Heading into the baseball battles of October (go Red Sox), the dealflow is really picking up. In the past week, the Northwest has seen deals in gaming, mobile software, healthcare, genomics, and biofuels.

—Oberon Media, a maker of casual games and gaming platforms that is based in New York but has a publishing arm in Seattle (I-Play), raised $20 million from Infinity Equity, based in Hong Kong. The deal is seen as an effort by Oberon to break into the Chinese market, and a way for Infinity to get into gaming.

—The Institute for Systems Biology, based in Seattle, has formed a partnership with Mountain View, CA-based Complete Genomics to sequence the genomes of 100 people next year, and another 2,000 people in 2010. As Luke reports today, Complete Genomics has a different approach to the market, offering genome sequencing as a service.

—TriQuint Semiconductor, based in Hillsboro, OR, won a 21-month, $4.5 million contract from the Office of Naval Research to make integrated circuits and amplifiers for radar and communications applications.

—Imperium Renewables, the struggling Seattle producer of biodiesel fuel, received a new investment from its existing investors to help settle its debts with Société Générale and other creditors. Imperium hopes the recapitalization (the amount and sources were undisclosed) will help it resume operations as soon as possible.

—Dexterra, a Bothell, WA-based maker of mobile management software, closed a $21.5 million round led by New Enterprise Associates. Previous investors Canaan Partners, Intel Capital, Mesirow Financial, Motorola Ventures, and Sigma Partners also participated.

—NeuroCom International, a Clackamas, OR-based maker of tools for assessing and rehabilitating patients with balance and mobility disorders, is being acquired by Natus Medical, based in San Carlos, CA. The deal is worth $18 million.

—Issaquah, WA-based Digini, a maker of development tools for Windows and Xbox games, closed a round of funding from California Technology Ventures. The amount was not disclosed.

—Bezos Expeditions, the venture organization of Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com, has made a Series A investment in ZocDoc, a New York startup that helps people find doctors and book appointments online. The amount of the investment was not disclosed. Last month, ZocDoc announced it had raised $3.3 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures.

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Back in May I wrote about the release of MozyHome for Mac, an Apple-compatible version of the Mozy online backup service that Berkeley Data Systems launched for Windows users in 2006. Between them, Mozy (which became part of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC last fall) and Boston-based Carbonite dominate the market for online backup—but for the moment, only Mozy’s system works with Macintosh computers, and the service has been so popular among Mac users that many Mac-based businesses have been using it, even though the MozyHome license agreement technically bars users from using it to back up business-related files.

Mozy COO Vance Checketts told me last spring that the company preferred to look the other way rather than turn business users away. But now that issue is moot: today Mozy will launch a public beta version of MozyPro for Mac, a business version of the backup service to parallel the original Windows version.

Like the home version, MozyPro for Mac copies sensitive data from the hard drives of Internet-connected computers to servers at Mozy’s remote data centers. But unlike the home version, it provides a Web-based administrative interface that allows IT managers to specify which content on each company computer should be backed up, and it can be used to back up servers as well as personal computers.

“There aren’t any other Mac backup solutions for businesses that come with an administrative interface,” Mozy spokesman Devin Knighton told me last week. “You can use Time Machine”—software introduced by Apple last year to allow Mac users to restore their computers to an earlier state—”but that only works for one or two people at a time.”

While individuals use online backup to protect against the computer theft or hard-drive crashes, businesses have even stronger reasons to subscribe to off-site backup services, Knighton argued, citing a study by the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington finding that 93 percent of companies that lose their data for 10 days or more file for bankruptcy within one year.

MozyPro’s pricing scheme works somewhat differently from the home service, which costs $4.95 per month for unlimited storage. The business version costs $3.95 per desktop or laptop per month plus $0.50 per gigabyte stored per month.

Carbonite, by contrast, charges a flat $49.95 per year for unlimited backups, and does not have separate home and business versions. Carbonite CEO David Friend says that a Mac version of Carbonite is in beta testing and is scheduled for general availability on December 15.

While Mozy’s Mac announcement is bound to get some media play this week, the EMC subsidiary may have a bit more catching up to do on the marketing side: Carbonite has been running an amusing promotion lately on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the late-night ABC talk show (see the YouTube videos here and here).

