This is a story about what goes on under the hood of your smartphone or tablet device. It’s also about Yahoo, the troubled Santa Clara-CA based advertising and information giant. But Yahoo doesn’t make a single mobile gadget of its own. So what’s the connection?

It turns out that Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) has ambitious plans to help publishers get more efficient about how they push content out to mobile devices. Specifically, Yahoo wants to become the new middleman of the mobile publishing world, giving media companies software that they could use to reach users of iPhones, Android devices, Windows phones, and other gadgets without having to bow to the programming approaches favored by their powerful makers—namely Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

To show how the system might work, Yahoo launched a fancy personalized news app back in November called Livestand. The app lets you select feeds from Yahoo partners like Forbes and ABC News and browse their stories on customized, magazine-like pages. It’s full of nifty user-interface elements like a 3D sideways-scrolling publication gallery. So far Livestand only runs on the Apple iPad, and at first glance it’s pretty similar to Flipboard, Zite, Google Currents, and a number of other social news reader apps. But Livestand’s true importance is as a demonstration of what’s coming. The unique and potentially revolutionary thing about the app is its software design: it may look and act like a native iOS app, but it’s mostly written in Javascript and HTML5, the languages of the Web.

Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz

How Yahoo pulled this off, and what it could mean for content owners who don’t want to put all their eggs in Apple’s basket—or Google’s, or Microsoft’s—was the focus of a long Xconomy interview last week with Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz, chief architect for Yahoo’s platform technology group in Sunnyvale, CA. I’d heard Fernandez-Ruiz speak before about how Yahoo is betting on HTML5—the next-generation version of the markup language underlying all Web pages—as an antidote to overreliance on proprietary operating systems like Apple’s iOS. “If you only work in iOS you are bound to the rules of iTunes,” he said at a December talk in San Francisco. “Publishers want pixel-precise, ‘Cupertino-like’ experiences—and we can do that, but also make layouts fluid,” he said.

I wanted to know more about exactly how Yahoo can do this, so I invited Fernandez-Ruiz to my office and quizzed him about the state of mobile software architecture, the role of the Platform Technology Group inside Yahoo, and the true significance of Livestand. The story he told will be eye-opening for anyone who was under the impression that the future of mobile apps is in Apple and Google’s hands alone. Those two companies may control the lion’s share of the smartphone market at the moment, but if Yahoo goes through with plans to share the tools behind Livestand with outside developers, it could help push the siloed mobile-app world back in the direction of the open Web, where no single company is able to dictate how online software and services should work.

The first thing you need to understand about Yahoo’s publishing vision is that it’s coming from the Platform Technology Group. This is the same part of the company that created and then open-sourced key technologies that are now part of the Web’s infrastructure, such as Hadoop, which allows companies to run big, distributed software systems, and YUI, a library of JavaScript tools for building rich Internet applications. Yahoo built many of these tools as part of an effort that began more than half a decade ago to reduce what Fernandez-Ruiz calls a “technical debt.” The company was weighed down by all of the separate technologies its engineers had built to support services like Yahoo Music and Yahoo Movies, and it needed a central platform. “There was a realization around that time that we had to switch the company from being vertical to being horizontal, and start creating reusable technology that we could deploy across the whole place,” he says. “That is how Hadoop got started, for example.”

Technologies created by the Platform Technology Group, such as Yahoo’s Content Optimization and Relevance Engine (C.O.R.E.), also help the company and its partners tailor content to appeal to specific users based on their demographics. Fernandez-Ruiz says click-throughs increased 300 percent after Yahoo applied C.O.R.E. to … Next Page »

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Once upon a time, there was a magical innovation called RSS, for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication. It freed news articles, podcasts, and other content from their original homes on the Web and allowed news junkies to follow their favorite publications and blogs through story streams called news feeds, which could be bundled together inside programs called RSS readers. For a long time, RSS readers were the best tools for browsing stories from lots of sources quickly.

But RSS was invented by geeks and didn’t belong to any single company, so there was nobody with an incentive to make the whole scheme more user-friendly. Finding a publication’s RSS feed and adding it to your reader was always a hassle, and the RSS readers themselves weren’t particularly fun to use. On top of that, publishers didn’t have good ways to make money on all the content they were sharing in their news feeds. So the RSS system, while important and useful, never really developed into a booming product category.

Now fast-forward a few years to the birth of tablet computing. With their big screens and touch-based interfaces, tablets look and feel a little bit like real magazines. So programmers naturally started thinking about how to revive the news aggregation idea on Apple’s iPad and other tablet devices. Pulse, released for the iPad in May 2010, was the first tablet reader to feature a combination of features that has now become standard in this category: a graphically rich table-of-contents page for navigation, and a stripped-down story page for reading. Flipboard quickly followed in July 2010, adding a social element. Feeds now consisted not just of the articles being pushed at you by news organizations, but also of the content your friends were sharing on Facebook or Twitter.

In the free-for-all world of Web and mobile software, what’s worth doing twice is worth doing a dozen times. Today there so many social news reader apps to choose from that it’s hard to know how they differ and which ones are most useful. To help you get oriented, I’ve rounded up the most noteworthy tablet news readers on the following pages and made note of a few strengths and weaknesses for each.

