Seattle-based Blue Marble Energy, the developer of renewable energy and specialty chemicals from biomass, said it has received a $2 million state grant through a partnership with the Odessa Public Development Authority. The company plans to use the grant, from the Washington Community Economic Revitalization Board, to build a refinery in Lincoln County that will turn organic biomass from around Eastern Washington into as much as 858 metric tons of biochemicals and 700 metric tons of green ammonia per year, says CEO Kelly Ogilvie, in an e-mail. The facility is expected to create 30 to 50 full-time jobs in its first year, he says.

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It’s been a busy week around here for the big tech companies. At Xconomy, we don’t usually report on things like product releases from Microsoft or sales figures from Amazon—our main focus is on new ideas, models, and companies—but readers need to understand where the big players are heading so they can see the gaps and opportunities for new businesses. So, for each of these pieces of mainstream tech news, I’ll tell you why savvy innovators and business leaders should care.

—Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) demonstrated its Web-based Chrome operating system for the first time in public yesterday. It won’t be available for another year, but the tech community is scrambling to understand all the implications. (Google’s Seattle engineers have contributed technology to the Chrome Web browser, helping to boost security—one potential advantage of a cloud-based operating system).

Sure, a fully cloud-based OS is a direct threat to Microsoft’s business model and the ecosystem of companies that support Windows. But more than that, it could reshape the landscape of online advertising by providing a new platform for launching ads on mobile devices, video channels (YouTube), and Internet TV. Perhaps the only thing that can slow down Google’s dominance on the Web is the federal government. In other words, this could get ugly.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has teamed up with LinkedIn to provide info about your business contacts within Outlook e-mail. It’s all part of Microsoft’s Outlook Social Connector, an add-in that feeds you data from your social networks. Integrating e-mail with social networks and search is a fast-growing area, with startups like Gist in Seattle (backed by Paul Allen and Foundry Group) helping lead the way. Gist’s CEO T.A. McCann told TechFlash that he’s known about Microsoft’s effort for a while and doesn’t see it as a direct challenge. Gist’s offering is more advanced, he said, and it includes features like integrating with Salesforce.com and the iPhone. But startups and investors beware: if you’re in this crowded space, you better have a product that cuts through the noise and has a way to attract customers fast.

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) is in discussions with Viacom’s MTV Networks to sell off at least some of its stake in the Rhapsody music service, as first reported by PaidContent. In a regulatory filing, prompted by a tender offer to issue new stock, Real said it is in talks to reorganize the management structure and/or corporate governance of the division, which might mean giving up its majority ownership stake (51 percent) in Rhapsody. Back in September, digital-media guru Bill Baxter (now at Seattle-based Cozi) wrote in Xconomy about Rhapsody’s fierce competition with Pandora, iTunes, and piracy. Message to startups: the world of digital music services is probably not where you want to be.

—Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) has been busy ramping up operations ahead of the holiday shopping season. Its billion-dollar acquisition of Zappos is helping it expand into shoes and apparel, and its Kindle sales look poised to take off, especially now that Barnes & Noble’s competing e-book reader, the Nook, has sold out until January. Amazon has really become the business and technology model to follow in online retail and product search. While there is still room for e-commerce startups to compete in various niches, they would be wise to study how Amazon built its brand and customer relationships before branching out to the wider world of retail.

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Wails of lamentation spread across the local tech community every time an entity like Zendesk or Greylock or Y Combinator departs Boston for parts west. But today we have a different tale to report. Day Software (SIX: DAYN) a Zurich, Switzerland-based content management software specialist that builds interactive websites for Fortune-1000 giants like Adobe and General Motors, is about to move its U.S. headquarters from Newport Beach, CA, to Boston.

When it comes to the software platforms and interactive content that define the world of Web 2.0 commerce, the Hub is the emerging capital, says Kevin Cochrane, Day’s chief marketing officer. “It’s inefficient for us to be anywhere other than Boston,” Cochrane says. “The majority of the partners we need to work with today in the Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 universe are in the Boston area, and Boston is ideally located for all of the major customers we’re securing up and down the Northeast corridor.”

Day’s new office, at 320 Congress Street in the booming Fort Point Channel area of South Boston, will open December 1, according to Kellie Snyder, a native Bostonian who is Day’s vice president of professional services. The office will initially employ 12 to 15 people and has room for up to 30. The company is “aggressively hiring” in all areas, including consulting and tech support, Snyder says.

