San Diego Xconomist Evan Snyder has been called a “stem cell revolutionary” and is regarded as a father in the field of stem cell research. When we talked in his office at San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, he told me he isolated the first neural stem cell in the mid-1980s, as well as the first human neural stem cell in 1998. Snyder’s team demonstrated the concept of stem cell pathotropism (the ability of stem cells to home in on injured or diseased regions of the brain) and helped to establish the concept that stem cells can be used to regenerate and repair diseased and damaged tissue.

He arrived in San Diego in 2003 to serve as a professor and director of the Stem Cells and Regenerative Biology Program at the Sanford-Burnham. He also is a scientific leader and researcher at San Diego’s new $127 million Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. While Snyder is focused primarily on basic research, he talked with me about the prospects for commercial development of stem cell technology—and how the much-publicized regenerative properties of stem cells, while holding tremendous long-term promise, will likely not be the focus of the first market successes. Our conversation, which I’ve condensed and edited, follows here.

Xconomy: My general impression is that much of the early promise and enthusiasm over stem cells has been dissipating.

Evan Snyder: I don’t think I would agree with that. I think there’s an enormous amount of promise.

X: I mean in terms of using stem cells in commercial applications.

ES: What the companies and the public thought was that it wouldn’t take any work, that you’d have a cell and you would sprinkle it with pixie dust and everything would get better. That was certainly unrealistic. It might have been fomented by scientists in the early days who were just totally enamored of the fact that you had cells that could read environmental cues and go down different pathways, and they seemed to do this based on their own intrinsic programming.

But the fine-tuning in the use of stem cells still comes down to really understanding the biology of the cell. That also entails understanding the biology of development, because … Next Page »

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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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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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It’s been a busy week for startup funding, with Obalon Therapeutics, Aperio Technologies, Topera, and Ivera Medical closing on financing deals. We’ve also got drug development news from Ocera Therapeutics and MediciNova.

—Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceutical said it’s closing its center of excellence in South San Francisco, which has been focused on developing early stage antibody drugs, and consolidating its operations, now known as Takeda California, in San Diego. The company’s San Diego center of excellence, which is focused on structure-based drug discovery, has about 170 employees, according to a report by Gary Robbins of U-T San Diego. Keith Wilson, president and chief science officer of Takeda California, told the U-T that Takeda plans to add about 30 positions in San Diego by the end of the year.

—San Diego-based Qualcomm’s wireless health subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, named 25 members to an advisory council to help the business address key industry issues. The list includes Kleiner Perkins partner Brook Byers, X Prize founder Peter Diamandis, inventor Dean Kamen, Diego Miralles of Janssen Healthcare Innovation, Eric Topol of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, Psilos Ventures partner Lisa Suennen, and Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology (Calit2).

—San Diego’s MediciNova (NASDAQ: MNOV) said its experimental asthma drug failed to meet the main goal of a second mid-stage trial. The drug developer said patients treated with its leading drug candidate, bedoradrine sulfate, showed significant improvement in other ways, but a sell off on Wall Street sent shares of MediciNova down by … Next Page »

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It was clear that San Diego’s MediciNova (NASDAQ: MNOV) had a lot riding on the outcome of a mid-stage trial of the company’s lead drug candidate, bedoradrine sulfate. As I reported recently, MediciNova has been developing the compound to treat acute asthma attacks that are not responsive to standard therapy.

So shareholders registered their disappointment in preliminary results that MediciNova released today after regular Nasdaq trading ended—sending shares of MediciNova down by roughly 50 percent in after hours trading. Less than two hours after the news hit the wires, MediciNova’s shares were trading around $1.40, after falling by $1.35, or 49 percent, from $2.75 a share.

Many investors probably didn’t read much beyond the first sentence, which says the Phase 2b trial “did not statistically meet the primary endpoint, improvement in forced expiratory volume (FEV1),” compared to a placebo. In other words, patients who got the drug did no better in exhaling for one second than patients who got a placebo. Yet bedoradrine showed a significant improvement in other ways over the placebo group as well as patients who only received the current standard of care. MediciNova says its drug also reduced hospital admissions in acute asthma cases, and no significant safety or tolerability issues were seen.

