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The name m-Qube Inc. may be gone from the local technology community, but it is not forgotten.

Slightly more than a year after the Boston-based mobile marketing channel developer was acquired by California's VeriSign Inc. for $250 million, m-Qube's inspiration lingers. For instance, executives that once made the company the fastest growing startup in New England are busy planting new seeds across the region with the hope of duplicating m-Qube's success.

Waltham's Mobicious Inc. and Quattro Wireless Inc. are two examples that have emerged over the past few weeks. This week, Mobicious, co-founded by former m-Qube director of marketing David Chang, landed $4 million in its first rounding of funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Carmel Ventures. Quattro Wireless, on the other hand, was launched publicly last week, driven by a $6 million round of funding from Highland Capital Partners, and led by former m-Qube general manager and CTO Andrew Miller and Eswar Priyadarshan, respectively.

In fact, of the 13-member management team in place at the time of m-Qube's acquisition in March 2006, 10 have moved into positions within the local high-tech startup community.

Event based social network Going.com has taken an additional $5 million in funding, in a round led by the sites original investors General Catalyst Partners and Highland Capital Partners.

Going.com recently passed 500,000 users, up from 200,000 users in early June and an impressive feat considering the service currently only operates in four cities: New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

George Bell and Bob Davis from General Catalyst and Highland Capital respectively will remain on the Going.com board of directors.

Going.com competes with Minglenow, Socialzr and LateNightShots. Going.com was previously known as HeyLetsGo.

128 has largely died as a haven for startups, just some VCs left behind there now. But meanwhile Cambridge seems like it has hit a tipping point. Now Google Boston is here, Ideo moved in from Lexington to Central Square, and there are even rumors some of the VC crew out in Waltham may be eyeing the area.

It seems that the combination of Harvard & MIT, the relatively (for this
close to the city) inexpensive rent, and efforts like Cambridge
Innovation Center (CIC) have really helped spur this growth. And I don't want to underestimate the help CIC has given to this effort. CIC started out as a doomed incubator concept and was reborn after the dot-bomb as a mixture of flexspace & entreprenuer support network.  They now take up something like six floors of a fourteen floor building and host 100+ companies.

Ambient was born in CIC in those dark of 2001, and they are still here now. Who else is here? I pinged Tim and got a quick list of a couple of the guys I could run into in the kitchen:
- iSkoot (CRV-backed VOIP over your cell phone, including Skype)
- Great Point Energy (raised a $30m A round from Kleiner and others to gassify coal)
- Visible Measures (General Catalyst-backed metrics for online video)
- Sconex (MySpace for the high school set)

Hell, there's even an NPR show (currently being recorded in Second Life) that's on the third floor. Walk out of the building and you can hit Tabblo, Vanu, Harmonix, Brightcove, E-Ink and many others in less then a mile radius.

We believe that millions of people accustomed to the immediacy and richness of the web will seek the quickest and easiest method of getting information, entertainment and social experiences when they are away from their desktop PC or TV. That immediacy will come via the mobile phone connecting and controlling media on out-of-home networks.

As a result, we are creating new opportunities for businesses to engage with mobile consumers in venues such as bars, cafes, campuses, stores, airports and hotels

The New York Times’ article, When it comes to innovation, geography is destiny, Greg Zachary, a former colleague writes that “where you live often trumps who you are.”

While I was hoping to read a piece about how your geography can define your innovation and technology. Instead it turned into a piece that took an all familiar route: Silicon Valley is destiny manifest, since it attracts the best ideas and there are venture capitalists who are ready to fund them. Sure, Silicon Valley’s advantages cannot be underscored, but everything isn’t as black and white.

To argue that India and China will replace SV as the center of tech universe is just a futile exercise. And to argue that innovations happen more in SV is also not quite on the mark either. Lets use Zachary’s own examples.

I visited the thriving code-writing communities in Tallinn, Estonia; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Helsinki, Finland, three Nordic cities that were being transformed by advances in cellphones, mobile computing and the Internet. Their tight-knit network of engineers seemed poised to create the tools required to make good on a much-hyped prediction: the death of distance… Yet these Nordic innovators were blindsided by two Silicon Valley engineers whose tools we experience whenever we “Google” the Web.

Is that really so?

Everytime my Nokia phone rings in New Delhi, though someone called me on my New York number trying to reach me in my San Francisco office, it proves that the distance is dead. And remember Skype! It was a nordic creation that killed the distance, and for a few million, made voice calls free.

As Vinnie reminds us, an ecosystem is not just the innovators, but the actual end users, who have a very active role to play in defining what innovations succeed.

For a while the technology was easily available to those of us in the West, especially in the US. Naturally, Silicon Valley, became the super hub. Now Asians and Europeans are adopting faster broadband and mobile technologies, and it is natural to see innovations come from these locales.

No wonder I am in 100% agreement with the title of Zachary’s piece: When it comes to innovation, geography is destiny!

In particular we need to build huge, standalone companies in the northeast. We need more independent, large-scale companies in gaming, consumer web services, consumer products and even consumer electronics.

It's going to happen. I believe that. These days I'm seeing super Boston/NYC entrepreneurs taking on enormous ideas. Some are part of our portfolio and some aren't.  And I'm super excited about that.

Google’s astonishing rise and Apple’s reinvention are reminders that, when it comes to great ideas, location is crucial. “Face-to-face is still very important for exchange of ideas, and nowhere is this exchange more valuable than in Silicon Valley,” says Paul M. Romer, a professor in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford who is known for studying the economics of ideas.

In short, “geography matters,” Professor Romer said. Give birth to an information-technology idea in Silicon Valley and the chances of success seem vastly higher than when it is done in another ZIP code.

With an Xbox that projects onto the wall, beer in the fridge, and a caffeinated techno soundtrack playing in the background as burgers sizzle on the grill outside, a dozen entrepreneurs are hard at work building Boston’s next Web start-ups in a Central Square loft dubbed Betahouse.

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The regional tech community is often bemoaned as the pale cousin of the West Coast’s vibrant entrepreneurial environment — where Google, YouTube, and Cambridge expatriate Facebook thrive. These and other innovative consumer-oriented firms are attracting most of the excitement and entrepreneurial vigor in the new generation of Internet businesses, not the data storage and systems infrastructure companies, which primarily service other businesses, that Boston is famous for.

But over the past year, the local entrepreneurs who tended to toil alone in coffee shops and at home have begun to meet, mix, and engage in marathon sessions of coding. This coming together of like-minded Web junkies is an effort to create the kind of successful interaction that is commonplace in Silicon Valley.

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