Author: Wade Roush

Motorola to Put Skyhook’s Location Technology into Android Phones, Bypassing Google

IT, Mobile, location based services

Wade Roush wrote:

For Google, it’s been a good news/bad news week. The good news is that the search leader’s open-source Android mobile operating system is catching on fast, with more manufacturers and carriers selling Android-equipped phones and more consumers buying them. The bad news is the story isn’t playing out exactly the way Google planned.

Yesterday the UK’s Vodafone announced that its UK customers will be able to buy Google’s Nexus One Android phone only in Vodafone retail stores, rather than through the Web store Google set up specifically for that purpose. And Google revealed that Verizon, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, won’t be selling the Nexus One at all, and is going instead with HTC’s Droid Incredible.

Today comes another change: Motorola is announcing that its own Android phones, such as the Droid and Cliq, will bypass the free location finding system that Google built into Android and use software from Boston-based Skyhook Wireless instead.

That’s a big win for Skyhook, adding a notch to a belt that already includes Apple’s iPhones and iPad line, Dell notebook computers, and mobile devices from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and other manufacturers. It’s also testimony to the open nature of the Android ecosystem, which—in contrast to the iPhone OS—was designed so that manufacturers and developers can swap out pieces of the operating system, such as the location-finding system, if they feel like it. And if, as Skyhook and many mobile developers argue, Motorola’s switch results in more accurate location readings for mobile users, then the move will ultimately benefit consumers as well.

Nonetheless, there’s reason to believe that Google is unhappy about Motorola’s decision. After all, there’s much more at stake than just bragging rights about whose location-finding system is installed in millions of smartphones. If Motorola phones use Skyook’s hybrid GPS-, cellular-, and Wi-Fi-based system to find their locations rather than Google’s own similar technology, it means vast amounts of data about the locations and travel habits of mobile users will go into Skyhook’s databases instead of Google’s. And location data, in the coming era of targeted advertising and location-based search and mobile commerce, will be one of the hottest commodities around.

Motorola is the first phone maker to add Skyhook’s location system to an Android phone. Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s founder and CEO, says Skyhook won Motorola’s business because it was able to persuade the Illinois-based mobile giant that its positioning system—which works in part by measuring signals strengths from nearby Wi-Fi networks and checking in with Skyhook’s continuously updated database of Wi-Fi network locations around the world—is more accurate than Google’s.

“We do side-by-side field tests all over the world and show that in a daily user’s life, this will perform much better,” says Morgan. “Every time you check in on Foursquare, it’s going to pick the right bar; every time you drive, it will pick the right road.”

It also helped, Morgan says, that Skyhook has direct relationships with scores of mobile-software developers who have built location-related apps for the iPhone platform and who say they want Skyhook’s system on Android devices.

“We decided to add Skyhook location to the ‘Movies’ Android App when we realized that it improved our accuracy over the native Android APIs,” said Joe Greenstein, co-founder and CEO of Flixster, in a statement prepared by Skyhook. APIs, or application programming interfaces, define the way different components of an operating system talk to each other; San Francisco-based Flixster has quite a bit of experience dealing with them, as its movie-search service is available on …Next Page »

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April 27, 2010
Central Square’s Barron Building Emerges as Startup Hub

startups, IT, Cambridge

Wade Roush wrote:

If there were a heat map showing how high-tech entrepreneurs are distributed around Boston, there would be a new red spot at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge’s Central Square.

From the outside, the four-story office building is distinguished mainly by its white-tiled facade and its large plate-glass windows. Deep inside is the office of Carl Barron, the building’s 93-year-old owner and landlord, long adored by neighbors as the unofficial “Mayor of Central Square.”

And now the building is also home to a gaggle of venture-backed Web and mobile startups, including Conduit Labs on the fourth floor and Oneforty on the second. Conduit is best known as the creator of the online music game Loudcrowd, and Oneforty has built a groundbreaking “Twitter app store” guiding Twitter fans to tools that make the microblogging service more useful.

Dozens of familiar faces from the Boston startup and investing scene were on hand for a joint Conduit/Oneforty housewarming party last Friday night, which was also the occasion for the unveiling of the Awesome Foundation’s March 2010 grant (it went to a London biology undergraduate, Charles Fracchia, who’s creating bio-engineered inks). At the party, I learned from Conduit CEO Nabeel Hyatt and Oneforty CEO Laura Fitton that both companies will be sharing their spaces with smaller startups.

Already subletting space from Conduit, according to Hyatt, are Shareaholic, maker of a social sharing plugin for Web browsers, and AccelGolf, which is developing GPS-driven golf apps for smartphones.

Jay Meattle, founder and CEO of Shareaholic, says his company moved into the Conduit space in mid-February. “We have a private room that can easily fit in 3-4 people, which is perfect for our size,” Meattle says. “It’s like an office within an office, with all the amenities of a big space like a kitchen, conference rooms, et cetera.”

William Sulinski, CEO and co-founder of Portland, ME-based AccelGolf, says the Cambridge outpost will become the startup’s sales hub.

