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

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

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

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

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Plans for IPOs and venture funding dominated the New England deals news this week.

—A new seed fund, backed by venture firm New Enterprise Associates and hosted by Harvard, came out of the woodwork last week. The Experiment Fund will invest up to $250,000 in seed funding in selected startups, with a focus on technologies that come out of Cambridge, MA. The news broke just a few days ahead of Facebook—the one that got away—revealing its plans to go public.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge-based startup working on treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its plans to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public offering.

—A PricewaterhouseCoopers and National Venture Capital Association report shows a mixed picture for life sciences investing in 2011, my colleague Arlene reported. Biotech companies raised $4.7 billion, showing a 22 percent increase over 2010, but the deal volume for the sector dropped 9 percent to 446 transactions. Medical devices companies also showed an increase in funding dollars but a drop in number of deals.

—Cambridge-based Brightcove set the price range of its initial public offering at $10 to $12 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The video hosting startup plans to sell 5 million shares, and give underwriters the option to purchase another 750,000 shares. Brightcove first filed paperwork last August indicating it intended to raise $50 million in an IPO.

—Synchroneuron of Waltham, MA, nabbed $6 million in Series A funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The startup is developing treatments for movement disorders such as tardive dyskinesia.

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This week’s deal news covered a breadth of sectors: biotech, medical devices, mobile applications, software, and robotics. Not to mention a major venture capital fund raise.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Avila Therapeutics was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million, with as much as another $575 million available in milestones. Avila is a maker of “covalent” drugs that are designed to shut down the activity of disease-causing proteins for a prolonged period of time.

—Verastem, a young Cambridge, MA-based biotech working on drugs targeting cancer stem cells, completed its initial public offering, led by UBS and Leerink Swann. The IPO (5.5 million shares sold at $10 apiece) represented a strong showing among investors, as Verastem originally indicated it planned to sell 4.5 million shares priced between $9 and $11 each. The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy another 825,000 shares.

—Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a maker of knee implant systems, raised $89 million in a Series E funding from private equity investors and government investment funds abroad. The company said it will put the money toward sales, manufacturing, and expansion of its technology.

—Co3 Systems, a maker of data loss management software, received new funding from Fairhaven Capital. The Cambridge, MA-based startup said it will put the money (whose sum was undisclosed) toward sales, marketing, and engineering.

—Malborough, MA-based medical device startup Navilyst Medical will be acquired by Albany, NY-based AngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO) in a transaction valued at $372 million, based on the company’s $14.20 per share closing stock price Monday. Navilyst, which focuses on … Next Page »

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The blow from getting a higher-than-expected bill from someone like your lawyer could be softened it if came attached to a 60-second video message explaining the special things he or she actually did in detail.

At least, that’s what Dave McLaughlin thinks—and he’s building his new startup Vsnap around the idea.

McLaughlin has been around the block before as an entrepreneur. He co-founded the mobile payments startup Fig Card, which was acquired by eBay last spring. Coincidentally, the 2011 application deadline for MassChallenge fell on the day that acquisition closed, so McLaughlin hurriedly finished the paperwork for the startup accelerator—and nabbed a spot. He’s also joined at Vsnap by chief technical officer Claudia Santoro, former vice president of engineering for the restaurant-focused software startup Exit41.

Vsnap didn’t take home one of the MassChallenge checks in October, but it’s now pulling in early customers—like Suffolk University and Schering Plough’s alumni association—to test out its alpha product and is readying itself to introduce its beta product sometime in February.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Users log into the Vsnap interface, record a 60-second video using their phone or computer camera, add descriptions, and can add attachments such as PDF files or Web URLs. Vsnap sends the package out through e-mail. Users can also record a video “signature” about themselves that will accompany all the messages they send. Currently the technology can be accessed via a Web browser, but Vsnap is developing iPhone and Android apps as part of the beta release.

The customer target for Vsnap is “any industry that has a low conversion rate but a higher price point,” says Joe Nigro, business development manager at the startup. That’s because lower priced products and services typically e-mail and communicate thousands of customers at once, and video messaging that many recipients could land you in a spam folder pretty quickly.

