In this “always on” era of online products and services, there is a time-saving appeal to the product introduced today by San Diego-based SlimSurveys. It’s designed to help businesses gather feedback from customers without sucking up too much of their time.

“We wanted to build a company from the perspective of the survey respondent,” CEO Sean Callahan tells me. So SlimSurveys has developed an online platform that limits each survey to just seven questions, enabling customers to quickly rate their satisfaction in various ways, so the survey experience will last no more than 30 seconds.

Think of it as the Twitter of surveys, Callahan says.

It’s not just a clever turn of phrase. Callahan, along with SlimSurveys co-founders Rodney Rumford and Daniel Marashlian, have been steeped in the ins and outs of Twitter at their previous venture, a photo-sharing platform that was founded in 2009 as TweetPhoto. They quickly expanded their TweetPhoto API beyond Twitter to include Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, and other social media networks. Callahan says TweetPhoto empowered third-party application developers to quickly add media-sharing capabilities to their apps without taking on the job of building and managing the infrastructure themselves.

SlimSurveys for mobile

“We grew that company rather quickly, from zero to 30 million [users] in just 18 months—and that was just our website,” Callahan says. Now he is looking to follow a similar strategy with SlimSurveys.

In an e-mail this afternoon, Callahan writes that the startup’s ultimate goal is “disrupting the survey industry and turning it into a time-saving experience for millions of consumers…We want to build an amazing product people love to interact and express with on a daily basis.”

But there’s little doubt that the SlimSurveys founders hope to repeat the broader success of TweetPhoto as well. The photo-sharing startup raised $2.6 million in venture capital (from Qualcomm Ventures, Anthem Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, and Eastman Kodak) before changing its … Next Page »

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In the free-for-all of the online video sector, it can be tough to stand out. But today New York’s Content Galaxy rolled out a platform it believes can give print media a new way to engage audiences who watch streaming videos.

Content Galaxy offers paid subscribers access to content such as video from authors, publishers, and media outlets. Steven Asherman, founder and president of the company, says the platform was developed within his consulting and software business, Base One International, though it may quickly become his primary focus.

Asherman says the platform could give newspapers and magazines new sources of revenue by letting them set up paid video-streaming channels that use content pooled from third-party sources. This could be a way for cash-strapped newspapers to break into the online video market without breaking the bank. “They’re not in the position to become video companies themselves,” he says. “They are very much in the position to understand and edit the material.” His company aims to make the process low-friction and transparent for all parties.

The business model for Content Galaxy, he says, differs from YouTube, which tends to pay only one party, such as the publishers who own or license content. Asherman tries to address how to divvy up revenue from the video streams among the multiple, independent parties involved. That can be tricky since the content may be gathered from multiple sources and watched through different channels.

“We’re measuring how long somebody watched, where they were watching from, and making that available in a secure way that deals with some of the privacy issues,” he says.

Content Galaxy’s platform even lets individuals independently sell channels and earn commissions when subscribers watch. “A guy with an iPhone who captures images of a plane landing in the Hudson River can monetize that content,” Asherman says.

Creators of instructional videos, he says, may also use the platform to extend their reach. “These are people who have DVDs and would like to stream their material,” he says. The platform currently features a sports and fitness channel with about 100 videos, representing some 10 DVDs. “Think of it as Netflix for long-tail videos,” he says.

In short, Asherman believes his business model can be a more lucrative option for publishers than YouTube’s streaming service. He acknowledges that some industry watchers tout free access to online video as the future, but he thinks his platform can eventually change their minds. “We’re still at a point where we need to prove this is a better way to make revenue from intellectual property than through advertising,” he says.

Content Galaxy has attracted some angel funding, Asherman says, and is looking for more. The company was founded in 2008 within Base One, which has been selling software-as-a-service via the Web since 1998, he says, to clients that include the U.S. Navy and banks.

Going forward, Asherman hopes to focus on Content Galaxy rather than his consulting business. “It’s not what I planned originally but that’s okay,” he says. “I started to realize pooling intellectual property was going to be an important way of selling in the future.”

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Google was back on the stump Tuesday, trying to convince enterprise software buyers that it really, truly cares about their business.

Amit Singh, the president of Google’s enterprise business, took the stage at the E2 conference in Boston to talk about the growing number of services that his company is offering for big business customers.

Google Plus, the social network envisioned as a Facebook challenger, is gunning to compete with business communication software like Yammer and Jive. There are hundreds of thousands of developers building millions of apps on Google App Engine, including Best Buy. And major companies like Costco, Roche, and Japanese airline ANA are moving all of their employees to Google apps for day-to-day business, Singh said.

“That actually took me by surprise,” he said. “The adoption curve is really accelerating.”

Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley and points beyond, people are building apps for Google Glass, hoping to get Google Fiber’s ultrafast broadband in their hometown, spotting one of Google’s driverless cars being road-tested, or marveling at the idea of Google Loon, a wireless network held aloft by stratospheric balloons.

Given those two options, which future version of Google are you supposed to believe—the serious enterprise software vendor, or the bold experimenter creating breathtaking new products for consumers?

Singh’s interviewer on Tuesday, InformationWeek editorial director Fritz Nelson, cut right to the point: “Are there any Google Glass projects in the works for the enterprise?” The idea drew a few muffled chuckles from the breakfast crowd, but it’s no joke.

Since it came to dominate Web search and online advertising, Google’s DNA has been in consumer services. Like any huge tech company, it tends to see new markets and sectors as an engineering and resources problem, something that can be solved if you throw enough money and people at it.

What that gets you is Google’s approach of—eventually—updating consumer products with features that business customers want. “Our intention since the beginning, for all our products, has been get them to scale, get the right features implemented, and once they’re ready, bring them to enterprise,” Singh said.

It’s hard to say what kind of business that approach has earned for Google, since the company still makes the vast majority of its money from its core online advertising business.

For 2012, ads accounted for $43.6 billion of Google’s $50.1 billion in total revenue. About $2.3 billion was from “other,” non-Motorola businesses, which includes Google’s enterprise products—but the company doesn’t break it out any further.

Some outside observers have tried to get at the size of Google’s enterprise business with their own studies, which have resulted in estimates as high as $1 billion per year. But you have to remember that Google also counts its non-Motorola hardware and online content sales in that “other” category, which means its branded devices and app store sales.

In any case, let’s stipulate that Google could be generating in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenues from its enterprise business. While we have no idea how much that revenue costs, it ain’t peanuts—there are plenty of business software companies that are hoping to reach that scale some day.

There’s also plenty of opportunity for Google to grow its enterprise business, especially in a world where online software and multiple devices will eventually become the norm for corporate IT.

In a recent report, research agency Forrester noticed two big trends working in Google’s favor. Android smartphones are now on par with Apple devices in terms of market share among “information workers,” and the future of software points toward “no single, dominant ecosystem on the horizon to supplant the Windows-PC world.”

In that scenario, cross-platform service providers have a chance to gain market share among corporate buyers, Forrester said—provided their tools work well enough for heavy-duty enterprise demands.