Fitton says she’s not sure yet who will move into Oneforty’s space, but that they’ll likely be other entrepreneurs funded by Oneforty’s investors, who include Boston-based Flybridge Venture Capital, San Francisco-based Javelin Venture Partners, and a bevy of angel investors such as Dave McClure, Roger Ehrenberg, Lee Hower, and Andy Sack.

There’s “a two-fold benefit” from having other companies supported by Oneforty’s investors in the same space, says Fitton. “It keeps the energy up, and it also means our investors and advisors are coming by the office all the time, so we can grab them for extra questions.”

The new cluster of startups in the Barron Building is another example of the informal incubator phenomenon that Erin spotlighted back in February. In these work/hangout spaces, sheer proximity tends to …Next Page »

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April 27, 2010
Breaking the Myopic Mold: Q&A with David Egner of Detroit’s New Economy Initiative

Entrepreneurship, innovation, Redevelopment

Wade Roush wrote:

If you ask people who’s lighting the innovation fires around Detroit, pretty soon you get directed to the New Economy Initiative for Southeast Michigan. This coalition of 10 community and philanthropic organizations was formed in 2008 with the goal of pooling resources to “restore southeast Michigan to a position of leadership in the new global economy,” according to the group’s website.

Ambitious seems like the right word for that vision, given the scale of Detroit’s problems.The population has dropped by more than half since 1950, the city budget deficit is likely to hit $450 million by the end of this year, and there are nearly 50 square miles of vacant, abandoned land within the city limits. The area would be lucky to regain a position of leadership in the Midwest, much less top rank on the global stage.

But if you were the type to let the difficulties get you down, you’d never even get started on solving them. And David Egner, the New Economy Initiative’s executive director, is not easily discouraged.

“The uncertainty will eat you alive if you let it,” says Egner, who is also president of the Hudson-Webber Foundation, a legacy of the family that founded Hudson’s department stores. In Detroit, he says, “We have to strike a balance between the comfortable certainty of going in a known direction, even if it is wrong—which is what Detroit has been doing for the last couple of decades—and the fear and uncertainty of limitless possibilities.”

Of course, optimism and a tolerance for uncertainty are practically a job requirement for people in Michigan’s non-profit sector. (Before taking the reins at the Hudson-Webber Foundation in 1997, Egner was an executive at Junior Achievement and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and CEO of the Michigan Nonprofit Association.) In a long conversation with Xconomy, the first part of which is included below, Egner emphasized all the things Detroit has going for it, such as its manufacturing infrastructure and its strategic location as an international port and a hub for rail, truck, and water traffic. Even the city’s empty land can be seen as an opportunity, Egner argues. That’s because it makes business expansion cheaper and creates room for experiments like Hantz Farms, planned to become the world’s largest urban farm.

Egner is realistic, too. He acknowledges that the city is still paying for its history of political discord and the complacency of its anchor employers, the big three automakers. Egner says the regional economy probably hasn’t hit bottom yet, with a new wave of business failures likely among auto suppliers who are slow to adapt to the new patterns of manufacturing. But he thinks the money the New Economy Initiative is committed to spending in Detroit—$100 million over eight years—will go a long way toward accomplishing the group’s three major goals. The initiative is seeking to create a stronger entrepreneurial ecosystem, make better use of the region’s existing industrial assets, and build up a better-educated better-trained workforce.

For the record, the members of the New Economy Initiative are the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan (based in Detroit), the Max M. and Marjorie S. Fisher Foundation (Southfield, MI), the Ford Foundation (New York), the Hudson-Webber Foundation (Detroit), the W.K. Kellogg Foundation (Battle Creek, MI), the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation (Miami), the Kresge Foundation (Troy, MI), the McGregor Fund (Detroit), the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation (Flint, MI), and the Skillman Foundation (Detroit).

While Egner still runs the Hudson-Webber Foundation, he puts half of his time toward overseeing the New Economy Initiative, which has downtown offices just blocks from Detroit’s landmark Renaissance Center. The coalition has to work fast; barring an extension of the understanding that binds its members together, Egner says, the initiative will run out of money in 2012 and disband by 2015.

Part 1 of my interview with Egner is below. We’ll publish Part 2 later this week.

Xconomy: This question may sound mean or inappropriate, but I mean it in a constructive way. Why is Detroit worth saving?

David Egner: That’s not an inappropriate question at all. Let’s start with the historical aspects. Seventy to 80 years ago, this was Silicon Valley. It was where people came if they wanted to make something and create a business. Today, it’s largely driven by autos.But before that it was stoves, and before that it was lumber. Detroit has always been a town of hard-working innovators.

It really was the institutionalization of the auto industry that led to us becoming complacent, and in some respects, entitled. Whether that was through how union contracts were drawn up, or how executives got compensated, there was this entitlement mentality that because of what Detroit had built, it didn’t matter how we got it, we were entitled to have it.