Note that I’m restricting my list to free reader apps available for the iPad (since I don’t have an Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, or Amazon tablet). I’m leaving out apps that require a paid subscription, such as Ongo, and I’m not including pure RSS-aggregator apps like Reeder, which tend to lack the graphical and social features of the newer crop of news apps.

Click “Go to First App” to start reading, or jump directly to an app from the list below. Be sure to continue all the way to The Bottom Line on last page, where I share my personal favorites.

GO TO FIRST APP >>

	Editions by AOL
	Flipboard
	Flud
	Google Currents
	News.me
	Pulse
	SkyGrid
	Trove
	Yahoo Livestand
	Zite
	The Bottom Line

… Next Page »

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Some big-company-related news to report in the Boston area. Let’s get right to it.

—Microsoft Research New England has made three new hires in its social media research group, joining danah boyd. They are professors Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas (specializing in personal connections and online communities); Kate Crawford from the University of New South Wales (mobile media and youth culture); and Mary Gray from Indiana University (youth sexuality and digital media).

—Speaking of Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), the software giant is working with Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F), Watertown, MA-based BlueMetal Architects, and Boston mobile-health firm Healthrageous to do research on extending health management to people’s vehicles. The companies are building a prototype system that collects biometric data and sensory information from a car that can be uploaded to a person’s health and wellness database.

—PayPal, the subsidiary of eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY), is looking to add staff in the Boston area, according to a report by the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner. The report says Scott Thompson, formerly president of PayPal and incoming CEO of Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), visited Boston last fall to discuss PayPal’s expansion in the area. PayPal, which may or may not get spun out by eBay (I’ve heard rumors), acquired Boston mobile firms Where and Fig Card last year. Thompson, a Raynham, MA, native and Stonehill College alum, was also a board member of Vertica, the Boston-area big-data company acquired by HP (NYSE: HPQ) last year.

—My colleague Curt Woodward spoke with Facebook engineering director Jay Parikh about the social network’s ongoing upgrades to its technical infrastructure. If his name sounds familiar, that’s because Parikh is an eight-year-plus veteran of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM). He served as a vice president of engineering for the Web content-delivery firm from 1999-2007. No word on why Facebook hasn’t set up an engineering center in Boston yet.

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Time for our data-driven roundup of the latest deals news from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

$17 to $18 billion—The approximate amount Yahoo could raise by selling off its stakes in China’s Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, according to reports today from Fortune and Dow Jones VentureWire. Yahoo’s board is reportedly considering the transactions this week.

$268 million—The price fetched by Sunnyvale, CA-based Web and mobile content delivery acceleration specialist Cotendo, which was just acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai, the big operator of private content distribution networks. Xconomy’s Greg Huang reported on the story.

$130 million—New financing announced this week for San Jose-based Stion, a maker of thin-film photovoltaic materials. Avaco, a South Korean equipment supplier, and unnamed private equity funds in South Korea led the round.

$94 million—The amount Google has invested in a group of four photovoltaic installations being built outside Sacramento by Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of Japanese giant Sharp. KKR and Recurrent itself also invested in the projects.

$40 million—New financing for San Francisco-based Jawbone, best known for its Bluetooth mobile headsets. Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and DST Global’s Yuri Milner ponied up.

$27 million—Total venture backing raised by Seeker Wireless, an Australian maker of geolocation software acquired this week by the Safely division of Emeryville, CA-based Location Labs. Financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but Ina Fried of AllThingsD pegged the deal at “just over $1 million.”

$11.6 million—Series B funding for Houzz, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup whose website and mobile applications offer renovation design ideas and product leads to homeowners. Sequoia Capital led the round.

$6.5 million—Series B funding for San Francisco-based Keas, a provider of game-based wellness programs for large employers. Existing investors Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners led the round. Xconomy profiled Keas and its big 2010 pivot last month.

$6 million—A Series A financing round for Tactus Technology of Fremont, CA. The company is developing touchscreens with retractable keys, and is funded by Thomvest Ventures.

$5.33 million—Series B funding for Menlo Park, CA-based ScaleArc, a maker of software for managing the deployment of large databases. Trinity Ventures led the round, with existing investor Nexus Venture Partners joining in.

$4 million—A Series A financing round for Menlo Park, CA-based SurDoc, a new startup offering Web-based document storage, annotation, and sharing. Backers include IDG Ventures.

$1 million—Seed funding for Mygola, a San Francisco- and Bangalore-based startup that connects consumers planning trips with human guides who assemble information about flight options, hotels, and the like. Blumberg Ventures and 500 Startups led the investment.

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“Marcus Welby is dead.”

So says West Shell, the CEO of San Francisco-based Healthline. Not that Dr. Welby was ever actually alive—the fictional physician, played by Robert Young, made house calls for ABC TV from 1969 to 1976. But Shell’s point is that few people these days have a family physician like Welby to whom they can easily turn with medical questions. These days, says West, “The doctor is your third opinion”—the first two being the Web and, you guessed it, the Web.

Shell says 170 million Americans turn to the Internet every month for help managing their health. And Healthline, the 130-employee company he’s been leading since 2005, captures a huge portion of them: roughly 100 million per month, spread across the many Web properties, such as Yahoo Health, AARP.com, and DoctorOz.com, that use the company’s search tools and medical content. It’s one of the three largest U.S. providers of consumer health information on the Web, the others being WebMD and Everyday Health.

