I visited GM’s Advanced Technology division in Silicon Valley on August 4, the same day the Detroit giant revealed its second-quarter financial results. The numbers were far better than one might have expected, given the automaker’s troubled recent history. GM said it brought in $2.5 billion in net income in the quarter, which was a bit less than it had earned in the previous quarter but nearly double the figure from a year earlier, back when the company was still mostly owned by Uncle Sam. The same day, GM said that its market share, after six years in free fall, has started to tick back upward.

Now, that’s encouraging data—but your mind is probably stuck a few sentences back, saying, “Wait, what? GM has an office in Silicon Valley?” Innovation, after all, isn’t a big part of the brand image at a company where the most iconic and profitable product is still the massive, gas-guzzling Chevy Suburban SUV.

But indeed, GM (NYSE: GM) does have such an office—inside a converted HP manufacturing facility in Palo Alto, on the same street with more conventional Silicon Valley players like WePay, mSpot, and Fry’s Electronics. GM doesn’t play up the facility’s existence in the press, and it took me more than a year to score an interview with its managing director, Byron Shaw. But once I’d toured the place and had a chance to quiz Shaw on his mission, I realized I’d picked a pretty appropriate time to visit. The situation at the office was—well, far better than one might have expected, given the automaker’s troubled recent history.

The biggest achievement for the 10-person outpost, which Shaw set up in 2006, is that it has managed to stay open for five years, despite the company’s bankruptcy, and broader turmoil in Detroit and the larger economy. “Surviving through the 2008-2009 downturn was key for us,” says Shaw. “We were able to maintain this operation without any cuts or loss of resources during that time. That was a big thing.”

Byron Shaw

But GM has a common-sense reason for keeping the Palo Alto office open, and it’s this: When you’re in your car, you’re not just driving anymore—you’re likely in “infotainment” mode, toggling between satellite radio, the GPS navigation system, cell-phone calls, and the like. Which means the components that make a car stand out in the marketplace are no longer made just from steel, rubber, or glass, but also from electronics and software. “The writing is on the wall,” says Shaw. “Look at what a car is today, and look at what it will be in 20 years. If you want to be competitive you have to have the best software and electronics in the industry, and you won’t get there if you don’t participate in Silicon Valley.”

Shaw’s squad doesn’t actually write software or build electronics. Rather, its job is to build relationships with all the people who do—so that when a new idea comes along that might make a future GM car better, the company knows about it.

Take Terminal Mode as an example. One staffer from Shaw’s office represents GM within an informal group of companies called the Car Connectivity Consortium (Honda, LG, Motorola Mobility, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Toyota, and VW are also members). The consortium is working on a way to make the infotainment system in your car into an extension of your smartphone. The idea is to let you access the content and apps on your phone via the in-vehicle sound system and LCD displays, with all user-interface elements automatically optimized for use while driving. (Sorry, no Doodle Jump allowed.)

Terminal Mode is both a set of Internet-based standards for moving all this data around, and an emerging system for evaluating and certifying new apps to make sure that they don’t exceed driver-distraction guidelines. Shaw says that Silicon Valley is “pretty much ground zero” for the consortium’s negotiations over Terminal Mode. For GM customers, the benefits of the company’s participation will be … Next Page »

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Why did Color, the $41 million startup that was launched with such force in March, slam instantly and with equal force into a wall of user dissatisfaction? The folks at Zurb have some thoughts about that.

Color’s iPhone app is designed to let users share photos with other people using the app in the same vicinity. The company describes it as “a fun way to create a public photo album with your friends.” But in an April blog post, Zurb marketing lead Dmitry Dragilev pointed out “the app only works if there are already a few users nearby.” People felt “confused and lost” because the app didn’t explain this subtlety, and didn’t give them a way to search for other people using Color.

In short, Color violated one of the fundamental principles Zurb tries to teach its clients: “It’s the click that matters most.” The firm formulated this maxim for the Web, but it applies equally well to mobile apps and other software. As Zurb founder Bryan Zmijewski explains, “Your online brand thrives and dies in the void that is created between clicks”—meaning the brief time between a user’s arrival at your site via an incoming link and his departure via an outgoing one. Unless your site (or app) lives up to the expectation created by the first click and delivers on the promise made by the second, nobody will care about it.

As you may be gathering already, Zurb is an unusual sort of design firm. It has a judgmental streak. And it’s not afraid to lecture clients about good and bad design, the dangers of complexity, and the need to think through a business strategy before sitting down to design anything.

Zurb "Chief Instigator" Bryan Zmijewski

Having been around for 13 years—which is roughly forever in Internet time—Campbell, CA-based Zurb has probably earned the right to have an attitude. If you got all your news from mainstream publications like Wired or Fast Company, you might think that the only design firm of note in Silicon Valley is Palo Alto-born Ideo, which employs more than 500 designers around the world. But boutique firm Zurb, with a team of just 14, has designed marketing sites, Web applications, and mobile apps for more than 150 companies, including a large group of what Zmijewski calls “grownup startups,” such as eBay, Facebook, McAfee, Netflix, Salesforce, Yahoo, and Zazzle. It claims to have generated over a billion dollars in market capitalization for its clients.

