On the heels of Renaissance Venture Capital announcing earlier this month that it had its first close of $60 million on its second fund, the Michigan Venture Capital Association (MCVA) released its annual report on the state of Michigan’s venture ecosystem. Its findings? More venture capital—a 64 percent increase in the past five years—and more deals. This optimism seems to square with regional venture capital data released by MoneyTree in April, which reported five deals in Detroit during the first quarter of 2012, with a total investment of $15.1 million. According to the MoneyTree report, the last time five deals were closed in Detroit in a single quarter was back in the second quarter of 2000. By contrast, three deals worth a total investment of $1.5 million were closed in the first quarter of 2011.

Michigan’s VC scene bucked the national trend of an overall decrease in venture activity. According to the same MoneyTree report, which is prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association based on data from Thomson Reuters, first-quarter venture capital investments fell 19 percent nationwide in terms of money and 15 percent in terms of deal numbers compared to the fourth quarter of 2011. In Michigan, venture capital investments in Q1 fell by 11 percent over the previous quarter, but the number of deals quadrupled.

The MVCA data shows that investments concentrated in Life Sciences (40 percent), clean tech (18 percent) and IT (18 percent). New to the report this year are figures on what state-backed venture funds are contributing to the economy: The MCVA estimates that companies supported by the $215 Venture Michigan Fund alone have put $50 million back into the economy in the form of salaries paid and services purchased.

Key findings in the MCVA’s report include that the number of venture firms and capital under management both increased. There are currently 54 venture capital firms in Michigan with 335 active portfolio companies. Of the $3 billion of venture capital under management, roughly $370 million is available for new investments both inside and outside of Michigan.

During 2011, Michigan startup companies received $191 million in capital investment. There were 38 total investments, which included 22 new companies that raised a first round of funding.

In 2011, four Michigan VC firms—Arboretum Ventures, Plymouth Venture Partners, and the local offices of MK Capital and Arsenal Ventures—successfully closed funds and raised a total of $348 million. The MCVA report says that Michigan now has six funds that are over $100 million. Small and mid-size funds continue to grow, as well, with eight funds between $50 million and $100 million and 13 funds with less than $50 million. There were three significant exits in 2011 out of a total of 13 exits: Accuri Cytometers (reported to be $205 million), Ecosynthetix ($100 million), and Micronics (undisclosed, but it’s electronics giant Sony that purchased the company).

Staying with the theme of optimism, the MCVA report predicts that by 2016, Michigan will be “a nationally known top venture capital location,” with both venture and angel capital communities playing a “meaningful” role in Michigan’s revitalization. While that remains to be seen, the numbers do seem to indicate strong forward motion.

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Seniors graduating last weekend from Babson College, the entrepreneurship-focused campus just outside Boston, were treated to a commencement speech from someone who’s got to be one of their biggest heroes: Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder, executive chairman, and former CEO of LinkedIn. (He’s also an author, a venture investor with Greylock Partners, a member of numerous corporate and advisory boards, and a frequent man about Boston.)

In keeping with the mission of LinkedIn and the theme of his recent book, The Startup of You, Hoffman argued in his address that old ideas about stepwise career progress are dead, and that all workers today need to think more like entrepreneurs. “Whereas we used to have a career ladder, now we have a career jungle gym,” Hoffman said. “You need to climb sideways and sometimes down; sometimes you need to swing and jump from one set of bars to the next. And, to extend the metaphor, sometimes you need to spring from the jungle gym and establish your own turf somewhere else on the playground.”

The speech gave an interesting glimpse into Hoffman’s mind—and into the mindset recent college graduates will need to adopt if they hope to start new businesses or dive into the startup scene around Boston, the Bay Area, and other innovation hubs. We asked Babson College for permission to reproduce the address in full. Here it is. (For a video of the speech, scroll to the end of the text.)

* * *

I recently co-authored a book called The Startup of You. I know that you all know this, because in honor and respect of your achievement of graduating today, I have gifted a copy to each of you. In it, I began with a quote from Mohammed Yunus. I will begin today with the same quotation:

“All Humans were born entrepreneurs. In the caves, we were all self-employed. Finding food, feeding ourselves. That is how human history began. As civilization came, we suppressed it. We became “labor” because they stamped us “You are labor.” ”

I begin with this quotation because entrepreneurs are important. Here in the U.S., we have always known this because we have an entrepreneurial nation.

We have founding “fathers” of the nation; in parallel, entrepreneurs are founders of companies.

The vast majority of people in the U.S. are descendants of immigrants who took a huge gamble to cross an ocean and come to a new land; in parallel, many entrepreneurial companies emerge from immigrant founders and immigrant talent who come here to build these companies.

The American dream is the ability to make your own destiny, through hard work, perseverance, and some combination of intelligence and luck. In parallel, new entrepreneurial companies succeed on the same basis.

Generally, many people think of entrepreneurs as the (relatively few) individuals who take their own isolated path initially away from society. Few entrepreneurs succeed, but when they do they create products, companies, and jobs for many others. These products, companies, and jobs are part of the ongoing health of a society.

And this is really important; just consider the current unemployment rates. We wish that we had more entrepreneurs creating more businesses.

However, in the modern world, entrepreneurship is even more important than the creation of companies and jobs.

Entrepreneurial talents, skills, and mindsets now apply to all jobs and professions. This is new, brought about by the accelerating change in the world from globalization and technology.

In the last decades, there was a notion of pursuing a career ladder.

You would graduate from a good college – like you are today – and you would select from a set of employers who want you to join the first rung of a career ladder. You might have some choices around industry – finance, transport, technology – or function – sales, marketing, finance, product development – but fundamentally you would seek and choose a path.

In choosing a path, you would then work at one or more companies, and work your way up the steps of a career ladder or (if fortunate) a career escalator. Inevitably, with some hard work and a little luck, you would … Next Page »

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Greg Pass is bringing more technology “street cred” to the team that is establishing the applied science and engineering campus on Roosevelt Island in New York. The former chief technology officer of Twitter on Wednesday was named the founding entrepreneurial officer for CornellNYC Tech, a $2 billion school to be built in the city.