Businesses, Forrester said, “can only continue to opt for ecosystem-specific solutions such as Microsoft Office … when the shortcomings of broad-reaching alternatives such as Google Docs are so profound as to derail productivity.”

Microsoft is moving toward this world, finally, with its recent decision to bring Office to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. Apple is making its Office alternative, iWork, available in the browser.

Google certainly has some of the products and parts of the platform to begin competing. There is still some lingering skepticism out there about how serious Google is taking the enterprise business, but independent analysts have been saying lately that Google is making surprising inroads against Microsoft’s critical enterprise software business.

The question is whether Google is finally putting serious muscle into the effort, or if its enterprise business remains an also-ran alongside an expanding universe of consumer projects—all in the service of more data and a bigger, more profitable advertising network.

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It has been a busy morning for Nina Nashif.

The CEO and founder of Chicago-based Healthbox is in town for the accelerator program’s second “innovation day” in Boston. Nine health IT startups will present their pitches this afternoon to a crowd of healthcare industry executives, entrepreneurs, and investors at the Revere Hotel near Boston Common.

You could be excused for not knowing who these startups are or what they represent. After all, dozens of healthcare accelerators have popped up in the past year or so, and with all the startups nibbling at the edges of truly gigantic problems in healthcare, it’s a super noisy sector.

That’s why I wanted to get to the top and see what Nashif (pictured) is seeing. Her training is in health administration and she’s a longtime business executive, having led international services and growth strategy at a Texas hospital, co-founded a wholesale business in New York, and served as vice president of Sg2, a healthcare analytics firm in London.

That was all before joining Sandbox Industries, a business incubator and venture capital firm in Chicago, and spinning out Healthbox as a separate entity.

Healthbox got started in Chicago in 2011-12, and in the past year it has expanded its three-month accelerator programs to Boston and London. Next up, interestingly, will be new programs in Jacksonville, FL, and Nashville, TN. And Nashif plans another session in Boston for early next year.

The biggest lesson learned so far, she says, is that “healthcare entrepreneurs need access to the industry, but just giving them access isn’t enough. We really need to help them refine their business model in the context of the industry.”

That means solving real problems, not going after perceived needs or operating at the fringe. “How do you make sure you’re building for the right stakeholder and you have a business model that will scale?” Nashif says.

One answer to that is pretty interesting and not obvious—especially for an accelerator. Healthbox is looking to diversify in terms of the stage of companies it accepts, Nashif says. I took this to mean admitting more established, later-stage companies as well as seed-stage startups—and it sounds like this is happening already.

As Nashif explains, Healthbox (and other programs) got started in part because of a seed-stage funding gap for young companies. … Next Page »

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Russell Conard, co-founder of the Ann Arbor-based startup Ornicept, likes to describe himself as a computer scientist with a birding habit. Conard hooked up with Ornicept’s other co-founder, Justin Otani, who is the son of a wildlife biologist, while they were both attending Indiana University. The two wanted to know how scientists and researchers collect data about natural resources because they had a hunch that the methods were ripe for disruption.

Ornicept has come up with a cloud computing-based tablet platform that the company believes can replace a backpack full of the current, outdated tools in use. Before Ornicept developed its product, Conard and Otani spent some time at the Lake Erie Metropark near Gibraltar, MI, which Conard calls one of the most amazing migratory bottlenecks for raptors in North America. More than 100,000 birds of prey stop at the metropark during the fall migration, and the pair watched how scientists collected data.

One wildlife biologist proudly showed Otani and Conard a clicker-type contraption that he was using to track the birds. Every hour, he would record the number of clicks. “The federal government was paying him to sit there eight or ten hours a day,” Conard explains. “And at the end of the day, he’d type the data into a computer.”

Surely, Otani and Conard thought, this old-fashioned way of data collection must be an anomaly. They started talking with representatives from state and federal government, companies, consultants, universities, and they found that across all sectors, the pen and paper method of data collection was still the industry standard.

“The natural resource world is very data-driven, but it’s like they didn’t realize there was this whole other co-existing world called the programming world,” Otani adds. “It’s not an effective use of statisticians’ time to be dropping rows into spread sheets.”

Ornicept develops the data fields depending on what kind of natural resources are being monitored, and then push surveys to the tablets belonging to researchers in the field. As the data is entered in, it syncs to the cloud where it can then be accessed by log-in from back in the home office or anywhere else in the world.

Working from the Ann Arbor SPARK office, Ornicept is in the midst of an end-to-end study of how users might engage with its platform and talking to government and other stakeholders to see what their needs might be.

“Our timing is great,” Conard points out. “All of a sudden, there’s access to secure cloud space, and we can work with rugged Android tablets that just came out a few months ago. A lot of this technology is brand new.”

Ornicept already has at least one high-profile booster: Congressman John Dingell, the longest-serving politician in Washington and the author of the Endangered Species Act of 1973. His office is working with the Ornicept team on ways the federal government might save taxpayers money while preserving the country’s natural resources.

Otani says Ornicept has just begun raising a seed round and has signed a “very forward thinking” out-of-state utility company as its first client. Ornicept will complete its pilot projects over the summer and plans a big commercial rollout for fall.

“There’s a dual benefit to using Ornicept technology,” Conard notes. “Agencies are being asked to do more with less, so they can have [employees] do more field work than clerical work. People can also work together even though they’re located in different places across the nation. This will increase collaboration in a way that hasn’t been done before.”

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We do it once a year. And every year, it’s one of the big highlights of the day.

I’m talking about the “Startup Xpo,” a showcase of some of the most intriguing young companies around Boston. It’s all part of XSITE, our fifth annual innovation conference happening this Wednesday, June 19, at Babson College. The overall theme this year is “Boston’s Tech Revival.”

The idea behind the Xpo is to give our audience of mainstream business leaders a glimpse of the depth and diversity of young startups bubbling up in the local ecosystem. These companies are all seed-stage, bootstrapped, or pre-VC round; they’re not household names, but they might be someday. Other than that, the main criterion is that I found them personally interesting.

They are a mix of consumer, enterprise, and science focused. A mix of software and hardware, Internet and mobile, healthtech and robotics.

Our emcee is Meredith McPherron, the director of the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Meredith helped revamp the HBS business plan contest this year (now called the New Venture Competition), and she’s got her eye on all things entrepreneurial.

Without further ado, here are the 10 Xpo startups:

—SnotBot, represented by Andrew Bennett of Olin College. OK, this isn’t really a company yet, but I like the project (and the name). It’s a multicopter flying robot that collects mucous samples from whales.

—Price Intelligently (Patrick Campbell). Software for doing scientific pricing of products. In other words, what should you be charging for that software or gizmo?

—Kibits (Matt Cutler). This company started out as a micro-social network, but it has moved into collaborative software for businesses. Stay tuned for more.

—ThriveHive (Max Faingezicht). This is marketing software and services for small businesses. Yes, it’s a noisy sector, but the company seems to be quietly onto something.

—Cloze (Dan Foody). Solving the classic inbox problem for e-mail, social, and mobile. Enough said.