Shareholders were likely expecting to see “home-run data,” MediciNova CEO Yuichi Iwaki told me by telephone late this afternoon. “We put the fact that we did not meet primary end point at the beginning,” he said. “If you read through everything, we clearly indicate that the trial was positive, and we’re ready to move onto Phase 3.”

Iwaki says the failure to meet the primary goal of the mid-stage trial was probably due to protocols that called for giving patients a two-hour intravenous infusion, which he says were based on an outdated trial design. The company has maintained that its drug poses a key advantage over the current standard of care in U.S. emergency rooms, which typically use an inhaled drug like albuterol, because constricted airways limit how much aerosol can be absorbed. As an IV drug, doctors have a better understanding of how much bedoradrine a patient has absorbed.

In a statement from MediciNova, Iwaki says, “We believe certain variables, such as administration of off-protocol therapies, especially in the standard-of-care alone group (placebo arm) and somewhat higher-than-anticipated variability in measuring FEV1 values limited the [bedoradrine] outcomes. Our goal is to control for these variables going forward, enabling us to run a successful Phase 3 program. Accordingly, we have filed our End-of-Phase 2 meeting request with the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and Rheumatology Products at FDA.”

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A team developing analytic software that scores patients for the risk they pose to being readmitted within 30 days after being discharged from a hospital is the winner of the inaugural Janssen Connected Care Challenge. The prize is sponsored by Janssen, a unit of New Brunswick, NJ-based Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) .

Kim Park, a founding partner with Janssen Healthcare Innovation, declared the Discharge Decision Support System (D2S2) as the winner this morning at the 6th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) Convergence Summit in downtown San Diego. The D2S2 team also was awarded $100,000 to advance the technology, which is under development by RightCare Solutions, a Philadelphia-based startup founded last year by Eric Heil of Domain Associates and Kathryn Bowles, a professor of nursing at the University of Pennsylvania.

The company describes the D2S2 system as a decision-support tool that uses key data from a patient’s admission to analyze the risk that the patient could be readmitted within 30 days after discharge. The software algorithm also “learns” by tracking patient outcomes and adjusting the way it scores a patient’s risk for readmission.

Because the D2S2 risk assessment is done upon admission, RightCare says hospital officials can better plan the discharge and follow-up care for at-risk patients. The company says a second-generation system will be able to recommend whether a patient at-risk for 30-day readmission should be referred to a skilled nursing facility, home care, rehab, or nursing home.

The D2S2 system was … 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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About 275 technologists and healthcare industry executives are gathering in downtown San Diego tomorrow as the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance (WLSA) convenes its Seventh Annual Convergence Summit at the Grand Hyatt.

“The overarching theme of the summit this year is ‘How do we move from innovation to institutional and personal adoption of the tools and technologies for wireless health?’” says WLSA CEO Rob McCray. Tomorrow’s agenda consists of all closed-door sessions for WLSA members, while McCray says the agenda for Wednesday and Thursday, which has no restrictions but is nearly sold out, puts an emphasis on the imperative for adopting technology innovations that meet healthcare needs and help to reduce costs.

In Wednesday’s opening session, for example, McCray says Leslie Saxon of the USC Keck School of Medicine is highlighting some of the practical aspects in determining who pays as institutional customers adopt wireless healthcare innovations. David Sayen, regional administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid in Californa, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and other Pacific islands, will talk about using innovation to wring more care from existing programs.

The 2012 summit also may go down as the year of incentive prizes in wireless health.

The parade of prizes begins Wednesday with the selection of a winner from three finalists named in early April as part of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Connected Care Challenge, a competition that was created to help bridge the gap in coordinating patient care among different healthcare practices. Each of the finalists received $50,000 to help advance their … Next Page »

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[Updated: 9:20 pm PT] Only a few companies have ever been successful enough to call themselves Big Biotechs. If boards and shareholders lack vision and guts, we’ll look back in a few years and wonder why the Big Biotechs went extinct.

The group of Big Biotechs includes companies like Amgen, Gilead Sciences, Biogen Idec, and Celgene. They grew from scrappy venture-backed startups with a dream into big, independent, profitable, diversified enterprises. They have enduring ability to create new jobs and new medicines. They are like ballasts in a stormy industry.