The Web is a far more automated and standardized place than it was in the 1990s, but Zmijewski (it’s pronounced shmi-yes-key) argues that companies actually need more help than ever understanding how to use their websites or mobile apps to hook customers. That’s because today’s sites and apps must often function as both the pitch and the product. “Ten years ago, there used to be a marketing site, and an application, and the story between the two could be completely different,” he says. “Now there is a marriage of the two and a kind of blending together. The marketing is a component of everything you click on. Understanding the words that are going to encourage a user to click in the right place or what are the places for the most profitable clicks; understanding how to drive people through a flow and get them to convert is all incredibly valuable, especially if your primary revenue stream is the Web.”

Zmijewski says Zurb designers think of themselves as “bottom-up strategists” who spend as much time helping clients conceive a product or service and how it might translate into revenue as they do thinking about its look and feel. “With an entrepreneur, I often say ‘Don’t worry about the marketing aspects of visual design right away. Start thinking about the mental model of the user that you’re trying to serve.’ If you have enough skills and you can collect enough information, maybe you don’t need help—or maybe you want a team to validate the idea and get it to market faster.”

Zmijewski’s first job out of Stanford, where he earned an undergraduate degree in product design in 1997, was at Skyline, a toy development company founded by Brendan Boyle. After Ideo acquired Skyline, Zmijewski spent some time soaking up the Ideo way of thinking and … Next Page »

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A San Diego startup founded by a couple of Qualcomm alums yesterday introduced its first commercial product, a system for Android-based mobile devices that organizes the daily flood of e-mail, calendar notices, alerts, text messages, and social media messages.

Baback Elmieh and Rachid El Guerrab founded Human Engines in 2008, initially providing customized user-interface technologies for Qualcomm and other “big brand” clients and partners that now include Google, Kyocera, and Lenovo. Because venture capital has been hard to find in San Diego, Elmieh says they initially bootstrapped Human Engines, and later raised some capital from their friends and families.

“We were immediately cash-flow positive and revenue-generating,” Elmieh says. “We’re 10 people and one of the cool things about the company is that we’re very interdisciplinary.”

The company describes Influx, its new commercial product, as a next-generation “universal inbox” that manages and streamlines the information overload that can burden heavily scheduled mobile users.

Influx organizes all of the events on your Android calendar into a daily “timeline viewer,” a display that Human Engines describes as its key innovation. The timeline, which can be scrolled, automatically combines incoming messages from a variety of sources and sorts them, according to when they came in, along the timeline. In essence, Influx is a visualization tool that flows like a river of information throughout the day.

“Currently, most people have to access corporate email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, calendar, and browser alerts in separate applications,” Elmieh says in a statement the company issued today. “It’s enough to create more than a little confusion in our busy lives. Influx simplifies things, and puts the focus back on the comprehensive user experience versus individual applications.”

Elmieh says the multi-disciplinary nature of Influx represents a new category of what he calls user experience (UX) technologies. It also explains why … Next Page »

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Memo to mobile-interface companies: Nuance is on the prowl.

The speech-recognition and imaging software giant (NASDAQ: NUAN), based in Burlington, MA, has acquired ShapeWriter, a Silicon Valley-based spinout from the IBM Almaden Research Center, for an undisclosed sum. Nuance has not spoken publicly about the acquisition, but a message on the ShapeWriter website as of yesterday reads, “ShapeWriter, Inc. is now part of Nuance. The ShapeWriter continuous touch application has joined Nuance’s portfolio of patented text input solutions recognized as the industry’s leading predictive text technology.” E-mail messages sent to Nuance’s media representatives this morning were returned, but the company hasn’t commented on the deal yet.

The deal is interesting on a few fronts. First of all, the technology in question—which lets you type on a touchscreen keyboard by sliding your finger to connect letters, instead of tapping them individually—is starting to take off. The key is that the software is predictive, so you can be sloppy and it will still get the words right most of the time. The big makers of mobile phones and operating systems are clamoring to offer consumers better ways of inputting text on touchscreens, so this technology seems to fit the bill. But given how similar the offerings look (at first glance) from tech companies like Nuance, ShapeWriter, Dasur, SlideIT, and Swype, I sense some patent battles and consolidation coming on.

Which brings us to interesting point No. 2. Seattle-based Swype is an early leader in the field, and a direct competitor to ShapeWriter and Nuance. Swype has venture backing from Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, and Docomo Capital, and has been inking deals left and right with original equipment manufacturers and wireless carriers to put Swype’s software on mobile devices. Knowing the guys at Swype, they are probably following the Nuance news with great interest, but won’t comment on it. (Though they have been getting lots of national media interest lately.)

Swype was founded in 2002 by Cliff Kushler and Randy Marsden, and is now led by CEO Mike McSherry. Kushler is the co-inventor of T9, the predictive texting technology that is used in some 4 billion devices worldwide. Guess who owns T9? That’s right, Nuance.

Over the past few years, Nuance has pursued an aggressive strategy of acquisitions in computer interfaces and speech. [Full disclosure: My brother-in-law is a former employee of Nuance who now works at Vlingo, a Cambridge, MA-based company that competes with Nuance in speech recognition---GH.] Nuance has also developed plenty of its own technologies. Back in March, the company introduced T9 Trace, its version of predictive, slide-y, touchscreen text-input software. Presumably, ShapeWriter adds a new dimension to the technology, but we’ll see where all of this goes.

I haven’t even mentioned Apple yet, but clearly Steve Jobs and Co. are watching this stuff closely. According to the New York Times, Swype doesn’t have a deal with Jobs just yet, but “is tinkering with software for the iPhone and the iPad and hopes to show it to Apple soon.”

