Will Boston ever catch up?

The explosion of consumer-oriented technologies, from YouTube to the iPhone, has been pushing the pistons of the technology economy for the past three years. That's great for California, and a real problem for Massachusetts, which has specialized in building technologies for corporate use since the mini-computer boom of the 1980s.

"The legacy here is more enterprise-focused, all the way back to Wang and Digital and Prime and Apollo," says venture capitalist Todd Dagres, referring to a crop of computer makers long dead and buried. "That was where you wanted to be in the last millennium. It's just not where the real juice is right now."

The juice, as Dagres puts it, is in all kinds of tech products for consumers, from new handheld devices and television set-top boxes to online videogames and so-called "social networking" tools like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, which allow people to connect and communicate with friends using free software.

In the first three quarters of 2006, $1.63 billion was invested in consumer technology companies in the United States, according to a survey by Dow Jones VentureOne. The bulk of those are in the San Francisco Bay area -- though a few, like Eons, a social networking site for people age 50 and over, are in the Bay State.

Having just boomeranged back to Cambridge after spending two years in San Francisco, the lack of consumer tech activity here is startling to me -- it's like going from a noisy, hot, crowded bar to another across the street where the bartender has plenty of time to wash glasses and gab with the three regulars perched on stools.

There are entrepreneurs here building consumer-oriented tech companies and a handful of venture capital firms investing in consumer tech, notably Spark Capital in Boston, General Catalyst in Cambridge, and Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham.

But Boston doesn't have the same gravitational pull Silicon Valley has right now; one of my last meetings out West was with a Harvard Business School student who is spending the summer in the Valley because he wants to plug into the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon there.

Many Boston area investors, like Dagres, aren't hesitant about pouring their millions into California start-ups and hopping on planes (Dagres's calendar includes four board meetings this week in Los Angeles). And Google, the search giant that has a wallet stuffed with more than $10 billion in cash, is a force unto itself. So far in 2007, Google has acquired 10 companies, the bulk of them located close to its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters.

Jon Flint, a cofounder of Polaris, says the current consumer tech deficit can be traced back to the 1980s, when none of the minicomputer companies were able to successfully transition to the PC business. "The PC was a consumer platform, and the Internet has become the new consumer platform," he says.

It can be frustrating to be a Boston entrepreneur working to get a consumer-oriented company off the ground. "The Boston investment climate is geared toward the new old thing -- something that has been done before, but now it can be done faster, cheaper, or smaller," says Stephen Randall, founder of Somerville-based LocaModa. "On the West Coast, the new new thing doesn't phase venture capitalists at all." Randall's technology allows cellphone users to interact with Internet-connected display screens in public places.

In a meeting with a Boston venture capitalist last year, Randall was discussing how patrons in a café might use his technology to search classified ads on Craigslist. "A VC from one of the top firms in Boston said, 'That's fascinating. Now, tell me: What is Craigslist?' " Randall recalls, chuckling at the investor's cluelessness.

He is in the midst of closing a $5 million first round of investment, including some money from a Boston firm, but reckons he'd have been able to raise the money two years earlier if LocaModa had been based in the Bay Area.

Matt Douglas is a Natick entrepreneur who is trying to build a better website for creating party invitations, challenging the dominant player, Evite.com, which is owned by IAC. One cool feature of Douglas's site, MyPunchBowl .com, allows a party planner to work with invitees to find the date that best suits everybody. "The mentality of East Coast investors is 'Show me revenue first, and then we'll talk again,' " says Douglas.

By contrast, in the Valley, many consumer sites get started by building an audience first and figuring out how to wring revenue from that audience later -- or simply getting a wealthy sugar daddy to acquire them.

YouTube, for instance, had only brought in an estimated $15 million in revenue for 2006, the year that Google bought the company for $1.65 billion. The site's value lay in how quickly it was attracting viewers, and how much time viewers were spending there.

Nabeel Hyatt says that Boston-area investors may not be comfortable enough with consumer technology to make the kinds of gut calls their West Coast counterparts make. "To make these kinds of bets, you have to be able to say, 'I know enough about this category and this industry, so I know that what you're building has a good chance of working.' "

His start-up, Conduit Labs, is building a new kind of site that blends social networking with gaming, and just raised its first round of funding last week -- partly from a West Coast firm and partly from Prism Venture Partners in Westwood.

The old saw about venture capitalists had it that they would never invest in companies that were more than a day's worth of travel away from their offices. Boston's Spark Capital, which just added $360 million last week to the money it manages, has invested predominantly in California companies; its two most recent deals were companies in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

All of the partners at the firm, Dagres explains, are bicoastal. One other advantage in Silicon Valley is the way that the blogosphere can help generate buzz around new companies. When a new consumer technology is demonstrated at a conference like the Web 2.0 Summit, for instance, dozens of bloggers in the audience are eager to try it out and write about it, which provides fledgling companies with free publicity.

But being Boston does have advantages. Hiring engineers is easier here, and it can be easier to get noticed in a place where there aren't so many companies doing similar things: the small pond effect. I'm seeing a few signs that a consumer tech community is starting to coalesce in Boston. There are a number of regular events that bring together entrepreneurs and investors, and the number of blogs written by the local digerati is growing.

Venture capitalists are beginning to invest in consumer tech companies in Boston; tomorrow Jon Karlen of IDG Ventures plans to seal an investment in Guild Cafe, a Cambridge company that operates an online hang-out for gamers. "I'm seeing a tide change in Boston," Randall says. "There is a new guard out there." The new guard needs to get busy.

Innovation Economy is a new weekly column that will focus on entrepreneurship, technology, and venture capital in New England. Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com.