But all of that DNA, or hard work and creative spirit, is still here in a major way. And we’re seeing it now at TechTown, where Randal Charlton is running the largest accelerator in the world, and receiving 100 inquiries a day from people trying to figure out how to start businesses.

Look at the comparative advantage points of Detroit versus the rest of the world, or the rest of North America. You’ve got the most cross-border international traffic in all of North America. You’ve got more goods coming over the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor than …Next Page »

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April 26, 2010
Awesome Foundation, Spreading Awesomeness Across the Universe, Expands to West Coast

IT, foundations, innovation

Wade Roush wrote:

For Boston-area Web developers, the place to be last Friday night was the Barron Building at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square. Home to Conduit Labs, Oneforty, Shareaholic, and several other Web startups, it’s become the newest pin in Boston’s entrepreneurship map. On Friday, it was the scene of a rollicking joint housewarming party for Conduit and Oneforty.

The party doubled as the award gathering for the winner of the March 2010 grant from the Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences, the Cambridge-born “microtrust” that hands out $1,000 grants to projects that “promote awesomeness.” The March awardee was Charles Fracchia, an undergraduate studying biology at Imperial College in London who’s spending a year in Boston doing an internship at Ginkgo Bioworks. Fracchia’s project is to create special cultures of microorganisms engineered to excrete “conditional inks” that change color at different temperatures.

But in addition to the bio-ink award, the Awesome Foundation had some more big news last week—the opening of a San Francisco chapter of the organization. It’s the third chapter outside Boston for the organization, which was created just last summer by Berkman Center researcher Tim Hwang and Betahouse founder Jon Pierce.

Here in Boston, the Awesome Foundation counts people like former Microsoft Startup Labs manager Reed Sturtevant as “trustees,” who contribute $100 per month toward the informal grants. The money occasionally goes to technology projects, but just as often are awarded to people with ideas for nifty or unusual stunts or temporary installations. Previous awardees have included Hansy Better Barraza, a Rhode Island School of Design architecture professor who planned to build a giant hammock on Boston Common, and Lauren McCarthy, whose wearable devices train people to have more effective social interactions.

Chapters in Providence, RI, New York, and now San Francisco operate autonomously, according to Pierce, but with the same charge: “funding awesomeness.” I interviewed Pierce about the organization’s rapid growth last week, and have written up our talk below.

Xconomy: What attracts people to start new chapters of the Awesome Foundation?

Jon Pierce: I think it’s the fact that it celebrates awesomeness over more traditional values. Awesomeness is a quality that is very impactful. It’s sort of that sense of wonder that you experience when you first hear about it. It’s “Wow, I didn’t think that was possible.” As a foundation, that’s novel, and the fact that it’s purely individually funded, with no real organizational structure, is also appealing to people.

The fact that we’re funding people on the basis of a really short, couple-hundred-word proposal, and we don’t have a strict vetting process or layers of bureaucracy that you have to go through at a traditional grant-making organization, enables us to get some more interesting ideas, because we aren’t necessarily concerned with whether [applicants] have corporate or academic credentials. We don’t even require that the projects be “successful” in a traditional way. We do fund projects that we hope will be …Next Page »

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April 26, 2010
Small Explosion, Evacuation at E Ink

IT, displays, Emergencies

Wade Roush wrote:

A small explosion at E Ink forced an evacuation of the company’s Cambridge, MA, offices and manufacturing facilities near Fresh Pond this afternoon. No injuries were reported, but employees have been sent home for the weekend as the company deals with water damage from the building’s sprinkler system.

The company said in a statement released to Xconomy: “There was a small incident at E Ink today. The incident was contained to a very small space within [the] R & D facility. No one was injured. There is no damage and no interruption of production. The incident was quickly taken care of and E Ink is cooperating with the fire department. Employees were sent home for the day because the sprinklers were engaged as result of the flash and resulting smoke. All employees will return to business on Monday.”

E Ink, which is a division of Taiwanese display maker Prime View International, makes the electrophoretic displays used in e-reader devices such as the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Plastic Logic’s forthcoming Que proReader.

Sriram Peruvemba, E Ink’s vice president of marketing, told Xconomy that the incident occurred in a “pod” or shop area in the company’s R&D operation where an employee was mixing various materials, and that it will not slow manufacturing of the “VizPlex” films used by E Ink’s customers.

E Ink researchers and engineers studying new display technologies routinely work with small amounts of dangerous materials, Peruvemba says. “Basically the research guys constantly get approval form the local authorities to bring in small quantities of different substances, including substances that may be flammable if mixed incorrectly,” he says. “In the next day or two we will know exactly what he mixed and what caused this. All of that will now be investigated by the fire department.”

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April 23, 2010
Athenahealth Hires IBM

Health IT, deals, IT

Wade Roush wrote:

Watertown, MA-based Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), which provides electronic health records and billing systems to physicians’ practices, has turned to the Managed Process Business Services wing of IBM (NYSE: IBM) for administrative and IT support, the companies announced today. IBM will help Athenahealth with tasks like data entry and physician billing. The deal “will enable Athenahealth to focus its resources on simplifying and improving administrative and reimbursement processes while reducing staff workload,” the companies said in a statement.