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Seattle-area mobile startups Dashwire, Ground Truth, and Swype have been named to FierceWireless’s Fierce 15 list. The 2010 awards recognize innovation and intelligence in emerging companies in the wireless sector (follow the link above to read the FierceWireless writeups of each company). Dashwire makes software to sync people’s phones with the Web and help them share digital media. Ground Truth provides data and analysis on how consumers use the Web on mobile devices. And Swype has developed a new kind of text-input technology for touchscreen devices that could change the way people enter information on the go.

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[Updated 1:30 p.m. 5/13/10 with product images] Litl, the Boston-based startup behind the unconventional Webbook home information appliance, is about to jump into the tumultuous and competitive “connected TV” market. At the Flash and the City conference this weekend in New York, the company will announce plans for a set-top box designed to let people interact with Flash-powered applications on their home televisions through the same simplified Litl OS operating system that the startup developed for the Webbook.

The Litl set-top box, which doesn’t have its own name yet, will come out early next year and will connect both to users’ home Internet service and to their large-screen TVs through an HDMI port, Litl CEO John Chuang told me today. It will have a remote control with a touchpad for gesture-based commands and a slide-out keyboard for text entry. “The whole package is going to be very affordable,” Chuang says, and will, in essence, let users access the same kinds of cloud-based content available to owners of the $699 Webbook, but without a traditional computer in the loop.

We’re looking forward to hearing more details about Litl’s plans when Chuang speaks at the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship on June 17 at Babson College; he’ll be one of several “Innovator Profile” speakers giving multimedia presentations on their work. For now, Chuang says the Litl set-top box will be driven by the same usability principles behind the Webbook—namely, an emphasis on quick access to content and applications, with a minimum of fuss over file management and other types of drudgery that usually go with operating a PC. But as the Webbook’s close cousin, the set-top box will also be a new type of beast in the connected TV market. The emphasis for most makers of Internet-connected set-top boxes has been on making it easier to access Internet-based video content on big screens (ZeeVee’s Zinc browser, which we’ve covered here, here, and here, is one example). Chuang has something else in mind.

“Our vision for what can happen on a TV is perhaps a little different from what’s existing out there right now,” says Chuang. “The major focus for box makers is what I would describe as ‘putting TV on TV,’ whether it’s movies or TV shows, and whether it’s Roku or Boxee or ZeeVee. I think that’s great, and we will certainly be able to play movies and TV, but what we are going to do is a lot more than that. Our goal is building new types of applications and experiences that are much more Web-centric than TV-centric.”

What those experiences might look like isn’t quite clear yet, although early signs are visible in the applications or “channels” custom-designed by Litl for the Webbook, such as a simplified interface for Facebook, a Weather Channel, a Flickr photo browser, and a Bakespace cooking app. As I reported in March, Litl plans to release a software development kit (SDK) this week that will make it easier for any programmer familiar with Adobe’s Flash multimedia format to create more such apps for the Webbook and the new set-top box.

Chuang says Litl won’t spend a lot of time trying to replicate PC- or mobile-style apps for the set-top box. “Our view of the world is that a lot of the apps that are being built, whether it’s for an iPhone or a laptop or an iPad, are really individual-based, meant for one person to use at a time,” he says. “What we’re going to enable to world to do is create a different type of app, that perhaps is more group-centered. That’s what TV is good for—you generally have your TV in a family room with a couch in front of it. The photos and the home movies have a place and that works, but … Next Page »

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One of the founding fathers of the personal computing era, Microsoft Research technical fellow Chuck Thacker, has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, which is often called the “Nobel Prize of computer science.” The award, which was announced today, comes with a $250,000 prize, sponsored by Intel and Google.

Thacker, 67, was awarded the prize for his design of the Alto, the first modern personal computer with networking capabilities, which he built while at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the early 1970s. It had a TV-like display, which enabled the development of the modern graphical user interface, as well as connections to outside devices like servers and printers. Although the Alto was never commercialized, it influenced generations of PCs in the decades that followed. Thacker was also cited for his contributions to the Ethernet local-area network, the first multiprocessor workstation, and a tablet PC prototype.

I spoke with Thacker by phone this morning—he’s based at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley. “I was actually flabbergasted when I was told” about the award, he says. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d win.” That’s because the Turing Award traditionally has been given to theoreticians or software experts, not hardware people. The previous Microsoft winners of the Turing Award are the late Jim Gray, Butler Lampson of Microsoft Research New England, and Tony Hoare of Microsoft Research Cambridge in the U.K. (Thacker is also a recipient of the Charles Stark Draper Prize and the John von Neumann Medal from the IEEE.)

Thacker says the most interesting thing about the Alto computer was that “it was a complete system.” It connected to servers that stored information remotely and to printers that produced documents. Although the hardware looked “quaint” by today’s standards, he says, the software behind it persisted. In particular, the user interface—keyboard, mouse, how you interact with programs—looked a lot like what we still use today.

So I asked him how he thinks computing interfaces might evolve in the future, given how little they’ve changed in 30 years. Thacker says he thinks about it from the point of view of what computers have not been able to do so far. “One thing I can’t do yet is talk to my computer,” he says. “I can’t carry on a conversation, and I’d like to see that.”