The planned campus got a boost early this week when Google announced it would give free space at its New York offices to house CornellNYC Tech classes over the next five years while the permanent home is built. The addition of Cornell alum Pass brings a notable name from the innovation community to the campus. Pass spoke to Xconomy about his role in helping to shape CornellNYC Tech and his hopes for the growing technology scene here.

Xconomy: What is an entrepreneurial officer?

Greg Pass: This is a new position that we’ve created to make sure someone is focused on making sure the academic program and the industry partnerships that we create result in entrepreneurial value for students, faculty, and the New York tech scene.

X: What got you interested in joining this project?

GP: It was an opportunity that blindsided me. I didn’t expect to be involved in helping to build a new school and program. I don’t know how you say no to an opportunity to build a new school from the ground up in New York while the city is surging in tech right now. It’s a unique opportunity for me to give back to my profession in a fundamental way.

X: What will your duties be as the campus develops and after it opens its doors?

GP: This is a fundamental role, not just an advisory role. On an ongoing basis there is going to be a lot of focus on thinking creatively about how the tech industry in New York can collaborate with the applied research activities of students and faculty. There is definitely creative work ahead of us but the goal is to drive much more value from that collaboration than we would typically see.

X: How important is it to team higher education with the technology and entrepreneurship community to keep the current momentum going?

GP: It remains a vital part of cultivating creative and innovative engineers. There is a great deal of untapped value there. In academia we have the latest research, which is often very applicable to industry, but there hasn’t been a honed interface between academic programs and tech right now, especially in New York. That’s definitely a great area of opportunity. We’ll see a ton of entrepreneurial value produced from those creative collaborations.

X: Are there new types of collaborations you would like to see happen at CornellNYC Tech that have not been tried elsewhere?

GP: There are certainly a lot of great engineering programs across the country and the world that are producing successful graduates. That’s not the issue per se. What we’d like to do is tailor our program specifically to students who are interested in having an impact through technological innovation. That could mean through entrepreneurialism and starting a company on their own or participating in a startup or an innovative company. To that end, in the program we’ll be exposing students to entrepreneurial experiences. Think of the program being somewhere between a masters program, so that students can achieve mastery in their topics, and something like Y Combinator, where students are getting actual entrepreneurial experiences, perhaps with New York tech companies.

X: Were there lessons that you wished you had learned in college to help you prepare for the technology and entrepreneurship world?

GP: When I first became an entrepreneur, twenty or so years ago, I wasn’t aware of programs to help me along the way. I’m certain there were some but they didn’t have the prominence and opportunity of things like Y Combinator. Things are moving in the right direction. In order to grow the size of the talent pool, additional resources like schools, community activities, and greater investment in incubators will really help increase the number of entrepreneurial engineers.

X: Will your position at CornellNYC Tech be full-time?

GP: It’s essentially full-time with time carved out to pursue entrepreneurial activities myself. Mostly things like advisories. I’m on the board of advisors of Obvious, which is Evan [Williams], Biz [Stone], and Jason [Goldman]’s new company. Certainly I want to keep engaged as an entrepreneur in the minority of my time.

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On the iPhone, the first page of the home screen—the one you see when you wake up the device—has room for only 20 apps, counting those in the dock. The iPad home screen holds 26. For me, that means the home screen is prime real estate, reserved only for the apps I use most often. So it was a big deal when I decided earlier this month to demote Instapaper to a folder on page two and give its spot to Pocket.

This reborn reading app—which was known until April 17 as Read It Later—earned its coveted position by doing just about everything Instapaper does, but with some extra visual pizazz. And what is that, exactly? Once you’ve installed the Pocket plugin or bookmarklet in your desktop or mobile Web browser, you can save anything you find on the Web—an article, a video, a photo, a recipe, or even a cool pair of glasses at Warby Parker—to your Pocket account. Then later you can peruse it, sans ads and other clutter, using the Pocket app on your mobile device.

Along with Instapaper, Readability, Longform, Zite, Flipboard, and others apps, Pocket is part of a new generation of services that treat the desktop Web as a place to discover content, but let you shift your actual consumption of that content to a more comfortable time and place—i.e., when you’re vegging on the couch with your iPad, or standing in line at the grocery store with your smartphone.

Pocket founder and CEO Nate Weiner

I wasn’t a big fan of Read It Later. Its design was dark and ponderous, which meant its only big selling point was the fact that it worked on more devices than the other reading apps (there were Read It Later apps for iOS, Android, and the Kindle Fire). So I was all the more intrigued by the app’s remarkable transformation into Pocket, which has a far friendlier design and a clearer value proposition. (One problem with the old app was that it wasn’t obvious that it could be used to save videos and other non-textual items.) I wanted to get the behind-the-scenes story of the relaunch from Pocket’s founder and CEO, Nate Weiner, and I finally got a chance to visit him at the startup’s downtown San Francisco office this week. Our edited conversation is reproduced below.

What’s clear from our talk is that Weiner pays close attention to the changing habits of consumers on the Web, and that he hopes to position Pocket to leapfrog over the other time-shifting apps by making the “save for later” experience on Pocket as simple and compelling as possible. Up to now, explaining what the app does and how it relates to the desktop Web has been tricky. So even with a user base of 4.5 million people, the app is reaching “maybe only 1 percent of the entire available market,” Weiner says.

But the battle for the other 99 percent is being fought right now. As more people buy smartphones and tablets, the contrast between the noise, clutter, and commercialism of the desktop Web and the ease, comfort, and cleanliness of mobile app experiences will only grow more acute. So it’s really only a matter of time before time-shifting one’s consumption of Web content using apps like Pocket becomes as common as time-shifting one’s television viewing using a DVR. The question is who will be the new TiVo—the company that makes saving Web content so easy it’s no longer considered a geeky chore.

All of this is scary stuff for publishers, of course. They were just starting to figure out how to monetize content on the desktop Web when the advent of the iPhone in June 2007 changed everything about digital content consumption. (Weiner, now 28, built the first version of Read It Later that same summer, while holding down a day job at a Minneapolis Web design firm.) At Pocket, Weiner says, the goal is to find ways to turn the time-shifting habit into a plus for publishers, perhaps by offering them an inside look at the data the startup gathers about how people use and share content once they’ve “Pocketed” it. In the future, Weiner says, Pocket might even provide ways for publishers to sell content or advertising through the app. (Pocket doesn’t currently show ads, and wouldn’t until there’s a fair way to share the revenue with publishers, Weiner says.)