Vsnap was first thought up to fulfill a personal need, says McLaughlin. His cousin, Jim Joyce, lives in Ireland and is from the U.S., while his wife’s family lives in Italy. He started shooting video snapshots of his kids to send to his family in different time zones. When Fig Card sold, McLaughlin decided to join his cousin on this new idea rather than move on to PayPal, he says. Vsnap still offers a free consumer service, but business messaging has become its focus.

Vsnap is currently developing its pricing model, which will vary depending on the number of Vsnaps a user sends and their access to Vsnap analytics. The analytics can measure things like if and when the recipients viewed the video and how they interacted with the attachments. Currently, recipients of the video message have to view the video message in a separate link, but Vsnap is working with PowerInbox, another local startup, to build out the capabilities for video viewing right in the e-mail inbox.

Vsnap recently nabbed a $40,000 investment from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corp. MTDC had previously said it … Next Page »

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Mark Lowenstein has made some pretty bold statements about what’s going to happen in the wireless industry this year. More mergers and acquisitions among mobile operators. Same goes for the handset makers. Mobile payments won’t take off just yet. And enterprises may have jumped the gun on tablets.

Lowenstein, a Verizon Wireless veteran and now managing director of the Boston-area consultancy Mobile Ecosystem, dishes out insights like this via his regular e-mail newsletter on the mobile industry, but I wanted to dig in with him a bit more deeply on what these big changes mean for startups and other innovative companies working in Boston and beyond.

Plus, the Xconomy newsroom has been a bit buzzy with mobile news lately, after we just announced our fourth annual half-day forum on the subject, Mobile Madness 2012 on March 14.

Lowenstein, an Xconomist, pinpointed a couple of different facets of mobile technology that aren’t necessarily new, but that are maturing and hitting new stages. Read on for those, and some of the startups around the country that are driving these trends.

—Enterprise Mobility: Big companies have been scrambling to put a mobile face on their business, and startups have been sprouting up or changing their approach to support them. “It’s not just about mobile enabling what they’re already doing,” says Lowenstein. “It’s about how it can be an additional potential revenue stream for them.” In fact, just this morning Framingham, MA-based Staples, one of the world’s largest retailers, announced it would be setting up a new e-commerce innovation facility in Kendall Square, with mobile as a big focus.

Businesses that need to build consumer-facing, brand-specific applications will continue to turn to mobile strategy and consulting firms to do the heavy lifting.

And companies that have previously developed individual applications for enterprises are now starting to sell the tools that allow companies and brands themselves to move much of their activity to the mobile front. That includes Boston-area firms like Raizlabs, Apperian, Modo Labs, and most recently, Verivo Software (formerly known as Pyxis Mobile).

—The App Marketplace. Speaking of apps, enough is enough. It’s been about four years and around half a million apps since Apple introduced its iTunes app store. “It’s been terrific, but one gets the sense that it needs to get to the next and more mature stage,” says Lowenstein. Meaning, a majority of apps don’t have a company behind them, don’t get updated, and don’t really make money. “They’re a fad, a fly … 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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When Samsung Electronics unveiled its new 55-inch screen organic LED television at the International Consumer Electronics Show, Universal Display (Nasdaq: PANL) in Ewing, NJ saw its own prospects rise. Organic LED (OLED) technology uses razor-thin layers of organic semiconductor material to generate light and electronic displays. It is an alternative to traditional LED and LCD technology and offers the potential to create devices that are lighter and use less energy. OLEDs do not use backlighting, which some LED and LCD displays require.

Universal Display develops OLED material and technology it licenses to manufacturers such as Samsung. While OLED screens have made their way into handheld-size devices such as Samsung’s Galaxy series of smartphones, production of larger displays that use the technology has been limited so far.