A second area of intrigue is computer-controlled cars and transportation. “I’m not that great a driver. The dents in my door demonstrate that,” Thacker says. “Computers should drive.” (He says he has followed the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions for driverless vehicles for the past few years.)

Given his work at Microsoft Research in tablet computing in the late 1990s—which helped lead to Microsoft’s first Tablet PC—I asked Thacker where he sees the field … Next Page »

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Please excuse the March Madness sports metaphor, but Microsoft is picking up the intensity around its innovative new products (and earlier-stage projects) this week. Between its TechFest research showcase, healthcare software product announcements, and a special local appearance by CEO Steve Ballmer, the Redmond, WA-based company is on a serious PR roll, getting the word out about its technology across a wide range of sectors. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. All of this takes place in the afterglow of Microsoft’s introduction of Windows 7 last fall, and its new mobile operating system, Windows Phone 7 Series. Here’s a quick wrap-up:

—CEO Steve Ballmer is giving a talk on the future of cloud computing at the University of Washington tomorrow morning. It will be at 10 am in the Microsoft Atrium of the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. And for the hands-on techies out there, you can take a tour of a portable Microsoft data center (housed in a cargo container), which demonstrates part of the company’s plan to “modularize” this crucial piece of equipment.

—TechFest, the annual showcase of Microsoft Research demos, was in full swing this week. A few projects to improve user interfaces grabbed me the most. One is “Body Computing,” whereby a person could use finger gestures or could tap on his or her own arm to control a computer; the system tracks electrical muscle activity and/or mechanical vibrations using sensors embedded in an armband. Another project is “Mobile Surface,” whereby you can interact with a screen projected on a table (which might show pictures or documents, say) using a mobile phone connected to a camera and projector system. The technology behind it is a bit similar to Project Natal, the Xbox add-on interface slated for release later this year.

—Health-IT software has become a major effort within Microsoft. Its Health Solutions Group numbers about 700 staff (800 if you count the new Sentillion team in Andover, MA). This week, the company announced HealthVault Community Connect, a unified software platform that allows hospitals to gather patients’ electronic medical information and make it available to patients and their referring doctors. It’s a big step in Microsoft’s plan to reach consumers through their physicians and drive mainstream adoption of electronic health records (and the HealthVault platform). The new software for hospitals will be widely available in the third quarter of 2010.

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For the second year straight, our readers have made stories about the biotech startup Follica’s plans to treat baldness, Terrafugia’s street-legal aircraft, and the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child Foundation among Xconomy Boston’s five most popular posts for the year. What conclusions can we draw from this?

Well, none. But I’ll speculate that some stories, when told well, strike chords deep within our psyches. And perhaps people don’t quickly, if ever, tire of such stories—as long as they still dream of operating flying cars, spurring growth of natural hair on their balding heads, or making laptops affordable for children in poor countries. (If you want to revisit last year’s greatest hits, you can check them out here.)

But that’s enough psychoanalyzing of our readers. At the end of the day, Xconomy is very fortunate to be completing its second full year with terrific support from readers, including those who shared insightful comments that helped to elevate and propel discussions around our stories. Also, it’s worth noting that as of today Wade wrote all but one of our five most popular stories posted in 2009. (Wade humbly tells me that there’s a larger online audience for tech stories than life sciences stories, but I think the popularity of his articles has more to do with his writing than his industry focus.)

Without further ado, the following are our top five stories of 2009 ranked in order of popularity:

1. Road-Ready Airplanes

It’s no surprise that Wade’s live blogging post from the Boston Museum of Science about the maiden flight of Woburn, MA-based Terrafugia’s street-legal airplane was a huge hit with readers; Wade was quick to deliver the goods on what was easily one of the most highly anticipated test flights in recent history. And the Terrafugia Transition appears to live up to the hype in videos of the highly publicized first flight. This is Terrafugia’s second year at No. 1—last year Wade’s profile of the company took the top slot.

2. A Hair-Raising CEO Selection

Does the word alopecia mean anything to you? Well, the clinical term for baldness means a TON to the folks at Boston-based Follica and its many followers, who seem to get really jazzed about the prospects of the startup’s yet-disclosed experimental treatment for hair-loss. Bob’s story in May about Follica hiring William Ju to be its new CEO set off another outpour of reader comments (1,240 and counting as of yesterday afternoon). And Bob’s August 2008 post about Follica’s $11 million Series B financing is still one of our best-read posts each month.

3. Innovative Computing User Interfaces

Wade’s post about his experiences at an annual convention for computing user interface experts offered an exciting peek at new ways people could interact with mobile devices and other computers in the future. A favorite presentation at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) meeting in Boston was the Microsoft research Patrick Baudisch’s presentation on “back-of-device” interfaces, an answer to the “fat finger problem,” which would enable users of small mobile devices to control screens with a touch-enabled controller literally on the back of devices.

4. Where Markets and Innovation Align

It’s great to read about markets and industry catching up with bleeding-edge technologies. Wade wrote about how this dynamic is at work at … Next Page »

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Woburn, MA-based Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) has paid $1.9 million in cash to acquire the assets of Planetweb, a dot-com-era holdover based in Redwood Shores, CA, according to a Monotype announcement today. Founded in 1996, Planetweb had raised nearly $60 million in venture backing to develop Internet browsers for televisions and other devices; its current lead product is SpectraWorks, a graphical user interface embedded in digital cameras, cable set-top boxes, and DVD players. Monotype says it plans to build its font and layout engines into the SpectraWorks user interface.