—CareSolver (Shana Hoffman). If you’ve ever worried about coordinating healthcare for an aging parent or relative, you might want to check out what this company is doing.

—Flume (Eric Kelsic). This team is working on Web tools for opening up the collaborative study of the human genome on a global scale.

—Wanderu (Polina Raygorodskaya). This Web startup wants to be the Kayak of buses and trains (intercity ground transportation). Many have tried; few will win.

—Crunchbutton (Judd Rosenblatt). This company provides one-click food delivery via smartphones and Web.

—Leaf (Aron Schwarzkopf). This company has developed tablet-based technology for payments, business intelligence, and customer loyalty programs for retail, restaurants, and other businesses.

So there you have it. Ten speakers. Ten companies/projects. Let’s do this.

XSITE is this Wednesday, and a few tickets are still available (check out the startup and student rates). See you all soon.

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In Texas, school is already out and the lazy days of summer have begun in earnest. But things are not slowing down in the Texas startup scene, with companies this week making announcements of fundraising and product upgrades for customers as far-flung as in China and low Earth orbit.

—NanoRacks, the Houston space-science startup located a stone’s throw away from NASA, announced today it has raised $2.6 million. Emerge, a Brussels-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups in telecom and e-commerce, is the lead investor to the tune of $1.5 million in the Series A round for NanoRacks. Chris Cummins, NanoRacks’ CFO, says the remainder of the investment is largely from individuals from Texas and California.

He added that the money will be used to fund development of the company’s external platform—a test bed for advanced electronics and materials experiments—that is mounted outside onto the International Space Station. It would be located on the “back porch” of the station’s Japanese module.

Being outside in space “gives you an entirely different environment for radiation; there’s a vacuum,” says Jeffrey Manber, NanoRacks’ CEO and founder.

NanoRacks next plans to return to space in April 2014.

—Austin, TX-based Appconomy, which provides mobile marketing and e-commerce platforms for Chinese retailers, announced on Thursday that it has made a significant upgrade to its Zhangyingbao service. This allows users of its consumer-to-consumer mobile platform—which is called Taobao—to be able to create branded mobile apps on their smartphones without any technical skills and in less than five minutes, the company says.

The Zhangyingbao service will help merchants on Taobao, which functions similarly to eBay where individuals and small businesses are selling items to other individuals. Now, these sellers can have as many as 200 products on display, versus the previous limit of 50 products. This gives each Taobao merchant more content to put in front of potential customers. Appconomy says Taobao is the biggest consumer-to-consumer online shopping platform in China.

Steve Guengerich, a co-founder of Appconomy, says Taobao currently has 6 million merchants signed up, of which 1 million are small, virtual-only shops. “For them, having a no-tech, no-cost mobile app is a no-brainer,” he says.

In May, the company, which is based in Austin and Shanghai, unveiled its “Smart Shopping App” in a soft launch in Shanghai. Customers use the app to upload shopping lists that the app then matches to maps of the store in order to plot out the most efficient route, among other services.

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After the dot-com crash in 2001, the tech world needed a few years to regroup. But starting around 2004, the year Facebook was founded and Google went public, the winds of innovation in consumer- and business-facing technology began to pick up again. In 2007 or so, they reached hurricane speed, and minus a short lull for the Great Recession, we’ve been buffeted by continuous change ever since, with the biggest advances coming in the overlapping areas of mobile, social, and cloud computing.

But for all its power, this storm was initiated by a surprisingly small group of players. Just three companies—Google, Apple, and Facebook—generated most of the new ideas (at least the mainstream ones) and most of the business momentum. (If I had more room and time, I’d work Amazon into the argument, but as a technology company, it ranks well behind the other three.) It’s been this way for almost a decade now, meaning it’s becoming harder and harder to imagine change coming from any other source.

That’s why journalists hang on every word from Larry Page, Tim Cook, or Mark Zuckerberg, and it’s why there’s perennial hand-wringing in the media about whether the Next Big Thing from Google, Apple, or Facebook—be it Google Glass, or the seventh iteration of iOS, or a new Android home screen populated by chat heads—is really as big as the Last Big Thing. Any sign that the giants might be faltering sends psychological shock waves through the whole high-tech culture, from venture investors to startup employees to eager technology consumers.

Well, at the risk of making myself into a pariah around Silicon Valley, I have a prediction to make. The storm has just about run its course. We have passed peak Apple, peak Google, and peak Facebook.

By which I mean: Apple will never again come out with a product as transformative as the iPhone. Google will never build anything more useful than its existing search engine, and it will never discover another business model as lucrative as search-based advertising. And Facebook may keep growing until every person on Earth with a computing device is a member, but it won’t ever be anything more than a place we share photos and links.

In sum, the next major advances in technology—the ones that will power the next cycle of entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley and the nation’s other tech hubs—will have to come from somebody else. To switch metaphors, the car is already out of gas; we just think there’s still forward progress, because we haven’t coasted to a stop quite yet. But we will. Chances are we’ll locate another gas station eventually—we always do. But before that happens, we may spend some time stuck by the roadside with the hood up, as we did in 2001-2004.

I’ll explain the thinking behind this prediction in a second. But first, let me be clear: I don’t think the petering out of the Google-Apple-Facebook triumvirate is cause for panic. In fact, it’s probably a good thing. No one should be allowed to lead for too long, or they get lazy and selfish. And a healthy innovation ecosystem needs a broader base than the one we have now. (That’s why I’ve been on the record rooting for Microsoft in the mobile wars.)

A situation in which power is spread between three companies was a big improvement over previous eras of computing, when a single company tended to dominate (for decades it was IBM, then it was Microsoft). In the next era, we may see something more like a true republic of technology, with no single company or group of companies possessing enough power to push others around and set the whole agenda for growth, the way Apple and Google have done in the mobile business with iOS and Android. That would be a good thing.

Now to the core of my argument. Here are three reasons why it’s a bad bet to expect any more game-changing innovations from Google, Apple, or Facebook.

1. Regression to the mean. Compared to the other companies in their cohorts, Apple, Google, and Facebook are all extreme outliers—the richest of the rich. They are the 1 percent; they’ve performed several standard deviations above the mean. Plain old statistics dictates that performance this good is usually followed by a dropoff in the direction of mediocrity.

You don’t reach this level of success by coming up with just a single earthshaking innovation—it usually takes two or more. Let’s spell it out. Google’s two fundamental innovations—now long behind it—were 1) if you look at the Web as a network of trust, defined mainly by links, you can use math to surface the best content, and 2) if you put related ads next to that content, people will click on them.

Facebook’s innovations were 1) if you make it super-easy for people to post photos and status updates to their feeds or timelines, it will give their friends a convenient way to feel like they’re staying in touch, creating a network that grows virally, and 2) if you make your identity system into a platform—something resembling single sign-on for the whole Web—you’ll have endless fuel for the feed.

Apple’s innovations were 1) if you pay attention to style, design, and ease of use, you can build computers that people will love, because they make work feel a little bit like play, and 2) if you marry this design sensibility with wireless technology and digital content like music, movies, TV shows, books, and games, it’s like putting a match to a pile of paint-soaked rags; you get a true mobile-computing explosion.