That seems to be changing with the debut of 55-inch OLED televisions from Samsung and a wicked thin 55-inch television from LG Electronics due for sale by the later half of this year. Steven Abramson, CEO of Universal Display, visited CES in Las Vegas but did not exhibit though his company’s technology could be found around the show. The plethora of smartphones and other devices built with OLED displays increases demand for the technology, he says. “We’ve been laboring in this vineyard for a long, long time,” Abramson says. “After sixteen years, we’re finally starting to see this take off.”

In addition to Samsung, other manufacturers tap into Universal Display’s research and development. “LG is buying material from us,” Abramson says. “We’ll eventually have a long-term agreement with them. Our revenues grow as the OLED industry grows.”

Universal Display reported net income of nearly $6 million on revenue of $21.8 million for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2011 compared with a net loss of $7.2 million on a bit less than $7.1 million in revenue for the prior year period. The company also … Next Page »

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Our long national nightmare of TV commercials that are too loud is finally nearing its end—and Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies is angling to help its network customers keep their programming audio nice and steady.

Elemental, whose investors include Seattle’s Voyager Capital and Alliance of Angels, is known mainly for its video-processing products. The company, which got its start in 2006, sells a device that uses graphics processing chips and a software application to ensure that video is sent with the right parameters for the best end-user viewing, whether they’re watching on a TV, a laptop, tablet, or other device.

That’s been a nice business for the roughly 55-person company: Elemental has grown to more than 100 customers and tripled its revenues to about $10 million in 2011. The company boasts major customers like ESPN, Comcast, HBO, ABC, and CBS.

Those customers, by the way, are currently preparing for the December 2012 federal deadline for stable audio levels between all kinds of programming—yes, they passed a law about it.

And thus was born a new audio management software service from Elemental, which it says will help customers track, correct, and report on swings in sound. The technology behind the new service was licensed from SRS, an audio software company. It’ll be available commercially at the end of the quarter.

Processing the audio can actually be a standalone service for Elemental, meaning it doesn’t have to be wedded to the appliances that already house its video-processing product, marketing vice president Keith Wymbs says.

“There could be some scenarios at different points in the network architecture where it may make sense to do nothing to video at all, and do only audio,” Wymbs says. “We’ve built it such that it doesn’t have to touch the video.”

Wymbs says the “utopia” for audio-smoothing software is having it in every set-top box, but that’s probably many years away.

“Set-top boxes are really built for minimizing the cost of the hardware, because it is such an expensive thing to put into a home,” he says. “So it’s going to take a number of years for this technology to get to the endpoint where it should be.”

Elemental also sees possibilities for the audio-optimization service as something that could be extended to other devices, just as its video service does today. “We view it as in line with our mission to perfect the media experience,” Wymbs says.

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Video editing software is way too hard to use.

At least, that seems to be what most consumers think. It explains why most of the videos you’ll find on YouTube and other video sharing sites are so raw, with no cuts, titles, or other effects. Apparently, people have a hard enough time just getting video off their smartphones or videocams and onto the Web; they can’t be bothered to whittle their footage down to just the best parts, or to jazz it up with music, graphics, and the like.

Well, you know what? Consumers are right. Video editing is too hard, especially if your first exposure to the craft is through Apple’s Final Cut Pro, Adobe’s Premiere Pro, Avid Studio, or one of the other professional-level video editing packages. These programs are powerful, but they’re also finicky, time-consuming, difficult to learn, and hard on your computer. (Don’t even bother trying to run them if you don’t own the latest, greatest Mac or Windows machine.) Even entry-level video editing tools such as Apple’s iMovie and Avid’s Pinnacle Studio force users up a pretty steep learning curve.

At the opposite extreme from the professional editing programs are the automated video creation tools from startups like Animoto. To make a slick music video at Animoto, all you have to do is upload a collection of still photos and video clips and select a theme and a soundtrack tune. The startup’s cloud servers do the rest. It’s a great boon for busy people whose videos might otherwise languish on their cameras or hard drives; the only downside is that it takes all the creativity out of the process.