Day Software was founded in 1994 as an interactive marketing agency but quickly evolved into a maker of software platforms for companies managing large websites. It’s been a public company on the Swiss Exchange since 2000. But last year, it brought in a new CEO, Erik Hansen, and rewrote its software from scratch to make it easier for clients to design, develop, and host customer-centric websites with interactive features such as blogs and wikis. The company counts GM, Adobe, Newsweek, the United States Army, Boston College, Ingersoll Rand, Rosetta Stone, Virgin Media, and the governments of Singapore and New Brunswick, Canada, among its big clients.

It will be much easier for Hansen, who is based in Zurich, to reach the new Boston headquarters than the company’s current Newport Beach digs. But that was “by no means the driving factor” behind the move, Cochrane says. “First and foremost, Boston is the hotbed for technology partners and interactive agencies, all of the companies that are critical to us as we look to build up our ecosystem,” he says. Boston offers the nation’s best pool of job talent for all departments of enterprise software companies, Cochrane adds. It’s also home to plenty of potential customers in higher education, a market Day has begun to penetrate, and it’s closer to the press and industry analysts who follow the content management sector, he says.

Another incidental benefit to the move, which has been in the planning stages for about 9 months: Day’s board chairman Barry Bycoff, a former Pequot Ventures partner who is also executive chairman at Progress Software (NASDAQ: PRGS), is based in Boston. Day’s planned grand-opening party at its new Boston headquarters on December 1 will coincide with a board meeting, according to Cochrane.

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[Editors note: Architect Robert Noble wrote this article with Glenn Croston]

The San Diego area is the home of numerous cleantech businesses that are developing innovative green cars (Aptera, V-Vehicle Co.), developing alternative fuels (GreenHouse International, Synthetic Genomics Inc., Sapphire Energy), finding alternatives to petrochemicals (Genomatica, Verdezyne), and providing renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions (KEMA, Kyocera, Envision Solar).

Assisting our growing cluster is a network of non-profits, trade groups, government agencies, universities, and investors who share a common interest in cultivating a green economy. These groups collaborate on many projects, strengthening our vision for more green businesses, jobs, and investments in cleantech innovation. But while they share common goals, local green groups are also distinct in many ways and often compete for money, members, and media; their varying perspective, focus, message, membership, and goals can be confusing. If you’re an entrepreneur, how can you find support for the green innovations you hope to commercialize? Where do investors look for opportunities and advice? Where can founders find the resources they need to move their ventures forward?

We’ve compiled a listing of these groups to help San Diego entrepreneurs and others find the resources they need to grow green, and to help San Diego’s green economy grow.

—The California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) is the cornerstone in developing San Diego’s green business cluster. As a non-profit, the CCSE works to advance the adoption of renewable energy, green building design, clean transportation options, and energy efficiency by providing workshops, information, and training.

—Cleantech San Diego is a membership-based non-profit industry association that sponsors events for businesses, investors, and others working in the cleantech cluster. They summarize their mission on their website, saying, “Cleantech San Diego advocates for new sources of investment capital, workforce development, international trade, federal and state research funding, targeted regulation, and sustainable land use planning and development.”

—San Diego Clean Enterprise Program, which is administered by Cleantech San Diego through a partnership with the City of San Diego and the mayor, which provides interest-free financing for energy efficiency improvements for small businesses. Cleantech San Diego also is working with the rest of the green community to support funding and grant applications, such as the effort to win $260 million in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds (CREBs) for local solar projects.

—San Diego Gas & Electric committed to develop a distributed solar power generation system in the San Diego region in 2008. So it’s no surprise that …Next Page »

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[Update: 1:55 pm Eastern, 11/20/09] After a bitter standoff earlier this year with billionaire investor Carl Icahn over alleged mismanagement, Cambridge, MA-based Biogen Idec now faces another sharp attack from a major shareholder.

New York-based HealthCor Management, a hedge fund that invests in health and biotech companies, said today in a regulatory filing that Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) overpays CEO James Mullen, that his performance has been poor, and that the company has a record of “excessive and fruitless” spending on R&D and little regard for its shareholders. HealthCor portfolio managers Joseph Healey and Arthur Cohen, in a letter dated November 18, urged the board to “revisit” Mullen’s compensation, cut research spending, and start buying back shares to boost the stock price. HealthCor said it holds 3.65 million shares, or about a 1.3 percent stake in Biogen, and it has held a position for more than a year.