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Microsoft’s chief strategic thinker, Craig Mundie, believes the United States’ situation with broadband access represents a “total policy failure.” In an interview with the Washington Post, Mundie decries the fact that, by some measures, the U.S. ranks 14th in the world when it comes to rolling out broadband Internet service. He says Internet access in Tokyo is much faster, and much cheaper, than it is in Seattle. (That fits with last month’s report from Cambridge, MA-based Akamai that said Washington state has the largest percentage of slow Internet connections in the U.S.—Eds.)

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It’s one of the bigger tech funding rounds as of late. And, not too surprisingly, it’s in the mobile sector. Bothell, WA-based Dexterra, a maker of software that helps businesses manage mobile workflow, has announced it has closed a $21.5 million investment round led by New Enterprise Associates, with previous investors Canaan Partners, Intel Capital, Mesirow Financial, Motorola Ventures, and Sigma Partners also participating. The startup was not specific about how the financing will be used, saying only that it will advance “Dexterra’s mobile business platform and applications” as well as “future opportunity in one of the fastest-expanding segments in the enterprise software market.”

Dexterra, which was founded in 2002, makes software that allows a company’s laptops and mobile devices to connect to corporate servers and access information such as billing records and inventory lists. The software runs on both Microsoft and Linux operating systems, and is designed to make mobile communication and data retrieval more efficient—which is increasingly important as businesses expand their mobile operations. Dexterra has benefited from partnerships with big companies like AT&T, IBM, Motorola, Verizon, and RIM.

The funding round seems to indicate the market for mobile business software is strong, and still growing. “Today’s challenging economic environment makes deciding which companies to invest in more difficult than ever,” said Scott Sandell, general partner at New Enterprise Associates, in a statement. “We are impressed by Dexterra’s revenue traction in both enterprise and carrier markets, strong suite of products targeted at growing markets and unwavering dedication to product excellence and customer success.”

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Boxborough, MA-based Auraria Networks, a content management and information analysis products provider, has taken in $10 million in Series B funding, reports PE Week, citing a regulatory filing. Pilot House Ventures apparently led the round, joined by previous investor Matrix Partners. It’s hard to gauge what Auraria does, since the website gives little information and says, “We are keeping the nature of our activities pretty ’stealthy’ and quiet at the present time…” But the core team is from Lucent Technologies, so we aren’t talking social networks.

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When corporate R&D rains, it pours. On the heels of Intel Research Seattle’s annual open house, an even bigger tech giant across Lake Washington is stirring up some serious action across the pond. Microsoft announced today it is opening a European Search Technology Center, with three main offices in the Paris, London, and Munich areas. Its goal is “to tap into local expertise and fuel local innovation with job opportunities that will help reinvent the European consumer online and search experience,” according to a Microsoft statement. The center will be headed up by general manager Jordi Ribas, who hails from the Microsoft Connected TV business group.

The European effort is being viewed as another way to compete with Google and other search engines in the battle for Internet advertising revenues, according to the New York Times, which quotes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as saying, “Investing in anything at this time can be a tough sell…But when economic times are tough, we have to keep our faith in the promise that technology holds to transform the future.” Ballmer did not say how much Microsoft is investing in the new search center, but did confirm it will employ several hundred workers.

In a statement, Ballmer said, “To compete in a global, innovation-driven economy, we need to draw on the world’s smartest, most creative minds. Increasingly, we are finding the talent we need here in Europe.” Ballmer called the new search center “an important step forward in our long-term strategy to invest in local development of search technology in Europe. We believe search is still in its infancy. Developers at the Search Technology Centre will play a key role in helping us redefine search as they create new search products and services for consumers and advertisers here in Europe and around the world.”

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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My last memory of Andrew Chien might be wrestling with him on the living room floor circa 1981. Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, his family and mine were friends. Chien grew up to be a professor of computer science at his hometown University of Illinois, then a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and now a vice president and director of research at Intel. Our meeting yesterday, at the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, was much more civilized than our last encounter (when I was about 10 and he was a teenager).

Besides his expertise in distributed computing and corporate research, Chien is interesting to Xconomy because of his connections to various innovation communities, on the West Coast and elsewhere. He has lived in San Diego for the past 10 years or so, but his Intel office is in Hillsboro, OR, and he also spends a fair bit of time at corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. “Intel is very distributed,” he says. “I have global responsibilities, including in China and India.” When we talked, he was getting ready for a business trip to Taiwan.