Now there’s a startup that’s trying to stake out some middle ground, by offering a freemium, cloud-based video editing tool that’s full-featured but easy to use, and doesn’t tax your computer. It’s called WeVideo, and it’s led by a Norwegian serial entrepreneur named Jostein Svendsen. If you follow the tech scene in Silicon Valley, you might have heard of these guys—they won a DEMOgod award at the Fall 2011 DEMO conference in Santa Clara, CA. But you probably didn’t know that the software was originally designed for schoolchildren in Scandinavia, or that the startup follows the same principles as the video game business—i.e., if it’s easy enough for kids to use, then at least a few adults should be able to figure it out, too.

I met with Svendsen last month and got the whole story behind WeVideo. I’ve also been trying out the system myself—the video below, made up of clips from a recent weekend trip to Mendocino, CA, is my first attempt. I spent about two hours making it, plus another hour to upload the original clips to the Web. (Story continues below video.)

Now, if you’ve done any video editing at all, you probably did a double-take two paragraphs back where I mentioned that WeVideo runs in the cloud (on Amazon’s EC2 compute infrastructure and S3 storage infrastructure, to be precise). Traditional video editing involves such large files that it’s almost the archetypal desktop application—it’s the last thing you’d expect to see migrating to the cloud. But that’s the whole point of WeVideo, and it’s the factor that Svendsen hopes will allow the company to pull ahead of the other consumer-level video editing providers.

“We’ve found a process which is extremely fast, easy to use, and efficient by utilizing the cloud to take away the bottlenecks on the desktop that have limited people, especially when they’re working with high-definition video,” he says. “Just like YouTube represented a new way of distributing video, we represent a new way of producing it.”

But is cloud-based video editing really ready for prime time? My experiments indicated that it’s close enough to be a decent alternative for non-professionals who might otherwise turn to … Next Page »

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Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and behold…the eighth wonder of the world. No, not King Kong, I’m afraid. But how about a computer that can read and interpret human emotions and mental states?

That would be from Affectiva, a Boston-area startup co-founded by Roz Picard, a 20-year veteran of the MIT Media Lab. Picard (see photo, right) is the founder and director of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group, and she has done extensive work in computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interfaces, with applications in autism communication, health and wellness, education, marketing, advertising, and other areas.

Picard is speaking at this Thursday’s Xconomy “6×6” event (Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas) in Boston. In advance of her appearance there, I sat down with Picard at Affectiva’s offices this week to get a demo of the company’s technology and to talk a little about the future of emotional and gestural interfaces.

One of the demos involved a computer tracking my facial expressions via webcam (and also my heart rate via blood flow to my face) while I watched a series of TV commercials. Based on indicators like raised eyebrows, smiles, or a furrowed brow (see example, below), the software tried to figure out how engaged, interested, amused, or disturbed I was during the course of each ad. It’s hard not to be self-conscious during all this, but I’m pretty sure the computer concluded: this guy hates all commercials. (And since I haven’t smiled since 1995, we’ll enlist my fellow editor Erin Kutz for the live demo on Thursday.)

Affectiva also will be rolling out a new product on Thursday—one that has applications in finance and healthcare, among other industries—but I’ll let Picard speak for that when the time comes.

Meanwhile, I asked Picard whether the field of affective computing would continue to advance incrementally (like speech recognition, say) or whether it would undergo a breakthrough of some kind. “I think it’s going to make some leaps,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot more happening by indirect measurement—nonverbal [cues] that people don’t really think machines can do. That’s going to really progress.”

To me, Picard’s work exemplifies what truly big ideas are about—for the first 20 years or so, they might be more interesting scientifically than commercially. But once the technology and marketplace gets to a certain point, a viable business can be built around them, even as the science continues to advance. And then who knows what will happen?

We’re looking forward to a fantastic 6×6 program and some great networking this Thursday (you can register here). Hope to see you there.

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Put high-quality cameras into devices with broadband wireless connections. Add powerful smartphone operating systems like iOS or Android and app-store ecosystems like iTunes and the Android Market. Mix in some sloth and disinterest on the part of established photo-sharing destinations like Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.