What sets Healthline apart from its competitors, according to Shell, is its focus on technology. Healthline’s core asset is a health-specific search engine programmed with a vast set of categories and definitions—a “semantic taxonomy,” to use the search industry term. The taxonomy helps consumers find the information they need, even if they don’t know the right keywords to use. To take a simple example, the Healthline taxonomy knows that “Lou Gehrig’s disease” and “amyotrophic lateral sclerosis” are the same thing, or that “brittle bone disease” is technically known as “osteogenesis imperfecta.”

Healthline CEO West Shell

“Doctors speak in Latin, insurance companies speak in billing codes, and patients speak in English,” says Shell. “These terminologies are incredibly difficult. But at the end of the day, the reason we beat Google and Microsoft and Yahoo in terms of being able to search health information and deliver it is that it’s the most complex information retrieval problem there is. Over half of the staff here are engineers, medical informatics specialists, doctors, pharmacologists, and nurses. That’s our unfair advantage.”

Much of the information available on Healthline is written by the company’s own researchers and contract writers. But it’s also a rich source of articles and videos syndicated from other sources around the Web, such as 5min, a library of instructional videos owned by AOL. Healthline also offers one of the Internet’s most comprehensive symptom search services. If you’re suffering from, say, excessive yawning, Healthline will give you a long list of potential causes, from insomnia to sleep apnea to a heart attack, and share information on potential cures and costs, as well as leads on local doctors who specialize in treating these conditions.

Healthline has raised about $50 million since 2005 from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Investor Growth Capital, and a group of strategic investors including General Electric, Kaiser Permanente, Aetna, US News, and Reed Elsevier. It’s looking like those backers made a good bet. The company’s business is growing at a rate of 50 percent per year, according to Shell. This fall, Healthline ranked 75th on Deloitte’s list of the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in North America.

That’s a remarkable turnaround for a dot-com era company that nearly disappeared from existence in the mid-2000s. Originally known as YourDoctor.com, the site was created in 1999 by James Norman, M.D., an endocrine specialist and Internet health education pioneer. YourDoctor.com built the foundations of a semantic taxonomy for health, but after the bust, the startup just couldn’t … Next Page »

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What’s the best way to tell my mother-in-law that we’re not going to visit her at Thanksgiving?

My college friend has taken over my friendship with another guy, and now both are ignoring me. Should I ask them why?

What do you do if the girl you asked to marry you says no?

[Questions posed by Ask.com users, November 15, 2011]

Google, the Mountain View, CA-based search and advertising giant, may have a 66 percent share of the search market, but there are plenty of questions its Web crawlers and ranking algorithms just can’t answer. That includes squishy, emotion-laden questions like the ones above, as well as detailed, local queries like “what’s the best place for Mexican take-out in St. Cloud, Minnesota?” For those types of questions, there’s just no substitute for bringing real humans into the loop.

Across the bay from Google, in downtown Oakland, there’s a 15-year-old search company that’s now banking on the power of these human connections over algorithms. It’s called Ask.com, and it’s the perpetual fourth-place finisher in the search engine races, after Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft’s Bing. Last year, Ask.com gave up on its long struggle—financed by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp, which purchased the company for $1.85 billion in 2005—to compete with Google in traditional Web search. Under Doug Leeds, who became CEO in mid-2009 after a stint at the helm of IAC property Dictionary.com, Ask.com decided to transform itself into a question-and-answer service. And as of this fall, the transition is complete: in September the company opened the live Q&A portion of its site, previously in beta testing, to all 63 million monthly visitors.

Ask.com's iPhone app

The change marks a return, in some ways, to Ask.com’s heritage as Ask Jeeves. Early in its history, the company’s claim—symbolized by its butler mascot Jeeves—was that it could find definitive answers to natural-language questions such as, “Who was the world chess champion in 1956?” or “What’s the difference between a leopard and a cheetah?” The problem was that the claim didn’t always hold up; the computational problem was just too hard, often leaving Jeeves at a loss. (Even today, search utilities like Apple’s Siri can only answer natural-language questions reliably within restricted neighborhoods of knowledge, such as the weather.) In 2001, Ask Jeeves bought an algorithmic search engine called Teoma and started spewing out long lists of blue links just like Google’s.

The company continued to welcome questions phrased in natural English, and it tried to siphon traffic away from Google by marketing itself as a question-answering site. But “we started talking to users in a way that was different from the way they wanted to talk to us,” Leeds told me in an interview this summer. “What they really wanted was an answer at the top of the page, not a list of links.” Even the so-called “smart answers” that Ask.com offered at the top of a search result page weren’t addressing the need. “As good as we think we got at this, at least 60 percent of the questions that come in every day are things we can’t answer from the information we crawl,” says Leeds.

It turns out that people are really good at coming up with questions that have never been asked or answered before. So Ask.com decided to shift strategies again. “Toward the end of 2009 and through 2010, we built a platform not just for searching documents, but for searching people—to give them a chance to answer the questions,” says Leeds.