From his global perspective, Chien has some keen insights into East Coast and West Coast innovation. “The Boston community was built on the backs of Route 128 defense contractors, which gave birth to the Digitals of the world, and then biotechs came out of universities,” he says. San Diego has some similarities to that model, Chien points out. “I’m amazed by Qualcomm and the wirelesss diaspora that came out of it. Qualcomm came out of the defense industry—Route 15 companies, which were heavily defense contractors—and there’s materials and radio expertise which is quite different from what you see in Silicon Valley.”

“The other interesting thing in San Diego,” he continues, “is there’s been really interesting crossover between information theory and communications, with life sciences. All that [information theory] methodology is spilling into the bio space…Bioinformatics really started at the level of blueprints. Then it moved rapidly to gene regulation, control loops, and systems. Those systems don’t operate in the traditional way that systems operate in electrical or mechanical engineering, because they’re statistical. Bringing those [mathematical] techniques to bear on biological systems to understand how they work, that synergy is powerful…The number of information theorists per capita in San Diego is high.”

I asked Chien what Intel Research is doing in the field, and he mentioned nucleic acid sequencing (e.g., DNA and RNA). “It’s all in the broad vein of the ‘X-dollar genome,’ which is getting cheaper and cheaper. Most techniques today, like 23andMe and Affymetrix, are based on optical sensing,” he says. “For Intel, optical is interesting, but it’s not the sweet spot for our interest…The grand dream is, can you move to a basis of electrical sensing.” If so, he says, you could do a huge amount of scaling up that’s possible because of the infrastructure built up around silicon chips. “The very broad vision of where this goes is not for medical or scientific research, but for sequencing as broad-based sensing—for instance, environmental sensing [e.g., food or water testing for safety] at low cost. It’s a long-range research effort.”

On that note, I asked Chien about his broader vision for Intel Research. “We call it ‘Essential Computing,’” he says. “About two and a half years ago, when I started at Intel, we took a hard look at where computing is going. The big change is that computing is moving from work-oriented tasks to social and communication-oriented applications, including health and well-being.” Essential computing, as Chien explains, will “simplify and enrich our lives.”

The effort rests on two main pillars or technological thrusts, he says. The first is “new functionality” that will allow computing devices to sense and be aware of everything from your emotional state to who your friends are. To some extent, that’s happening already. The second pillar is motivated by what Chien calls “the dirty secret of the IT industry—our technology is hard to use. It often lets us down. We need to make technology something you’d depend on” for sensitive communications with people important to you, he says. In the end, it’s about making computing devices simpler and easier to use. “It’s like your wristwatch,” Chien says. “It’s got to become that integrated and that reliable.”

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Last week’s unveiling of the first phone running the Android operating system—the T-Mobile G1, which will be available to consumers on October 22—suddenly made Google’s vision of an open source smart-phone platform to compete with Apple’s iPhone seem much more real. But developers writing applications for Android phones have been immersed in the new operating system for months, and one of the teams that’s gotten the most pre-launch publicity is right here in Boston. It’s the group of current and former MIT students behind Locale, an application that automatically changes an Android phone’s settings based on its location.

If you’re a movie or music fan, for example, you could use Locale to teach your Android phone to shut off its ringer whenever you go to your favorite cinema or concert hall. Or you could program that risqué Gisele Bundchen or Tyson Beckford wallpaper to change into a staid nature scene when you walk into the office. It’s such a bright idea that the Google-led Open Handset Alliance picked Locale last month as one of 10 winners of the $275,000 top prize in its first Android Developer Challenge, a contest designed to stimulate outside programmers to come up with useful apps for the Java-based operating system.

That’s a cool $55,000 each for the five members of the Locale team—Clare Bayley, Carter Jernigan, Jasper Lin, Jennifer Shu, and Christina Wright—and comes on top of the $25,000 the team won for making it through the first round of the Android contest. The group was one of six teams participating in an experimental spring-semester course, “Building Mobile Applications with Android,” taught by well-known MIT computer scientist Hal Abelson. Though the students had only four months to come up with a functioning application, “All of them actually produced things that worked, which was amazing to me,” Abelson told Bob.

