MaxLinear, a fabless RF chipmaker based in Carlsbad, CA, filed a registration statement today for an initial public stock offering, marking only the second IPO in the San Diego area since Bridgepoint Education made its debut on the New York Stock Exchange in April. About 45 IPOs have taken place nationwide so far this year.

Eight semiconductor industry veterans founded MaxLinear in 2003. The company specializes in designing highly integrated, CMOS (Complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor) chips, and has had notable success designing semiconductor-based TV tuners. Maxlinear says its customers include wireless module makers, original equipment manufacturers and original design manufacturers.

David Rodewald, an outside spokesman for the company, said MaxLinear executives would not comment beyond the statement issued today.

The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering were not disclosed, although Dow Jones says the Carlsbad company plans to sell an estimated $100 million in stock. The company plans to use the proceeds for working capital and general corporate purposes.

The founders self-funded MaxLinear for the first year, and co-founder and CEO Kishore Seendripu talked about their efforts to generate revenue by taking on consulting work and other outside work during a panel discussion on bootstrapping in San Diego six months ago. Seendripu defined bootstrapping as “a self-sustaining process that proceeds without external help.”

MaxLinear secured its first round of venture funding in late 2004, after completing development of its first prototype silicon television tuner using CMOS technology. The company identifies its venture investors on its website as San Diego-based Mission Ventures, U.S. Venture Partners of Menlo Park, CA, and Battery Ventures, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Menlo Park, CA.

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Kent, WA-based LaserMotive has won $900,000 in a NASA competition to build a small prototype device that one day could help lead to a commercial “space elevator,” a cable that could transport cargo to and from outer space. The news was reported by the New York Times and other outlets. LaserMotive, a laser power-beaming company, is led by Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, who both also work with Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. The power-beaming project and competition was reported by TechFlash earlier today.

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I’m not going to do justice to this event. Let’s just get that out there right now. There were some great speakers and panels at yesterday’s Entrepreneur University in Bellevue, WA, organized by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. But this isn’t about them. This is about the crowd-pleasers that brought an otherwise productive day to a close. That’s right—this is about pornography and Bacon Salt.

Not necessarily in that order, though. About a year ago, I profiled Bacon Salt, a couple of ex-Jobster guys in Seattle who hit upon a recipe for success: make everything taste like bacon. Their strategy of social media promotions—together with their natural charisma and some great-tasting food products (I can vouch for Baconnaise too)—has led to national exposure on ABC News, Oprah, Jay Leno, and the Today Show, not to mention a couple of segments on Jon Stewart (you can watch them here and here) that started it all.

Bacon Salt co-founder Dave Lefkow gave the closing keynote at the NWEN event, telling his company’s story from the beginning. From starting a food company on $5,000 (won from America’s Funniest Home Videos) instead of the $20 million usually expected in the industry, to fundraising and growth, to marketing and profitability, and now to Operation Bacon Salt—airlifting the company’s bacon-flavored condiments to U.S. troops in places like Afghanistan.

Through it all, Lefkow stressed the importance of finding evangelists for his products—including a couple in Virginia who tattooed the Bacon Salt logo on their legs. “These are people we don’t know,” he said. Bacon Salt also started a website in response to some kids who have snorted Bacon Salt…and put video clips on YouTube.

There are a few more updates to the story. He says Bacon Salt is “currently developing the world’s first meat-flavored personal lubricant.” I still don’t know if Bacon Lube is real or a joke, but Lefkow says he has found a company to manufacture it, and we can expect it in 2010. Other new products will include Bacon Pop (popcorn, not soda) and Bacon Ranch (a dressing, I think).

On a more somber note, Lefkow announced a charity event to benefit children with cancer. His four-year-old daughter was recently diagnosed with leukemia. The “Bacathlon,” billed as the world’s first bacon-themed athletic competition (including an eating contest), will be held the night of November 19 at Heaven Nightclub in Pioneer Square.

The last session at the NWEN event, after a few cocktails, was “Entrepreneur Idol”—seven lucky contestants got to pitch the audience and a panel of media judges (including yours truly) on their startup idea in 60 seconds. This is not an easy thing to do. Of course, we judges had the easy job of sitting back and giving our critiques; I hope some of the feedback was actually useful.