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For Mik Kersten, it all started when he saw Maria Klawe speak at the University of British Columbia. It was the mid-1990s, and Klawe, a distinguished mathematician and computer scientist—now the president of Harvey Mudd College and recently appointed to Microsoft’s board of directors—was giving a lecture to students and faculty. “She talked about her hippie days traveling in India, and it convinced me to switch to computer science,” Kersten says.

Kersten was an undergrad at UBC studying anthropology. Today, he is the co-founder and CEO of Tasktop Technologies, a Vancouver, BC-based startup that is working to reinvent user interfaces for software developers and other knowledge workers so they can be much more productive. It is one of those quiet Northwest success stories you probably haven’t heard much about yet, but you will—Tasktop is profitable, and has recently signed a number of important deals with the likes of IBM and Microsoft.

The company’s basic idea is to organize work around tasks, instead of files, folders, or Web pages. Kersten’s “task-focused interface” builds tools and information around the specific task you are trying to accomplish—writing code to import digital media into a library, say, or analyzing trends in a database. Tasktop’s software automatically gathers screenshots, notes, e-mails, and other information related to the task at hand and puts it on your desktop in a single handy spot for reference. If you come back to the task an hour later, or a week later, your desktop is returned to where you left off.

It’s a far cry from the way most people work on tasks today, using tools that are glorified Windows Explorer or Mac Finder applications, or Outlook or Google search tools that make you scroll through tons of results, Kersten says. As a software engineer himself, he had felt quite a bit of personal pain. “I was getting bad RSI [repetitive strain injury] in my forearms,” he says. “I was spending more time looking for the information I needed to write code than actual coding.”

Kersten’s early career path took him to Palo Alto Research Center (formerly Xerox PARC) in Silicon Valley, where he worked on user interfaces until 2003. There, he was exposed to a technology called “degree of interest trees.” This is a type of interface that lets you navigate large, branching structures of information. The amount of detail displayed is based on your level of interest in each item, so you don’t get swamped with lots of information about low-priority matters. As Kersten explains, this “makes it easier for programmers to work with very complex systems”—like having to refer to millions of lines of code, or search through 100,000 files. “Programmers get completely overloaded with information,” he says. “It’s extremely difficult to find what they’re looking for.”

After a six-month stint at Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software (billionaire Charles Simonyi’s company), Kersten decided to quit industry to do fundamental research on how to improve … Next Page »

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It’s been a very busy week for news in the mobile industry. First, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) rolled out a one-click mobile payments service that promises to shake up the world of mobile-app developers and distributors. Then it seems like all hell broke loose, courtesy of the massive CTIA wireless expo going on in San Diego through this Friday.

Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening in mobile-device interfaces, iPhone apps, and other mobile news from the Northwest:

—In the area of speech interfaces, Seattle-based TravellingWave announced today at CTIA its “voice-powered text prediction” application for mobile phones. The idea is to combine keyboard-based text input prediction with speech recognition so you don’t need to press as many buttons, while keeping the text-entry process accurate and simple to use. TravellingWave was founded in 2004 and is backed by its founder, angel investors, and grants from the National Science Foundation.

—Not to be outdone, Microsoft’s Bing and Sprint said today that the upcoming Samsung Intrepid smartphone (available Oct. 11), which runs on Windows Mobile, will incorporate Microsoft’s Tellme software to enable consumers to use their voice to dial contacts, compose text messages, and search the Web for business listings, cafes, weather and traffic reports, maps, and directions. It’s the first mobile device to use Tellme, as far as I can tell.

—Seattle-area startup Glympse, which focuses on mobile location sharing, announced yesterday it has been selected as a “showcase” application within Windows Marketplace for Mobile, Microsoft’s recently announced mobile app store. So Glympse is now available on Windows phones with GPS, and is in private beta trials on the iPhone. Back in May, Glympse first launched its service on T-Mobile phones with Google’s Android operating system, and CEO Bryan Trussel talked with me about the company’s strategy.

—Who knew that developers in Portland, OR, had put out so many iPhone apps? Silicon Florist reported yesterday that the region is responsible for making more than 40 apps in the iTunes store, including prominent ones from Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Whole Foods, and Zipcar. The list also includes Stanza, the hit e-book app developed by Lexcycle, which was co-founded by Portland resident Marc Prud’hommeaux. Lexcycle has since been absorbed into Amazon. (Don’t mess with Seattle.)

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The digital photo frame is one of those consumer-electronics categories that seems perpetually poised to take off, but never quite gets airborne. I bought a Ceiva frame for my grandmother back in 2001—it plugged into a phone line and downloaded new pictures from the Ceiva website every night at 3 a.m. Today, things are pretty much the same. The displays of the latest models are brighter and crisper, and most come with memory-card slots instead of phone cords. But there has been surprisingly little innovation around the basic idea of the digital frame. They’re still just passive devices that sit on your desk or bookcase, cycling through the same pictures over and over until someone updates the memory card.

Isabella Products in Concord, MA, is trying to change that. On October 30, it will launch Vizit, which masquerades as a digital photo frame but is actually a sophisticated, two-way photo management device connected to a nationwide cellular data network. The product will have a price tag commensurate with its capabilities—in the $250 to $280 range, plus a monthly subscription fee. I know a lot of early adopters who won’t balk at that price, considering that the Vizit—the brainchild of local venture capitalist and Motorola veteran Matthew Growney—raises the bar for the whole category of digital frames, just as the iPhone did in the mobile world.