Not only does Locale work—it’s one of the applications that will be available starting October 22 from the Android Market, Google’s answer to the iTunes App Store for the iPhone. That’s according to Carter Jernigan of the Locale team, who’s now a full-time software engineer for Akamai Technologies in Cambridge, MA. Jernigan met me for lunch in Kendall Square this Tuesday, and I asked him how his team came up with the idea for Locale, what it was like to win the Android Challenge, and how he thinks Android compares to other mobile platforms. (Locale “wouldn’t even be possible on the iPhone” thanks to restrictions put in place by Apple that keep third-party programs from running in the background while other programs are active, he says.) An abridged version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: Did you have the idea for Locale going into Abelson’s class, or was it something you came up in the course of the semester?

Carter Jernigan: The brainstorming began before the class. One of the prerequisites was that you needed a team and a project—not necessarily a final idea, but some idea of what you wanted to be. So we did a lot of brainstorming and came up with the idea for the application and assembled the group before we applied to be in the class.

X: Did you also know ahead of time that you wanted to enter the Android developer contest?

CJ: We knew about the contest going into the class, but entering it wasn’t our primary goal. Our primary goal was to do well and get an A. But entering the contest was certainly doable within the context of the class.

X: Why did you pick the problem you did— a location-based application for changing a phone’s settings?

CJ: I was looking for an application that would solve a problem that people have on a daily basis. The idea hit me when I was just observing friends and family members and coworkers having their phones go off all the time. Having the phone behave differently depending on where you are is a way to solve the problem.

X: Haven’t there been previous attempts to get at this problem of cell phones ringing at inappropriate times? For example, I’ve read about movie theaters and playhouses experimenting with jamming devices that would prevent audience members’ phones from receiving calls.

CJ: My understanding is that jamming devices are illegal. And blocking people’s communications is such a blunt way to solve the problem. I don’t think that’s the right solution. One of the things Google is trying to do with Android is …Next Page »

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In an article Monday in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, Richard Stallman, president of Boston’s Free Software Foundation, criticized the trend toward utility-style “cloud computing” as a marketing strategy designed to lock users into proprietary computing platforms. Stallman included Web-based services such as Google’s Gmail in his critique. “One reason you should not use Web applications to do your computing is that you lose control,” he told the Guardian. “It’s just as bad as using a proprietary program. Do your own computing on your own computer with your copy of a freedom-respecting program. If you use a proprietary program or somebody else’s web server, you’re defenseless.”

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On a clear day, David Wetherall can see Mount Rainier from his desk. On a clearer day, he can see the future of Intel. OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But Wetherall, the director of Intel Research Seattle, has certainly been charged with leading an exploratory research effort for the chip-making giant—blue-sky, “off-roadmap” stuff that won’t be in Intel’s products anytime soon, but is nonetheless vital to the company because it could help create the broader future of computing.

Intel Research Seattle, located three blocks from the University of Washington campus, is one of three Intel labs tied closely to universities around the country—the others are at UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. The Seattle lab, which opened in 2001, has 20 full-time researchers, with about an equal number of students, interns, and visiting researchers at any given time.

I sat down with Wetherall yesterday as he was doing last-minute preparations for today’s annual lab open house. Wetherall has been director of the Seattle lab since mid-2006. He is also an associate professor of computer science and engineering at UW, and his own research has focused on wireless networks and distributed systems. It’s an unusual model, in that Intel hires its research lab directors for three-year terms, after which they typically go back to academia full-time. (Wetherall is the third director of the Seattle lab.) “The lab has a charter, to bring in new people from the university,” says Wetherall. This helps “invigorate things” and keeps the lab’s research on the “cutting edge.”

As Wetherall explains, it’s a pretty open and forward-looking effort. “We have a lot of joint research, projects where university people work here, and we also fund research at the university. It’s a big way we get things done. There is a joint, open collaborative agreement between Intel and UW. People don’t have to sign an NDA,” says Wetherall. “We’re not focused on an immediate product, we’re focused around opening markets…We’re chartered with doing disruptive research that’s not on the product map. Intel is interested in new computing technologies. We’re trying to invent them, and stay ahead of the game. We’re a small scout organization looking for game-changing technologies.”