There are several challenges in the market today that make it harder than ever to create companies like these. The biotech venture community can’t afford to build startups anymore that have Big Biotech aspirations; there’s only a lukewarm biotech IPO market; and Big Pharma companies have an endless appetite for acquisitions to replace their aging drugs with expiring patents. Wall Street values the short-term payday over long-term potential.

All of these factors are conspiring to put a lot of pressure on biotech companies to sell to Big Pharma companies. You’ve seen it with GlaxoSmithKline’s $2.6 billion hostile bid to acquire Rockville, MD-based Human Genome Sciences (NASDAQ: HGSI). San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) is reportedly another object of Big Pharma desire. If these deals get done, they could end up tipping over a set of M&A dominos that would significantly change the biotech industry—and not necessarily for the better.

Richard Pops

“We’re at a unique moment in the history of the industry,” says Alkermes CEO Richard Pops. “When you look at the companies in the $2-plus billion market valuation tier, it is an incredibly important time and an incredibly vulnerable time. These companies are big enough to help to solve big problems in Big Pharma.

“If you are a Big Pharma company facing a patent cliff, you really have a huge revenue gap to fill, and small companies don’t really help you. They aren’t scaled to solve your problem. And this is precisely why companies in this valuation tier are so vulnerable. When you have a $2 billion valuation, it’s usually because something made your company an economic enterprise rather than a big science project.”

Pops runs one of the Big Biotechs. Rather than being acquired by a Big Pharma company that might want its technology that makes drugs last longer in the blood, Alkermes decided to do the acquiring. It bought Elan Drug Technologies, in a move that turned it into a trans-Atlantic 1,200-employee enterprise with revenue streams from multiple products—and a good shot at profitability for the long haul.

[Updated to add Ariad and Pharmacyclics.] A fair number of companies out there have some realistic chance to be members of the Big Biotech class. I count 23 companies in the NASDAQ Biotech Index with market valuations of more than $2 billion. Will they remain independent, like Alkermes, or go extinct? You can size up the list here yourself.

When I look at this list, a few things jump out. Amgen, Gilead, and others at the top have gotten so big and rich that someone would really have to move mountains to buy them. At the bottom of the list are a few little companies, like Vivus, that are surely built for quick and easy takeover. What concerns me more are the companies in the middle. They are the ones with compelling technologies, strong management teams, and at least … Next Page »

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To whom much is given, much shall be required.

Regular readers know that I’m not in the habit of quoting scripture. But this line found in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke has a bit of new relevance this morning, as Facebook’s initial public offering—valuing the company at $106 billion at the opening bell on the NASDAQ Exchange—begins a process that will turn hundreds of Facebook shareholders, including current and former employees, into millionaires.

The real windfall won’t come until later this year: lock-up rules mean insiders and other major shareholders can’t start selling their shares until three to six months after the IPO. But that’s actually sort of convenient, because it leaves these soon-to-be-tycoons some time to think about what they’ll do with their new resources.

Of course, there will be the inevitable, entirely reasonable burst of materialism. Silicon Valley’s realtors, travel agents, and Tesla dealers will experience a welcome bump in business. A lot of old Ikea furniture and Sony stereo equipment will end up on the curbs of Palo Alto, displaced by Ligne Roset and Bang & Olufsen.

But if Facebookers are anything like their predecessors at PayPal and Google, their new toys won’t distract them for long. They’ll eventually fan out across Silicon Valley and found their own startups, or start investing in their friends’ companies, or both.

“You are going to make hundreds of millionaires and see a lot of new startup activity, because these kids are going to start companies on their own,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a scholar of entrepreneurship with appointments at Stanford, Duke, Emory, and Singularity University. “It’s going to be a big boom for Silicon Valley.”