Under these conditions, it was probably inevitable that entrepreneurs would create a slew of new mobile photo-sharing startups like Instagram, Picplz, and Path. Instagram, with somewhere north of 12 million users, seems to be the winner in this space so far; it’s getting smartphone owners used to the concept of snapping photos on the go, applying optional faux-vintage filters, and sharing instantly on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous, or Foursquare.

Now comes the next logical step: video sharing apps and startups. All of the latest smartphones shoot high-definition video as well as photos, but so far, Instagram doesn’t let users share video clips—at least, not yet. That’s created room for even newer iPhone apps like Socialcam from Justin.TV, Vlix from Spotmixer, and Klip, from the Palo Alto, CA, startup of the same name.

All of these free apps let users record and edit short video clips and share them with friends. None have a gigantic following yet, and I don’t know which one will dominate. But if the contest were being decided on sheer elegance, the winner right now would be Klip.

I sat down recently with Alain Rossmann, the veteran computing and mobile entrepreneur behind Klip, and got a tour of the app and a glimpse of the thinking behind its design. (See the video below.) If there’s a single theme that differentiates Klip from the other video sharing apps, it’s Rossmann’s obsession with refining the user-experience details.

That’s a skill he says he began to develop at Apple, where he was on the marketing team for the original Macintosh in the early 1980s. One thing Rossmann says he learned from Steve Jobs—whose “genius was there even then, but also the difficult side”—was that “the last 10 percent of refinement gets you 90 percent of the market share.” Which explains why Klip includes seemingly obscure but aesthetically important features like face detection—to make sure that the profile photo that shows up alongside your uploaded videos is cropped properly. “When you see your friends, you want to see their face,” Rossmann insists. “To get that on a phone with retina-display resolution, you have to do face detection.”

Here’s a short video of Rossmann demonstrating Klip. Story continues after video.

Rossmann has five startups under his belt prior to Klip. Three went public, and two were acquired. That’s “more than any one man, or his wife, should have to bear,” he jokes. But he can’t seem to resist.

After Apple, Rossmann co-founded Radius with a group of other Macintosh team alums; the company made graphics cards and external displays for the Mac. Next came C-Cube Microsystems, which built the first chips for handling MPEG video compression. EO, which made a pen-based wireless communications tablet (like the iPad, but about 16 years ahead of its time) was next. Then there was Unwired Planet, which helped give birth to the Wireless Access Protocol for Web browsing on feature phones and ultimately morphed into OpenWave (NASDAQ: OPWV). And finally there was … Next Page »

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There seems to be a theme in Massachusetts venture investing right now. Things aren’t quite as hot as they were earlier this year, but are still trumping last year’s numbers for the same period. That’s what my colleague Greg noted about the MoneyTree report for Q3 2011 venture investing. And that’s what I’ve observed here with data from CBInsights FundingFlash—a daily roundup of companies receiving venture capital, angel investment, and growth equity funding—surrounding startup deals last month in Massachusetts.

On to the specifics. Twenty-nine Bay State startups raised a collective $253.8 million in equity-based deals in September. That’s an increase from the August ($156.5 million) and July ($250 million) funding totals. And September 2011′s funding is well above the total from September 2010, when startups pulled in $146.7 million in 25 transactions. But it’s still nowhere close to June’s massive $564.7 million pot, so talk of a bubble might have been premature.

The surge in September financing can largely be attributed to a $125 million Series F funding round for Westborough, MA-based Boston-Power, an advanced lithium-ion battery developer. (Note, this deal wasn’t included in the MoneyTree Report, likely because SEC documents for it had not yet been filed.) While the financing—which came largely from the Chinese government and a Beijing-based venture firm—helped plump up the deals total for the month, its overall effect on Massachusetts is mixed. As part of the deal, Boston-Power cut about 35 percent of its 80-person work force in the state as it shifts operations to China to pursue electric vehicle applications for its technology there.

The Boston-Power deal handily made energy the leading sector for the month, with $131.8 million raised across three deals. Healthcare followed with $71.2 million raised in eight deals, which included $23 million for Tokai Pharmaceuticals and $15 million for Tensha Therapeutics, both of Cambridge, MA. An SEC filing in September showed that Watertown, MA-based Arsenal Medical had raised $12 million, but just this week the company announced an $18 million financing round, which included $15 million for its new spinout, 480 Biomedical.