HealthCor is urging the board to turn things around by buying back $500 million to $1 billion worth of stock annually. That would reduce the supply of available shares, and increase the value of those that remain on the market.

“We fear that continued acquiescence to the status quo will be viewed as an indictment of the Board’s lack of focus on shareholder value creation,” HealthCor wrote in a letter to the board, which was disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

[Update with company response, 1:55 pm Eastern, 11/20/09.] Biogen Idec “actively engages with our shareholders and we appreciate their input,” says company spokeswoman Jennifer Neiman. That said, she also noted that Biogen has already done share repurchases worth $5 billion since 2004, and last month its board authorized an additional $1 billion of share repurchases.

HealthCor said in its letter that it has been arguing for changes at Biogen for more than a year. The fund noted that the company’s stock has seen no real growth for six years, and is currently trading near levels seen before the company filed for FDA approval of natalizumab (Tysabri) in 2004. (The stock was selling for $44.26 per share on February 17, 2004, and was at $46.05 at the time HealthCor wrote its most recent letter on November 18, 2009.)

While “investors have been left holding the bag,” in HealthCor’s words, the firm …Next Page »

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Ryan McBride wrote:

Pilates is famous for shaping up peoples’ buttocks, tummies, and thighs. But what can the popularity of this fitness phenomenon and the market for health products do for investment portfolios? Cambridge, MA-based Lighter Living, which operates a health and fitness website that features Pilates expert and company founder Marjolein Brugman, has raised $3 million in an equity round of financing, according to an SEC filing.

Brugman, who appears to have pioneered an aerobic version of Pilates called AeroPilates, is listed in the regulatory filing as an executive and director of Lighter Living. There’s also a big name in venture investing involved with the firm: Michael Greeley, a founder and general partner of Boston-based venture firm Flybridge Capital Partners, who is listed as a director of Lighter Living. Neither Brugman nor Greeley was immediately available for comment this morning, but a spokeswoman for Flybridge confirmed that the firm is backing the company.

At first glance Lighter Living—which sells fitness and wellness products and offers health tips and insights from Brugman on its website—doesn’t seem like a typical bet for Greeley. However, he’s always told me that he is interested in businesses in which healthcare and information technology intersect. Previously, his interest in healthcare and IT has been manifest in investments he has led for Flybridge in companies such as Bedford, MA-based MicroCHIPS, a developer of micro-devices for medical uses, and business software firm BlueTarp Financial, of Portland, ME.

Yet Lighter Living does address a huge market demand for products that help people look and feel youthful, and there is an emerging trend of interest in this market among venture capitalists. Polaris Venture Partners is backing Cambridge, MA-based Living Proof, a provider of hair-care products based on advances in polymer science at MIT and other research institutions. Investments in the likes of Living Proof and Lighter Living could provide a boost for both consumers’ looks and venture portfolios’ outlooks.

Flybridge’s investment in Lighter Living is “building on [Brugman's] success in the healthy living market,” said Kate Castle, a spokeswoman for the venture firm. She said that Brugman has sold more than $500 million in healthy living products on the TV shopping channel QVC over the past 12 years.

Lighter Living is planning an official launch in 2010, Castle said.

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TheNextRound, a Framingham, MA-based startup that makes software for private equity and alternative investors, has been acquired by Windsor, CT-based SS&C Technologies for an undisclosed amount, according to an SS&C announcement today. SS&C makes financial management software for insurance companies, hedge funds, banks and credit unions, real estate companies, and other institutions.

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Cambridge, MA-based Cambridgesoft, which makes software for life sciences companies, disclosed in regulatory documents filed November 17 that it has raised $31.3 million in new equity-based financing. Cambridgesoft first announced the funding round (though not the amount) in a November 16 release that named new investor Health Evolution Partners and existing investor Goldman Sachs as the funders in the round.