If there was one lesson, it was this: porn wins. Danielle Morrill got everyone’s attention by pitching her idea for a live video streaming adult-content service aimed at couples, called StreamHer.com (like Ustream, but for porn). After that, pitches on business productivity, IT consultancies, and mobile apps felt, well, less stimulating.

In the end, our judges’ picks were Firestarter Labs (T.J. Goan), which does software and services to create better presentations; Buzzeromatic.com (Andres Krogh and Matt Steckler), a Web service for granting front-door access to apartments and condos; and yes, StreamHer.com (Danielle Morrill). I’d also like to thank Jim Byers, Michaela Romanova, Nick Reed, and Gaven Kanemori for pitching us on their cool ideas and companies.

I was told afterwards that I was the “Randy” of the Idol judges. Better than Paula Abdul, I suppose.

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Ion Torrent Systems, a company advised by Harvard University genomics pioneer George Church, has raised $23 million in new capital to develop what it calls on its website “groundbreaking and highly disruptive technology” and to hire people who “want to do what it takes to put a dent in the universe.”

The company, which has a location near Yale University in Guilford, CT, and one in San Francisco, has raised $23 million in equity out of a financing round that could be worth as much as $26 million, according to a regulatory filing released today.

The document doesn’t say who invested, and Ion Torrent didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the new company is associated with some big names, including Church and Stanford University’s Ron Davis, who serve on the company’s scientific advisory board, and CEO Jonathan Rothberg, who was the founding CEO of 454 Life Sciences before that company was sold to Roche two years ago for $140 million in cash.

Ion Torrent Systems website is pretty vague about what it is really up to, although its job postings offer some clues. It says it is looking to hire molecular biologists and biochemists to do the aforementioned universe denting, and that it offers that it offers the opportunity to work with top scientists “and have a profound impact.” It is also looking to hire software developers and “evangelists” who want to “create the biotech software platform of the future and share it with the world. Build powerful tools and create a tight-knit community that will use and develop them for years to come.”

GenomeWeb speculated back in March, based on a patent application filed by Ion Torrent Systems, that it is working on new DNA sequencing technologies, although the company wouldn’t confirm that. Major players in the field—such as Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies, San Diego-based Illumina, and Roche—have been in a competitive frenzy to lower the cost of sequencing full human genomes. One Mountain View, CA-based startup, Complete Genomics, raised $45 million in venture capital earlier this year to support its new model for sequencing entire genomes for as little as $5,000 apiece or less.

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Woburn, MA-based remote control software company LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), which went public in July, said today that early investors plan to sell 2.9 million of their shares in a secondary public offering. At this afternoon’s share price of around $19.35, that would bring the stockholders some $56.1 million. Venture backers Prism VentureWorks and Polaris Venture Partners are among LogMeIn’s largest shareholders. LogMeIn said it will also sell 100,000 company-owned shares in the offering.

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Just came back from the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association’s annual meeting in downtown Seattle, where 500-plus biotechies and distinguished guests (including more than a few local politicians) gathered for a quiche-and-berries breakfast and some keen networking.

The keynote speaker was Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health and now a senior fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Just a few highlights from his talk here:

Zerhouni laid out the top five challenges in public health, as he sees it. Nothing too surprising, but a good way to frame the whole healthcare discussion:

1. The shift from acute to chronic conditions. (“This is a worldwide issue,” he emphasized. “This is the new global health horizon.”)

2. Aging population.

3. Health disparities.

4. Emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. (Pandemics, for example.)

5. Emerging non-communicable diseases. (Things like obesity and depression, the latter of which the World Health Organization predicts will be the No. 1 cause of disability and dysfunction for people aged 25-44.)

As a world-class radiology researcher, Zerhouni also spoke to the scientific challenges the industry faces. He said the fundamental scientific barrier to doing “translational” research—that which leads to new products like drugs or devices—is the complexity of biological systems involved in diseases. “The explosion of data does not equate to explosion of knowledge,” he said. (This is a common theme across all fields of science and technology.)

On this front, Zerhouni stressed the importance of both external and internal sources of innovation. Meaning, the state of Washington should “find ways of bringing in collaboration on the translation or creation of knowledge.” He pointed out that “building relationships with the Asian Rim is probably your strategic advantage.”

For the politicians in the audience, Zerhouni noted, “Today when you get elected or not elected, the main driver is jobs, jobs, jobs.” He said his dream is that in a few years, biomarkers and healthcare stats will impact political campaigns, to the tune of, “In my district, Body Mass Index has dropped from X to Y.” (Luke previously reported on the issue of jobs being the driver of public support for biotech.)

