things that your DVR usually handles if you’re a cable subscriber—and for better or worse, there’s no equivalent (yet) of a universal DVR for Internet video.

But there is help. The best service I’ve found for locating and tracking my favorite shows comes from a San Francisco startup called Sidereel. At the Sidereel website, you can search for your favorite shows, add them to a personalized calendar, and sign up for e-mails that will notify you when new episodes are out. There are also handy links to all the places online where you can watch the shows. For example, my current favorite show, Fringe, is available on Amazon, Hulu, iTunes, and Xfinity TV, and a Hong Kong-based site called Megavideo (who knew?). Last week, Sidereel also came out with an iOS app that lets you do most of the same things from your iPhone or iPad.

Sidereel isn’t a household name like YouTube or Netflix, but the angel-funded, 35-employee startup says it’s the world’s largest independent TV site. It attracts a million users every day, and over 10 million per month (the average user comes back once every three days). Unlike Apple or Hulu or most of the other players in the Internet TV space, Sidereel isn’t in bed with—or at war with—any particular TV network or media conglomerate, so its advertising-driven episode guide and tracking service can afford to be all-inclusive. With 9,200 shows in Sidereel’s catalogue, you’re pretty sure to find the shows you like.

I wanted to find out more about this unusual and under-recognized startup, so I headed over to Sidereel recently to spend some time with founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar. Right off the bat it was clear that Arzhintar isn’t your typical brash SoMa/Silicon Valley CEO—he’s more John Hodgman than Master of the Universe. He came to startup life only after abandoning careers as a lawyer and a globetrotting novelist. He says it’s “almost the story of my life” that “things end up being great but for all the wrong reasons.”

Arzhintar got interested in media at Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania, where he was a protege of the college president, former CBS president Arthur Taylor. But he took a roundabout path into the media business, getting a law degree, spending three years as a corporate attorney for a technology firm, realizing that “not only was I a bad lawyer but I also hated being a lawyer—there’s no interaction with people,” then spending a while writing fiction while touring France, Spain, Argentina, and Chile.

He finally ended up in San Francisco working for Guba, a startup that had created a search tool for Usenet, the vast Internet discussion system that predates … Next Page »

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