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Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), the developer of what it hopes will be the first FDA-approved treatment to actively stimulate the immune system against cancer, said today the U.S. regulatory agency has received its amended application and set a deadline of May 1, 2010 to complete its review. The company is seeking clearance to start selling sipuleucel-T (Provenge) for men with prostate cancer that’s no longer controlled by standard chemical castration therapies. The application includes data from a 512-patient study which showed the drug could extend lives by a median of four months when compared with a placebo.

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A new IBM supercomputer opened at Brown University’s Center for Computation and Visualization in Providence, RI, today is 50 times faster than Brown’s next best machine and is the most powerful computer in Rhode Island, according to an announcement from IBM (NYSE: IBM). Researchers at Brown and other institutions intend to use the 1,440-processor machine to model subjects such as the genomes of ocean-going microbes, the mechanics of human and animal movement, and the topography of other planets. Brown ordered the multimillion-dollar supercomputer in June; its exact cost hasn’t been disclosed, but IBM and Brown are calling it “a shared investment.”

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After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an …Next Page »

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Dealmakers appear to be getting their business done before the week of Thanksgiving—because we’ve seen a decent stream of deal closings involving Boston-area life sciences and tech companies over the past week or so.

—Framingham, MA-based Punchbowl Software, which operates the party planning website MyPunchbowl.com, said it acquired technology assets of a group vacation website called I’m In. Punchbowl founder and CEO Matt Douglas provided details on why the transaction made sense for his startup.

—After months of operating quietly, seed-stage venture fund Founder Collective officially debuted last week. Eric Paley, a managing partner and co-founder of the firm, told us why he and other software entrepreneurs came together to form the new venture outfit, which has offices in Cambridge, MA and New York City. Here’s a hint: They were a bit frustrated with the status quo in the venture industry.

—Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based biotech startup focused on developing techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, reeled in $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the new round of investment in Fate, which was founded by top academics at Harvard University, Stanford University, The Scripps Research Institute, and the University of Washington.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN), a Waltham, MA-based biotech firm, reported this week that the firm sold a second license to its technology—which is for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing molecules—to industry giant Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN) for $1 million upfront, plus potential milestone payments.

—Corindus, a Natick, MA-based startup developing a robotic system for implanting vascular stents, collected $5.3 million of a planned $10 million in venture dollars, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

—Cambridge -based Ligon Discovery found $1 million in a seed round of financing from incTANK Ventures, with plans to validate its small molecule microarray system for drug discovery that was developed at Harvard. The company was founded by folks from Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

—We spotted Angus Davis, a co-founder of Microsoft’s voice-based Internet search subsidiary Tellme Networks, at Polaris Venture Partners’ Dogpatch Labs recently and wondered what he was up to. It looks like he’s been working on a new Providence, RI-based startup called Swipely, which quietly swept up a cool $1 million from First Round Capital.

—Jealous? Highland Capital Partners, the Lexington, MA-based venture powerhouse, closed its eighth fund, worth a whopping …Next Page »

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We hope to make this a regular feature in our Xconomy cities. It’s a look at small financings of private companies in tech, life sciences, and cleantech. These are deals in the roughly $100,000 to $1 million range, and they’re increasingly where the action is for local entrepreneurs, yet they’re often harder to track than the bigger deals we tend to report on.

And there were at least 12 of these smaller financings in the Northwest in October (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies. ChubbyBrain gets its data from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources, and this is the second monthly installment of “under the radar” deals in the Seattle area (you can see the previous deals for September here). The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of financing.

A few quick observations: Like the previous month, most of the financings were in Washington (7 out of 12), but a significant number (5) were in Oregon. Most were equity deals (7), with the rest (5) being debt financings. The majority of financings (9) were in software, Internet, or tech, while a much smaller number (3) were in life sciences and healthcare, and no cleantech or energy deals made the list.

If nothing else, these lists are a cool way to hear about emerging startups we otherwise wouldn’t know about. For example, I’ve heard of Teranode, Nearlyweds, and 1000Museums before, but Zapproved and Intellisist are completely new to me.

Here are the 12 “under the radar” deals from last month:

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When I was in fifth grade, I wanted to be an architect. (I also wanted to be a geneticist, a meteorologist, and an astronaut. I guess I wound up doing the next best thing to all of those sci/tech careers—writing about them.) I loved my junior builder kit, a collection of little plastic columns and I-beams and snap-on windows that was perfect for constructing models of International-style skyscrapers like the Sears Tower in Chicago. The only problem with the kit was that once you’d finished your perfect modernist creation, you had to tear it all down before you could build something else.