The chances that any of these companies (or indeed any given company) will come up with a third, equally earthshaking insight in the future are low. We have a tendency to assume that preternaturally lucky people are preternaturally smart, and that their luck will continue, but those are errors built into … Next Page »

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Technology continues to surge through the financial world like a gust of wind. But at times, it’s taken a bit of coaxing to bring about change.

At the New Jersey Technology Council’s recent FinTech Conference in Jersey City, technologists and financial experts discussed how wealth management platforms, mobile transactions, and other tools are reshaping this very mature sector.

Jon Stein, CEO of Betterment in New York, discussed “Innovation on Wall Street” alongside Adnane Charchour, president and CEO of Scivantage in Jersey City; Ted Myerson, managing partner of Triangle Ventures; William Rhind, managing director with investment firm ETF Securities; and Luis Valdich, global head of markets strategies for J.P. Morgan. Michael Cichowski, principal at Edison Ventures, moderated the discussion.

Stein said mobile technology, for real-time trading and other transactions, has introduced new ways for the public to participate in the financial world. It’s a trend that his company, Betterment, is capitalizing on with its online financial advisor service, which has raised $13 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Anthemis Group, Bessemer Venture Partners, and others.

“Technology today has an opportunity to help people invest better and make better decisions by giving them real advice that is actionable,” Stein said.

Scivantage’s Charchour raised some concerns though about the layperson understanding this rush of financial content that technology offers. “What’s lacking is the ability to make sense this flood of data,” he said. Scivantage, founded in 2000, develops wealth management software.

Platforms that provide access to information, Charchour said, might not necessarily help people make more informed investment choices. “For the self-directed person it is still like the Wild West trying figure out where to put your money,” he said.

While some people turn to online communities and social media to share ideas about the financial scene, he questions the veracity of such methods.

“That is not a sound, strategic process,” Charchour said. As more people demand technology from their financial institutions to see what is happening in the market, he is concerned there is a lack of analytics to help the public understand it all.

Getting an advisor’s expertise is useful, he said, and pointed to companies such as ETF Securities as an example. “You don’t have to worry about understanding commodity trading,” he said.

Adoption of mobile technology is picking up steam on Wall Street, Charchour said, but the transition is not without its kinks. “It’s going to hit slight bumps from an infrastructure perspective,” he said.

In spite of some initial pushback from wealth management professionals as mobile devices became more prevalent, Charchour said more advisors are adopting such technology to interact with their customers.

Mobile also offers deeply rooted institutions a chance, Myerson said, to quickly evolve beyond the legacy systems they have relied on. “It’s a lot easier for these firms to jump right into mobile,” he said.

Some firms have adopted entrepreneurial strategies, Myerson said, by rolling out mobile platforms that may have rough edges but are refined with the help of customer feedback. “That’s the way some of these firms end up adopting new technology,” he said. “With some of these legacy areas, you can’t get that same rate of return.”

Myerson said high-frequency trading is one area of financial technology that once was a hotbed of disruption that is now moving towards consolidation. High-frequency trading uses algorithms to make trades at breakneck speeds via computers.

Though these upstart firms rose in the early 2000s, Myerson said few new players have emerged in the past two to three years in this segment. He attributed that in part to a fall-off of business as larger firms traded more with each other. “That extra edge these [HFT] firms had disappeared,” he said.

In spite of that, Myerson said high-frequency trading firms have left their mark on the brokerage community by reducing the fees that firms often charged. “Cost pressure completely went down,” he said. “We’re not going to see that return.”

He expects to see consolidation among HFT firms combining their infrastructure and data centers. “We see a shift going from trying to be the fastest in the market to now looking at this vast amount of data,” he said.

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Here’s some potentially big news in the world of Internet TV. This tech sector is dominated by giants—think Comcast, Verizon, Cisco, Microsoft, Netflix—but that doesn’t mean a smaller company can’t play with the big boys.

That company would be Azuki Systems, based in Acton, MA. The five-year-old startup has rolled out new software this week that aims to help cable and telecom companies compete better in the age of on-demand video and multiple screens.

Azuki sells its video-delivery software to a mix of cable and telecom service providers, as well as content owners like Showtime, Epix, and other channels. The startup is known primarily for helping its customers deliver video to mobile phones and tablets—the so-called second and third screens. But that’s changing as of this week.

What’s new is that Azuki is now expanding its ambitions to target the first screen—your main television set—in a major bid to be in every home, and on every device. Its latest software is designed to give cable companies in particular a one-stop “container” in which all their video can be delivered to all the different screens; this is the “TV everywhere” idea, which hasn’t fully happened yet because of digital rights issues and stalled agreements with networks.

But cable companies and telecoms still own a big piece of the puzzle: connections into homes. (Not to mention many billions in revenue.) And that’s why Azuki is doubling down on them for its customer base.

“Owning the infrastructure is an advantage for them, but they need to expand their business model and be inclusive of over-the-top [pure Web] players and other Internet services,” says Cheng Wu, Azuki’s CEO and co-founder (pictured). “The service providers need someone to help them move to a more open architecture, keep their investment intact as much as possible, but help them move to a new landscape.”

Azuki says its software allows cable companies to shift more of their old video resources to broadband Internet, where more of the future’s money is to be made. And do it so as to limit the effort it takes to rework and maintain different video-delivery systems for each kind of screen. The technical details involve shifting spectrum resources from quadrature amplitude modulation (the digital video format for cable known as QAM) to broadband Internet video in a more efficient way than has been available to date.

What does this all mean for consumers? More personalized TV options, according to Azuki. Right away, a cable company using the software could offer features like multi-screen browsing and time shifting on any device—so when you switch to a new channel, you can rewind and see what you missed, for example. But the bigger goal is to let people watch what they want anywhere, anytime, using existing cable infrastructure.

Down the road, that would mean the old electronic programming guides—the scrolling list of what’s on your 500 channels— “would not exist anymore,” Wu says. “Every guide is personalized. You have yours, I have mine. As you deliver video service, every channel has the contextual intelligence of who you are and what content is being requested that might be relevant to you. It has to be scalable. You’re talking about an Internet problem, not a town problem.” And, of course, personalized channels could lead to personalized advertising—which could be lucrative indeed. (A number of software companies are working on personalized TV/video discovery apps, such as NextGuide.)

It’s a big vision, all right. But a small company like Azuki has to navigate some pretty choppy competitive waters. Besides other video tech startups, it has to outmaneuver Cisco, which Wu calls the “800-pound gorilla” in the sector. (Wu sold a previous company of his, ArrowPoint Communications, to Cisco for $5.7 billion in 2000.) From Wu’s perspective, Azuki is trying to open up and commoditize video-delivery technologies that Cisco would prefer to keep locked up.

And then there are the pure Web players—the Netflixes, Hulus, and Aereos of the world. These companies are popular with consumers, but their business models have some challenges; Wu points out that Netflix is not very profitable. And Fred Sammartino, Azuki’s director of product management, says any cable company or telecom should be able to provide huge libraries of on-demand video on any screen within a few years.