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April 23, 2010
Mascoma Collects $3.4M in Debt Round

energy, Biofuels, deals

Wade Roush wrote:

Mascoma, the Lebanon, NH-based developer of advanced methods for making ethanol from wood fiber and other non-edible plant matter, has raised $3.4 million toward a $10 million round of convertible debt financing, according to regulatory documents filed April 21. The funding presumably puts the company in stronger position to move forward with construction of an ethanol plant in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

The filing indicates that Mascoma raised the new funds from a group of 10 separate investors, but it doesn’t identify them. The company’s past venture and strategic investors, who have ponied up at least $100 million in three previous rounds of funding, include Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, General Motors, Marathon Oil Co., Pinnacle Financial Partners, and Vantage Point Venture Partners.

Mascoma won a $15 million grant from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation in June 2008 to build a cellulosic ethanol plant in Kinross in Chippewa County, south of Sault Ste. Marie, MI. The state later pledged another $8.5 million for the plant, which is a joint venture with Marquette, MI-based forestry company J.M. Longyear and is expected to create 50 to 75 jobs and be operational by 2012.

Mascoma representatives did not immediately respond to Xconomy’s request for comment on the funding round. Mascoma appointed a new CEO, chemical industry veteran William Brady, in January.

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April 23, 2010
Detroit: America’s Laboratory for Innovation

wwwade, Detroit, innovation

Wade Roush wrote:

What the heck is Xconomy doing opening a bureau in Detroit?

The same thing we’ve been doing all along: seeking out technology innovators in key cities and chronicling the work they’re doing to turn their ideas into businesses that will drive the economy forward, both regionally and nationally.

There’s no question that Detroit falls short on many of the ingredients that propel tech-company growth in Xconomy’s other home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle—things like an existing network of experienced serial entrepreneurs, a deep-rooted ecosystem of venture and angel investors, a menagerie of big high-tech anchor companies, and multiple top-level universities and research institutions churning out highly trained graduates and new technology concepts.

But in Detroit, the need for innovation is far more urgent than in any of those other places. So it’s going to have to make do with, and build upon, the resources it does have. And there’s nothing about the character of Detroiters or the automotive industry’s current woes to convince me that the city can’t bounce back.

For one thing, there’s no choice. The stakes are too high. If a way can’t be found to restart entrepreneurship and risk-taking in the region’s manufacturing, services, and technology industries, the city’s population, tax base, and infrastructure will continue to erode.

But more importantly, Detroit is a city of big ideas and big accomplishments. It’s the home of world-changing inventions such as the refrigerated railroad car, the automatic traffic light (the first one was installed at the corner of Woodward and Michigan in downtown Detroit in 1920), the mechanical clamping mop, and, of course, the assembly line—which became the key not just to unprecedented middle-class prosperity, but to the Allies’ victory in World War II. And that’s not even counting Vernors ginger ale (which was always in abundant supply around my grandparents’ house in Charlotte, MI), guerilla marketing, techno and rap music, and the Last Word (a cocktail combining gin, maraschino liqueur, lime and green Chartreuse).

And let’s not forget that Detroit is also home to two of the country’s largest corporations. Ford is currently America’s eighth largest company, and GM is No. 15, according to Fortune magazine. None of Xconomy’s other home cities can claim even a single company in the top 30, as measured by revenues. (Seattle-born Boeing is No. 28 but is now headquartered in Chicago, and Microsoft is No. 36.)

With such a powerful history of innovation behind it—much of it showcased at Dearborn’s Henry Ford Museum, whose collection of technological artifacts is rivaled only by the Smithsonian’s—Detroit is a city that no one should write off. Time Inc. certainly isn’t: last fall, the media giant bought a house in Detroit and is spending a year …Next Page »

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April 23, 2010
The XSITEment Returns on June 17 at Babson College—X Prize Founder Diamandis to Keynote Xconomy Summit

Xconomy, events, XSITE

Wade Roush wrote:

Most Xconomy events last only an afternoon or an evening. Barely enough time, in other words, to scratch the surface of all the amazing work technology entrepreneurs are doing around New England, in areas as varied as cloud computing, health IT, mobile commerce, smart grid technology, and the future of drug development. But our flagship annual conference, the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (XSITE), is different: it’s a chance to gather for a full day with leading innovators and investors from New England and around the country and hear all the details on what they’re doing to turn ideas into great businesses.

We’re pleased to announce that registration is open for this year’s edition of XSITE, which will be held for the first time at Babson College in Babson Park, MA (that’s next door to Wellesley, for those of you not up to speed on your suburban geography). Neighboring Olin College joins Babson as co-host of the event, and we couldn’t ask for a more appropriate venue, given the focus at Babson and Olin on entrepreneurship and engineering that meets real social and economic needs.