Today, when you arrive at the Ask.com website or fire up the Ask.com iPhone or Android apps, you see a big search box where you can type in your question. If the service can find a definitive answer somewhere in the database of 700 million question-answer pairs it has culled from the Web, it will simply show you the answer. (Question: Is a Granny Smith apple more tart than a Red Delicious? Answer: Yes.) If it can’t, it will show you a list of related Web results. And if those results don’t answer your question, you can click on the “Q&A Community” tab, where you can submit the same question for review by other Ask.com users.

There’s no guarantee anyone will answer your question, but in my limited experiments, I’ve always received at least one answer within an hour. “The biggest challenge for us is how to integrate these two services,” Leeds says—meaning the Web answers that arrive in milliseconds and … Next Page »

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Updated 11:30 am 11/3 with slides
Sorry, experts: Information consumers don’t particularly care about all your highfalutin’ degrees and special titles. For a surprisingly large swath of online queries, friends and other real-world users are the key sources of opinions, says Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s director of search.

“People don’t know who to trust. They don’t know who experts are. I can claim to be an expert in search, but you have to believe me,” Weitz said Wednesday in a presentation at the first Seattle Interactive Conference.

Like a true data geek, Weitz had a truckload of statistics, research, charts, and graphs to illustrate the importance of social signals in influencing user behavior online. But the short version is summed up well by this quote: “Humans crave other humans inside of search.”

There is an exception to the no-experts finding—when it comes to technical problems, people online actually want to see expert opinions, Weitz says.

But for every other example of some very common queries that Microsoft studied, the opinions of friends or other regular users were vastly preferred. Here’s that key slide from the presentation, and the rest is embedded below via Slideshare:

That’s significant for Microsoft, of course, because of the company’s deal with Facebook that gives Bing access to public Facebook data. Bing now incorporates that information into its search results.

“The bottom line is people are using social networks, in this case Facebook is the dominant one, to pose questions, to get opinions from people they know,” he said. “And in case you didn’t know, Bing has a relationship with Facebook.”

It’s an interesting relationship. Facebook hasn’t gone full-force into Web search, instead relying on its Bing partnership. Some who study the sector, though, say Facebook will eventually do search itself—potentially leaving Microsoft behind.

That would be a big letdown for Bing, which is growing in share of the search market (and powers search for poor old Yahoo) but is still well behind the search market leader, Google.

For his part, Weitz said the tracking of quality social signals will become even more important over time, as the amount of information online and the volume of search traffic increases, Weitz said.

For instance, search in general still expects people to put the right combination of keywords into the search box when they’re looking for something they don’t know anything about. “If you think about that, it’s chaos,” he said.

And while search gurus are trying to figure out how to make algorithms better at answering questions, Bing finds that users are going to their social graph when they want to ask a question and get an opinion.

If your garden-variety Internet user gets entrenched in that kind of split—social networks to answer questions and search to gather raw data—you can see how hard it might be for straight-up search tools to break Facebook’s hold and truly catalog all the valuable information out there.

“The cold math that we have used for 15 years now to help refine results to your particular keyword is not something which was sustainable long-term,” Weitz said. “You need that emotional connection to actually help you rationalize your way through the decision you have to make.”

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New York’s interclick (NASDAQ: ICLK), an advertising technology company, agreed to be acquired by Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) for $270 million in cash, according to a press statement on Tuesday.

Five-year-old interclick developed a platform to help advertisers process large volumes of data from multiple sources to better understand and target their audiences with online display and video ad campaigns. According to an interclick spokesperson, the company’s management will remain onboard after the acquisition is complete. Yahoo is offering $9 cash per share for all outstanding shares of interclick. The deal is expected to close by early 2012.

The acquisition by Yahoo is a bit of a coup for interclick, which is rapidly making a name for itself in the online advertising sector. In October, comScore said interclick ranked No. 16 among ad-focused Web properties in the U.S. for the previous month. Yahoo Network Plus was No. 2 behind Google Ad Network in the same ranking.

Interclick has been growing quickly on its own. In an earnings statement released in August, interclick estimated its 2011 revenue would be about $142 million, up from its previous guidance of $140 million. Interclick reported a profit of $4 million on revenue of $101.2 million for 2010, up from a profit of $502,000 on revenue of $55.3 million in 2009.

Though its technology whetted Yahoo’s appetite, interclick has had to defend some of its practices in court. In August, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed, with prejudice, several claims against interclick that alleged the company’s online advertising practices violated a variety of state and federal laws. Last December, Sonal Bose filed a lawsuit, which included claims of privacy violation, against interclick and sought class action status. Bose alleged interclick monitored her Web browsing and misappropriated personal information via code within online advertisements; however, she dropped the privacy violation claim in March.

Michael Katz, CEO of interclick, said in a statement, “We have said from the beginning, interclick has always taken consumer privacy very seriously and these claims were brought without merit.”

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There are two kinds of people: Those who already own an iPhone 4S, and those who don’t but have seen Apple’s Siri ads and wish they did. Siri, of course, is the voice-operated personal assistant that can read your text messages, schedule appointments, check on the weather, make waffles, and babysit your toddler (just kidding about those last two). It’s the coolest feature of the latest Apple smartphone, which went on sale last week. Virtually overnight, it has brought state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology into the consumer mainstream.