Pocket has hired Mark Armstrong, the founder and head curator at Longreads, as its editorial director, and part of his job, according to Weiner, is to reach out to publishers and explore the various options for cooperation. “Right now there is no silver bullet, and the most important thing for us to be doing is to experiment and see what works and what doesn’t,” Weiner says. He says he’s acutely aware that the fortunes of Pocket, which is now eight employees strong, ultimately rest on the health of the content industry: “If [we] don’t figure it out, there will be no content to save, because nobody will be writing it.”

Here’s the full interview.

Wade Roush: From what I’ve read, you’d been planning the rebranding for a long time—actually, ever since you closed Read It Later’s $2.5 million Series A round back in early 2011. What was the thinking behind the change?

Nate Weiner: Yeah, I knew that we needed to rebrand by that time. For one thing, we had launched this feature on Read It Later called Digest. With Pocket, we have killed it off, but it was a magazine-type view that would auto-categorize things. I learned pretty quickly from that that people didn’t care about the categorization, but the thing they liked was the view. So I knew that the visual piece had to be brought forward a lot more. But more important, … Next Page »

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When the X Prize Foundation’s Peter Diamandis took the stage in San Diego this morning at the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) annual convergence summit, he said it was the perfect audience for announcing the foundation’s newest competition—the “Nokia Sensing X Challenge.”

The challenge, organized through a partnership with the Finnish wireless device manufacturer, is offering a total pool of $2.25 million in incentive prizes over the next three years to stimulate the development of health sensors and wireless sensing technologies.

“We’re living in a day and age where really small teams of individuals—people like yourselves—are empowered to do the things that only large corporations and governments could do before,” Diamandis told the audience. “We’re looking to foment, to push forward, to celebrate, to announce a new generation of healthcare biometric sensors.”

The competition that Diamandis outlined will offer $750,000 a year, beginning in 2013, to teams that have developed “the most outstanding” sensors for drastically improving the quality, accuracy, and ease of monitoring a person’s health. There will be multiple winners each year, but how many and how much prize money will be awarded to each team has not yet been determined, Diamandis later told me.

“We aim to facilitate and inspire research in an area where we are also seriously exploring,” said Nokia chief technology officer Henry Tirri, who joined Diamandis on the stage. The type of “open innovation” promoted by the X Prize competition “has proven to be a very interesting and engaging method of opening a very broad amount of innovation in a very different way,” Tirri added.

“Our goal is to create an ecosystem of the innovators and companies out there, and to give them the platform to really show your stuff to the entire planet,” Diamandis said.

“Why are we doing this? Number one, we need better sensors,” Diamandis added. “My car, my airplane, and my computer have more biometric sensing capabilities that we do as humans. We should be creating gigabytes of data per day about our bodies’ health, monitoring every single moment, every single second of what we do. The fact that it doesn’t exist right now is terrible.”

The timing is ideal, Diamandis explained, because … Next Page »

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Two Boston-area companies that don’t do a lot of talking in the media are making some noise today.

They don’t have much in common, except that each is working on a really big technological problem in society with a pretty novel approach (and they’re getting some funding news out before the holiday weekend). As usual, there’s much more to these companies than just their funding news, so stay tuned.

—Liquid Metal Battery, an MIT spinout working on grid-scale energy storage, has raised $15 million more to complete its Series B financing. Khosla Ventures led the round, joined by Bill Gates and energy firm Total. I have no idea what a liquid metal battery is, but presumably it could be a more cost-effective way of storing energy from sustainable sources like wind and solar, as compared to existing alternatives.

—Recorded Future, a data analytics startup based in Cambridge, MA, has raised a $12 million Series C round led by new investor Balderton Capital. Previous investors Google Ventures, Atlas Venture, IA Ventures, and In-Q-Tel also participated in the round. Recorded Future is developing analysis and visualization tools to help government agencies and financial institutions make predictions based on data across the Web.

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Very few people in the mobile industry will disagree that mobile payments are today’s biggest challenge for developers. In the Apple universe, there is a strong solution to the problem: Apple simply requires users to register their credit cards before they can use any services. But this approach only works for a very small segment of high end users in the developed world. For ecosystems outside of Apple’s, mobile payments simply do not work. Inconvenient credit card forms that are impossible to complete on the mobile device, fragmented carrier billing solutions, and tons of other methods have been tried without any real success. As a result, developers on platforms like Android are able to make much less money per user than they are making in Apple’s ecosystem.

As a lot of app makers gravitate towards freemium business models driven by in-app transactions, the lack of payment mechanisms becomes even more of a problem. There is, however, one emerging solution. If you look at the average revenue per user (ARPU) for social games powered by in-app transactions, such as OMGPOP’s Draw Something, it’s clear that the most powerful way to make big money is through what I call nanotransactions. Microtransactions in the range of $1-$5, usually implemented via carrier billing services such as premium SMS, provided the monetization basis for the Mobile 1.0 era of ringtones, wallpapers and Java/Brew games. In nanotransactions, the values exchanged are a few pennies only, but the high number of these small in-app transactions makes up for the size, often leading to much higher revenues overall per user of $10 and higher.

The only big problem with nanotransactions is that the value of the transaction is way less than the effort of actually doing it (completing credit card authorization, sending a premium SMS or even typing a PIN code to access your wallet). Unfortunately, given the very nature of money (which requires security, fraud, data protection, and proper regulatory compliance), it is just physically impossible to improve the user experience much.

But I think this problem can be solved with the help of virtual currencies that are not directly linked to real money. Bear with me as I explain.

As money theory suggests, a currency can successfully function if it satisfies two criteria: It must be backed by real value (just as old currencies were backed by gold) and it must be liquid (meaning it could at any time be freely exchanged into that value). Now, in the global mobile ecosystem, there are a lot of valuables that could be used to back virtual currencies, the most notable of which is consumer attention and engagement.

Already, billions of dollars per year are being spent on mobile marketing, which means that mobile users are generating value for advertisers simply by doing things on mobile, like using social networks, browsing websites, or downloading apps. In fact, if an advertiser pays an ad network or another promotional channel $1 per promoted app download, the assumption is that the user installing that app will generate at least that much value just by choosing to download the app, or in other words just for his or her own willingness to try it out. From that perspective, every aspect of user engagement has value to it—from checking the weather on a website to browsing an app store and downloading apps.