The last issue Zerhouni addressed was a particularly interesting one: culture wars around science and technology. “Don’t be oblivious to the political, cultural, and moral aspects” of biotech and biomedical work, he said. “Be careful to not assume that everyone in the world believes what you do is holy and good.” Having dealt with the profound issues of evolution vs. creation in Washington DC—most notably in the context of stem cell policy—Zerhouni was sharing some hard-earned wisdom that everyone in the room could take home with them.

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Bitwave Semiconductor of Chelmsford, MA, has raised $1.33 million out of a planned $6 million Series C equity funding round, according to regulatory documents. The company makes radio-frequency integrated circuits for portable devices. Bitwave collected $10 million in Series B funding from Apex Venture Partners, TVM Capital, and ECentury Capital Partners in August, 2008.

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SpectraScience, the San Diego medical device maker, has raised more than $4.3 million through a private placement that combines preferred shares and warrants, according to a regulatory filing today. As I reported previously, SpectraScience (OTCBB:SCIE) acquired its optical biopsy technology when CEO Jim Hitchin acquired certain assets from the bankruptcy of Minnesota’s GV Medical. In its filing, SpectraScience says the company sold 433,000 units at $10 a share. Hitchin tells me the offering closes a $5 million round the company began earlier this year.

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Dave Paton and Dave Moody tell me they founded EESG, a San Diego cleantech startup also known as Energy Efficiency Systems Group, last year in anticipation that soaring energy prices would unleash strong demand for practical alternatives. But they didn’t focus on new technologies for alternative energy sources. They focused on energy efficiencies.

They also wanted to take advantage of their extensive experience with the hotel industry. Paton had spent 30 years working as an executive at the Hilton, Radisson, and Doubletree hotel companies. And the company the pair had previously founded, Vista, CA-based Paramount International Telecom, provided a voice-activated automated attendant and message system for the hospitality industry. So they knew hotels. As Paton and Moody put it, they understood that for a hotel to keep its four-star rating, it was going to have to keep the air-conditioning running through the summer.

As a result, Paton and Moody concluded that developing technologies to help hotels and other facilities improve their energy efficiency was a likely growth business ideally suited to their expertise and industry contacts. And it was a business that wouldn’t require huge amounts of external capital. The business partners say they set out to create a system that incorporated the best technologies for sensing and measuring energy use, for monitoring and communicating such information in meaningful ways, and for remotely managing everything—from the 15-ton air-conditioning chiller on the roof to the boiler in the basement.

“Every piece of equipment has a sweet spot that it operates at with optimum efficiency,” Moody says. The energy conservation and management systems that EESG has developed are designed to identify equipment throughout a facility, and to optimize the performance of each unit. “We know every model, every unit, every product type, and we know how to control it,” Moody says. “Our system is specifically programmed for that equipment, say a Trane 360, and to keep it operating at that sweet spot.”

To tie it all together, they hired software engineers to develop proprietary software analytics that provide a comprehensive and real-time energy audit of customer facilities. EESG also developed a Web-based interface that can be accessed online or by a smart phone. Paton says their system, once installed, reduces customers’ energy consumption by 8 percent to 15 percent annually. The partners say EESG has implemented its technology so far at four hotels in the U.S. and Canada, including the luxury Fairmont Hotel in Washington D.C.

Fairmont Hotel

“The building engineer can be anywhere in the world,” Moody says. “You just go to a secure portal, and see how the system is operating. Or maybe the vice president of asset management wants to drill down to one chiller at one property, but he also wants it aggregated to show all the chillers at all the buildings that he manages.”

So far, the founders have funded EESG’s technology development themselves, along with friends and family. But they are now looking to raise about $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and for public relations and marketing.

Moody and Paton say they have raised about half from wealthy individual investors and cleantech investment funds, such as Longboard Capital Advisors of Santa Monica, CA, which has invested $300,000 from its Blue Earth Fund in EESG’s current round.

“Although we typically do not invest in early stage companies, it was an easy choice to invest in the management at rapidly growing EESG,” Longboard managing partner Brett Conrad wrote in an e-mail to me last night. “We felt like our investment risk was further reduced by management’s deep experience and relationships in hotel and resort management around the world. Because Longboard Capital Advisors focuses on clean tech investing, we are particularly excited by EESG reducing their customer’s carbon output while at the same time while achieving extraordinary ROI’s by significantly reducing energy costs from power hungry air conditioners, elevators and escalators.”