Now, if you only looked at the record to date, you wouldn’t get the impression that Facebook’s alumni are especially prolific—and you’d be forgiven for wondering if they have any interests outside of social networking, collaboration tools, and Web infrastructure technologies. With help from CB Insights, which has been preparing its own study of the “Facebook Mafia,” I did a search for companies founded by Facebook alumni, and turned up fewer than a dozen examples:

Asana (Web-based task management) – Dustin Moskovitz, Justin Rosenstein
Cloudera (Apache Hadoop distributions) – Jeff Hammerbacher
Cove (collaboration, acquired by Dropbox) – Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi
Daily Strength (online support groups) – Doug Hirsch
Jumo (social networking for non-profits, merged with GOOD) – Chris Hughes
MemSQL (database management software) – Eric Frenkiel
Path (social networking and media sharing) – Dave Morin
Peixe Urbano (Brazilian local commerce site) – Julio Vasconcellos
Quora (question answering) – Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever
Storm8 (mobile games) – Perry Tam, William Siu
Trialpay (targeted advertising) – Eddie Lim

This isn’t a terribly long list, at least compared to the number of companies created by ex-PayPal people or ex-Googlers. But the real Facebook diaspora may only get underway six to 18 months from now, as the lock-up period expires and Facebook employees realize that working for a public company isn’t nearly as fun as working for a startup. An IPO is “like getting married,” Wadhwa points out. “The engagement is fun but after that you have all these responsibilities. Every quarter you are accountable to the public markets, and if anything goes the slightest bit wrong things get very nasty. The Silicon Valley kids won’t like it.”

So let’s say it’s early 2013 and antsy young engineers and product managers are leaving Facebook in droves and setting up their own companies. What big problems should they tackle? Or, as venture capitalist Michael Greeley put it yesterday, “What is to become of all this liquidity?”

It would be understandable, but disappointing, if ex-Facebookers only pursued the things we already know they’re good at. It’s clear that when you gather a team of star Stanford- and MIT-trained engineers, lock them in a room with a case of Red Bull, and give them some big-data problem—say, how to store and retrieve camera-phone photos from 800 million people—they can devise diabolically efficient algorithms to solve it. But how many more mobile social apps, enterprise collaboration tools, and infinitely scalable databases does the world really need?

The sad truth is that today’s startup founders swarm around a small thicket of opportunities in the cloud, mobile, and Web spaces. Even one of the valley’s leading iconoclasts, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, occasionally seems to have trouble thinking outside the Internet box. As a sort of dare to rising entrepreneurs, Graham recently published a list of “frighteningly ambitious” startup ideas. But at least three of the ideas on the seven-item list—a new search engine, a replacement for e-mail, and a better delivery mechanism for digital entertainment—are just more of the same.

To make the most of their skills—and the long careers they have ahead of them—the coming crowd of Facebook alumni would do well to look outside Silicon Valley for problems to solve. Here are just a few of the ways they could profitably direct their brainpower:

Build untraceable communications tools for activists and dissidents. Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging worked great for organizers of the Arab Spring uprisings—until their governments caught on and started using the same tools to hunt them down. The assignment here: build a system that protects the user’s identity absolutely. Of course, any tool that helps dissidents could also be used by terrorists. Or could it? Figuring out how to favor the white hats over the black would be part of the challenge here.

Create a truly great, cross-platform customer service and support system. Part of being civilized means dealing with the bureaucracies in our lives, whether they’re our governments, our employers, our healthcare providers, or our ISPs. We need technologies that … Next Page »

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Waiting for the biotech industry to advance new treatments for male pattern baldness (as well as female hair loss) might seem about as exciting as watching hair grow. But some people have a lot of skin in the game, if you know what I mean.

More than just a few people, actually. San Diego’s Histogen estimates that hair loss affects some 40 million men and 21 million women in the United States alone. Histogen, which has been developing a bio-engineered treatment for stimulating hair growth, says less than 7 percent seek treatment for their hair loss “due to the limitations of available options.”

For these people, any incremental improvement in hair growth can be thrilling—even life-changing—which helps explain a burst of enthusiasm we’ve noticed in recent days in messages penned below a 2011 article about Boston-based Follica on the Xconomy Boston website. With close to 1,500 comments posted over the past 14 months our readers have shown no loss for words, making this one article a defacto online message board and a virtual support group for the follically challenged.

As I reported in 2010, few life sciences companies have gotten as much mileage from a pilot trial that enrolled two dozen patients as Histogen has for its much-anticipated treatment. The company says its formulation consists of proteins, including growth factor molecules, secreted by human fibroblast cells grown in a laboratory culture. The concoction is injected just below the scalp.