The Seattle lab’s research theme is “focused on future computer systems woven into the fabric of everyday life,” says Wetherall. It’s the next step in the evolution of computers as they migrate from desktops to mobile devices to embedded devices. “We try to figure out what technologies and usage models work, how to power them, how to provide privacy, how to do sensing,” he adds. Researchers at the lab have expertise in hardware, robotics, machine learning, wireless networks, and human-computer interfaces, among other disciplines. “We believe in prototyping, from hardware through software systems, and we have a user-centered viewpoint,” says Wetherall. “We are finding out what users want.”

It sounds a lot like the “connected computing” (or ubiquitous computing) trend that the founders of Voyager Capital were telling me about last week, from an investor’s perspective—the confluence of software, wireless, and digital media. I asked Wetherall what connections the Intel lab has with the local innovation community in these areas. …Next Page »

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There has been a lot of bad news already this week. Now Xconomy has learned that the global law firm Heller Ehrman has laid off 139 workers in its Seattle office, effective November 28, according to Washington State’s Employment Security Department. This comes on the heels of the news that the company’s partners have voted to dissolve the 118-year-old firm, which is headquartered in San Francisco and known for its work in the tech and life sciences community.

I pinged Stephen Graham of Fenwick & West (an Xconomist) to get his take. “Heller was a fine firm, and it is sad to see it go,” he writes in an e-mail. “However, they have a lot of great lawyers and wonderful people, the vast majority of whom will go on to continue their careers at other firms. In Seattle, at the end of the day, after all the unfortunate and severe disruption, I think the net result will simply be the absence of the Heller name in the legal community. The players will be fine. Their clients will be fine.”

According to published media reports, 2007 was a difficult year financially for Heller. That had led to the departure of several dozen partners in the past year. And in the last few months, Heller had reportedly been in talks to merge with other law firms, including Baker & McKenzie and Mayer Brown, but no deal materialized.

Heller Ehrman is one of the largest law firms to close its doors recently. It employed 650 attorneys and professionals across 35 practices in 14 offices in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, according to its website. Its practices included antitrust and trade regulation, information technology, energy and cleantech, life sciences, and intellectual property litigation. Its client list included Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers. Heller opened its Seattle office in 1983.

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San Diego-based Wireless Info Tech, a mobile testing and applications company, has agreed to be acquired by Beijing, China-based VanceInfo, an IT services provider and software development firm. The deal is worth $1.08 million in cash plus restricted stock. It is seen as a strategic move that could strengthen VanceInfo’s position in the U.S. mobile market.

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You get home from a big business trip to San Francisco, you’re talking with a friend from out of town, and you find out that he was just there too. If you’d known, you could have met up! It’s a common scenario—and it shouldn’t happen as often anymore.

After all, you probably keep an electronic calendar that includes details about your upcoming trips. And most calendars these days allow you to share your appointment data with other people’s calendars, over the Web or corporate networks. There ought to be a central exchange where your calendar program can go to find out whether any of your friends (or colleagues, or potential clients or customers) are going to be in the same area as you at the same time.

Well, now there is. It’s called LuckyCal, and it’s being built by a Lexington, MA-based startup that’s one of the first 10 companies to receive a grant from Facebook’ $10 million “fbFund.” Announced last year, the fbFund is run by Facebook with money from Accel Partners and The Founders Fund, and is designed to support independent developers working on applications for the Facebook Platform (the subject of my interview last week with Facebook senior platform manager Dave Morin). LuckyCal got the largest possible grant from the fbFund: $250,000, to be doled out in installments as the startup meets usership milestones.

But, while LuckyCal’s Facebook application is an important part of its offerings, you can use the service even if you don’t have a Facebook account, by giving it access to your desktop- or Web-based calendars and address books and inviting friends to share their own data. LuckyCal’s matching algorithms suck in all this information, along with public event listings from sources such as Ticketmaster, and spit out what the company calls “lucky” events: confluences that you can then decide whether to act upon. Say you’re going to Minneapolis-St. Paul next weekend. LuckyCal might see from your address book that you have a cousin there, and suggest that you give her a call; and it might know from the interests you’ve listed on your LuckyCal profile that you love public radio, and send you a link to purchase tickets to a live broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion.”