The Vizit is attractive, but much more importantly, it’s smart and it’s connected. “The beauty is not so much in the physical design, although our guys have come from places where design matters, like Motorola and Bose and Nike and Facebook,” says Growney. “To us, it’s about the connectedness of the device…it’s about managing the sharing experience.”

On the hardware side, Vizit has an impressively large screen, measuring 10.4 inches diagonally, which is 2.4 inches more than Ceiva’s largest frame. It has HD-quality resolution of 800 pixels by 600 pixels, compared to Ceiva’s 640 by 480.

But it’s the interactivity packed into the screen that really sets the device apart. Trust me, I’ve seen lots of these devices, and the Vizit—which I got to play with last week during a visit to Isabella’s office inside Concord’s historic old Damon Mill building—is unique.

For one thing, it’s a touchscreen device, which means there aren’t any cryptic buttons on the side or the back of the frame: all the controls are right on the display. For another, it’s got an elegant user interface that makes it easy to do things like rotating photos, choosing different slide show transition effects, or selecting which photo album you want to view.

It’s also got the built-in cellular modem, which means it can download photos from the Internet without having to be plugged into a phone line or an Ethernet cable or integrated into a home Wi-Fi network. And the modem doesn’t just grab photos from the network: it can also … Next Page »

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When you’ve been at Microsoft for 17 years, you’ve seen a few things. This morning, Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, shared some of his hard-earned wisdom in a keynote talk at company headquarters in Redmond, WA—helping to kick off Microsoft Research’s 10th annual faculty summit.

Mundie outlined his broad thoughts on the future of computing and Microsoft’s role in it—and went into pretty good depth in spots. Nothing too earth-shattering, but it was cool to hear the technologist discuss the roadmap of where his company may be headed with more of a research and innovation hat on, and not much marketing slickness. The backdrop of his talk was that computing devices are becoming more and more pervasive (at least in wealthy countries), so what are the emerging opportunities? “Computing everywhere will be something we take for granted,” Mundie said. “But it was not common knowledge as little as 15 years ago.”

“Today, computers work at your command,” Mundie continued. His vision, he said, is that they will transition to “working on your behalf.”

Here are my top five takeaways from his talk:

1. It’s all about the natural user interface.

Today’s devices are able to understand voice, handwriting, and touch commands better than ever before, but nobody has really put it all together yet. “All the things we talk about as natural user interfaces have been largely used one at a time as enhancements to [graphical user interfaces],” Mundie said. Gesture recognition, expressive responses, immersive 3-D virtual environments, and understanding of context—these advances in computing algorithms will lead to software that is “better at anticipating what you might want.” (Mundie said that Nathan Myhrvold, who hired him, pointed out that early movie cameras were used to film plays before people experimented with them to create new kinds of film experiences. In the same way, better user interfaces will lead to new ideas about how to use software, Mundie implied.)

2. It’s time for the digital assistant—but fear not, real assistants.

Mundie showed a demo of Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz talking to a “robotic receptionist” (on a screen) to schedule a meeting. The software used machine vision to track Horvitz’s movements, gaze, and orientation to the screen, speech recognition to understand what he was saying, and speech synthesis to communicate back to him—all in real time. Mundie admitted each element was still rough, but … Next Page »

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Dan Weld spends a lot of time thinking about the Web and how to get the best information out of it. Weld is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Netbot, AdRelevance, and Nimble Technology. He is also a venture partner with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Some of his research projects include customizable software interfaces and ways to improve information finding on Wikipedia. He is an expert in Web search, information extraction, and adaptive user interfaces, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask: what is the big deal with Microsoft’s Bing, anyway?

In a recent interview, Weld talked about the improvements Bing has made over Google and other current search engines (only slight), the future of Web search, and a hint at a project he is working on that he thinks could change the way we find information online.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: Let’s start with your general impressions of Bing.

Dan Weld: I think it’s a nice, if small, advance. Some of the things they’ve done in this relaunch are primarily architectural and will support their plans for the future. In terms of what is actually available right now, the biggest change is integrating vertical search in a uniform way.

X: What does that mean?

DW: When you think of search, everyone thinks about Google, and maybe Yahoo, but there are many other kinds of search, like people searches (you can think about Facebook as a people search), travel search (Kayak and Expedia), health information sites. You can think about Wikipedia as providing a search for encyclopedic information. Shopping searches—Amazon is great in part because it makes it easy to find so much information about the products, and reviews of products. All of these are examples of vertical search experiences. Instead of having wide coverage, you have a better experience within a narrow range.

Bing has tried to marry those things into an integrated wide search experience. All of the engines have been doing this. If you do a search on Google for a movie, you might see information about show times and trailers at the top, for example. Bing has gone further in some directions than people have gone before, in this aspect. If you look at their tabbed pane, it lets you look at different kinds of information right there.

X: But doesn’t Google do that too?

DW: All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done. With the shopping tab, you get a faceted interface, meaning you can narrow your search using categorical information, restricting yourself to a particular brand or price range. Those facets are specific to the object you’re searching.

X: So if this is just a small change, what kinds of big changes can we expect to see in the future?