Well, it turns out that there’s more where that came from. The same Silicon Valley defense project that gave birth to Siri—called CALO, for Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes (more on this below)—has another, lesser-known spinoff, a Palo Alto news personalization startup called Trapit. The company’s web-based service uses AI to organize the welter of new content that appears online every day into tailored collections called “traps.” And while the technology is still a bit raw, there’s a chance that it could have the same kind of impact in the world of Web search and online news that Siri is beginning to have on mobile interfaces.

I’ve been playing with TrapIt for about three months now. It hasn’t become a part of my daily news-browsing routine, but I can definitely see that happening if the startup continues to refine the interface, improve its search algorithms, and make the site more tablet-friendly. (Trapit took the lid off its service in June, but it remains in closed beta testing, which means you have to request an invitation to get an account. The wait was short when I registered. The company says it’s going to open the beta version of its service to the whole public later this fall.)

The first thing to try when you go to Trapit is either to browse one of the existing, featured traps—which are often related to breaking news, such as yesterday’s killing of Muammar Qaddafi—or start one of your own by entering a phrase or keyword into the “Discover” bar. After a short wait, you’ll be presented with recent news stories and blog posts on your topic, culled from across the Web.

At first the selection may seem pretty random. The neat part is that as you peruse various articles, which pop up in lightbox-style windows, Trapit observes what you’re reading, how long you spend with each article, and what you’re sharing with others. It uses these cues and others to beef up its profile of your personal tastes, so that over time it’s able to surface more articles that fit your interests and fewer that don’t.

You can also train Trapit manually by clicking on the thumbs-up or thumbs-down buttons—and the more you do this, the faster the software will learn your preferences. As you create traps on new topics and train your existing traps, you can end up with a whole gallery of mini-magazines, exclusively tuned to the mix of subjects that you, and you alone, are passionate about. It’s a pretty unique service—the closest comparison I can think of is Google Alerts, which are like standing search queries with the results e-mailed to your inbox every day. But Trapit is more like regular Web surfing. It’s just that you’re surfing the Web you want.

Trapit’s AI-driven approach goes completely counter to the dominant trend in news curation today, which emphasizes the power of social networking and collaborative filtering. News aggregation apps like Flipboard, Pulse, AOL’s Editions, CNN’s Zite, Yahoo’s Livestand, and Google’s forthcoming Propeller platform may seem to provide personalized news feeds, but … Next Page »

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It’s official: Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners is announcing a couple of moves related to its network of Dogpatch Labs startup incubators. One bit of news involves the fate of the original Dogpatch in San Francisco. The other piece is about a brand new (and long-awaited) international site that is opening today. (Dogpatch Labs already exists in San Francisco, Cambridge, MA, and New York City.)

First, the Bay Area news. As my colleague Wade reported earlier this month, Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco has been looking for new office space as it is being forced to move from its current location at embattled Pier 38. The new space, it turns out, will be in Palo Alto, adjacent to the new Polaris Ventures office, which is one block off of University Avenue, says Dave Barrett, a general partner at the firm. The Polaris office has Brian Chee and Ryan Spoon based there, and several other partners who spend a fair bit of time there. (Chee moved to the Bay Area when Polaris closed its old office in Seattle recently.)

The Dogpatch facility in Palo Alto will be open for business in early November, Barrett says. Interestingly, while some VCs are talking about startup ecosystems becoming more concentrated in urban centers (and that fits with some Boston-area venture firms opening offices in Kendall Square), Barrett sees Palo Alto as “the center of gravity” and “a pretty interesting base for life sciences” in the Bay Area.

And now for the international news. As my colleague Erin reported last December, Polaris has been working on a new Dogpatch Labs site in Dublin, Ireland. Today it is being unveiled in a ceremony attended by the Irish prime minister and other dignitaries. Dogpatch Labs Europe, as it is being called, will start with about 35 entrepreneurs, some from Ireland and some from elsewhere in Europe and Africa, Barrett says.

“We think it can be an interesting center of heat for entrepreneurs, for Ireland and for Europe,” says Barrett. He calls Dublin a “breeding ground” for ideas and startups. “It’s got a vibe to it,” he says.

Heading up Dogpatch Labs Europe will be Noel Ruane, a tech veteran who previously led LaunchPad, a Dublin-based startup accelerator program. He’s also the former CEO of Brandmail Solutions and spent a few years in Silicon Valley with IDA Ireland, where he played a role in attracting Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and PayPal to set up offices in Ireland. And in fact, the new Dogpatch building is located in the Grand Canal area of Dublin (see photo above), right across from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft’s offices, Barrett says.

Polaris isn’t talking about how much it plans to invest in the Dublin facility, or the number of companies it will house (or finance)—though the first group of eight startups is being announced today. “The mission is to try to build a community and build relationships with folks, some of which we’ll invest in and some we won’t,” Barrett says. He adds that the main challenge, as in other places like New York, is that “it’ll take time to lead a rebirth.” (He also says Dublin’s Dogpatch might be most similar to Kendall Square in its breadth of sectors—not just consumer-focused Internet, but also software as a service, infrastructure, and life sciences.)

In any case, Dogpatch Labs Europe will add to this running total of stats for Dogpatch in the U.S.: more than 500 residents from 300 companies; 100 companies have received outside funding totaling more than $140 million; 13 companies have been acquired; and Polaris has provided funding for 13 of the startups.