The Internet sector had the highest number of deals last month, with 10, and came in third for funding raised, at $39.2 million. The top deal in that sector and the fourth-largest deal of the month was a $13 million Series D financing for Boston-based Visible Measures, a maker of software that helps advertisers and publishers track the performance of online video. Massachusetts companies also raised another $10.5 million in 10 debt- or rights-based financings last month.

Check out the list below for details on the top 5 deals:

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The Seattle area is an undeniable leader in the rapidly growing cloud-computing sector, from tech mega-companies like Microsoft and Amazon, to local branches like the expanding EMC Isilon division, and active investors.

We know it’s big. We know it’s important. We know it will change the way things are done. But if you’re not an insider, conversing with cloud experts can leave your head reeling with references to platforms-as-a-service, Hadoop, CouchDB, virtualization, spot instances, noSQL, and so on.

There’s apparently no shortage of bluster within the industry, either. As Scott Sanchez, who works for OpenStack, tweeted on his personal account:

So, for those non-experts out there who have been pretending to know more than you do, please take heart in this awesome video from the folks at tech consulting firm Avanade. During a recent kids-at-work day, they decided to have a little fun and ask the office youngsters what they thought of this critical new trend in business.

(For the record, I’m with Sophia, who breaks it down as simply “technology in the sky.”)

Oh, and talent recruiters should keep their eye on the last kid, in the (very) junior executive outfit. I see a CEO in the making.

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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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Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group for innovation and entrepreneurship, says it has selected three finalists in eight categories for the region’s 24th annual Most Innovative New Product (MIP) Awards competition. The 24 finalists were culled from more than 140 nominations submitted, according to a statement from Connect. The finalists in each category are evaluated by San Diego experts and business executives in that category. Winners will be announced at an awards luncheon, set for Dec. 9 at the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines.

The finalists in each category are:

Clean Technology

Genomatica, for Process that produces high-volume industrial chemicals from renewable feedstocks.

Noble Environmental Technologies, for proprietary ECOR process to produce environmentally friendly building materials.

Wildcat Discovery Technologies, for electrolytic process that makes environmentally friendly materials.

Communications and IT

Ethertronics, for its Ether 1.2.1 technology for embedded antennas in mobile devices.

Kyocera Communications for Kyocera Echo, a dual-touchscreen smartphone.

Swarmology for Swarm.it, real-time contextual search and marketing technology.

Life Science – Diagnostics and Research Tools

Biocept, for OncoCEE-BR diagnostic screening technology to detect circulating tumor cells.

Life Technologies, for Ion Personal Genome Machine, technology for semiconductor-based DNA sequencing.

Targeson, for ultrasound contrast imaging of VEGFR2 receptor on lining of blood vessels.

Life Science – Medical Products

Hypnoz Therapeutic Devices, for Jaw Elevation Device used to maintain open airway during medical procedures.

IOS Technologies, for technology that enables dental professionals to create digital impressions and 3-D models.

Optimer Pharmaceuticals, for fidaxomicin (DIFICID), a new antibiotic treatment for C. difficile.

Software

FICO, for Falcon Fraud Manager 6 Analytics, used to detect payment card fraud.

MOGL for MOGL, online restaurant mobile rewards program.

SwoopThat, for online technology that helps college students find cheapest online price for every book they need to buy.

Hardware and General Technology

Aculon, for Aculon AL-X and Aculon H1-X products, nano-scale films and coatings for a variety of survaces.

LifeProof, for LifeProof case for the iPhone 4.

Memjet, for high-speed inkjet printing technology.

Action and Sport Technologies

Hydroflex, for flexing surfboard design.

KVA Stainless, for technology to produce seamless stainless steel tubing, pipes, stamping, and forming.

TaylorMade Golf, for R11 Driver with movable weight than enables golfers to customize to their swings more precisely.