DW: Lots of people are happy with search today, but that’s because they set their sights too low. I think search is going to change enormously in the future, and I think it’s going to do so by … Next Page »

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Seattle-area software startups AdReady, Swype, and TeachStreet won “best in show” at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Fast Pitch Forum and Tech Showcase yesterday. The winners, selected from 23 presenting companies, were voted on by the audience. The prizes include tickets to Safeco Field.

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It is high season for tech gatherings in Seattle. The next couple of weeks will feature a dizzying array of events chock-full of compelling computing content, not to mention top-tier networking. How is a busy entrepreneur, researcher, or investor to choose which ones to attend? Let Xconomy be your guide…

—This Wednesday, April 22 (yes, tomorrow), the Washington Technology Industry Association is putting on a feast for all of you interested in the future of human-computer interfaces. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson is moderating an all-star panel of interface experts: Cliff Kushler of Tegic and Swype (text-input software for mobile devices); James Landay from the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering department (activity sensing, user behaviors); Bert Keely of Microsoft (Windows Pen & Touch technologies); and Jeff Pobst of Hidden Path (gaming interfaces).

Bryant says, “The kind of topics we’ll be discussing are at the heart of what user-centered computing will look like in the coming years and decades.” He points out that when you think about everything from the Wii to Windows 7 to Web browsers (and throw in the iPhone and GPS devices for good measure), “the entire history of computing can be summarized as ‘advances in user interfaces.’” Now there’s food for thought.

—How far along is Windows Azure? Microsoft’s cloud computing service was announced last fall, and is seen as a competitor to Amazon Web Services, Google’s App Engine, and other offerings like VMware’s “virtual data center” operating system. But who is actually using it yet, how does it work, and what is Microsoft’s cloud strategy? On April 30, Microsoft is hosting an event organized by the WTIA where it will answer those questions, and more. Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s general manager of cloud infrastructure services, will give an overview of Azure and Microsoft’s view of cloud computing software and services.

A bonus speaker will be Ian Knox, director of product management at Skytap, a Seattle-based cloud computing and virtual lab startup. Knox will talk about using cloud computing for Windows applications and lowering IT lab costs, among other things. All in all, it’s essential stuff for anyone interested in shaping the future of the cloud.

—On May 1, the Technology Alliance is hosting its annual State of Technology luncheon. This year’s theme is “framing the future.” The guest of honor is Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, who will have a keynote conversation with the UW’s Ed Lazowska. (We’ll see if he puts Ozzie on the spot about Windows Azure or Microsoft Live Labs.) Throw in an address by Gov. Chris Gregoire, a benchmarking presentation by Technology Alliance board chair Jeremy Jaech (of Verdiem), and recognition of the Alliance of Angels’ 2009 company of the year, and you have the technology event of the season, not to be missed.

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After a flurry of Northwest deals the previous week, the past seven days have been fairly quiet, with some activity in security software, aviation, and biotech.

—Kent, WA-based Naverus, a company that makes advanced navigation systems for airlines and air traffic managers, raised $4 million from existing investors Foundation Capital and East Peak Partners. I got the story behind the company and its efforts to make flight paths greener and more efficient, from chief marketing officer Dottie Hall (a very early Microsoft employee from the late 1970s).

—Washington state’s venture capital numbers for the first quarter of 2009 came in, and not surprisingly, they’re pretty grim. But they’re certainly not without hope, as VCs from OVP Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Buerk Dale Victor told me in an interview. We also tallied the state’s top five venture deals of the first quarter, which span the areas of biotech, lasers, user interfaces, and cloud computing software.

—Seattle-based Haute Secure, a maker of anti-malware security software, has been acquired by TRUSTe, an online privacy firm in San Francisco. Financial terms were not disclosed. Haute Secure was funded by Baseline Ventures and Sherpalo Ventures.

—GridNetworks, an online video startup in Seattle, is merging with Global Media Services, a New York firm. No financial terms were given. The combined company will provide streaming video and other media services for personal computers, mobile devices, and TV. GridNetworks was founded in 2005, and was backed by Comcast, Cisco, and Panorama Capital.

—Portland, OR-based SignaCert, an IT security and management software startup, raised $8.8 million in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors including DCM, Intel Capital, and SmartForest Ventures. In-Q-Tel and other strategic investors also participated.

—Luke reported that BiPar Sciences, a Brisbane, CA-based developer of cancer drugs, is being acquired by Paris, France-based Sanofi-Aventis in a deal that could be worth up to $500 million if the company’s lead drug candidate reaches certain milestones. Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital led a $13 million Series A funding round in BiPar in 2004.

—Lastly, we ran a two-part feature story on how some of Seattle’s most prominent venture dealmakers are approaching the University of Washington’s tech transfer office, and its researchers, in search of the next great UW spinout. The consensus seems to be that the UW has long been a world leader in commercializing technologies, and now the intensity has been jacked up an extra notch.

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A few local tech companies have still been able to raise significant new funding rounds in a very tough climate. The latest is Seattle-based Adapx, which is announcing today it has raised a $9 million Series B round, led by new investor UV Partners in Salt Lake City, UT. Existing investors OVP Venture Partners, based in Kirkland, WA, and Paladin Capital Group in Washington, DC, also participated in the round, which closed in March.

Adapx (pronounced “adapts”) makes digital pen technology that allows workers in the field to take handwritten notes and efficiently upload them to a computer. The technology allows workers to use pen and paper to collect data, mark up charts and maps, and draw on design diagrams, and then digitize their pen strokes by docking the pen to their PC. That way, they can automatically integrate the info with mainstream software applications like Microsoft Office, Excel, Autodesk (for engineering design), and ESRI (mapping).