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It’s unclear how much damage Hurricane Irene will deal out as it travels up the Eastern Seaboard this weekend, but in the British Virgin Islands, it’s already caused one notable loss. Lightning from the storm sparked a fire that destroyed the home of Sir Richard Branson, who lost thousands of irreplaceable photographs in the blaze.

That’s the strongest case I can think of for storing all of your photos in the cloud. (It sounds like Branson’s photos were prints, but he probably could have afforded to get them scanned.) There are other big reasons too—once a photo is online, it’s obviously much easier to order prints or share it with friends or family. But the cloud’s power as a giant backup drive is probably its best selling point. After all, photos are the next best thing to memories, and if you lose your memories, you lose a part of yourself.

The question, these days, is which cloud photo service to use. I’ve been a Flickr member virtually since the service’s founding in 2004, when it was still owned by Vancouver, BC-based Ludicorp. I have nearly 13,000 photos and videos stored there, and they’ve racked up some 168,000 page views over the years. But I’m very concerned about Flickr’s future within Yahoo. Its founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake are long gone, longtime product head Matthew Rothenberg (a veteran of the Butterfield days) departed in March, and it doesn’t appear that the 46-member Flickr team is being given much room to innovate these days.

Flickr did roll out a nice redesign last summer, but such updates seem to take years, while features that are in dire need of improvement, such as the apps that let you upload photos from your Mac or Windows machine, go completely neglected. Flickr has been outmatched by Facebook when it comes to social photo sharing; it hasn’t put out an iPad app; and it completely missed the boom in photo sharing on camera phones, leaving it to startups like Path, Instagram, PicPlz, and Color. (One former Flickr architect wrote on Quora that Yahoo wasted years in the early iPhone days on internal debates over the implications of the mobile revolution for photo sharing.)

I’m not saying that Flickr is dead or even dying—it’s just not clear that Yahoo understands or values the service anymore. In a December 2010 layoff notice explaining that Yahoo was “cutting investment in underperforming and non-core products so we can focus on our strengths,” Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz pointed to e-mail, the Yahoo homepage, search, mobile, advertising, and content as strengths, but she didn’t mention photos.

You might ask why I’m focusing on Flickr as the incumbent, when the biggest photo sharing service in the world, by far, is Facebook (it stores about 100 billion photos, compared to Flickr’s 6 billion). Well, here’s why: Facebook doesn’t actually care about photos. It only cares about the people who appear in them. If it were concerned about the images themselves, it would offer better tools for creating, curating, and viewing photo albums; instead, it’s poured most of its photo-related development efforts into tools for tagging the people who show up in photos. That’s key because tagged photos show up in the news feeds of the tagged individuals, which helps to keep the whole endless conversation that is Facebook rolling. The images themselves might as well be piled up in a giant shoebox, for all the effort the company puts into helping you organize or discover them.

So what’s left, if you’re looking for a serious cloud photo service beyond Flickr? As it happens, there are some very interesting new options. I want to touch on three of them today: Google+, Apple’s iCloud, and a brand-new service called Snapjoy. They each push in a different direction—you might call them Web-centric, device-centric, and cloud-centric, respectively. I have no idea which one will prove most popular. But at least we’re living in interesting times. It almost feels like 2004-2005 again, when Flickr itself was new.

Google+

Back in 2004, Google bought a Pasadena, CA, startup called Picasa and started giving away the desktop photo editing software it had developed. A couple of years later, in 2006, it bolted on Picasa Web Albums, which allowed Picasa users to … Next Page »

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More money for online deals? You betcha. This time it’s Bellevue, WA-based ChoozOn, which is developing a consumer service to help shoppers sift and aggregate sales, deals, and offers from different sources. The company has raised $3.2 million, led by Michael Orsak of Worldview Technology Partners and James Brown of AVG Ventures. ChoozOn was founded by a trio of former Yahoo execs: Nick Weir, Usama Fayyad, and Hunter Madsen. The startup says its consumer product is coming sometime in the third quarter.

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New York’s Yext, a business listings company, said Thursday in a press release it raised $10 million in a funding round led by WGI Group. Other investors participating in the round include Sutter Hill Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners. Five-year-old Yext plans to use the funds to grow its PowerListings platform, which lets businesses edit and add photos and video to their own listings that appear on websites such as Yelp, Yahoo, Superpages, Citysearch, and Yellowbook. Listings edited through Yext cannot be altered by other visitors to those sites. According to Yext, more than 4,000 businesses use PowerListings to control their listing information.

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If you’re like most people, you do a lot of your personal communicating via Facebook and text messages, but you handle most of your business matters over e-mail. In fact, you probably spend far too much of your workday on e-mail (some estimates say 30 percent), and you wish you could be more efficient and productive with that time.

Well, what if you could do a lot more stuff directly from your inbox? Instead of clicking on e-mail links that take you somewhere else, for instance, what if you could watch videos, comment on people’s updates on Facebook and Twitter, and browse daily deals, all from the friendly confines of your e-mail account?

That’s the idea behind a young Cambridge, MA-based startup called PowerInbox. OK, maybe it won’t make you more productive at work or cut down on time spent in your inbox just yet. But the idea actually leads to something bigger, involving the future of e-mail as a unified platform for social apps.