Moody sums it up a little more succinctly. “It is a good green thing for sure,” he says, “but the bottom line is that it helps you save money.”

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You know how listening to music on a friend’s pricey Bose headphones makes it harder to tolerate your tinny little speakers at home, or watching your favorite show on a high-definition screen spoils you for regular TV? I’m at a moment like that in the way I look at photographs. For the last few weeks, I’ve been playing around with a new computerized technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography, which can lend a stunning level of brightness, contrast, and detail to digital images. And now every traditional non-HDR image that I see looks flat and dull by comparison.

It’s a dilemma, actually, because the HDR “look” can be peculiar, artificial, even surreal. If you lived in a world where every photograph was made this way, you’d have a constant migraine. But for now, I’m a little bit addicted to HDR. And at the risk of getting you addicted, too, I want to talk this week about how the technique works, what you can do with it, and how it can help all of us question some of the conventions and expectations we’ve built up around the art of photography, and around the related art of looking at photographs.

HDR images are unusual because they don’t represent a single moment in time, like most photos, but rather are digital fusions of several images of the same scene, taken at different exposure levels. (In photography, the longer the exposure time, the more light gets captured by a camera’s film or digital sensor, and the brighter the resulting image.) To collect raw material for an HDR image, photographers generally take at least three pictures: one that’s underexposed, one that’s overexposed, and one at a normal exposure. This is called exposure bracketing. The easiest way to explain is to do a bit of show-and-tell:

1. Normal Exposure

2. Underexposed

3. Overexposed

Digital cameras have come a long way in the last 10 years, but the sensors inside them are still nowhere near as good as the human eye at handling the huge variations in luminance that occur in the natural world. (Photographers call this variation dynamic range.) As you can see from Photo 1 above—the one taken at the standard exposure level that my camera chose automatically—the trees look okay, but the sky is pretty washed out. That’s because the camera, in choosing an exposure that would capture some detail in the hills and leaves, wound up gathering too much light from the much brighter sky above.

The HDR process offers a way to compensate for this technological limitation. If you examine the underexposed image (Photo 2) above, you’ll notice that the landscape is pretty dark, but there’s a lot more detail in the clouds—you can actually see how shapely they are. Conversely, in the overexposed image (Photo 3), the sky is a featureless white blur, but you can see a lot more stuff happening in the trees—detail that was largely lost in the shadows in the normal exposure.

…Next Page »

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Zeemote, a Chelmsford, MA-based startup that developed a handheld game controller for use with games on mobile handsets, has closed its doors and is putting its assets up for sale, according to a story today in Mass High Tech. Founded in 2005 by Boston-area entrepreneur Beth Marcus, the company worked with handset manufacturers Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, and RIM to make its Bluetooth-based device compatible with their phones. Mass High Tech spoke with a partner from Zeemote backer Commonwealth Capital Ventures who confirmed the closure but offered no further details.

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RXi Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXII), the Worcester, MA-based developer of RNA interference drugs, said today that Noah Beerman has replaced Tod Woolf as president and CEO. Beerman, 47, was most recently chief business officer of Indevus Pharmaceuticals. The company said the leadership switch was part of a succession plan as it looks to advance into product development. Woolf will remain on the company’s scientific advisory board.

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I was chatting with a couple of local investors at the TechStars (seed fund and mentorship program) event in Seattle on Wednesday. They thought the VC panel discussion of the startup climate and culture in different cities around the country was boring. If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, they said, that’s just where you are, and you deal with it.

But au contraire, mon frère—as a journalist and outside observer—I view those comparisons across different innovation clusters and their respective histories as a way to generate some good stories and insights. On the panel, there were certainly some constructive (and at times controversial) things said about the entrepreneurial climate in Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

Here are a few edited highlights from the panelists, several of whom bring an outside perspective to their current cities:

Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group gave a brief history of the startup scene in Boulder, CO—useful for any city with entrepreneurial aspirations. “When I showed up in ’95, what I found was on the software side you had a lot of smart engineering talent but you didn’t have much else. A handful of entrepreneurial companies in storage and cable infrastructure. Not much in the way of entrepreneurial executive leadership other than from these pockets. In the mid-90s, because of the counter-culture community—and the Internet was purpose-built for places like Boulder—you had a lot of people who were independent, very smart, doing their own things suddenly intersecting with a medium that allows you to be anywhere. It’s 100,000 people plus 25,000 college students. A pretty small town, but it has the largest percentage, per capita, in the United States of computer scientists and PhDs. Yet there wasn’t a broad wave of entrepreneurial experience,” Feld said.