Aerospace and Security Technologies

Geodetics, for positioning and navigation technology for dynamic platforms offering a variety of processing, global positioning system (GPS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) options that can be configured to cover a broad performance spectrum.

Langford & Carmichael, for ScenGen, a software program that generates all possible scenarios for a given situation at a very high speed.

MicroPower Technologies, for MPT2500 Rugged-i, solar-powered wireless video surveilance camera technology.

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The IT space accounted for most of the deal-making we tracked in New England over the last week.

—Boulder, CO-based TechStars said it pulled in $24 million in new funding, which will go to giving each company in its startup incubator programs (in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York) another $100,000 in the form of convertible notes. The new TechStars money comes from investors like Foundry Group, IA Ventures, Avalon Ventures, DFJ Mercury, SoftBank Capital, SVB Financial Group, RRE Ventures, and Right Side Capital Management.

—Boston-based Visible Measures nabbed a $13 million Series D financing round, bringing the company’s total funds raised to $45 million since it got started in 2005. Visible Measures is developing software for tracking how Web viewers watch video online and share it with friends, and how video spreads across sites like YouTube and AOL. The Series D round was led by DAG Ventures, and included strategic partner Advance Publications (owner of  Conde Nast) and return investors General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital.

—FirstFuel Software, a Boston-based energy efficiency startup, raised $2.4 million in first round funding led by Battery Ventures and Nth Power. The company (formerly called iblogix) is developing analytics software for tracking building energy performance without the need for an on-site audit. The new cash will go to scaling and customer adoption.

—Cambridge, MA-based Yesware announced  the investors in its $1 million seed financing, which will go to developing its software plug-ins and analytics for salespeople. The money comes from venture firms Google Ventures, Foundry Group, and Golden Venture Partners, and angel investors Geoffrey Hyatt, Colby Wood, Mike Baker, David Cohen, Mike Dornbrook, and Will Herman.

—Our VentureDeal feed picked up a couple other financings: $310,634 in debt-based financing for Lexington, MA-based e-commerce startup Daily Grommet, and a $1.5 million debt deal for Waltham, MA-based health IT startup PatientKeeper.

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A Boston-area tech startup with a pretty bold vision is announcing its expansion to Silicon Valley today. Waltham, MA-based Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinout, is opening an office in Santa Clara, CA, where its CEO Dave Berman is based, along with other key members of the team.

Affectiva, which has about 25 employees (most of them in Waltham), is looking to hire 15 people in Santa Clara, mostly in sales, marketing, and business development, Berman says. He’s a former WebEx veteran, and in fact Affectiva’s new office sits right across from his former company, which is now part of Cisco Systems.

“I’ve been commuting [to Boston] for two years,” Berman says.

Affectiva, which started in 2009, uses computer vision and machine learning software to interpret people’s facial expressions, gestures, heart rate, and other physiological responses. The idea is to be able to track and understand consumers’ emotions as they do things like watch video ads, play computer games, or interact with Web or mobile content. The software works in conjunction with a webcam and/or biometric sensors, like a wristband that monitors temperature, motion, and sweat—and consumers have to opt in to all of that, of course.

The company’s technology comes from the Media Lab’s “affective computing” research group, led by professor Roz Picard. Picard and research scientist Rana el Kaliouby are founders of the startup, which most recently raised $5.7 million in a Series B funding round led by Kantar (part of communications firm WPP) and Myrian Capital. “I wanted something that was next-gen, a software-as-a-service model, a huge opportunity. And something pretty early,” says Berman about what attracted him to work at Affectiva. “I met Roz and Rana and they blew me away. This is going to be everywhere.”

Talking to Berman, I still felt like I was in a sci-fi movie, though. I’ve followed Picard’s research over the years—including recent work with el Kaliouby on autism-related technologies—but I don’t have an intuitive feel for how well a computer can classify a person’s emotions based on their expressions. (I would guess not all that well, though it’s improving.)