First, some news. PowerInbox is rolling out its private beta platform today—you can try it out here using our access code. The free download works across Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook. Basically, it lets you do things like comment on Facebook, view photos, see and send tweets, and get information about local deals from Groupon (see screenshot below)—all without leaving your inbox.

The core idea behind PowerInbox, as founder Matt Thazhmon explains, is “let’s make e-mail interactive.” What he means, really, is adding social features to e-mail that will connect users more efficiently to the services they use every day.

PowerInbox was co-founded last year by three Electronic Arts veterans (including Thazhmon, who worked on Madden football and other games). The startup raised a $1 million seed round earlier this year from Atlas Venture, Longworth Venture Partners, Correlation Ventures, and angel investors. The four-person team, originally from Orlando, FL, by way of the San Francisco Bay Area, recently moved to the Boston area. The company has found office space for the coming year near Central Square in Cambridge.

There are plenty of e-mail-related companies out there, of course. They include—just to name a few—Baydin, Gist (now part of RIM), Help Scout, Mimecast, Rapportive, Taskforce, Senexx, SMTP, Sonian, and Yesware, to go along with Constant Contact, HubSpot, and a whole host of marketing tech companies. Some of these are trying to make your inbox more productive and efficient, while others use e-mail as a platform for other applications. And each e-mail system, like Gmail or Outlook, has its own add-ins and gadgets. But where PowerInbox is different is in its vision for the future.

The company’s long-term goal is for developers to create new apps on top of the PowerInbox e-mail platform. Anyone from Facebook to travel and deals sites (left) to video services (Netflix, anyone?) to recruiting, dating, or meeting-scheduling sites—indeed, any entity that interacts with customers by e-mail—could conceivably build an app that helps people interact with content through an inbox.

One emerging focus is on forming partnerships with gaming companies—such as social-network game giant Zynga, but also smaller developers—to let users play games within their e-mail, and make it that much easier to start playing. “We think this is going to be huge,” Thazhmon says.

But making big changes to e-mail tends to be hard because it’s an open platform, … Next Page »

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Attention, techies. Want a deep dive into the future of the Web, search, and online services? Then sit down with Qi Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division, if you ever get an opportunity.

In the meantime, you can check out this video from Lu’s talk at Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA, back in May. Microsoft organized the event in partnership with Xconomy, and we all had a blast talking with Lu and listening to his insights.

Lu was personally recruited by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in late 2008, after spending a decade at Yahoo. He was brought in to revitalize Microsoft’s online efforts in search and advertising (including Bing), Web software, services, and infrastructure.

In his talk, Lu laid out what Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is currently working on in the area of Web software and services, and how it all fits into the landscape of big trends like social media, daily deals, and mobile apps.

“The question for all of us is, what’s the structure of that new Web? What are the things that connect all those apps together? That’s where we see a great opportunity for Microsoft to take a leadership role,” Lu said.

“The Web has far outgrown its intellectual heritage. It’s a digital society. We need a richer, better way to navigate the Web, discover, and interact in a lot more compelling manner,” he continued.

You can also read about Lu’s thoughts on Microsoft’s recent $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, as well as my writeup of some takeaways from Lu’s talk, which also includes an in-depth Q&A he did with Xconomy about Microsoft’s Web strategy. Some of the highlights include how search is a gateway to other online services, how Microsoft is positioning itself with respect to Facebook, Apple, Groupon, and (of course) Google, and how the company’s pace of innovation is crucial to its future.

Check out the video below for some highlights from Lu’s talk at Microsoft NERD.

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Although an attentive observer can see a steady stream of news articles from UW Computer Science & Engineering, with more than 40 faculty members and 750 students, there is more going on than is reported. When I was given an opportunity to occupy an office inside the Paul G. Allen Center, I was excited to take a closer look.

One of the most visible gems in CSE is Oren Etzioni. Etzioni has been the technical wizard behind at least four commercial products or services. Most famously, he was involved with Farecast, a web service to help people to decide when to buy airplane tickets at the best price. Farecast was sold to Microsoft and now is a key part of Bing Travel. Etzioni was the technologist behind Go2Net, Netbot, and MetaCrawler, all cutting-edge web services that became commercial products. Now his latest project, Decide.com, just went live, a service for deciding the best time to purchase consumer electronics equipment. The core technology behind Farecast and Decide.com is his approach to indexing and analyzing very large collections of text documents, searching for information to help people make better decisions.

Shwetak Patel is another sparkling gem in CSE. Patel, who specializes in sensor technology, was in the news recently because his company Zensi was sold to Belkin, a maker of computer and consumer electronics products. Through Zensi, Patel commercialized signal processing techniques for measuring electricity, water, and natural gas usage within a house without having to instrument every appliance. One sensor per house is enough to identify what device is using electricity, when it is using it, and how much is being used. The same techniques with different sensors work for water and natural gas. Patel also made a Hollywood appearance by selling a system for detecting the illegal copying of movies by digital cameras in movie theaters, which he sold to the Motion Picture Association of America. Currently he is doing compelling work with networks of low-power sensors that can be easily and cheaply deployed for residential and commercial building monitoring. Patel’s sensors are hidden inside a wall or under a water heater to detect and alert a homeowner, or an insurance company, when a sensor detects water leaks, fire or carbon monoxide. These sensors will be able to save the lives of many homeowners, and save insurers hundreds of millions of dollars; water damage claims now surpass fire claims and natural disasters and are very expensive to settle.