When I first heard about LuckyCal’s service, it reminded me of 1990s-era predictions about “intelligent agents” that would scour the Internet, making your travel arrangements, negotiating appointments, doing your holiday shopping, and the like. A full-blown agent would require a level of artificial intelligence that’s still way beyond what computer science can accomplish. But LuckyCal does something very similar, just by crunching together the standard data that can be extracted today from productivity applications like Outlook and iCal and Web platforms like Facebook and Gmail.

It’s a no-brainer, in a way. But nobody had done it. “Calendars have been around for a very long time,” observes LuckyCal’s 37-year-old CEO and co-founder Sanjay Vakil, a Canadian-born entrepreneur and software architect who’s a veteran of local startups like Ambient Devices and PatientKeeper. “Electronic calendars have been around for a reasonably long time. And online calendars have been around for 8 to 10 years now. Yet nobody has tried to do this—to solve the simple problem of ‘Here’s where I’m going, show me what’s available while I’m there.”

Facebook, where members are already eager to make connections, is an obvious place to try out the model—and so far, a couple hundred Facebook users have signed up for LuckyCal. But ultimately, Vakil sees the software as something that could go beyond the social-networking crowd to become a money-saving tool for big organizations whose employees travel regularly. The fbFund grant comes at a key moment, helping the startup get its idea working first in a friendly environment (and perhaps helping it to earn a bit of money on Ticketmaster commissions along the way). But long-term, Vakil says, the business model is more about licensing LuckyCal’s services to big corporate customers.

Vakil says he’s been thinking about better ways to interact with event information for several years—ever since he worked at Ambient, a Cambridge, MA, startup that sells wireless information displays such as the Ambient Orb, which glows red or green according to the direction of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and the Ambient Scorecast, which shows the progress of baseball games, hit by hit. (Vakil wrote the code for the latter device.)

“LuckyCal came out of a meeting with David Rose,” Ambient’s director and chair, Vakil says. “We had this idea for the Ambient Clock—a device that would take calendar information and show it on an analog wall clock. If you had an appointment between 2:00 and 3:00 it would fill in that pie piece. But we looked at the data real people put into their calendars, and on average it’s only about one event per day. What do you do with the rest of the clock? Why not try to …Next Page »

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Authoria, a Waltham, MA company that makes software used in employee recruiting and retention, said Monday that it will be bought by White Plains, NY-based private equity firm Bedford Funding for $63.1 million. Bedford has also agreed to put $8 million in working capital into the company.

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Bill McAleer and Enrique Godreau remind me of an old couple. They’ve been through the ups and downs together. They’ve raised three children (OK, venture funds) in the past 10 years. They even sometimes finish each other’s sentences. And together they’ve built Voyager Capital into one of the most forward-looking venture firms in town.

First, some vital stats. Voyager Capital, based in downtown Seattle, has some $370 million under management. It raised its funds in 1998, 2000, and 2007. It does primarily early-stage deals across three main tech sectors: software and services, wireless, and digital media (including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing). It has a satellite office in Menlo Park, CA, and just opened a branch in Portland, OR, last month. Earlier this month, Voyager led an $8 million Series B investment in Los Gatos, CA-based Nusym, which makes software for verifying electronic designs.

I had a chance to sit down with McAleer and Godreau last week to talk about Voyager’s strategy and how it fits in with important trends in the tech industry. They discussed some of their portfolio companies, but they also expounded on the broader theme of “connected computing” (sometimes called ubiquitous computing) and how the Seattle area is uniquely positioned as a tech-business center. They also touched on the effects of the current financial crisis on investment strategy, and how they view the broader future of venture capital.

When McAleer and Godreau co-founded Voyager Capital in Seattle back in 1997, the tech world was a different place. Microsoft still ruled in software. The Web was just taking off, and Google didn’t exist yet. Amazon.com was just two years old. McAleer had come from Seattle-based Aldus (inventor of PageMaker) with a background in multimedia, and had his own firm for three years working with early-stage companies. Godreau had come from Gartner Group and Adobe by way of Xerox PARC; he was an early backer of Seattle-based aQuantive, which had a big IPO in 2000 and was bought by Microsoft for $6 billion last year. “We thought this region would take off as a tech region,” says McAleer.

But there were a number of challenges. “When we first started, it was how to get really senior talent into the city,” says McAleer. “That’s changed a lot. But back in 1997, there were still only a couple of opportunities they could go off to if their startup failed. The cost to build is somewhat less here [than Silicon Valley], so there’s a cost advantage. The other challenge is to attract really top-notch sales and marketing talent. It’s still thin in terms of really qualified marketing people. On the plus side, with the connected computing trend, consumers are leading rather than businesses.”