Now, if a portion of that value were passed back to the user (just like all traditional loyalty programs do with points, airline miles, etc.), and if it were stored and made available for the user to freely spend, it would create a currency solution that is not linked to real money at all. From the example above, even if 50 percent of the $1 value were passed on to the user himself, downloading just one promoted app would top up the balance by $0.50. In the nanotransactions economy, where individual items are priced at a few pennies each, that’s real money.

The best part is that the virtual nature of the currency would solve all the problems of the traditional money, like regulatory security requirements, high carrier taxes, inconvenient payment data collection forms, and so on. Transactions would be as simple as pressing one “buy” button, without any registrations and PIN codes—even simpler than on iTunes, where you still have to type your password.

My company, GetJar, launched just this kind of consumer loyalty based virtual currency platform, GetJar Gold, earlier in the year. The program rewards GetJar users with Gold “coins” for app downloads. We also provided developers with a software development kit that they can use to incorporate GetJar Gold into their apps and accept Gold coins as a way of payment for in-application items. Across the board, developers using the solution have seen 100 percent increases in conversions when augmenting the traditional payment options with the virtual currency.

I believe all the conveniences of virtual currencies are forcing a major shift in the near future and that this mechanism will account for as much as half or more of all in-app transactions. I will be very curious to see the dynamics between “local” (i.e. supported in one app only) and “global” (supported across a range of apps and developers) virtual currencies evolve. While each type does have specific advantages to an individual developer, I personally believe that ultimately, a few global currencies will become dominant. In any case, the mobile industry will benefit massively from much improved monetization for the developer and better user experiences with a greater choice for the consumer.

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A bunch of small-ish deals (and some not so small) to catch up on from the past week…

—Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) has acquired Syncplicity for an undisclosed price. The cloud-based file management startup, based in Silicon Valley, will be integrated into EMC’s Information Intelligence Group. The move is viewed as helping EMC compete with Dropbox for big enterprise customers.

—Boston-based TurningArt has raised $1.5 million more from NextView Ventures and other investors. The Web startup lets you browse for independent artwork and click to order prints.

—Cambridge, MA-based Spindle (fka Biff Labs) has raised $775,000 from investors including Polaris Ventures, Atlas Venture, Greylock Partners, SV Angel, and Ray Ozzie. The company is trying to build a “discovery engine for the social Web.”

—Boston wireless-networking firm Ember is being acquired by Texas-based Silicon Laboratories (NASDAQ: SLAB) for $72 million plus earnouts. It’s been a long, fun ride for Ember, which started in 2001. CEO Bob LeFort, co-founder Rob Poor, and investor Bob Metcalfe shed some light on the deal and what it means.

—Boston startup Yottaa announced a $9 million Series B financing from General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners, Cambridge West Ventures, and other investors. Yottaa is building Web infrastructure technology with the goal of helping businesses make their websites run faster on browsers and mobile devices.

—Cambridge, MA-based Ra Pharmaceuticals closed an $8.6 million tranche of its $27 million Series A. The company’s tech platform is designed to generate protein-like molecules that can combat a range of diseases.

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Don’t you hate it when you read an article about a promising new company and then you never hear anything about it again? We do too, which is why we’ve checked in with Loveland Technologies, Axonia Medical, and 3D Biomatrix for updates on the state of their operations, new milestones, and future plans.

Loveland Technologies: Projects Covered in ‘Awesome Sauce’

Loveland Technologies, a Detroit IT company started by San Francisco transplant Jerry Paffendorf whose motto is “changing the urban landscape with community maps, fundraising, and a dash of awesome sauce,” has enjoyed some mainstream recognition since we last spoke. “Our stock does seem to be rising in more traditional ways,” Paffendorf says.

In April, Loveland got a $7,500 grant from the Knight Foundation for its Imagine Detroit Together project, which combines technology and grassroots organizing to encourage residents to participate in large-scale demonstrations of civic unity. Imagine Detroit Together was behind the crowdfunding effort to get a painting by local artist Miguel “BeloZro” Yeoman up on a billboard near I-94. The painting, titled “The Rebuild,” featured futuristic Ford, GM, and Chrysler workers surrounding a globe along with the phrase, “Imagine Detroit working together?” Though Imagine Detroit Together was able to raise the $3,500 needed to slap “The Rebuild” up on the billboard, the billboard owners, fearing a lawsuit, required that Yeoman cover the logos of the Big 3 before they would display the painting.

Despite that experience, Paffendorf says he looks forward to working with Yeoman’s partner/manager James Feagin again. “He has a lot of interesting ideas for how to bring diverse groups into Detroit,” Paffendorf says. One idea is Peak Population Day, where organizers would try to lure 1.3 million people to the city for a massive block party along Woodward Avenue from the Riverfront to 8 Mile. That will require building some digital tools for organizing big groups, which Loveland is working on now.

Perhaps the unlikeliest partnership Loveland has formed is with Nora Maroun, wife of the controversial billionaire Manuel “Matty” Maroun, who owns the busy Ambassador Bridge crossing to Canada. (Yes, that’s right—a privately owned border crossing. Only in Detroit.) Maroun has his share of critics, particularly in southwest Detroit, where a t-shirt depicting him as Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons” was popular a few years ago. In addition to the bridge, he owns Michigan Central Station, a.k.a. Detroit’s Most Famous Ruin, a crumbling former train station that was designed by the same architectural firms that designed New York City’s Grand Central Station.

Central Station has long been a conundrum because it’s considered too solidly built to demolish without a prohibitive price tag, and too ruined to be restored without a similarly prohibitive investment. (Though one would imagine if anyone had the money to do either of these things, it would be the 854th richest person in the world, perhaps with an assist from the man he’s tied for 854th richest person with, but that’s an op-ed for another day.) Instead, Maroun has put his wife Nora in charge of working with Loveland on Talk to the Station, a website gathering public suggestions for what to do with the blighted monolith. Residents are invited to share their ideas for preservation via text, voicemail, or online submission. The idea is to foster open, inclusive dialogue that Maroun has pledged to keep her eye on. Though there are no guarantees, to have this discussion in a public forum is actually a pretty big step. (Paffendorf, by the way, has nothing but good things to say about Mrs. Maroun.)

