The past 24hrs have had a few great announcements for the Boston area tech industry including funding, site launches and new feature announcements. Here is a quick run down of the events.

Invoke Solutions Grabs 7M - First reported in the BBJ, on Xconomy and now TechCrunch, Waltham, MA based online and mobile research firm announced $7 million in venture funding from North Atlantic Capital, Bain Capital LLC and BEV Capital.

Also reported on Xconomy and now on Techcrunch, Loki / Skyhook Wireless launched a new location service that will tell everyone where you are via wifi positioning technology. Do I actually want this? Reminds me of my Stalker.com post from back in 2006. Actually for mobile browsers and us iPhone users, this has great application to enable your map based programs know where they are.

Writers looking for a little extra cash? Andover’s Helium launched their writer marketplace yesterday. It’s basically a elance like platform for publishers to post submission requests including the what they are willing to pay for the article. When I looked yesterday, there were a decent load of requests with prices ranging from 70 - 180 per 700 - 1000 word article. Scott and the guys who actually get paid to write can tell me if this works out to a good per-word rate!

Finally, although I may have missed other stories, the New England Patriots released their Newenglandfootball.com site in an effort to expand their reach to the local fans through high school football teams. I love this story because it shows an innovative attempt to use social media by a major sports franchise but also because it gives the SEO expert in me a legitimate opportunity to reference the Tom Brady And Gisele Bundchen sex tape in a blog post. You dirty pigs are searching for it right now…or you will after this post!

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Technorati Tags: Boston Web 2.0,Tech,Helium,Patriots,Loki,Skyhoow Wireless,Invoke,Waltham,Boston,Andover,Football,Tom Brady,Gisele Bundchen

Utterz.com, a Maynard based site that I first covered earlier this year and one of the few technology stories that broke on 93south, came back out of stealth today and expanded their product offering to include impulse publishing of both pictures and video in addition to the original voice service. I had a chance to play around with the service this weekend and was impressed with the changes and progress that they have made.

Think of Utterz as Twitter for audio, pics and video. Utterz is a very simple concept where registered users call a pre-set number (712-432-6666) to leave short sound clips (or Utterz) that are automatically posted on the users Utterz profile. With this release, Utterz now allows users to accompany their posted messages with both pictures and video that can be submitted via email or site upload. The pictures and video are automatically matched to the previous voice utter on the website.

The company also followed the advice from my previous post and added a selection of widgets (Ok…I’m sure they were planning on it anyway) that allow you to publish your latest Utterz to your blog or online profiles. Notice my Utterz widget in the sidebar - not much of a set I must admit but I’m not sure if I am the real target.

One of the interesting parts of the overall concept is that it allows a 2-way conversation through a blog-like comment system. Users have the ability to post responses to each message through the website or directly through the phone number. When you call in, the automated attendant will notify you that their are replies waiting for your messages and give you the ability to respond…almost voice texting in a way.

This new “micro-blogging” service still has a few bugs to work out and I will be curious to see how they will handle offensive content even in a community policed format. However, I think that the new feature set combined with the site’s clever branding (a bit refreshing for east coast standards) have the potential to turn Utterz into a very popular service.

RPM Communications, the maker of Utterz and Foonz, also announced a $4 million Series A round of funding led by Morgenthaler Ventures.

Technorati tags: utterz, boston web 2.0, maynard, mobile, technology, sms, video, audio, twitter, start-up, launch

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Need to know what to wear and how to do your hair 24/7?  Waltham based mobile start-up Quattro Wireless announced a new contract to power the mobile version of celebrity hairstyle site, BeautyRiot.com.  The San Francisco-based fashion site provides image galleries of your favorite celebs like Ashlee Simpson, Hilary Duff, Nicole Richie, Lindsay Lohan, Jessica Simpson, etc.

BeautyRiot is utilizing Quattro Wireless’ services to create an adaptive mobile website with tightly-integrated, mobile-optimized advertising units from major advertisers such as P&G brands Crest and Always. Quattro helps online publishers translate any existing wired website into a mobile website, and match relevant advertising inventory to generate revenue and grow a loyal mobile audience. 

I love both of these business.  Online publishers of all sizes know they will need, if they have not started already, to release a mobile strategy within the next year.  Not every publisher is going to have the developer bandwidth to produce this quickly.  Quattro can step in to solve this problem while at the same time providing mobile advertising support.  Quattro is both a publishing platform and an ad-network (of-sorts), which is a great business way to hedge your bets and provide a value for customers beyond a simple publishing platform.

Although not local, BeautyRiot is just one of those “so simple it just should have been cloned by David already” brilliant ideas.  Basically all they do is re-publish pictures of your favorite celebs…it’s like Cosmo stripped down to the part people are buying it for anyway!  How hard was it to put this site together? 

This very SEO friendly site is gaining traffic which will hopefully translate into revenue for our own Quattro Wireless through the mobile application.

 BeautyRiot.com’s People Count on Compete.com

I received such a great response from the first Boston Mobile 2.0 round-up from earlier in the week, that I decided to create another list to point out the local start-ups that I missed on the first list!

Thank you to REM and everyone else who helped continue the list!

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Aylus (Westford, MA) Great application and a start-up that should have been on the first list, Aylus will deliver a real-time multimedia service over mobile handsets for media types like live video, video clips, images, and the mobile screen itself! The company has secured $15 million in venture funding. Thank you to REM for pointing them out.

Unwired Appeal (Boston, MA): Mobile marketing firm specializing in SMS marketing campaigns, interactive text-messaging solutions, and mobile multimedia platforms. The site touts that they have delivered over 2,000 applications!

Cielo Group (Wellesley, MA) Cielo Group is a mobile marketing outfit that deliverers “advertainment” applications that connect consumers with brand companies like Red Bull, Anheuser-Busch, BMW, the US Air Force and Bank of America.

Wherecast (Cambridge, MA?): Wherecast is another stealth based mobile offering that was passed along by REM on the earlier round-up. The companies founders come out of MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley

Mobeus (Cambridge, MA): Is using speech recognition to make a dramatically improved user interface for mobile devices which sounds like one of those ” I should of thought of that” concepts. I could only gather this information from articles around the web and the Sigma Partners website…if they have a website, they need some serious SEO.

Technorati tags: mobile 2.0, mobile, Boston Mobile, Boston Web 2.0, Cielo, Unwired Appeal, Aylus, Mobeus, Boston Start-up