Meanwhile, streaming-video device maker Roku raised $60 million last month as it ramps up competition with Apple TV, Google TV, and consoles like Xbox and PlayStation. “Apple TV can be thought of as … Next Page »

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IDInteract, a Detroit-based social marketing and brand interaction startup we profiled in March, is launching a new internship/retraining program today geared toward U.S. veterans interested in learning new IT skills. Called TechVets, it’s open to anyone honorably discharged from the military with a background in basic programming.

“We want them to have a little bit of a background in technology, and then we’ll train them,” says IDInteract’s founder and CEO Matt Standish.

After completing a two month internship, TechVets participants will be compensated with company stock. Think of it as retraining meets financial rewards, Standish explains. The ultimate goal is to fill full-time positions at IDInteract with TechVets participants if it’s the right fit. Standish says he hopes to have at least five TechVets interns in place by August.

The launch of TechVets caps a busy spring for IDInteract. The company has moved into office space in a downtown Detroit building and plans to take over an entire 10,000-square-foot floor by the end of the year. The big, open office features tables covered in graffiti by local artists and a Detroit Red Wings red-and-white color scheme. Standish is looking to fill 10 full-time positions immediately, and hopes TechVets might help with the challenge of finding good talent.

That’s not all the company has been up to. It signed a deal with Xbox to provide social media offers and promotions to VIP customers ahead of the Xbox One launch this fall. It has also inked deals with the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team, Best Buy, and Red Robin restaurants. In addition, IDInteract is working with Marketing Associates in Detroit to build relationships with automotive manufacturers.

“There’s a lot of momentum,” Standish says. “We’re really excited.”

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[Editor’s Note: Mark Siegel, managing director at Menlo Ventures, was the keynote speaker at IBF’s Venture Capital Investing Conference today in San Francisco. The post below summarizes his talk, in which he argued that the convergence of mobility, cloud infrastructure, social and big data---what he calls the Right Now Economy---sets the stage for $500 billion in venture returns over the next decade.]

Every technology cycle is driven by a huge disruptive new trend in innovation, such as the PC, the Internet/telecom boom, or the rise of social networking. We’re in the midst of the latest cycle, and it’s particularly compelling because it marks the convergence of four important trends: mobile, social, cloud infrastructure and Big Data.

These technological mega-trends have converged to create the real-time marketplaces of the Right Now Economy, which are already disrupting trillions of dollars in aggregate market value and have produced an incredibly fertile area for entrepreneurs to grow ideas into well-funded companies with the potential to take on established stalwarts.

In this Right Now Economy, what had to be planned can now be spontaneous. What was previously owned, can now be rented on demand. What was stored in inventory can be delivered or manufactured just in time. Matching supply more closely with demand leads to efficient pricing, better utilization of assets, and less waste. Traditional supply chains are being disrupted, and this is presenting growth companies with golden opportunities to displace large and once-unassailable market leaders, in almost every industry sector.

Big Investment Returns

This kind of disruption offers a very attractive proposition to venture firms, who have, as an asset class, experienced lackluster returns over the past 10 years. In fact, I’ll argue that the companies funded in the next few years will produce $500 billion in venture returns, and top-quartile internal rates of return of over 25 percent over the next decade.

Converging Mega-trends: Mobile, Social, Cloud, Big Data

Each technology mega-trend underlying the Right Now Economy is producing great opportunities for entrepreneurs and venture capital investment. First, there’s mobile. Consider that the smartphone was unimaginable in 2000, didn’t really exist until 2007, but is being mass marketed in the developing world in 2013. Cell phones and tablets have overtaken PCs and laptops to become the predominant personal computing devices. Five billion people around the world will become “Right Now” e-commerce, gaming, media, and education consumers in the next five years.

Platforms for reaching these consumers have evolved, too. Two-thirds of businesses now use Facebook for marketing, and 47 percent of Americans active on social networks say that Facebook has the greatest impact on their purchasing behavior.

And now we are connecting everything. It’s estimated that 50 billion devices will be Internet-connected by 2020. Today, the standard way to think of a television is as an Internet device, powered by companies like Menlo-backed Roku. Yet even refrigerators are connecting: LG has announced a refrigerator that will download recipes and give you a shopping list.

This connectivity, along with the rise of mobility and social networking, produces reams of data everyday. In the realm of big data, there are many novel approaches being developed to quickly analyze and glean business insights from this data. We’re seeing innovative database technologies and algorithms to categorize, search and sort not just structured tabular data, but unstructured data like Web pages and images as well. Who would have imagined that a company called Splunk, which started out just analyzing log files, could be worth over $4 billion?

To help power this analysis, we’ve got the cloud, which represents the most fundamental change in computing since the PC and client-server architectures. The number of virtual servers in the cloud surpassed physical servers in 2010 and will continue to skew even more dramatically, thanks in part to companies like network virtualization startup Pluribus, in which Menlo is an investor. With underlying hardware in computing and networking becoming commoditized and even irrelevant, the new value is being created in software and systems for this new, multi-application, mixed-workload, virtualized environment.

The Right-Sized Venture Industry

Besides the investment opportunities that lie ahead, the VC industry has returned to a healthier state. After a decade of lackluster performance, the industry has been winnowed to 200 or so active firms and $20 billion of annual inflows. To entrepreneurs, this means the remaining firms possess the know-how needed to build successful companies, and that goes well beyond investment dollars.

Value is Now Generated Pre-IPO 

In fact, I would argue that most of the value that gets built into young companies does so well before they reach the IPO stage. For companies going public before 2000, almost 75 percent of their eventual market value was realized in the public market, post-IPO. Since then, as it became harder to get small companies to market, the venture capital industry has played the role that the public market used to play for micro-cap IPOs. As a result, nearly all of the market value of public technology companies is accruing while they are still private. Compare the recent offering of Facebook to that of Microsoft.

This fact will draw an increasing number of investment dollars to VC firms who back smart entrepreneurs. And with the additional promise of very substantial returns thanks to the Right Now Economy, right now is a very good time to build companies that cater to the demands of this disruptive convergence.

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Social media analytics company Dataminr in New York announced today it raised $30 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners and Venrock.

Dataminr, founded in 2009, uses Twitter’s firehose of public tweets to analyze events happening around the world and identify trends on behalf of customers in financial services and government. The company said it plans to use the new funding to grow in its current markets and for expansion into new segments.

Web monitoring and analytics has become a crowded and competitive field, with companies such as Palantir, Recorded Future, Quid, Crimson Hexagon, and Lexalytics all making significant progress.

Last September, Dataminr raised $13 million in a Series B round from Deep Fork Capital, GSV Capital, Wharton Equity Partners, Viceroy Capital, and others.

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A busy morning for Series B tech financings already…

—Cambridge, MA-based CustomMade has pulled in $18 million led by new investor Atlas Venture and previous investor Google Ventures. That brings the company’s total raised to more than $24 million, by my count. CustomMade runs an online marketplace that connects consumers with regional makers of furniture, woodwork, jewelry, ceramics, and other crafts. The approach is part of a wave of Boston-area companies building the “anti-Amazon” in retail/commerce. (More details on the funding at Boston.com and Pando Daily.)