Loveland also continues its work with Why Don’t We Own This, which maps all of the vacant land in Detroit, and Paffendorf says the city is definitely paying attention (finally!), but that nothing official is in place yet. And that crowdfunded Robocop statue? It’s still being built rather painstakingly by hand; keep track of its progress here.

Axonia Medical Raises More Seed Financing

Harry Ledebur, president and CEO of Kalamazoo, MI-based Axonia Medical, says the company has just raised its second million in seed financing. Ann Arbor SPARK’s pre-seed fund and Western Michigan University’s Biosciences Research and Commercialization Center contributed to the round. Ledebur says that Axonia now has enough operating capital to take it through January 2014 as it continues to work toward clinical trials.

As I wrote in a January article about Axonia, the company’s technology, which is spun out of the University of Pennsylvania, hinges on the production of axons, the long thin parts of nerve cells that carry signals to distant target cells. Unlike other regenerative treatments in development, Axonia uses … Next Page »

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The votes have been tallied, and the winner of the Republican primary in Kentucky’s 4th congressional district is…Thomas Massie.

With 45 percent of the popular vote, Massie, a Tea Party constitutional conservative, fended off a couple of establishment-backed competitors in the race. That means he will be the heavy favorite (in the red state) to win the general election for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. (More national political context here.)

Why should we care? Because Massie is the founder of SensAble Technologies, the venerable Boston-area firm that was recently acquired by Geomagic. He’s a well-known MIT grad in these parts. And he’s a prolific inventor in the field of touch-based computer interfaces. You can read about his fascinating story here.

Massie is leading a charge to encourage more engineers and problem solvers to get into politics. We will be watching to see how he fares amongst all the pols—and whether more engineers end up following his lead.

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TripAdvisor has been thinking about social technologies for a while now. Back in 2006, the Newton, MA-based Web company (NASDAQ: TRIP) rolled out a new social network, called Traveler Network, to help its users connect and share travel reviews with each other. The firm’s CEO and co-founder, Steve Kaufer, helped lead the project from beginning to end, even as it proved difficult to get consumers to sign up.

“It was a colossal failure,” says Adam Medros, TripAdvisor’s vice president of global product. And Kaufer owned up to it, saying the experience taught his team “a lot of things not to do.”

At least it failed quickly. In 2007, Facebook opened its platform for app developers, and TripAdvisor took advantage with its “Cities I’ve Visited” app, which lets users put pins in a map to show where they’ve gone, as well as share travel experiences with their Facebook friends. It was the start of a fruitful partnership between the companies; TripAdvisor has one of the most popular travel apps on the social network’s platform, and more recently it has built on that popularity to show users travel reviews from their Facebook friends (and friends of friends).

Now Facebook has just gone public, of course, and people are wondering what the ripple effects will be for social technologies and business models across various industries. Online travel is a sector we care about, especially in the Boston area where, besides TripAdvisor, we have companies like ITA Software (now part of Google), Kayak (reportedly getting ready for its own IPO), and Goby (now part of TeleNav), as well as upstarts like Hopper and WaySavvy. And seeing as TripAdvisor is one of the East Coast’s biggest consumer Web companies, period, it makes sense to check in with the 12-year-old company in our back yard.

While the Facebook IPO doesn’t directly affect TripAdvisor, it’s a watershed moment for the social Web and, as such, is a good excuse to ask questions about the future of social and online travel. “It’s been a very fun and exciting and transformative ride,” says Medros, who has worked at TripAdvisor since 2004, after getting his MBA at Harvard Business School.

Here are some highlights from my recent chat with Medros (see photo), edited for length and clarity:

Xconomy: What does Facebook’s IPO—and social tech more broadly—mean to TripAdvisor?

Adam Medros: It’s a huge validation of Facebook as a platform and the vision they have of making the Web more social. Travel is a big expense. It continues to be something where people are nervous about, is this hotel going to be great? We want to make it easier to plan that trip. What social does is it layers on top a wonderful amount of, not quite serendipity, but discovery of the hidden gems.

X: I’m glad you mention discovery, because I feel like a lot of websites are moving away from travel “search” and trying to do “discovery” instead—because a lot of times you don’t necessarily know what you’re searching for.

AM: We wrestle with this a little. People come to TripAdvisor with an idea of where they want to go, but within that city they want to know where to stay, where to eat, what to do. The next level above that is the inspiration level—where should they go? Social has potential to play a part in solving that, … Next Page »

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Here’s a potpourri of San Diego tech news, large and small, fresh from the local fields of innovation.

—San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the world’s biggest manufacturer of wireless chipsets, said it has renewed its global QPrize venture investment competition for the third time. The $1 million pool is almost double the total pool Qualcomm offered when it created the QPrize in 2009 to accelerate wireless technologies in key business sectors. Qualcomm plans to hold regional competitions in China, India, Israel, Korea, North America, Brazil, Western Europe, and Eastern Europe, and award $100,000 in convertible note financing to a finalist in each region. The company plans to award another $150,000 in financing to a grand prize-winner chosen from the eight finalists.

—Newbury Park-based Sauer Energy, a wind power technology developer, said it has acquired 100 percent of the assets of San Diego-based Helix Wind, a San Diego maker of small vertical axis wind turbine systems that ceased business operations at the end of 2010. Helix, which was trying to commercialize its iconic design for helical-shaped turbines, had an accumulated deficit of nearly $42 million. In a statement, Sauer Energy CEO Dieter Sauer says, “We purchased only the assets, therefore there are no liabilities, no obligations or debt whatsoever to Sauer Energy.”

—San Diego-based Pelfunc, founded by Sanjay Nichani and Ray Fix, launched their mobile app “Skqueak” for the iPhone in Apple’s iTunes App Store. Skqueak lets users record audio while simultaneously sketching or animating a design over a photo, map, or other image. The result is a kind of multimedia postcard that can be shared through social media and embedded in blogs.

—Qualcomm’s top European executive, Andrew Gilbert, met with reporters to talk about the wireless giant’s technology licensing strategy for wireless charging systems that can be used to charge electric vehicles (EVs) as well as smartphones and other devices. Gilbert also showed off an all-electric Le Mans prototype racer, and said Qualcomm remains on schedule with its plans to install its wireless charging technology for as many as 50 EV taxis in London.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the San Diego wireless technology giant, says today it is joining forces with EvoNexus, the free tech incubator operated by the nonprofit industry group CommNexus.