Babson president Leonard Schlesinger, a nationally celebrated leader in the field of entrepreneurship, will be on hand to help us kick off the event, and we’ll also hear from keynote speakers like Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, who knows a lot about igniting entrepreneurship and innovation. Other featured speakers will include Rod Brooks, whose startup Heartland Robotics is reimagining the way factory workers do their jobs; Alkermes chairman and CEO Richard Pops, a national leader in biotechnology; and Bob Metcalfe, the Ethernet inventor who has made a mission of promoting “enertech” or the idea of clean, super-abundant next-generation energy technologies. We’ve posted the whole list of confirmed speakers, who already number almost 30, over at the XSITE registration page, where you can buy a ticket to XSITE at our “super saver” rate until April 29.

The theme for XSITE 2009, last June, was “The Recovery Starts Here.” We planned all of our keynote talks and panel discussions around creative ideas from New England tech and life sciences companies for lifting the country out of recession. The theme this year, “Building the Next Economy,” grows directly out of the 2009 conference—but with a crucial difference.

There’s no question now that economic recovery is underway, though it’s been slow to show up in some parts of the country, like Xconomy’s newest home city, Detroit (from whence we’ll have at least one speaker). What’s important now, as we head into this century’s second decade, is the choices we make about the kind of economy we really want. Will it be based on rusty, outdated, and wasteful approaches to energy generation, transportation, healthcare, communications, and consumer-goods manufacturing? Or will it be built around new ideas like using advanced 3D design and prototyping technologies to streamline product development, putting IT and modern communications technologies to work remove the excess costs from patient care, and managing the electric grid and our homes and offices to extract hidden efficiencies?

Obviously, we have a bias here—because we believe, at bottom, that technological progress is what drives exponential growth (that’s where the X in Xconomy comes from, after all) and that innovation is the straightest way out of the economic doldrums and toward a solid, sustainable, rewarding economy.

In addition to our plenary sessions, we’re expanding the conference this year to include four breakout tracks. Three will be the same as last year: Life Sciences, Energy, and Information Technology. The new track will be focused, like our just-announced new channel, on Health IT.

And, like last year, we’ll close out the formal sessions with a raucous XSITE Xpo, a rapid-fire series of presentations by 12 startups in life sciences, energy, and infotech with the audience voting on their favorites. An evening networking party will follow, naturally.

We’ll provide a lot more details about the conference agenda over the coming weeks…but we hope you will sign up early for what’s sure to be 2010’s most XSITE-ing celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.

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April 22, 2010
Patrick Admin Officials Hold Open Office Hours

Massachusetts, Business Development, Government

Wade Roush wrote:

The Patrick Administration announced today that representatives of the Massachusetts: It’s All Here campaign to support business growth in the state will be available for meetings with college students, entrepreneurs, and small business executives at their new location in the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, Cambridge. Officials who will be available by appointment for office hours at the CIC include Gregory Bialecki, Secretary of Housing and Economic Development; Eric Nakajima, Senior Innovation Policy Advisor; Anne Struthers, Executive Director of Business Development; and Kofi Jones, coordinator of Massachusetts: It’s All Here. Xconomy broke the news about the opening of the state’s CIC outpost in early February.

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April 21, 2010
Bill Gates Pushes His Foundation’s Health, Education, Energy Agenda at MIT—The Podcast

IT, energy, Education

Wade Roush wrote:

Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates visited MIT today as part of his College Tour, a three-day trip to universities across the United States. In his talk, Gates emphasized the importance of getting more bright young people to innovate in critical areas such as global health, education, and energy—all areas where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is already investing or considering investing.

I’m going to post a writeup about the talk later this afternoon, but for now, here’s a podcast recording of Gates’s talk, for anyone who wasn’t able to get to MIT (or squeeze into Kresge Auditorium) for the event.

Please try to ignore the typing sounds in the recording—that’s me taking notes.

Xconomy Podcast: Bill Gates Speaks at MIT
April 21, 2010

CLICK TO PLAY

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April 21, 2010
The Xconomists Reach Out to Detroit

Michigan Economy, innovation, people

Wade Roush wrote:

One of Xconomy’s unique strengths is our network of Xconomists, leaders in the worlds of innovation and entrepreneurship who have accepted our invitation to act as occasional guest bloggers, story sources, and informal editorial advisers. We’re proud to count 61 Xconomists in Boston (our original home base), 50 in Seattle, 42 in San Diego, and 16 so far in Detroit

In April and May, to celebrate the opening of our newest bureau in Detroit, we’re tapping the entire network to asks Xconomists the same question: “What are five things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy?” We’re rounding up some great answers, and we’ve started to publish them here on the Xconomy Detroit home page.

On Tuesday, the official opening day for the site, we ran essays by Kyoto Prize-winning Harvard researcher George Whitesides, one of the founders of biotech giant Genzyme, and Randal Charlton, executive director of Detroit’s leading technology incubator, TechTown. Today, we featured pieces from Nobel Prize-winning MIT biologist Phillip Sharp, a co-founder of Biogen and other biotechnology companies, and former GM executive Bob Purcell, now an automotive and energy consultant. We’ve got a couple dozen more essays in the hopper, and we plan to publish one or two every weekday until we run out.