“In the mid-to-late 90s, there was huge activity around the Internet. Anybody with a pulse could get a company started. The predictable thing eventually happened, there was a lot of wreckage. But from ‘95-2001, Boulder had imported a lot of executive talent—CEOs, VP sales, engineering leadership. We also had a lot of entrepreneurs who had one or two companies in that cycle. So by 2003, people were starting to come back and get re-engaged in entrepreneurial activity. There were probably 50-plus people that made $10 million or more, so there was enough of an angel community. There was critical mass around this. But what was missing was something that tied the community together. There was the endless cocktail party circuit of entrepreneurs. Eventually people got bored and stopped going.”

That led David Cohen, Feld, and others to form TechStars in Boulder. “It cemented this notion of first-time entrepreneurial activity is the core of the ecosystem. What was needed was fresh meat into the system. We got a lot of new, young people into the community,” Feld said. “The other thing was that one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs is to have an engaged relationship with an experienced entrepreneur. We found we were creating this thing that integrated the whole value chain of entrepreneurs. It really energized the existing entrepreneurial activity around a thing.”

Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels then gave his thoughts on the Boston innovation scene. [Disclosure: Chris is on Xconomy’s board.] “In the IT ecosystem in Boston, there are a number of things going on,” Sheehan said. “It’s a wonderful place for universities and colleges. MIT has been the granddaddy in terms of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But what I’m seeing is a fresh set of energy coming …Next Page »

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A regulatory filing made last month by GreatCall, the San Diego-based parent of Jitterbug, offers some insight into the value of Jitterbug’s acquisition of Waltham, MA-based MobiWatch. Jitterbug announced the deal yesterday but declined to comment beyond its press release. The filing shows that GreatCall provided 630,000 shares of common stock to MobiWatch and its shareholders. A note in the filing says the common stock was issued “in connection with the acquisition of certain assets of MobiWatch, pursuant to a purchase agreement dated 9/30/2009.” GreatCall currently values its common stock at 17 cents a share, which puts the official value of the MobiWatch deal at just $107,100—but with a big potential upside.

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Gloucester Pharmaceuticals has won clearance to start selling its first cancer drug in the U.S.

The Cambridge, MA-based biotech company said today it has gotten the green light from the FDA to start marketing its romidepsin treatment, under the brand name Istodax, for patients with a rare malignancy of the skin known as cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. The drug is expected to be commercially available starting in January, the company said in a statement.

The news comes as little surprise since Gloucester won a unanimous recommendation in early September from an advisory panel to the FDA. Gloucester built its application to the FDA around a pair of mid-stage clinical trials of 167 patients in which about 40 percent experience a reduction in tumor size after getting intravenous infusions of romidepsin. Nausea, fatigue, infections, and vomiting were the most common side effects, and were mostly mild to moderate in severity.

The company looked like such a sure bet that less than one month before it made its pitch to the FDA panel, it raised $29 million from Novo A/S, Apple Tree Partners, ProQuest Investments, Prospect Venture Partners, and Rho Ventures.

Romidepsin is a member of a class of drugs known as histone deacetylase inhibitors. These treatments have been around a long time and have traditionally been used in neurological conditions: only relatively recently have they been considered potential cancer treatments, as I described in a preview story of the FDA panel review back in September. Merck introduced the first drug in this class for cancer, after it won FDA approval in October 2006 for vorinostat (Zolinza), also for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma. Zolinza generated just $9 million in sales in the first six months of this year, so Gloucester has to be hopeful that it can enlarge the market. The patient population with this condition is a small one—the disease affects about 1,500 people each year in the U.S.

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Light Sciences Oncology, the Bellevue, WA-based developer of an unusual drug-device combo treatment for cancer, has put itself in position to raise $35 million for its product development through setting up a line of credit and offering investors warrants to buy shares, according to a regulatory filing released today.