The move adds a new dimension of business and technical expertise to EvoNexus, which relies heavily on volunteer tech executives and others to help mentor entrepreneurs enrolled in the program. EvoNexus operates two incubators in San Diego, one is downtown and the other in the University City neighborhood, and provides fully furnished office space, utilities, and other services to startups at no charge.

“A big differentiator for EvoNexus—from an investor’s or entrepreneur’s point of view—is that we are the best deal in the country because we’re completely free, except you have to pay for your parking,” says Kevin Hell, the former DivX CEO who has been overseeing EvoNexus for the past year.

Now EvoNexus will collaborate with Qualcomm Labs to develop a track within EvoNexus called QualcommLabs@EvoNexus.

Qualcomm Labs is expected to serve a role at EvoNexus that is similar to its function within Qualcomm, where it helps to identify and assess new products and market opportunities developed internally through Qualcomm R&D. For example, Qualcomm housed its wireless health initiative in the Qualcomm Labs business unit (known at the time as Qualcomm Labs Services) before moving it into its new Qualcomm Life subsidiary.

Qualcomm Labs also wants to guide startups developing innovative technology in certain areas, such as machine-to-machine communications, into the EvoNexus program. Qualcomm and EvoNexus did not disclose the financial terms of Qualcomm’s participation in the program, if there are any. But startups admitted into the QualcommLabs program will get separate seed funding from Qualcomm Labs as well as free space in an EvoNexus incubator.

Qualcomm did not disclose how much seed funding it plans to … Next Page »

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Here at Xconomy we are coming down the home stretch of preparations for our biggest annual event: XSITE 2012, on June 14 at Babson College. That’s (gasp) just over three weeks away.

XSITE 2012 is our fourth annual full-day conference and celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship—involving not just startups, but also big companies, universities, and other organizations. You can check out the updated speaker list here.

But today I want to talk about just startups. Specifically, seed-stage, pre-Series A tech companies, the kind that are under the mainstream radar, but which we have gotten to know in the course of reporting on the innovation community.

At XSITE, we traditionally feature a small group of these companies—potentially transformative ones—in an afternoon session called the “Startup Xpo,” where 10-12 companies give short pitches to our audience. It’s one of the big highlights of the day. And this year will be no exception, though we are focusing more specifically on tech/IT/software companies (no health-tech or cleantech tracks this time).

I’m pleased to announce the following speakers/companies that are confirmed for this year’s Xpo:

—Varun Chirravuri, co-founder and CEO, Laveem
—Paul Harkins, founder and CEO, NeighborPower
—Ben Jabbawy, founder and CEO, Privy
—Jonathan Kay, founder, Apptopia
—Dave McLaughlin, founder and CEO, Vsnap
—Fatma Yalcin, co-founder and CEO, Curisma
—Yifan Zhang, co-founder and CEO, Pact

The unusually perceptive among you might notice that only seven companies are listed. That’s because, well, a couple of others are pending. But it also means we’re looking for at least one more startup to round out the list. If you’d like to be considered—again, your company should be seed-stage, or early-stage bootstrapped—please drop me a note to the address below. (Don’t call me or I’ll be very unhappy. Unless you have a scoop for me. Or some Facebook stock you’re looking to dump (not).)

As for the rest of you, we are expecting quite a crowd, including plenty of out-of-town speakers and guests. You can register for XSITE here. Hope to see you there on June 14.

And this just in: Gus Weber from Polaris Ventures and Dogpatch Labs has agreed to emcee the Xpo. So we’re ready to rock and roll.

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According to Monster.com, there are currently 841 open software and IT development jobs in Michigan. Compare that to 319 jobs in manufacturing, 487 in healthcare, and a dismal 46 in creative and design. It’s something I hear often in my line of work: There is a severe shortage of software development talent in Michigan, and people with the necessary skills can essentially find a job immediately.

It’s with this talent shortage in mind that the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) launched the Shifting Code initiative, a job retraining program that graduated its first 26 participants last week. According to Ann Arbor SPARK, one of the organizations that administers the program, 20 companies participated in Shifting Code and 65 percent of graduates have already found jobs at places like Ford and SRT Solutions.

Loosely modeled after the Shifting Gears initiative, a four-month “career transition” program that retrains seasoned professionals for jobs in growth sectors or with small startups, Shifting Code is designed to address the changing needs of Michigan’s employers as the state tries to diversify its manufacturing economy. The Shifting Code program includes an assessment, classroom training, mentorship, and a practicum/internship component. Upon graduation, many participants go on to start full-time or contract jobs with participating employers.

“Governor [Rick] Snyder has really taken note of the IT skills gap,” says Donna Doleman, vice president of marketing, communications, and talent at Ann Arbor SPARK, pointing out that Snyder called for this type of program as part of his “talent message” last year. “The challenge is that many IT professionals may not have a background in a specific language that employers are looking for, which is where Shifting Code comes in.”

Doleman says organizers expected about 50 people to be interested in the first informational session, which was held in January. Instead, about 700 people expressed a desire to participate. Because of that high level of interest and the fact that it costs the state between $1,000 and $1,500 to train each Shifting Code participant, the program has a competitive application process. (In addition, each participant pays a $100 registration fee.)

In addition to Ann Arbor SPARK, the MEDC is partnering with the Workforce Intelligence Network and Oakland Community College on Shifting Code, says Amy Cell, the MEDC’s senior vice-president of talent enhancement. She expects that 10 groups will graduate from the program by the end of 2012. The first classes are learning Drupal and JavaScript, and later groups will focus on the .Net framework and other languages depending on the needs of employers.

Most classes, which are held on nights and weekends, are at the intermediate level, though Cell says Shifting Code does provide some entry-level classes. “Most people in the program have a technical background and some prior software experience,” she says, adding that they often have been trained in outdated software languages. “We’re looking for the best fit to meet the needs of employers.”

Subha Ramadoss graduated from Shifting Code last week and on Monday, she started a new job with Commerce Guys, a French e-commerce company with … Next Page »

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“What if we thought of it as a canvas, rather than a bridge?”