The content of the essays is as varied as the backgrounds of the people writing them, but I think it’s fair to say that most of them hit on a few common themes, such as the need for entrepreneurs, investors, academic researchers, and state policymakers to work together to clear away old obstacles to economic experimentation and grease the wheels of innovation. Many in Michigan are trying to do just that, but our hope is that our posts will surface some new ideas, increase attention on the issue, and help galvanize more action.

As Xconomy works alongside other media outlets such as Time Inc. to focus attention on Detroit and the vital, instructive stories about the struggle to reinvent the region’s economy, we hope, too, that our “Five Things” campaign will underscore the fact that innovators around the country care about Detroit’s future and are watching with great interest and concern. Just as we’ve seen in our other cities, we think that it’s enormously helpful to analyze one region’s challenges by bringing in fresh perspectives from other regions. (Indeed, that was one of the effects we were always trusting would emerge as we gradually built up the Xconomy network.)

We’re extremely interested in your own thoughts about how Detroit can get its economy working again, and in your reactions to the Xconomist essays. Please write to us at [email protected], and/or leave your comments on the individual articles. We’ll highlight your contributions in future posts. Many thanks to all our friends in Detroit for the warm welcome you’ve extended to Xconomy!

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April 21, 2010
Report: Google Courting ITA

deals, IT, Software

Wade Roush wrote:

ITA Software, the Cambridge, MA-based maker of airline fare search software, is in talks with Google about a potential acquisition, Bloomberg reported this morning. ITA, whose investors include General Catalyst Partners, Battery Ventures, Spectrum Equity, PAR Investment Partners, and Sequoia Capital, is seeking as much as $1 billion, according to the Bloomberg report, which cited unnamed sources. ITA’s software could help Google compete with Microsoft in the travel search arena, but if Google were to acquire the 500-employee company, it would also make the search giant into a major provider of behind-the-scenes airline reservations systems. Xconomy profiled ITA in December 2008.

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April 21, 2010
One Studio to Rule Them All: Warner Bros. Buys Turbine, Secures All Rights to Tolkien Games

IT, Games, deals

Wade Roush wrote:

The Burbank, CA-based Home Entertainment Group of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, a unit of media giant Time Warner (NYSE: TWX), has purchased Westwood, MA-based online game maker Turbine. The companies announced the deal after markets closed tonight.

Turbine is best known for its massively multiplayer online (MMO) game world Lord of the Rings Online, based on the famous series of books from J.R.R. Tolkien. A Time Warner subsidiary, Snowblind Studios, already holds the rights to all console and PC games based on the Tolkien books, and the Turbine acquisition gives the company control of the MMO rights as well. “Now all games rights for the LOTR franchise will be unified under the Warner Bros. shield,” the company said in a statement.

Time Warner did not release financial details of the acquisition, but an unnamed source cited in the Boston Globe put the purchase price at $160 million.

If that price is correct, the Time purchase does not represent a massive return for Turbine’s investors. The 16-year-old game company has raised at least four rounds of funding from a group including Polaris Venture Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Tudor Ventures, Columbia Capital, Granite Global Ventures. Most recently, last August, it collected $6.6 million in the first tranche of a planned $50 million Series D round. Assuming that no more of the $50 million was collected, Turbine’s total venture funding since inception amounts to just more than $100 million.

Turbine is also known for its online games Dungeons & Dragons Online, which recently adopted a free-to-play model driven by virtual goods sales, and Asheron’s Call, its first title. Asheron’s Call is still online today, though it’s frequented by a dwindling audience of loyalists who—like Lord of the Rings players—pay about $15 per month for access.

With about 300 employees, Turbine was North America’s largest privately held game studio at one time. Martin Tremblay, president of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, said in a statement that Turbine is “recognized globally for its industry-leading technology, groundbreaking graphics and its unique ability to create and operate massive and persistent online worlds which greatly enhance players’ social gaming experiences. The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online have both been an enormous success for Turbine and we look forward to working with their talented development team to continue creating award-winning online games.”

Turbine president and CEO Jim Crowley, meanwhile, said joining Warner would allow Turbine to reach bigger audiences. “This acquisition is very exciting because it allows us to expand globally while continuing to focus on creating spectacular online games that our loyal fans and players have come to expect,” Crowley said.

Turbine is the second Boston-area company to become part of the Time Warner empire this year. Time Inc. acquired Cambridge, MA-based shopping recommendation site StyleFeeder in January.

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April 20, 2010
Ford App Controls Smartphones

automotive, IT, Mobile

Wade Roush wrote:

Ford Motor Company’s wireless division announced today that AppLink, a downloadable application for its Sync in-car communications and “infotainment” system, will allow drivers to use voice commands to control certain apps on their mobile phones. Available first on the 2011 model Ford Fiesta, Applink will work initially with Android and BlackBerry devices, and will allow users to control apps such as Internet radio services Pandora and Stitcher and Orangatame’s OpenBeak twitter app. AppLink will work on all Sync-equipped vehicles starting next year, and will also be upgraded to work with Apple’s iPhone. Ford also said it is readying a website for mobile app developers who want to adapt their software to work with the Sync system.