The UW CSE computer security team recently won gleaming accolades at the national collegiate cyber defense competition in April, evidence of the world-class expertise in this area at the UW. The challenge for teams from colleges across the company was to take control of and run an IT system while defending it from attack by professional “hackers” over a three day contest, and the UW team won the competition. Yoshi Kohno, a UW gem focused on computer security, has made news recently for exposing security holes in equipment we use every day. Kohno’s work highlights the potential for hackers to gain control of automobile systems, pacemakers, or baby monitors. Kohno not only exposes security holes, but develops tools and techniques for secure computing.

During my short time in CSE, I have discovered … Next Page »

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Another Boston-area business software company exits the scene today via acquisition. Following in the footsteps of Gomez (and many others), Waltham, MA-based DynaTrace, which helps companies manage the performance of their software applications, has been bought by Detroit-based Compuware (NASDAQ: CPWR) for $256 million in cash. The deal closed on July 1.

DynaTrace has 180 employees worldwide, and “substantially all of these,” including the management team (led by CEO John Van Siclen), are expected to stay with the merged company, according to the press release. DynaTrace started in 2005 and was VC-backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Bay Partners. The company raised about $22 million in total financing, including $4 million at the beginning of this year. So the acquisition looks like a very strong exit for the investors.

DynaTrace had $26 million in revenues over the past 12 months, the release stated, and is expected to add between $35 million and $45 million to Compuware’s top line in fiscal year 2012.

Compuware counts among its big customers Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Adobe, Amazon.com, the BBC, USA Today, and Subaru (and now DynaTrace customers like Zappos, SAS, and Macy’s, if they weren’t already). The firm was founded in 1973 and went public in 1992. By acquiring companies like Gomez and DynaTrace, Compuware is making a strong move in performance management software and user experience for Web and mobile applications.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s biggest acquisition to date was on display this week, in Boston. I’m not talking about Skype. I’m talking about Qi Lu.

Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division, was in town on Wednesday to meet with employees at the firm’s New England Research and Development Center (NERD) in Cambridge, MA, and, in addition to private meetings with local companies and universities, to give a public talk that was co-hosted by Xconomy.

For those who don’t know, Lu was brought in at the end of 2008 by CEO Steve Ballmer to spearhead Microsoft’s fast-growing online efforts—including Bing, MSN, and mobile advertising. Before that, Lu was a senior exec at Yahoo for a decade, where he ran engineering for the search and advertising group. He had previously worked at IBM’s Almaden Research Center and Carnegie Mellon University.

So Lu is basically The One, charged with bringing the world’s biggest software company to a more competitive position in the digital, online, and social era (no pressure). And he was quite a steal—especially compared to the $45 billion that Microsoft offered to pay for all of Yahoo in early 2008.

This week, when he was in Cambridge, Xconomy sat down with Lu for an exclusive interview. Between that and his talk at the NERD center (see photo below), we learned a great deal about Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) evolving strategy in search and the Web—and where the company sees itself playing across the various fields of consumer online services. We’ll have a separate story on that soon.

But first, we had to get Lu’s take on the big news of the week, and what everyone was buzzing about—Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, the Luxembourg-based Internet phone and video firm (which has a big Silicon Valley presence). Skype will become a separate division within Microsoft; it won’t be integrated into Lu’s online services division. Partly because it isn’t in his direct purview, Lu didn’t go into much detail. But from the high-level comments he made during our interview, and at his public talk, it sounds like there are plans to use Skype’s technologies across a wide range of Microsoft businesses.

“This acquisition is very strategic,” Lu told us. “Certainly we are very confident that … Next Page »

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Meet Dr. Qi Lu (see photo, right). I have met him before, but it was at a backyard barbecue, and I didn’t want to grill the man about the future of search and the Web in that setting. But this is different.

Lu, the president of Microsoft’s online services division (his first name is pronounced “chee”), will be in Boston on May 11, and he’s stopping by the company outpost in Kendall Square to give a talk on Microsoft’s vision for the future of the Web and search. He’ll also sit down for a brief Q&A with yours truly, and we’ll take questions from the audience.

It’s all happening at Microsoft New England Research and Development Center (NERD), starting at 6:15 pm (doors open at 5:30) on the 11th. The event is free, and you can register here.

Lu is the man who was brought in to revitalize Microsoft’s Internet efforts in late 2008. Among his many duties on the senior leadership team, he oversees the company’s digital advertising efforts across search (Bing), portals (MSN), mobile, and other platforms. He has some pretty deep ideas on where search and Web technologies are headed—and where the real business opportunities are. Before coming to Microsoft, Lu spent 10 years as a senior exec with Yahoo, and also worked as a research staff member at IBM.

I’ve been wanting to ask him about how Bing is doing against Google, and what Microsoft’s strategy is in emerging areas like location-based advertising, video search and ads, local deals, and social media. (And also which innovative areas startups and entrepreneurs should be looking at.)

So bring all your questions too—and we hope to see you on May 11.

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