Berman walked me through a demo that was eye-opening. The company had volunteers watch a series of TV commercials—standard baby-product stuff, for instance—while a webcam captured their facial expressions. Affectiva’s software identifies key movements and facial markers—regions around the eyes, lips, and more—and infers positive and negative reactions during the course of each ad. What’s more, it tries to distinguish between different mental states, such as frustration, confusion, excitement, contentment, concentrating, interested, disagreement, and unsure. (Another Affectiva technology that is in the early stages of development involves monitoring heart rate based on webcam images that can be analyzed to track the blood flow to a person’s face.)

The business idea is to “send real-time insights back to the marketer,” Berman says, and to provide a sample pool of “thousands of [consumers] in seconds.” On the advertising front, the company is already making money. Its customers include Disney Media, Millward Brown, IPG, and some 150 universities and nonprofits on the research side. But you can also imagine a much wider range of applications, if enough people opt in to the technology—which Berman says could help make “content more relevant to them.”

Imagine retail kiosks that react to customers’ expressions as they browse products by trying to show them things they like, he says. Or websites and smartphones that react to people in real time as they interact with content, play video games, take online education courses, or watch presidential debates. It’s all part of the big vision of computers that understand their users’ emotional states—something that’s been talked about for decades, but is only starting to see the commercial light of day now.

“It’s a big business if we do this right,” Berman says.

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What the heck is social video analytics and advertising?

Whatever it is, Visible Measures has closed a Series D financing round worth $13 million, based on the strength of its software platform in that field. The Boston company, which started in 2005, has raised a total of more than $45 million to date. DAG Ventures led the latest round, and new strategic partner Advance Publications (which owns Conde Nast) and previous investors General Catalyst, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Northgate Capital also participated.

The concept behind Visible Measures is to help advertisers and publishers track online video performance—how Web viewers interact with videos, which segments they watch, when they share it with others (hence the social bit), and more broadly how the content spreads across video sites like YouTube and AOL. At stake is billions of TV advertising dollars that many predict will shift to online as the audience for Internet video grows and software tools allow for better ad targeting.

Visible Measures has nearly 80 employees, according to CEO and founder Brian Shin (see photo above). The team is split between Boston, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Ottawa, Wyoming, and London.

The company operates at the intersection of entertainment, digital media, software analytics, and advertising. Other firms with complementary or related approaches in video and ads include Akamai, comScore, Quantcast, Bluefin Labs, Brightcove, DataXu, Extreme Reach, and Wistia.

It was refreshing to hear Shin speak at a FutureM event last week about how he didn’t have it all figured out back in the early days of Visible Measures.

“We said, ‘Let’s try this advertising thing,’” he said. “When you’re trying to create a new market, there aren’t a lot of great examples. You have to have advisors, people you trust, to help you grow.”

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Bedford, MA-based VideoIQ, a maker of video surveillance technology, announced today that it has pinned down $7.5 million in Series C funding, from Atlas Venture, Cisco, Matrix Partners and Tenaya Capital. The company reported $6 million in funding earlier this year in an SEC filing. It said today that the new funding will go to fueling growth and product development.

VideoIQ also announced it has hired Ed Bednarcik as its new president and CEO. He was previously CEO of Wright Line, a company focused on 911 public safety and data center technology. Before that, Bednarcik was an early employee of A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE).

VideoIQ’s technology is designed to store video surveillance footage for months of continuous recording, and offers HD viewing and analytics capabilities to capture more relevant information for its customers.

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Score one for video-based recruiting and marketing. (Yes, there are a lot of startups in this sector, plus Skype and Google.)

Cambridge, MA-based Take the Interview has closed $775,000 in seed funding this week from angel investors, as well as partners and limited partners of DreamIt Ventures, the startup incubator in New York City in which the company participated this summer. It was the first New York class of startups for the program, which is based in Philadelphia.

Take the Interview makes a video-based platform for companies to screen job candidates, and for job seekers to market themselves to employers. The goal is to use self-recorded video clips to make the hiring process more efficient for all involved. Take the Interview rolled out its private beta this summer and says it has more than 100 users.

The startup, which is based at Dogpatch Labs Cambridge, is led by co-founder and CEO Danielle Weinblatt. I first mentioned the company in a story back in February.

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