That’s the question that occurred to Ben Davis as he was sitting outside the San Francisco Ferry Building one Saturday morning in September 2010, gazing at the western span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Not long after, he got a chance to propose the idea to New York artist Leo Villareal—and now he’s running a non-profit dedicated to using the bridge as the framework for a massive Villareal “light sculpture” called Bay Lights.

The plan, if enough money can be raised, is to mount 25,000 individually addressable LEDs on the bridge’s suspension cables, turning the iconic structure into to a giant display for a shimmering, never-repeating constellation of patterns. (You have to watch the video rendering below, created by two employees at Pixar, to fully grok the concept.) The two-year, $8 million light show would come at a key time in the Bay Area, coinciding with the America’s Cup regatta, the opening of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, the completion of the new Exploratorium, and several other signature events. Analysts predict it could be seen by as many as 50 million people and bring the city $97 million in added tourist dollars.

Private backers, including prominent Bay Area entrepreneur-investors such as Ron Conway, Matt Mullenweg, and Adam Gross, have already committed $5 million for the project. But there isn’t much time left raise the rest. Davis says Caltrans, the state agency that controls the Bay Bridge, wants the organization to show it has $7 million in the bank before construction begins in July. “It doesn’t happen if we don’t raise $2 million more by July 1,” he says.

So Bay Lights is appealing to the technology community to help it complete a crash fundraising effort. The organization is urging Bay Area entrepreneurs and engineers to use social media, including Twitter and Facebook, to form teams of contributors. The teams that raise the most money but June 30 will win a variety of perqs, such as an invitation to a City Hall reception with Villareal and civic leaders. The top fundraising team gets a dinner with Villareal and invitations to the grand lighting gala and VIP pre-party.

[Story continues below video]

Why should the tech community be willing to pony up for public art? Maybe because Villareal’s design is partly a paean to technology. After all, it’s a Burning Man-style light show on a canvas a mile and half long. “The piece really reflects the beautiful synthesis between art and technology here in the Bay Area,” says Davis. “It’s reflective of the quality of life that we enjoy and our ability to inspire one another.”

Also, it’s just damn cool, and for two years every smartphone-toting tourist in San Francisco will be posting photos and videos of the light show to Instagram and Facebook. “Knowing that it will be widely shared and passed around through new means of technology, we are encouraging the technology community to get involved,” Davis says. Local technology leaders, he says, “have a track record of being able to band together in coopetition and make some great things happen for the region.”

The Bay Bridge, which is actually three bridges in one (two suspension bridges on the San Francisco side of Yerba Buena Island and a seismically dicey truss bridge on the Oakland side), turned 75 years old last year. But it has always labored in the shadow of its more famous sibling, the Golden Gate Bridge. As soon as the Golden Gate opened in … Next Page »

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Coach Wei has been busy lately. The founder and CEO of Boston-based Yottaa is busy running a tech company on two continents. Not only that, but he’s trying to pioneer a new approach to building an enterprise software and Web infrastructure company—one that can iterate and release products almost as fast as a consumer Web startup.

Oh yeah, his company also revealed today that it has raised a $9 million Series B financing round from its existing investors, General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners, and Cambridge West Ventures, as well as other undisclosed investors. (The round closed a while ago.) Yottaa previously raised a $4 million Series A in 2010.

Yottaa—which has almost 50 employees, most of them in Beijing—has been on a quiet tear lately. The company released its core software for speeding up websites last year and has built up a customer base of e-commerce sites, retail shops, marketing agencies, and other businesses. In February, Yottaa rolled out a content delivery network that includes Internet routing and Web optimization technologies. (You might have wondered how a startup with only $4 million over a couple years could run a content delivery network with data centers around the world; well, it had more money than it was letting on.) And just last week, the company released its “mobile acceleration” software, in partnership with another Boston company, MocoSpace, which calls itself the largest mobile social gaming platform.

These moves increasingly put Yottaa in the same discussion as Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), the 13-year-old Web infrastructure firm, except that Yottaa is going after smaller customers than Akamai is, and their technologies are different. But their big goals overlap. For those of you keeping track, Akamai now bills itself as a cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere (with emphasis on Web and mobile). Akamai recently bought Blaze Software and, before that, Cotendo in Web and mobile optimization.

Another thing to watch about Yottaa is its “anti-lean startup” approach—invest in a big team upfront, put in a fair bit of engineering time, and then try to roll out big products. That’s as opposed to the lean startup model, popular in consumer and social Web circles, whereby you have a small team and roll out new iterations continuously.

Yottaa’s approach is geared toward solving the big infrastructure problems of the modern Web. “Because of the scope of the problem and the required complexity of the solution to solve these problems, such offerings typically require a much longer development process,” says Wei. (A year of engineering to get to bare minimum quality, say.) “It took lots of work to get here,” he says. “However, we are here now and we are able to move really quickly and roll out products faster than anyone else.”

That’s a big claim, but if Yottaa is successful with those products, it could have a big impact on how lots of tech firms operate. “I think this will be inspirational for U.S. startups to think about a different way to build a company,” he says.

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The $2 billion applied science and engineering college campus planned for New York is still years away from opening its doors, but Google stepped in today to give the project a head start.

Google CEO Larry Page hit the city this morning to announce his company would let CornellNYC Tech occupy 22,000 square feet at Google’s Manhattan headquarters. CornellNYC Tech, a collaboration between Cornell University and Technion Israel Institute of Technology, can use the space for free for some five years while the permanent campus is built on New York’s Roosevelt Island.

At a press conference, Page said it was important for the giant search and software company to nuture tomorrow’s innovators through education. “We want more of the best minds doing the imagining for us,” he said.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg also spoke at today’s press conference, talking up Google’s effect on the city since the company opened its offices here in 2006. “That really helped jumpstart New York’s now-booming tech center,” he said.

Google’s support of the CornellNYC Tech effort could help maintain that momentum. Cornell will have access to the office space on July 1 and can use the space free of charge for at least five and a half years or until the engineering campus opens, expected in 2017.

David Skorton, president of Cornell, said graduate students and faculty members from the university’s Ithaca campus will start using the space in the fall. Starting in 2013, new students will have the chance to take classes within Google’s New York building on Eighth Avenue. Cornell will have the leeway to expand to 58,000 square feet of space in the building during the expected five-year stay.