Over the past week, gentle and not so-gentle visitors to the Follica comment page have seized on the early results of Histogen’s latest experimental trial, which Histogen CEO Gail Naughton presented a week ago in Raleigh, NC, during the annual meeting of the Society for Investigative Dermatology. Naughton gave an oral summary of the data on May 11 and presented a poster the following day on “Stimulation of hair growth in humans by cell-secreted proteins.”

The data has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, according to a Histogen spokeswoman. “We are not releasing an announcement at this time,” she adds.

Yet Histogen has summarized its early findings on its website, where a PDF copy of the May 12 poster also can be downloaded. The company says 56 patients were enrolled in … Next Page »

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So here is my obligatory post on Facebook…which will be the most spectacular IPO of a venture-backed company in the history of mankind…and it just priced tonight.

The shares priced at $38 giving the company a market cap of $104 billion fully diluted, raising $16 billion in proceeds. Of the 421 million shares being sold, 57 percent (or 241 million shares) are being sold by insiders; in the past few years only LinkedIn and Pandora had a higher percentage of shares coming from insiders. Assuming the “green shoe” over-allotment option is exercised, the total amount of proceeds will exceed $18.4 billion. And this is where I want to focus.

Putting aside the potential negative signaling of all this insider selling—and General Motor’s voting with their feet (or tires) this week—what is the impact on the VC industry with all this liquidity? First—according to Fortune—some of the numbers:

—Individual shareholders (mostly Zuckerberg) are selling $3.2 billion of stock and will retain stock worth $27.7 billion

—Institutional shareholders are selling $8.3BN of stock and will still hold $15.8 billion

—This does not include the existing institutional investors (T. Rowe Price, Andreessen Horowitz) which hold about $1 billion of stock and are not selling, nor does it include all the other employees who are now fabulously wealthy

—Of the institutional investors, $5.1 billion of stock being sold is held by institutions which have traditional LPs and/or are themselves LPs. This same group of investors will still have $10.6 billion of Facebook stock yet to be sold.

For me what is most interesting is to speculate about what is to become of all this liquidity. The venture industry has struggled mightily to raise capital; in the past few years the VC industry has raised between $12 to $15 billion annually. As these proceeds are realized and distributed, do much of these dollars get recycled—that is, will underlying LPs begin to increase their allocations to VC as they start to see Facebook distributions? The math suggests that one year’s worth of VC fundraising is now in around half a dozen VC firms fortunate enough to have invested in Facebook!

Additionally, we are watching a very deep and wealthy pool of new angel investors get created and collectively they will play a powerful role in the next wave of great company formation. Much like the “PayPal Mafia” from the last decade which sponsored many of this cycle’s great companies, the Facebook Mafia should do the same over the course of the next decade. These individual investors themselves could become significant LP’s in many venture funds which, if that were to be the case, would further drive VC industry expansion.

Or is this just all wishful dreaming?

This essay originally appeared today on Michael Greeley’s blog, On the Flying Bridge.

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Buried in the news of the past month, which was admittedly a busy one, was a press release headlined: “Geomagic Acquires Sensable 3D Design and Haptics Businesses.” As far as I can tell, no media outlets besides Xconomy picked up on this deal or its historical—and now, political—significance. Woe is them.

That’s because “Sensable” would be SensAble Technologies, the Woburn, MA-based maker of touch-based computer modeling and design systems. The venerable New England firm started back in 1993 and went on to pioneer all sorts of applications in 3-D modeling and haptics technology—a field of human-computer interfaces that involves touch feedback, sort of like the kind you feel in modern video-game controllers and smartphones.

After nearly 20 years, SensAble’s acquisition by North Carolina-based Geomagic—the price wasn’t disclosed, but was rumored to be just a few million dollars—is an unceremonious ending to one of the most intriguing companies of its era. [Disclosure: Xconomy CEO and Editor-in-chief Bob Buderi was an early investor in SensAble.]

Yet even more compelling than the company is its founder, a young engineering whiz from MIT named Thomas Massie. Over the years, that whiz kid developed many other passions besides building computer interfaces and running a tech company. Things like energy independence. The pursuit of individual liberty. Faith and family. And guns—lots of guns.