The latest financing comes about 16 months after Light Sciences Oncology pocketed $40.1 million in venture capital. The newest transaction gives Light Sciences Oncology the right to access a $23.3 million line of credit, along with access to $11.8 million more if investors choose to exercise warrants, according to the regulatory filing. The company hasn’t yet borrowed money under the line of credit, the document says. CEO Llew Keltner, the super-busy CEO I profiled last year, couldn’t immediately be reached for comment. If Light Sciences collects the full amount, it will have raised $172 million for its drug development programs since inception.

Light Sciences Oncology is attempting to develop the first treatment of its kind against cancer. The system works by using a light-emitting diode, guided by a biopsy needle, which doctors can thread inside a solid tumor with the help of an ultrasound or CT imaging machine. The patient is then injected with an inactive chemical drug called talaporfin sodium (Aptocine). Once the light is turned on, powered by cheap AAA batteries, it is designed to activate the drug to kill tumors while sparing nearby healthy tissue. The light stays on for almost three hours, during which time the patient can watch TV or read a magazine. After the treatment period, the patient goes home.

The technology is being put to the test in a pivotal clinical trial of more than 200 patients with liver cancer. Light Sciences Oncology hasn’t yet announced the results of that study, which began recruiting patients in November 2006. But other signs from the company have suggested that it likes what it is seeing so far. In August, Light Sciences started two new clinical trials of the technology for two very different applications—treating children with neurofibromatosis, and for treatment of an enlarged prostate, also known as benign prostatic hyperplasia.

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[Updated and corrected---8:30 pm ET on 11/05/09]Marlboro, MA-based Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ:ESLR) said it will move its solar panel production from Massachusetts to China—dealing a blow to the clean technology economy in the commonwealth.

Evergreen plans to begin migrating the manufacturing of solar panels out of its Devens, MA, plant to a facility under construction in Wuhan, China, in mid-2010, the company announced in an earnings statement on Wednesday. A lull in demand for solar cells globally and other factors have caused the price of solar panels like the ones that Evergreen makes to plunge by more than 30 percent since mid-2008, when its Devens production facility opened, the firm said. However, the company said it does plan to continue producing its silicon wafers and cells in Devens. It will also produce the silicon wafers in China beginning next year.

An Evergreen spokesman was not immediately available for comment this afternoon, and it was unclear how relocating panel production would impact its work force in Massachusetts.

Manufacturing in China is intended to reduce overall production costs, and Evergreen said it is receiving a $33 million loan from Chinese government to help cover the expenses of moving into a new plant that the company will lease from a contract manufacturing firm called Jiawei Solar. Evergreen’s move may sting some Massachusetts politicians and taxpayers; the state committed $23 million in grants to the firm, behind considerable support from Gov. Deval Patrick and his administration, to support its manufacturing in Devens. And Ian Bowles, the state’s secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs, said in a statement about two years ago when construction of the Devens plant began that “we are breaking ground not only on a factory, but on the commonwealth’s clean energy future.”

Evergreen said it will manufacture its “String Ribbon” wafers at the facility it is building and will own in China, and that the wafers will then be sent to the the plant that its partner Jiawei Solar is building to convert the wafers into solar cells, which are used to make solar panels. The worldwide solar panel market has taken a beating over the past year or so due to reduced government spending or subsidies for the products in Spain and Germany, both of which are big solar panel users, as well as lower-than-projected demand in other countries such as the U.S., according to a recent report by Lux Research, which has an office in Boston. [Editor's note: the above paragraph was corrected to say that Evergreen, not its Chinese manufacturing partner, will build and own the facility where its silicon wafers will be produced in China. There are also added details from the company about the overall production process.]

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Want to know what the real opportunities are for startup companies and investors in the field of Web search and information discovery? Or what happens when you put Google and Bing in the same room? You’ve come to the right place.

We’re putting the finishing touches on the program for our next Xconomy Forum, on the future of search and information discovery. It’s all happening on the evening of November 30 in Seattle, at the University of Washington (Kane Hall, Walker-Ames Room). You can see the writeup and program here.

In addition to our panel—which includes Brian Bershad from Google, Harry Shum from Microsoft (Bing), Steve Hall from Vulcan Capital, and Oren Etzioni from the UW, Madrona Venture Group, and Farecast—we’ll have a series of “bursts” from some of the most exciting startups working in information discovery today.