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April 20, 2010
Twitter Pitch Contest at MIT

MIT, business plan competitions, social media

Wade Roush wrote:

The organizers of the MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which is celebrating its 20th year in 2010, announced last week the newest addition to their lineup of contests: a $500 Twitter pitch or “Twitch” competition. Anyone can enter by tweeting their business idea in 140 character or less, reserving 11 characters for the required hash tag “#100kTwitch”. Organizers say they’ll judge entries based both on creative quality of the pitches and their “virality”—ideas that get retweeted by Twitter users with lots of followers will earn more points. A winner will be announced May 12. The full rules for the Twitter pitch contest, which will kick off at 9:00 a.m. on April 20, are here.

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April 19, 2010
Mobile Meets the Marathon

IT, Mobile, startups

Wade Roush wrote:

Everyone around Boston gets into the marathon spirit on Patriot’s Day, even startups. Today, two Boston-based mobile companies are using the event to highlight their technologies.

One is Skyhook Wireless, which makes the software that iPhones, Dell notebook computers, and other mobile devices use to determine their locations based on GPS and Wi-Fi signals. Last month Skyhook introduced a service called SpotRank that gathers anonymous data on the locations of people accessing Skyhook’s system, creating near-real time maps of demand for location information. Today the company is using SpotRank to highlight location lookups along the route of the Boston Marathon.

In part, it’s a just a demonstration of geek prowess—as more and more people flock to the marathon route to watch the runners, Skyhook’s system will highlight the swelling crowds using its online “heat maps,” especially around the finish-line area near Boston’s Copley Square. But the larger point is to demonstrate how big events that attract mobile phone-toting crowds drive up usage of location-based services.

SpotRank is “the only source of behavioral intelligence [on human travel patterns] of this magnitude available worldwide,” Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan said in a statement last month. “By allowing developers to play with this data we expect to see eye-opening uses of location.” Skyhook hopes that developers will use the SpotRank data, which is available through a provider of mobile developer tools called SimpleGeo, to create new applications and think up new uses for location information, such as predicting crowds and determining the best times for merchants to offer location-based promotions.

Another local startup tapping marathon excitement is FitnessKeeper, maker of the RunKeeper run tracking application for location-aware mobile phones. If you’re a longtime Xconomy reader, you’ll recall that FitnessKeeper founder and CEO Jason Jacobs ran the 2009 Boston Marathon dressed as a giant iPhone, raising more than $2,500 for the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in the process.

Today Jacobs is repeating the stunt, but with some company. Aaron White, a developer for FitnessKeeper and chief technology officer at Cambridge-based startup DoInk, will be running alongside Jacobs in a giant Android phone costume, to mark the release of the RunKeeper application for phones running Google’s Android operating system. The app went live in the Android Marketplace (the app store for Android phones) just last night, according to Jacobs.

This year Jacobs is running to support the American Liver Foundation, while White is raising money for Grateful Nation, an online community created by Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. FitnessKeeper fans can track Jacobs’ and White’s progress live at the RunKeeper website, which also features a series of YouTube videos about Jacobs’ and White’s preparations for the marathon.

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April 19, 2010
Oracle Scoops Up Phase Forward for $685 Million

Health IT, deals, IT

Wade Roush wrote:

Phase Forward (NASDAQ: PFWD), the Waltham, MA-based maker of software that helps pharmaceutical companies manage clinical trials of new drugs, will be acquired by California database giant Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL), the companies announced today. Phase Forward, which is fetching a price of $685 million or $17 per share, will become part of Oracle’s Health Sciences Global Business Unit.

The price represents about a 30 percent premium for Phase Forward’s shareholders over yesterday’s closing stock price of $13.08.

Oracle, which is headquartered in Redwood Shores, CA, painted the purchase as part of its strategy to offer more database-driven business applications in key vertical industries such as healthcare. The company already offers an extensive line of software products for tasks such as capturing patient data and analyzing the progress of clinical trials. It said that combining its products with Phase Forward’s “is expected to enable researchers, clinical development professionals, physicians, regulators and patients to more effectively and securely capture, contribute, access and share data.”

Oracle also said the acquisition would help it tailor its systems to help hold down the costs of pharmaceutical R&D. “The life sciences and healthcare industries are converging as they seek to control costs while accelerating patient-centered innovation,” Neil de Crescenzo, Oracle Health Sciences senior vice president, said in a statement. “Phase Forward brings outstanding products and employees with significant expertise to Oracle that will help enable the delivery of personalized medicine and value-based healthcare.”

The acquisition is subject to shareholder approval. While the news of the proposed takeover came as a surprise—not a word of had leaked out to the media before today’s announcement—it fits a now-familiar pattern in which Massachusetts high-tech companies grow to the sub-billion-dollar stage, and are then scooped up by West Coast giants with deeper pockets.