After leaving SensAble in 2003 (read on for what he says about that), Massie moved back to the heartland of his home state of Kentucky and spent a few years running a farm and building a solar-powered, off-the-grid house for his family. Then he got into politics. In 2010, he ran for the office of Judge-Executive of his rural county, and won in a landslide.

Now, in a stunning move to those who knew him in Boston, he is running for Congress in one of the most heated races around the country. He has been endorsed by U.S. Representative and presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) and his son, Senator Rand Paul—both prominent figures in the conservative Tea Party movement. The Republican primary in Kentucky is next Tuesday, May 22, and as of last week polls showed Massie in the lead. Since the county is predominantly Republican, if he wins, he will be the presumptive favorite to represent Kentucky’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

That’s right, the boy-wonder genius from MIT—the founder of SensAble, a pioneer of haptics—is now a political hero of the Tea Party. And he wants to reform our government. An unlikely story? You be the judge.

Diversity Was a Catholic

Thomas Massie grew up in northeastern Kentucky, in a small town called Vanceburg, on the Ohio River. From a young age, he was interested in taking apart radios and vacuum cleaners, blowing things up with gunpowder, and building mechanical contraptions—everything from a self-watering flowerpot to a robot arm. He entered numerous science fairs and competitions from grade school through high school and often won, despite not having much in the way of resources. That changed when he got to MIT as a freshman in 1989 and was surrounded by world-class facilities (and fellow geeks).

“He was probably the first person from his ZIP code that ever went to MIT,” says Bill Aulet, a current MIT faculty member who helped lead SensAble Technologies as its president from 1996 to 2002. “He would say, ‘Diversity where I came from was a Catholic’—a Catholic, singular.”

As an undergrad, Massie worked in roboticist Kenneth Salisbury’s lab in the old Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. (Salisbury would move to Stanford University in 1999.) One of their later projects was to build a device that would simulate being able to touch and manipulate objects in the virtual world with your hand. It consisted of a computer-connected robot arm with a thimble on the end that you could stick your finger into; when you moved your finger, the computer sensed your precise motions through the movements of the robot arm, and then provided force feedback through the apparatus to simulate the feel of an object on the screen (a button, say). Massie built early versions … Next Page »

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We’re anticipating a lot of news out of a big cancer conference that begins next week in Chicago. Here is your head start.

—Cancer researchers have talked for decades about finding the silver bullet that could kill cancer cells without harming the healthy cells nearby. These days, the industry is focusing on the development of “empowered” or “armed” antibodies, or antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs). Luke put together a list of venture-backed life sciences companies that are focusing on ADCs. His list includes San Diego’s AnaptysBio, Fabrus, and Ambrx.

—San Diego’s Elevation Pharmaceuticals said a mid-stage dosing trial of its lead drug candidate, an aerosol dubbed EP-101, generated positive results among patients with moderate to severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The company said it tested four doses of EP-101, with all four doses showing EP-101 was safe and effective in helping COPD patients breathe easier. Elevation raised $30 million in a Series B round five months ago that should enable the company to complete a follow-up round of testing this year.

—With the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting set to begin next week in Chicago, Luke used his BioBeat column to provide a rundown on eight cancer drugs to watch from biotech companies throughout the U.S. He picked them because they are either on the cusp of reaching the market, or just beginning to show their potential.

—BioSurplus, a San Diego company that provides pre-owned lab instruments to the life sciences industry, said it raised $1.5M to fund its expansion into Boston. The company recently opened similar equipment showrooms in the San Francisco Bay Area and Korea. BioSurplus said most of the funding for the move came from San Diego-based KI Investment Holdings.

—Good News for Xconomy: Our national biotech editor, Luke Timmerman, is one of four finalists in the blogging category of this year’s Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. Whatever happens, he’s put Xconomy in good company. The other blogging finalists work for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Reuters. Winners will be announced June 26.

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A few years back, molecular geneticist Tom Maniatis was approached by a Harvard Business School student with a heart-wrenching story. The student, Avichai Kremer, then 29, had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Kremer had an unusual idea: He wanted to advance ALS research by offering million-dollar prizes to scientists who made meaningful contributions to research into the disease.