We have confirmed short presentations from four startups:

—Evri, led by CEO Will Hunsinger. This Seattle company is trying to reinvent Web browsing by understanding the content of Web pages and the connections between entities on the Web, using semantic algorithms.

—SEOmoz, led by CEO Rand Fishkin. This Seattle-based firm focuses on search engine optimization and Internet marketing, helping companies around the world boost their Web traffic and expand their business.

—Topsy, led by CEO Vipul Ved Prakash. This San Francisco startup is working on a novel search engine for social media, starting with Twitter. It’s what people call “real-time search,” and it’s based on Internet conversations, not documents.

—Sage Bionetworks, led by CEO Stephen Friend. This Seattle-based nonprofit is trying to do for biology what Twitter and Facebook did for social networking, and what Linux did for open-source software. It’s a tall order, but search technology is key to allowing biologists to find and share results in a common global database.

We’re really looking forward to the discussions on Nov. 30, and hope to see you there (registration info here).

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Seattle-based RealNetworks is cutting 4 percent of its worldwide staff today, about 70 out of 1,700 jobs, according to All Things Digital. The report cites the economic downturn and cost-cutting as reasons for the move. Last week, RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) reported a small profit for the third quarter, the company’s first profitable quarter since the first three months of 2008.

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It was an inspiring afternoon yesterday at Xconomy’s latest event, “Pharma’s Bet on Boston Innovation,” in Cambridge, MA. Local industry pioneers such as Millennium CEO Deborah Dunsire and Sirtris CEO Christoph Westphal talked about how game-changing technologies and sound business strategies have attracted big pharmaceutical outfits to invest in their respective companies.

Our speakers also offered insightful perspectives from within their organizations, including AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck & Co., Novartis, and Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Boston-based Enlight Biosciences used our venue to break the news about its recent partnership with healthcare powerhouse Abbott Laboratories. One corporate venture investor from a pharma company likened the returns of her fund to “pocket lint” relative to the revenue of the overall company, but said the corporate venture unit is important to the company’s ability to access innovative science. And Westphal even speculated that our own Luke Timmerman is a “SIRT1 over-expresser” because his genes help him stay thin despite his high-calorie diet. (Laugh if you want, but Sirtris’ deep understanding of genes, like SIRT1, that control aging and cellular metabolism helped the Cambridge, MA-based biotech get sold to Glaxo for $720 million in June 2008.)

A recurring theme throughout the day was that big pharmas and innovative biotechs need each other. Generally speaking, large pharmaceutical companies haven’t created enough innovative products over the past decade to justify their huge internal R&D budgets. But biotech has continued to push the envelope to transform risky science into drugs, providing a source of new products to fill pharmaceutical companies’ ailing R&D pipelines. We heard from executives from such local biotech firms as Aileron Therapeutics, Aveo Pharmaceuticals, Hydra Biosciences, and Enlight Biosciences about how relationships with pharma companies are bankrolling their drug-development activities. (Here’s a link to a list of all the speakers who were on the agenda yesterday.)

Our audience of life sciences innovators helped us pack the 16th-floor ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. But for all of you who weren’t able to attend the forum, here are seven key insights from our speakers and panelists:

—Raise lots of money when you can. It’s true that the financing climate in 2004, when Sirtris launched, was completely different from the stingier one today. But Westphal—whose company raised $104 million in private financing before its $69 million IPO in May 2007—aggressively raised capital beginning with a $5 million seed round in August 2004. While raising funds for the seed financing, Westphal understood that there was competition among the venture investors such as Polaris Venture Partners (where he is a former general partner). “The VC guys were all mad because they thought they could do it themselves,” he said. Given the high interest from the venture community, Westphal quickly raised $11 million more from investors in September 2004—just a month after closing the seed round.

—Build it boldly, and pharma will come. Huw Nash, vice president of corporate development at Aileron, knows something about drawing interest from Big Pharma. His Cambridge-based company in June raised $40 million in a financing that included the venture units of Eli Lilly, Glaxo, Novartis, and Roche, as well as traditional venture and angel investors. A big part of the allure at Aileron is the company’s “stapled peptide” drugs that have the potential to home in on thousands of different molecular disease targets not reached by previous treatments. (Read Luke’s story about Aileron for a deeper explanation of its novel platform.) “This is the type of solution that [pharmaceutical firms] need to really open the door to a completely new growth opportunity,” said Nash.

—Pharmaceutical companies want to …Next Page »

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