Now there’s an easy way to build as many model buildings as you want—and put them on display for millions of people to see. It’s Google’s Building Maker tool, released last month. The Web-based software lets you easily create beautifully textured 3-D models of real buildings by matching up simple digital shapes with information from Google’s aerial photographs of major cities. You can store your finished models in Google’s 3-D Warehouse and submit them to Google for “publication.” If a model is well-constructed and no one else has built a better version, Google will insert it into Google Earth itself.

Google made Building Maker available for about 50 world cities when it introduced the tool on October 13. This Tuesday, it added eight new cities to the list: Boston; Brussels, Belgium; Cologne and Dortmund in Germany; Las Vegas; Los Angeles; Rotterdam in the Netherlands; and San Jose, CA. Once I heard Boston had been added to the list, I couldn’t resist diving in and playing around with the tool, starting with a model of my own apartment building in Boston’s South End.

After a couple of days of experimenting, I can tell that Building Maker is going to provide some addictive fun for a lot of mapping and modeling freaks like me. But just as important, I think it will provide a rewarding way for people who aren’t professional architects or cartographers to contribute to the “geoweb.” Today, we can explore this expanding digital replica of the real world through 2-D interfaces like Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth. But as it gains fidelity, the geoweb could eventually blossom into the immersive, geographically accurate 3-D online world that futurists have called the Metaverse.

If the Metaverse does come into being someday, it will be in large part thanks to Google, which is on a mission to “create a three-dimensional model of every built structure on Earth,” according to an October blog past by Google product manager Mark Limber. But even a company as wealthy as Google doesn’t have the resources to model all the world’s buildings on its own. So in classic Tom Sawyer fashion, it came up with Building Maker, which makes the work so enjoyable that thousands of Google users will be glad to pitch in.

From talking with Limber himself yesterday, I’m convinced that this strategy is only one part shrewdness and about three parts sheer enthusiasm. “The world is really big, and there are an awful lot of buildings, so I do think everybody will have to get involved” to fill out the 3-D world, Limber says. “But on a personal level, it’s really fun to be able to drop a couple of blocks, move them around a bit, add a texture, and voila! There is a little bit of magic there that we hope will draw people into this whole word of 3-D, and be a little more informed about it because they participated in it.”

Like all good pastimes, Building Maker starts out simple, but goes very deep. What makes the tool possible in the first place is the fact that …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Omeros expects to apply for FDA clearance to start selling its first product by the second half of next year, and it also hoping to strike at least one partnership over the next couple of years with a bigger drugmaker, CEO Greg Demopulos said today in his first quarterly update running a public company.

Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) is “on track” to finish enrollment next year of more than 1,000 patients in clinical trials of its lead anti-inflammatory drug candidate that’s supposed to help patients recover faster from arthroscopic knee surgery, Demopulos said on a conference call with analysts. Results from those pivotal studies should be available by the middle of 2010, and if the results are good, the company will ship off an application to the FDA to start marketing the product before the end of 2010, he said.

The clinical trial update was an important point for Omeros to make in the first week it has been legally allowed to make public statements since the 15-year-old company completed its initial public offering on October 7. Omeros raised about $62 million through the transaction, but its shares lost more than a third of their value in the first two weeks, earning it the dubious distinction of having the worst performing IPO of the year. Omeros has rebounded a bit since then, although its shares are still down 23 percent. Now the company is setting up expectations of events in the year ahead—like an FDA filing or a big corporate alliance—which could entice more investors to lift its stock out of the doldrums.

If the clinical trials go well, “we’ll have the first commercially available drug delivered directly to the surgical site to improve recovery” of knee surgery patients, Demopulos said.

The treatment, called OMS103HP, combines a couple of generic anti-inflammatory drugs into an injection designed to reduce post-operative swelling and speed up recovery time, Demopulos said. The clinical trials aren’t designed to see if the Omeros drug can wean patients off opioid-based pain relievers that circulate throughout the bloodstream, but it’s possible that could be one of the benefits, Demopulos said in response to a question from analyst Mark Monane of Needham & Company. Omeros is also looking at health economic analyses that might help justify the drug’s expense by showing how it speeds up recovery time, reducing rehab costs, and allows people to get back to work sooner than they otherwise would, Demopulos said.