I’m a technical guy by training, so I wanted to hear more about this trend, and where the Seattle area fits in. McAleer explains connected computing as the “next stage of computing”—the next step in its evolution from mainframes, desktops, and PCs to the Web, Web 2.0, and smart mobile devices. As I see it, the proliferation of smartphones, social networking, and increased connectivity is changing the way people live, and is leading to all kinds of new applications for consumers and businesses. “We’re going through another sea shift in technology,” McAleer says.

He continues, “The unique thing about Seattle is with the software, wireless, and digital media base… eventually we’ll be connecting at all times. Seattle is really well-positioned for the blend of all three… Most other tech areas don’t have the richness in anchor tenants and available talent. When we started investing, you’d see teams from one company. Now you see teams that are from a mix of companies. And around all that has grown up a capital infrastructure, supported by a strong university.”

“This geography happens to have a lot of skills,” says Godreau. “With Linux in Portland, Nintendo and Xbox designed here, network and wireless companies here, and prominent retailers like Nordstrom, Costco, Starbucks. What happens when you combine those elements? You get the computing of the future. That distinguishes us from the Valley, …Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA, startup Tipjoy, a Y Combinator-launched company whose technology allows Web surfers to leave small payments at the blogs of their favorite content creators, announced on its own blog this week that it has closed a $1 million Series A funding round. The round was led by New York-based seed stage investor Betaworks and also included the Accelerator Group, David Shen Ventures, and private investors Chris Sacca, Taavet Hinrikus, and Ron Bouganim.

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I’ve always thought “Web services” is a boring name for one of the most lucrative areas of tech-business innovation. The term encompasses many interactions on the Internet—everything from Web-based software to shopping to social networks. A big question these days is how to monetize these Web services, and how to get revenue from all the various Web 2.0 applications that have emerged. Sure, there are traditional business models based on advertising, subscriptions, and transaction commissions, but what are cutting-edge companies doing with these models?

I had a feeling last night’s Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA) event at the Westin Hotel in Bellevue, WA, would provide some unique answers—and I wasn’t disappointed. (The drinks and dinner, which I hadn’t expected, didn’t hurt either.) I’ll give a straight recap here, and try to follow up with more insights down the road.

The title of the WTIA panel was “Cashing in on Web services: The display ad model and beyond,” and it packed an all-star lineup of Seattle-area Web companies. The moderator was Scott Jacobson, a principal at Madrona Venture Group. Perhaps the most striking thing about the panel was how young everyone looked (I’m starting to feel old around these entrepreneur types):

—Matt Hulett, chairman and CEO of Mpire, maker of ad network WidgetBucks
—Andy Liu, CEO of BuddyTV, the largest TV destination site
—Mike Metzger, CEO of PayScale, the largest salary comparison site
—Spencer Rascoff, CFO of Zillow, the second largest real-estate site
—Tony Wright, co-founder of RescueTime, a time-management software site

Jacobson opened with some brief remarks about online advertising versus other revenue models. “You have to have massive scale to build a business on advertising,” he said. “But there are other ways…to make money, and we’re going to explore those here.” Indeed, it was interesting to see the different approaches taken by the five companies, based on each one’s product and size.

Mpire, though small in workforce (18 employees by the end of this year), has the sort of scale to make advertising work (1.2 billion impressions a month). Hulett explained his approach with WidgetBucks, an online ad network used by some 20,000 publishers, including many small bloggers, where the ads run alongside the content. “The state of online advertising is still in its infancy,” Hulett said. “The bar is pretty low right now. Publishers are looking for other solutions that monetize better than [Google] AdSense.” Jacobson asked whether advertising budgets are shifting away from display ads. “I don’t think anyone’s going to say online advertising is dead,” said Hulett. “There’s a little softness in display, but overall the area is strong.”

Liu spoke a bit about BuddyTV’s traffic (over 30 million pageviews a month), content, and user behaviors. The site includes news, videos, and trivia games for TV fans. “We always wonder, when do people spend time on our site? Most of it comes during the workday,” he said, to laughter from the audience. “We always build two things into the products. …Next Page »

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Having written