—Boston-based SageCloud has raised $10 million led by Braemar Energy Ventures. Matrix Partners also participated in the round. SageCloud is working on an energy-efficient way to do “cold storage”—storage of data that is written once and accessed infrequently—using commodity hardware and control software. That massive problem is jacking up the costs of data backup and archiving in the IT industry. SageCloud is led by Carbonite co-founder Jeff Flowers.

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Anxious to put technology to work reaching audiences, marketers helped shoot adrenaline into IT workers’ salaries, according to a recent study.

Technology recruiting firm Mondo in New York last week released findings of a survey based on IT job placements the company made in 2012 and 2013.

Among the professionals surveyed, experienced IT security managers with more than 10 years in the field saw their average base compensation jump from $90,000 to $145,000. Meanwhile the average base pay for systems analysts rose from $65,000 to $83,000, the report said.

Michael Kirven, CEO of Mondo, says gains in the overall economy have been even more pronounced in the technology market. “That’s driving up salaries,” he says.

Mondo, which has offices in San Francisco, Boston, Denver, Chicago, and other cities, places technology and marketing professionals with other companies. The company, which spun off in April from Bluewolf, a business consulting firm in New York, based the report on more than 1,000 IT job placements it made over the past year.

Other technology jobs enjoying bumps in pay according the report include data analysts, up from $60,000 to $71,000. Chief information officers’ base salaries increased from $180,000 to $190,000. Developers who create on apps to work with the Android platform saw their base salaries from $120,000 to $130,000.

Kirven says the responsibilities of chief information officers increasingly converge with the duties of chief marketing officers at many companies. Traditional marketing efforts, he says, focused until about five years ago on print ads, radio, and television to get messages out. “None of that really required a sophisticated technology infrastructure,” he says.

These days chief marketing officers look to blogs, search engine optimization, and e-mail campaigns to connect with their audiences. For the first time, he says, marketing must coincide with technology—which requires support from chief information officers.

This demand, Kirven says, sometimes leads to the formation of teams within companies that combine technical talent with marketing professionals. Advertising firms, for example, might bring talent in-house to work on Web development, user experience, digital creative, and big data. “On the backend that data may come from 50 to 500 different databases,” he says. “You need a very skilled technical staff to analyze, integrate, and aggregate all of that data.”

Even rookies—with the right skills—in the technology job market may see fast salary growth, he says. “We see people come in with one year of experience with … Next Page »

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The mysterious Wayne Chang won’t tell me much these days, but he’s got a message for Boston-area startups: Talk about distribution.

If you’re a software startup, he says, your product is obviously important. But equally important is figuring out how to get people to use your product—and spread the gospel to others.

That’s one of the issues Chang is going to talk about when he shares the stage with Miguel de Icaza and Izhar Armony at Xconomy’s flagship innovation conference, XSITE, on Wednesday of next week (6/19) at Babson College (a few student and startup tickets are still available).

Chang spoke on the phone from San Francisco, where Apple’s developer conference is going on and the Crashlytics kickoff party is happening tonight. He’s the co-founder of Crashlytics, the mobile crash-reporting startup in Cambridge, MA, that was bought by Twitter for $100M+ in cash and stock in February.

As Chang sees it, distribution is a startup’s biggest problem. So at Crashlytics, his team spent more time cultivating its network of developer customers than its product. “Most startups that fail, they only focus on the product. We nailed the core of the product, but then spent most of the time figuring out how to get it everywhere,” he says.

For Crashlytics, he says, that boiled down to three things:

— “We don’t engineer solutions, we engineer emotions.” Chang, who would be a psychologist in another life (and maybe this one), says he thinks deeply about what motivates developers, and that “emotions drive conversations.”

— “Deliver a ‘wow’ experience.” One part of that is making it super easy to start using the product. “There’s an icon that jiggles, you click it and drag it into your app, and it’s that simple,” he says.

— “Virality begins with one.” Word of mouth spreads when customers are passionate about what you’re selling. But instead of thinking about how to reach the masses, Chang says, think about how to reach one person (or type of person)—and make it so there’s a “greater than 50 percent chance” that he or she will tell someone else about your product.

Twitter has 20 offices around the world, and the Boston-area outpost will be the biggest outside of San Francisco headquarters, Chang says. Its focus will be the future of mobile and the future of TV; Twitter acquired Bluefin Labs along with Crashlytics this year. “We will be aggressively hiring,” says Chang.

You can hear much more from Chang and Miguel de Icaza (of Mono and Xamarin fame) about their considerable efforts with mobile developers—and the trials and tribulations of building companies in the post-PC era—on June 19 at XSITE. Hope to see you there.

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Injecting new technology into a long-established industry is a big enough task for most new companies. So is tying your fortune to a brand-new technology application that is still finding its place in the market.

New York-based Floored must like a good challenge—it’s trying to climb both of those mountains.

The startup’s aim is to shake up the real estate industry by layering its software for modeling physical spaces on top of 3-D scanning cameras from Mountain View, CA-based Matterport.

Floored’s service captures the interiors of properties in photographic quality for users in real estate, interior design, and other sectors. Using algorithms and manual input, the data is refined to create interactive models that can be viewed with Web browsers or an iPad. The service can be used to try out remodeling and renovations of space.

CEO David Eisenberg demoed Floored’s service alongside other startups at this week’s Enterprise Tech Meetup. “Think of Floored as a company that captures and cleans 3-D data and then sells different variants of that data to the enterprise,” he said.

He founded Floored last July while working as an entrepreneur-in-residence at venture firm Accel Partners. Last December, Floored raised a $1.1 million seed round from Lerer Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Brooklyn Bridge Ventures. This spring, Floored was a finalist at the TechCrunch Disrupt NY competition for startups.

Early this year, Floored released its first product, which lets users explore 3-D spaces. “It’s very similar to a CAD file except it’s got photographic textures,” Eisenberg said. The company, he said, makes money by working with real estate companies to digitize property for marketing and other purposes.

Floored’s platform lets users virtually demolish walls to view space as an empty floor plate. The software also allows empty floor plates to be filled in with designs for potential construction.

Part of the 3-D model of tech startup incubator 1776 in Washington, D.C., image produced by Floored.

During the demo, Eisenberg showed models of townhouses, offices, and restaurants including nearby Japanese restaurant Nobu, which was modeled to show how the space could be configured different ways when rented out for events.

The software lets users alter the position of the sun, turn lights on and off, move furniture, and change textures and colors in the virtual space. The service can be used by real estate brokers to help market properties, he says. “We’re trying to reduce the amount of time it takes to either lease or buy a space and take a percentage of that ROI,” Eisenberg said.

Floored plans to release products in the coming years, Eisenberg said, for such areas as building design, construction, and property management.

After demos at the event by Sailthru and customer behavior tracker Nomi, Eisenberg sat down for a fireside chat with me.