While investors are certainly interested in the knee surgery drug candidate, Omeros has made plain that it isn’t putting all its eggs in that basket.

One key piece of the strategy is based on scientific work that it hopes will enable the company to hit a whole new class of targets on cells that have long been considered “undruggable.” This is the group …Next Page »

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At least 17 Seattle-area startups rolled out new websites last month, according to the latest edition of Seattle 2.0’s startup index. The index now lists 373 companies, which are ranked on the basis of Web traffic estimates. The top 10 sites didn’t change much from previous months. The startups that are new to the list are HasOffers, BigStartups, Team Apart, Boxoh.com, EnergySavvy.com, Couchsoft (Mentby), Osnapz, Social Kind (TweetToCall, Escape My Date), Fotozio (PicTranslator), Adometry (Veracity), Qbiki Networks (iPhoneSeattle), HotelsOutlook, BuzzMinder (2Reminders), Splitts.com, Data Applied, Baldy Beanbag (The Big Magoo), and Megosi.

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Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN) said today that Amgen has purchased a second license to develop a treatment that uses ImmunoGen’s technology for linking targeted antibodies to cell-killing agents that make them more potent. ImmunoGen will get $1 million upfront and could receive $34 million worth of milestone payments over time if Amgen is successful in developing a drug against an undisclosed target on cancer cells. Amgen bought its first such license to the ImmunoGen technology in September.

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Seattle-based Cozi announced today it has formed a strategic partnership with MeadWestvaco (NYSE: MWV), a Sidney, NY-based maker of school and office supplies and planning tools. Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced, but the partnership will give MWV consumers access to Cozi’s Web-based software for helping families manage their busy schedules. The tools include a family calendar, customized to-do lists, and messaging systems. This is the third partnership Cozi will announce with a Fortune 500 company this year, including a previous deal with Dell to pre-load certain home computers with Cozi’s software.

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It wasn’t so much the predictions as the discussion that was most interesting at last night’s annual predictions dinner, organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association. Will Twitter be acquired in 2010, and why? Who will have the dominant cloud computing platform in the next couple of years? What kind of startup are you looking to build or finance, and which areas are you staying away from?

A panel of Seattle-area tech entrepreneurs and investors gamely took the bait and had some lively exchanges over the course of an hour. OK, these guys all know each other, and we’ll take what they say with a grain of salt since it’s a public forum—but here were some of the most interesting points they made. (You can read more comprehensive recaps of the panel on Brier Dudley’s blog at the Seattle Times, and soon on TechFlash by moderator John Cook.)

The panel was split 3 to 2, with the narrow majority guessing Twitter will get bought next year. Andy Sack of seed-stage fund Founder’s Co-op predicted Twitter will make more money than Facebook in 2010 (surprising, given the current disparity in the other direction). Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate firm, said Twitter should charge for search (as it has begun to do in partnerships with Google and Bing). Kelly Smith from Curious Office and the startup Pressplane argued that Twitter could be “absorbed by a big company,” but “it’s going to go nowhere.” By the end of the evening, Sack was predicting that Microsoft would buy Twitter next year.

There was a consensus that 2010 could be a big year for acquisitions. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson boldly predicted that Amazon will buy Netflix, Blockbuster, and Hulu, while opening brick and mortar “Amazon media stores.” Greg Gottesman from Madrona Venture Group said Cisco might buy EMC (for VMware) and Seattle-based F5 Networks, while Microsoft might buy Research In Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry smartphone. Sack predicted Adobe would pick up Seattle photo-editing startup Picnik. Rupert Murdoch (News Corp.) would buy Seattle’s Cheezburger Network, and someone would buy Redfin.

Looking back on 2009 for a minute, the big deals that were questioned by the panel included Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture (Gottesman said it just didn’t make sense strategically) and …Next Page »

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Natick, MA-based Corindus has corralled $5.3 million of a proposed $10 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The firm is developing a robotic system that helps surgeons control the position of guidewires in veins in procedures to implant vascular stents, according to the firm’s LinkedIn profile. A call to company CEO David Handler was not immediately returned today, and it’s not stated in the SEC filing who participated in the financing. Prior to this financing, the firm raised $12.8 million in a Series B financing in spring 2008, according to a story I wrote about the deal for Mass High Tech.

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