Bloomberg said the Roosevelt Island applied science campus and a second campus, to be built in Brooklyn by a team led by New York University, have the potential to drive more economic change in New York. “Tech employment has grown 30 percent in the city. We are second only to Silicon Valley,” he said, “and we don’t like to be second to anybody.”

Although Google, Facebook, and eBay have established footholds in New York and the startup ecosystem continues to evolve, Skorton said more collaboration is needed with the academic community. “The missing ingredient is a pipeline of top tech talent,” he said.

In addition to classes, the space at Google will host hackathons and other events to connect with the local innovation community. Google will also have a chance to recruit from the students taking classes there. Skorton said every graduate student will have access to industry mentors as well as academic advisors. “We’re jumping in with both feet,” he said.

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Crowdsourcing design startup 99designs is putting its own product to the test with a competition to redesign its homepage. The company, which connects businesses in need of design help with freelancers willing to compete for design work, wrote a request of its own, asking its 158,000 registered designers to revamp its site for a chance to win one of three $1000 prizes.

To company CEO Patrick Llewellyn, using 99designs is a great way for any lithe start-up to get design help without stretching its resources. “We’ve got lots of different projects on the go, and not enough design resources internally,” he says. “What better way of thinking about how we can do this than running a contest for our community?”

Each contest on 99designs works like this: customers can create a brief to give designers a clear, detailed idea of what they’re looking for, from logos to websites to stationary, mobile apps and more. Depending on their budgets, they can choose between bronze, silver and gold packages (for example, between $299 and $699 for a logo, or between $599 and $1,499 for a website). Then, as designers submit ideas, customers can collaborate with them, explaining what they like and don’t like. Once users find something they want, they pick the winner and get the final design and a copyright for the original work. 99designs gets a cut that averages between 20and 30 percent of the fee, and the rest goes to the designer. Simple.

99designs CEO Patrick Llewellyn

This isn’t the first time 99designs has started its own contest. In the past the company has hosted light-hearted challenges, like a contest to invent a new hairstyle, and more timely ones, like designing a new logo for The Gap after the retailer’s revised mark was widely panned back in 2010. But this time, contest entrants will be putting their work in front of famous guest judges, including lean startup guru Eric Ries, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, and 99designs co-founder Mark Harbottle.

Though bringing in such heavy hitters could be seen as a move to push back against 99designs detractors who have complained that high volume doesn’t make up for low-quality design work, Llewellyn says it’s simply a smart move by a smaller company in need of design help.

“The driver for us is that we need this work done,” Llewellyn says. “It’s less about what other people think. But if that’s an offshoot and we get to show off some cool work, that will be great.”

99designs has a transoceanic origin story. Back in 1998, a Canadian teenager named Matt Mickiewicz needed to build a website, so he documented his experience online, giving advice to others. As Mickeiwicz’s Web design forum grew, Harbottle, who lived in Melbourne, began selling his software through the site. Eventually, Harbottle realized that it was a great business opportunity, so he reached out to Mickiewicz and suggested that they go into business together.

Despite his Web prowess, Mickiewicz was only seventeen. So he stayed in Canada, and Mickiewicz and Harbottle built their company, called Sitepoint, via long-distance collaboration. At the time, Sitepoint distributed books on design and development and hosted different forums including a Web development and designer forum. Soon, designers took over the threads, inventing a sort of design tennis match where people would post fictional briefs and hold contests to see who could come up with the best design. At first it was just for fun, a way for designers to bounce ideas off each other. But then a designer building a website in need of a logo asked the forum to submit logo ideas, and offered to pay them if he picked one.

“All of this was just happening in a forum thread,” Llewellyn says. “Mark saw all of this activity and said, ’I wonder if there is a business here?’”

Harbottle decided to start charging a listing fee to see if that killed off the forum. But people were willing to pay $10 to post a brief. Then $20. In 2008, Sitepoint spun out 99designs as its own product.

“It was essentially observing a naturally occurring behavior inside this designer forum, then creating a minimally viable product,” Llewellyn says. “It was a wacky start-up in this little business called Sitepoint.”

Four years after it was founded, the company has grown to more than 55 employees, relocated its headquarters from Melbourne to San Francisco, hosted 136,000 design contests, and paid out $33.8 million to designers. In 2012 alone, the company expects to pay out $25 million.

“It’s been a really interesting ride,” Llewellyn says. “The most interesting thing is that for the first 3½ years of existence, we didn’t spend any money on marketing. We were all word of mouth. We had a really big … Next Page »

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If you’ve ever wondered how quickly an alien army like the one in Independence Day could subdue humanity, worry no more. From the ingenuity on display at Maker Faire, it’s pretty clear that we’d be saved by the large and growing corps of civilian tinkerers, who could probably take down a space cruiser using nothing more than duct tape, a Roomba, an Arduino board, and a few LED lights.

This year’s Maker Faire Bay Area happened May 19 and 20 (and was preceded by a special Education Day on May 17). I spent Saturday afternoon wandering the event enormous expo halls at the San Mateo Event Center, home to the Faire since its inception in 2006, and used iMovie on my iPhone to hack together the short video below, showing everything from a Lego train set to NASA Ames Research Center’s “Phonesats” (microsatellites powered by Android phones).

The creation of Make Magazine and O’Reilly Media, the event is basically the world’s geekiest county fair—think Burning Man meets the Intel Science Talent Search. And it’s become enormously popular: according to the San Jose Mercury News, the event attracted 120,000 people on Saturday alone, snarling traffic for miles around. (I got smart this year and arrived via Caltrain.)

It would be fruitless to ask whether Maker Faire is the product of the massive maker movement blossoming in the U.S.—with thousands of people taking up soldering irons and building their own fire-breathing robots and remote-controlled spy planes—or the stimulus behind this movement. It’s clearly both. Though the event is a Bay Area creation, it has since spawned clones in Detroit, New York, and—for the first time this summer—Kansas City, MO. Community-run “mini maker faires” have also sprung up in cities from Atlanta to Vancouver. While the tech-media spotlight seems stuck on stories like the Facebook IPO, the Faire was a great reminder that real innovation starts in the nation’s garages and dorm rooms.

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