Xconomy: What really got Floored started? This is a marriage of software with hardware to solve a pain point. How did these elements converge?

David Eisenberg: I was searching for a solution to a problem that I thought was coming. I had a vague hypothesis for where the world was going. I had been the first employee for two startups that had done well. One is in the e-commerce space, Bonobos here in New York. The other is a big data company on the West Coast, TellApart. I was in e-commerce for five years and became really nervous that a lot of the big retailers were going to have trouble competing with Amazon down the line. I became interested in the hypothesis that the digitization of physical goods, vis-à-vis technologies like 3-D printing, was going to be an opportunity for companies to help enterprises fight back.

I got into 3-D scanning backwards through 3-D printing. One of the inputs to 3-D printing is 3-D models. The way you built 3-D models was by hand and I was curious if anyone out there was doing it automatically. I found a very nascent 3-D scanning industry—on the consumer end. On the enterprise side it’s been around for architectural purposes for a little while. I found a company building hardware that I wanted structure a relationship with. That was late 2011. In early 2012, I was calling senior managers at different types of companies where I thought the 3-D scanning application might make sense. I talked to folks in hospital construction, real estate management, and retailers.

Of all the things I was looking at, real estate was perhaps the largest market with the least competition and the most engaged initial audience.

X: How much handholding did you have to do to get folks in real estate to understand how this could work?

DE: We had some wind our sails. A lot of enterprises had been shaken up to the degree that mobile had rocked their businesses, in some good ways and bad. There was nothing they could do to stop the onslaught of people having these incredible computers in our pockets. They were primed to understand that technology would affect their businesses in ways that were uncomfortable for them. In real estate, with the advent of the iPhone you had a very functional camera in the hands of millions of people and that would result in pictures of property—whether the outside or inside—all over the Internet. This was something they were curious to know how they could control. When you tell them it’s not something they can control, you get some mixed reactions.

Until we had a functional visual demo, this was pretty hard. If you are doing anything that is going to be an interactive piece of software, as quickly as possible get to the demo stage. In the same way that I have very little imagination about physical spaces, I think they had very little imagination about software. It became necessary to show them what I was talking about.

X: When did you know it was time to devote more of your energy to this idea?

DE: Sometimes people get into startups to leave their corporate jobs. I encourage people to “test before you buy.” I had worked for startups for five years and had started my … Next Page »

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StillSecure announced Wednesday that it has sold its managed security services division to Connecticut-based SilverSky for an undisclosed amount. That’s obviously significant news for the Superior, CO-based company, but in the long run it might be less important to StillSecure’s future than its announcement it will now focus exclusively on its network access control (NAC) product, Safe Access. The product reorientation is an attempt to capitalize on the major shakeup the “bring your own device,” or BYOD, trend is creating in the IT security world.

StillSecure also announced the promotion of new CEO James Brown. Brown, who was StillSecure’s CTO, and co-founder and chairman Rajat Bhargava, who Brown replaced as CEO, discussed the new developments Wednesday.

The deal with SilverSky, a Connecticut-based company, spins off a substantial part of StillSecure. The managed security services unit accounted for about 40 percent of StillSecure’s headcount, Bhargava said. He declined to say how many employees remain, but media reports said StillSecure employed about 100 before the sale.

StillSecure was split between its managed services and NAC units, which were evolving along different tracks. NAC looks more promising in the long run, in StillSecure’s view.

“Both industries are becoming more specialized, and ‘bring your own device’ has created new opportunities in the NAC space,” Brown said.

Those opportunities for StillSecure come from the challenge BYOD creates for companies trying to protect their networks as employees connect with their own smartphones, tablets, and laptops. In a blog post explaining StillSecure’s shift, Brown noted that most of the devices are unmanaged and not compliant with employers’ security policies, which makes their networks vulnerable.

StillSecure will market Safe Access as the most scalable and easy-to-use mobile device management software. StillSecure will spend the next year building its business around Safe Access and focusing on its core markets, which include the military and financial, retail, and healthcare sectors, Brown said.

The sale to SilverSky is a good outcome for StillSecure and the employees who are being transferred, according to Brown. SilverSky is better positioned in the managed security services market and has larger market share than StillSecure.

SilverSky will get about 40 employees, complementary technology, a broadened partner base, and additional security operations centers, SilverSky vice president of product marketing Mike Flouton said. The deal increases its number of clients from about 6,000 to 6,700.

SilverSky has raised about $100 million from investors including Goldman Sachs and Bessemer Ventures. The company, formerly known as Perimeter E-Security, acquired Denver-based USA.NET in 2007 and rebranded the two companies under the name SilverSky earlier this year.

The company already has employees in Denver and Colorado Springs, and its network operations center is in the state, Flouton said.

The companies would not discuss the terms of the deal, but Bhargava said their relationship didn’t end when the deal closed last Friday.

“One of the important points we like to make is we’ve become highly invested in the success of SilverSky,” Bhargava said.

While the SilverSky sale and product shift are big changes for StillSecure, the leadership transition is more about continuity, Bhargava said.

Brown, who was the chief technology officer and has been with StillSecure for 10 years, replaces Bhargava as president and CEO. Bhargava will remain with the company as an “active chairman” involved in strategy.

Bhargava has a solid track record in Colorado. He was a co-founder of Service Metrics along with Trada CEO Niel Robertson. Service Metrics was acquired by Exodus Communications in 1999 for $280 million. Bhargava has helped launch other startups, including MobileDay, which is based in Boulder and of which he is a board member, and Boston-based Yesware, which he co-founded.

StillSecure does not disclose details about its headcount, revenue, or number of clients. Bhargava said the 13-year-old company has raised $38 million, with the last funding taking place in 2006. Its investors include Mobius Venture Capital, the firm managed by Brad Feld prior to the Foundry Group. Feld is a StillSecure board member.

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Drawing on an unprecedented amount of government data that is easier to access than ever before, more than 11,000 software developers, entrepreneurs, students, and others across the country devoted part of last weekend to building technologies designed to help local, state, and federal governments solve problems and improve their communities.

The first National Day of Civic Hacking encompassed events in 83 cities including Detroit, where an understaffed city department sought help answering its phones; Denver, where the winning team built an app that helps visitors find legal marijuana dispensaries; and Seattle, where teams developed tools to connect people with events in their neighborhoods.

The civic hacking events are one manifestation of a broad movement toward technology-enabled openness and citizen participation in government. Seattle company Socrata is making a fine business of this “democratization” of government data, providing a cloud-computing platform that helps cities, counties, states, and agencies in the U.S. and abroad manage and publicize troves of data.

The company didn’t set out to serve the public sector.

Founder and CEO Kevin Merritt had built an email archiving company that ultimately became part of Microsoft through its 2005 acquisition of FrontBridge Technologies. Merritt left the software giant in 2007 to begin Blist, the company that became Socrata.

The name change corresponded with a significant pivot for the Seattle startup. The idea behind Blist was to make “the world’s easiest database,” helping non-specialists within an organization use data that had been the realm of programmers and database administrators. (It’s a mission we hear from a lot of big data companies these days, including Seattle-based Tableau Software.)