“Investors and customers really get our story. Adapx has exceeded our expectations for adoption,” says CEO Ken Schneider. The company, founded in 1999, counts more than 500 companies and government organizations as customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense, NASA, the Port of Seattle, Holland America Line, and various public works agencies and construction firms.

OK, but digital pen technology has been around for many years, and has never really taken off. So what’s special about Adapx? From what I can tell, two things. First of all, the technology really seems to work. In the past, everyone from Apple to Logitech to Microsoft has developed digital pens to capture handwriting and integrate it with digital files. These systems have tended to be clunky and unreliable, or just too much of a pain for mainstream customers to get started on. Some have required special paper, for instance.

The Adapx version, which uses technology from the Swedish firm Anoto, requires no special paper—though it does require you to print out the form (a spreadsheet or chart, say) you’ll write on, using software that prints a special watermark to help the pen keep track of where on the page you’re writing. The pen, which is the size of a magic marker and writes regular ink, contains a tiny scanner that captures your handwriting and stores it until you dock the pen with your PC. “That allows the paper to become the device,” says Schneider.

Which then leads to the second main advantage of Adapx. The handwriting is uploaded, recognized as text, and integrated into an Excel form or Office document automatically. The point here is that … Next Page »

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I spent a couple of days this week at CHI, the big annual meeting of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). It was the first time since 1994 that the conference—the main international gathering for scholars and practitioners in user interface design—has come to Boston. But it wasn’t the first time that a single company, namely Microsoft, has dominated the proceedings. Matching statistics from other recent CHI meetings, authors from Microsoft Research supplied nearly one out of eight papers presented at the conference, and researchers Ken Hinckley and Meredith Ringel Morris from MSR’s Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group in Redmond were co-chairs of the technical program.

I’m a sucker for this stuff, so I thought almost all of Microsoft’s 25 CHI papers were interesting. But two of the talks in particular, presented back-to-back on the closing day of the conference, contained enticing new ideas about how we might use computing devices in the future. One of them was Hinckley’s own paper on Codex, a prototype dual-screen computer system. The other was a paper by Patrick Baudisch on “back-of-device” interfaces, an intriguing alternative to today’s touch-screen-based devices.

Baudisch, a German native, is a former Xerox PARC researcher who joined Microsoft in 2002 and recently accepted a joint position at the Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam in Germany. One of the questions he’s been studying over the past few years is whether it’s feasible to move the main touch interface for small mobile devices (think phones, mini-tablet computers, iPods, Zunes, and the like) from the front—where your fingers occlude your view of the screen—to the back.

After all, the smaller devices get, the less screen real estate they’ll offer, and the larger the fraction of the screen that’s covered up by your finger when you try to manipulate it. “The scientific term for this is the fat finger problem,” Baudisch deadpanned during his talk.

If the touch-sensitive surface on a mobile device were on the back instead, gestures like pointing, tapping, and selecting wouldn’t get in the way of the screen. At least, that’s the idea. But that creates a new challenge—seeing where your finger is going. So Baudisch’s team has been experimenting with a variety of approaches, including using transparent screens (which, unfortunately, don’t leave room for the electronic guts of most devices) and attaching a boom with a camera to a device’s backside (which is predictably clunky).

Baudisch’s newest prototype, and the one he described yesterday, is called nanoTouch. It’s a squarish little gadget resembling an iPod nano, with a 2.4-inch screen that dominates the front and a capacative trackpad similar to the mousepad on a laptop computer attached to the back.

The nanoTouch is designed to be held by the edges in one hand while you operate the trackpad with the index finger of your other hand. The cleverest touch, so to speak, is that the device uses “pseudotransparency” to provide visual feedback—basically, the “cursor” is a life-size picture of a finger that tracks with the position of your actual finger, as if you were looking through the device with X-ray glasses.

It’s a nifty effect that neatly captures the concept of back-of-device interaction; the tip of the simulated finger even turns white when you press harder against the screen, as if the blood were rushing away from that spot. Baudisch’s nanoTouch demo provoked a little flurry of publicity back in December, with coverage by Engadget and New Scientist, among others (I’ve embedded a nanoTouch video from New Scientist below). But as Baudisch explained yesterday, the finger is just for show—it’s there to quickly train the user on what’s happening. “You never see the finger in an application,” he said. “For any real application, we reduce the touch to a single point—which is how we get the finger out of the equation and enable high precision.”

By masking the screen of the nanoTouch prototype and leaving less and less of the trackpad active, Baudisch’s group has been studying just how tiny manufacturers might be able to make future devices without sacrificing usability. They’ve found that as long as a target (meaning, say, an onscreen button) is more than about 3 millimeters across, it’s possible to accurately manipulate a device with a screen measuring as little as 8 millimeters diagonally—less than the size of the fingernail on your pinky.

Baudisch suggests that such devices might be made into pendants, wristbands, or belt buckles—all of which would surely be more fashionable than wearing your smartphone on a geeky belt holster. “Back-of-device interaction is the key to making extremely small pointing devices,” Baudisch concluded.

But while certain types of devices such as music players may keep shrinking (as this classic Saturday Night Live skit about the “iPod Invisa” predicted), we’ll probably still want to … Next Page »

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