Xconomy’s Ryan McBride met with Phase Forward CEO Bob Weiler just last month. They talked about the challenges the company faces as it grows beyond the first stage of adoption of clinical trial management software—the simple switch from paper records to digital tracking—and attempts to create systems that will help Big Pharma customers like Roche and GlaxoSmithKline manage the whole process of clinical research (what it calls an “integrated clinical research suite”). Toward that end, Phase Forward has made a number of acquisitions of its own, buying companies like Cambridge, MA-based Waban Software, which makes clinical data analysis systems.

But the company’s move to expand beyond electronic data capture—and its success adding customers (it added 50 new ones in 2009, helping boost its revenue by 25 percent)—didn’t seem to come fast enough for investors’ taste. The company’s market valuation peaked at about $1 billion in November 2007 and, by last month, had declined to just over $550 million.

That drop in market valuation certainly made it a little easier for Oracle to swallow up Phase Forward. Oracle’s market cap today is about $132 billion.

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April 16, 2010
Online Notebook Smackdown: Evernote Vs. Springpad

wwwade, IT, Web

Wade Roush wrote:

I’m a digital pack rat, which means I tend to get unreasonably excited about online notekeeping systems. I’m driven by the conviction that there’s got to be one best way to use the Internet to save and retrieve every bit of information I might want to look at later, whether that means Web clippings, important e-mails, voice memos, receipts, photos, maps, shopping lists, restaurant reviews, instruction manuals, or whatever. Of course, you could just store all this stuff on a single hard drive—but then you’d have to carry that drive with you everywhere. Putting it in the cloud means it’s available from anywhere, including your mobile devices.

I thought I’d found the beginnings of an answer back in 1999, when a developer at the Silicon Valley startup where I was working created, in his spare time, one of the most elegant content management and publishing systems I’ve ever seen. It was intended as the custom backend for the news website I was managing, and the beautiful thing about it was that you could easily create categories for articles, and categories-within-categories, and categories-within-categories-within-categories, then post stories to as many categories as you liked and navigate to them using a nifty system of nested links. It was like one of those cubby hole racks for your closet, only infinitely expandable. I thought it would make a great product on its own, but alas, the startup was in a different business (e-books) and when it eventually died, so did the publishing system.

I’ve been searching for a replacement ever since. Right now I think there are two main contenders for the title of best online notes application: Evernote and Springpad. I signed up for Evernote—created by the Mountain View, CA, startup of the same name—shortly after the Web version of the service was launched in June 2008, and I’ve stored just over 2,100 items there, averaging about three per day. And I’ve been following Springpad closely since Charlestown, MA-based Spring Partners opened their service to the public in November 2008. You can read my review of Evernote here and my news articles about Springpad here, here, and here.

If you’re the kind of computer user who spends a lot of time grazing for information online, or if you’re just a busy person juggling a lot of plans and commitments, a cloud notekeeper would probably be helpful. Both Evernote and Springpad let you capture information in multiple ways—whether you’re at your computer using a Web browser or you’re out and about with your mobile device—and they both make stored notes easy to find it later. But when it comes to what you can do with your notes, and how the companies earn money, the two services couldn’t be more at odds. Today I thought I’d compare the two tools, with a focus on the major similarities and differences rather than the specific features (which are many; Evernote’s product overview page is here and Springpad’s intro video is here).

If I were forced to cut to the chase, I’d have to say that Evernote is great for geeks and serious info-hoarders while Springpad is better for shoppers, cooks, soccer moms, and other average folks doing everyday stuff. But for the details, read on.

1. Evernote costs money if you use it a lot; Springpad is free forever. You can sign up to use Evernote for free, but non-paying users have a file upload limit of 40 megabytes per month. That might be enough if you’re only saving Web clips, but if you’re uploading stuff like Word documents or Powerpoint presentations, you’re going to exceed it fast. A premium Evernote subscription, which raises the ceiling to 500 megabytes per month, costs $5 per month or $45 per year. Springpad, by contrast, is totally free and solely advertising-supported. Spring Partners makes money through lead generation—for example, by …Next Page »

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April 16, 2010
Daily Grommet Raises $3.4 Million

VC, deals, IT

Wade Roush wrote:

The Daily Grommet just hit the daily double. The Lexington, MA-based startup, which scouts out consumer products from colorful, progressive, relatively unknown manufacturers and promotes one such “grommet” each day through online videos, announced today that it has closed the first tranche of its Series A funding round at $3.4 million. Existing investors LaunchCapital and Gerry Laybourne, founder of Nickelodeon and Oxygen Media, were on board for the A round, and were joined by new investors Jean Hammond of Hub Angels and Launchpad Venture Group, John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures, Nancy Peretsman, and Jill Preotle of Boston Golden Seeds. “Daily Grommet is attacking an enormous market opportunity in a David vs. Goliath way,” Landry said in a statement. “This is already a totally disruptive story-using social technologies to blow up the old models of product discovery and distribution.” Xconomy profiled the Daily Grommet in July 2009 and published an extended interview with founder and CEO Jules Pieri in August 2009.

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April 15, 2010