Socrata’s data sharing platform was loaded with social features, under the hypothesis “that somebody in isolation wouldn’t be able to understand data as well as a group of people in collaboration,” Merritt, pictured above, says. And it turned out that rather than using the product as a database, customers were using it as a way to access and share data from other enterprise systems. “It offended us at first,” he says.

Even more importantly for the future of the company, the platform had gained a following in the public sector as the “open data” movement—the idea that governments would put data online for reasons of transparency, accountability, efficiency, and good governance—began to gain steam in late 2008 and early 2009.

“They were going through this metamorphosis from a default position of hoarding and only exposing [data] through … Freedom of Information Act requests, to governments just saying let’s put it all online and let’s see what happens,” Merritt says.

In spring 2009—around the time the Obama Administration began the federal government’s open data site, Data.gov—Socrata decided to focus all of its attention on the public sector.

It has since built a roster of more than 70 customers around the world, and from all levels of government. They include the cities of Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco; counties from Snohomish in Washington to Travis in Texas; states including Washington, Hawaii, and Maryland; and major federal agencies like the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Data.gov site, now with more than 66,300 datasets online. The company has a growing list of international organizations and governments, too.

Governments pay Socrata a monthly subscription fee to use its platform, which can provide everything from a public-facing Web site for interacting with government data to data hosting to application programming interfaces (APIs) for third-party developers to tools for custom information products. The company also hosts a vast quantity of government data that is not made available to the public. More than half of the data on Socrata’s network is for internal government use, Merritt says.

The company streams some 14 terabytes of data a month.

Socrata’s pricing structure depends on the size of the government customer and the amount of data it puts online. In general, a city of 300,000 to 400,000 people would pay “a few thousand dollars a month” for an open data portal. Smaller jurisdictions can get discounts, and the company is working on engineering improvements that could put the technology in reach of small towns.

Merritt says most governments start with geospatial, expenditure, crime, and transit data—all of which is usually relatively easy to access and publicize—and then move on to other data sets that may require underlying systems be upgraded to feed into the Socrata platform at regular intervals. Few governments can afford to proactively digitize their historical archives, but will post data that is accessed to satisfy Freedom of Information Act requests so that others can see it.

Socrata reported in April that its recurring revenue had grown 126 percent year over year, though it declined to give a revenue or profit figure for this story. However, the company is clearly doing well, having not raised additional capital since 2008 when it took on $6.5 million from Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures. The company has 45 employees, mainly in an office that once housed Starbucks’ corporate headquarters in Pioneer Square. It also recently opened branches in Washington, D.C., and London. It is backed by Frazier Technology Ventures and Morgenthaler Ventures, which invested $6.5 million in early 2008.

Merritt says Socrata’s services are usually an easy sell once governments have made the decision to put data online—and more are enacting policies to make this standard procedure. Last month, President Obama issued an executive order that “the default state of new and modernized government information resources shall be open and machine readable.”

Socrata’s competition is often a combination of products and services from legacy hardware vendors, system integrators, and internal and external developers. But the company also faces a growing competitor in the open-source Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN), developed by the U.K.-based Open Knowledge Foundation and used for data sites by governments in the U.K., Brazil, the Netherlands, Germany, and most recently, as part of an upgraded Data.gov site.   (The software is free. Organizations including the Open Knowledge Foundation offer paid services such as customization and integration.)

The federal government’s main open data repository late last month initiated a new unified data catalog based on the CKAN system “that will make it easier to federate with other federal agency catalogs, as well as those of states, cities, and counties,” according to a blog post on the change.

The Socrata platform continues to provide data hosting, visualization, and APIs for the Data.gov site, as well as for the open data efforts of several federal agencies. But it can’t be thrilled to see arguably its biggest rival gain a foothold on one of the world’s foremost government data stores.

(The company’s platform is interoperable with CKAN, and Socrata also provides an open source version of its core technology.)

Merritt sees a long way yet to run for the open data movement. He estimates that only about 1 percent of government data is online. And the amount of data captured each day is of course growing as more systems get more sophisticated sensors. Utility smart meters are one example.

In addition to the citizen hackers who went to work last weekend on projects for scores of city and state governments and 21 federal agencies, big companies are doing more with government data.

For example, Socrata is working with Yelp on a pilot project in New York and San Francisco to add restaurant health inspection reports to online reviews.

There are also potential future business opportunities for Socrata in standardizing and aggregating certain kinds of government data for specific industries. Insurance companies, for example, have contacted the company offering to pay for zip-code level crime rates in a uniform format from city to city, Merritt says.

“We’re just laying the foundation for what’s going to happen over the next two to five years, where we’re really going to see ecosystems develop on the back of open data, and we’re going to see governments allow civic developers to help them deliver the last mile of services that they want to deliver to the citizens and residents that they serve,” Merritt says.

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Just under two weeks to go before our blowout event of the year: XSITE 2013: Boston’s Tech Revival at Babson College on Wednesday, June 19. (Full agenda here.)

Tom Leighton, the CEO and co-founder of Akamai, will set the table with a historical perspective on Kendall Square and the Boston-area tech community, followed by a look at how innovators are thinking about the sectors of cloud, mobile, video, and security.

After that, I want to highlight just a few of the discussions of the day:

—In “The New Face of Software,” open source guru and Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza will chat with Crashlytics co-founder and Twitter Boston leader Wayne Chang. They will cover everything from how software startups can get distribution to the Boston-area talent war for developers (and what it all portends for the industry). Their chat will be moderated by Izhar Armony from Charles River Ventures.

—In “Serial Entrepreneurs Club,” Olin College President Rick Miller will moderate a distinguished innovators panel that features Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio; David Berry, Partner at Flagship Ventures; Meredith Flynn-Ripley, CEO of HeyWire; and Roy Rodenstein, CEO of TrueLens. These veteran entrepreneurs cut across the sectors of big data, Internet, mobile, marketing, and sustainability. They will share lessons from their fields, talk about markets and timing, and work out how innovators might solve some of the biggest problems in business, education, and society.

—Our annual “Founders’ Stories” breakout panel features four of the most compelling New England CEOs you could ask for: Mike Baker from DataXu; Diane Hessan from Communispace; Jeremy Hitchcock from Dyn; and Jason Jacobs from FitnessKeeper. Moderated by Xconomy’s Curt Woodward, they will share the best lessons (and war stories) from their careers, which span the fields of mobile, advertising, marketing, Web infrastructure, consumer tech, and health.

—We’ll all have some fun with the MIT Blackjack Reunion panel, which features four business and tech leaders returning to the scene of the crime (or at least its origins in the Boston area) to talk about what beating casinos out of millions taught them about starting new businesses and building companies. The group includes Neelan Choksi, President of Tasktop Technologies; angel investor and tech executive Semyon Dukach; SolidWorks founder Jon Hirschtick; and Bill Kaplan, CEO of FreshAddress.

It’s going to be an amazing and inspiring day, and you can still get a ticket here (innovation special runs for a few more days). We hope to see you on June 19.

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