Maniatis was both skeptical and intrigued. He had lost his sister to ALS, and was the longtime chair of the research and drug-development committees for the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association. “The prize model had never been tried in life sciences,” says Maniatis, who is now a professor and chair of the department of biochemistry and molecular biophysics at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (and one of our Xconomists). “At the time Avi entered the scene, the ALS community was pretty small. And the drug companies did not see it as a profitable pursuit.

As it turns out, Maniatis says, ALS was a perfect model for a prize-based research approach. In 2006, Kremer’s idea became Prize4Life, a Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit that is now one of the most influential forces in ALS research. In addition to offering a $1 million research prize each year—-the latest of which will be announced at a fundraising gala in New York on June 6—Prize4Life has spearheaded several programs designed to mobilize and energize scientists working in ALS. Kremer and a handful of his HBS classmates are running the entire endeavor, says Maniatis, who is a member of Prize4Life’s scientific advisory board. “They had such an affection and respect for Avi that many of them put off jobs to stay in Cambridge and work for this nonprofit,” he says.

Kremer and his classmates spent more than 1,000 hours talking to experts from the drug industry, academia, and nonprofits, before officially launching Prize4Life’s model. “What inspired me was the success of the Ansari X-Prize,” Kremer says in an e-mail, referring to the California organization that provides incentives to researchers in education, energy, the environment, life sciences, and exploration. “It proved to me that a prize can correct a market failure.” In Prize4Life’s case, he explains, that market failure is the lack of capital “to focus innovation coming from academia and small biotechs on ALS,” he says.

This year’s award will mark the third effort by Prize4Life to support ALS scientists with $1 million in research funding. In 2010, 33 teams of scientists—about half of whom came from academia and the other half from pharma companies—competed for the organization’s first $1 million award by proposing treatment protocols meant to extend the lives of mice with ALS by 25 percent. Ultimately, none of the teams met the goals set out by Prize4Life, and the $1 million prize went unclaimed, though several of the applicants are continuing their research with the organization’s support. (Prize4Life also sponsors a number of smaller research grants.)

Last year, Prize4Life awarded $1 million to Seward Rutkove, co-founder of Woburn, MA-based Convergence Medical Devices, for his work developing a biomarker that can measure the progression of ALS in patients. The tool is designed to make clinical trials of potential new drugs more efficient.

This year’s major prize will be a revival of the inaugural award’s goal—the promise of $1 million for research that demonstrates 25 percent survival in ALS mice. “In the previous round, no one was able to achieve that, but there are so many … Next Page »

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What began as an effort by a couple of San Diego engineers to bring computer vision to the iPhone has resulted instead in “Skqueak,” a mobile app that enables users to sketch over photos and videos on their iPhones. The Skqueak app is now available in Apple’s iTunes App Store.

Sanjay Nichani, who moved to San Diego in 2006 after working at Cognex (NASDAQ: CGNX) the Natick, MA-based pioneer in machine vision, says he founded Pelfunc (Skqueak’s parent company) with Ray Fix, another former Cognoid, in mid-2010. The original idea was to develop an app capable of recognizing electric circuit designs or the kind of molecular geometries used to depict chemical reactions.

“We said it would be nice to have audio with the pictures, and that’s how Skqueak evolved,” Nichani says. As the Pelfunc founders made it possible to overlay sketches (along with messages and graphics) with audio over photos and videos, Nichani says they realized what they had was more of a social networking tool than a computer vision app.

By the end of 2010, they decided to run with their new concept, even though “it meant that we’d need to develop a website and backend system support” so users could create their own accounts for storing and sharing their Skqueaks, Nichani says.

Skqueak employs a drawing function that reminds me of Draw Something, the Pictionary-like mobile app developed by Omgpop, the New York company acquired by Zynga in March for $180 million. You draw by dragging your finger across an image on the iPhone display screen.

With Skqueak, however, users also can record audio while they sketch a handlebar mustache and devil’s horns—or anything else—on one of their own photos or videos. The result is a sort of multimedia postcard. The founders envision users sending “Skqueaks” to their friends, attaching them to e-mails and tweets, posting them to their Facebook pages, and even embedding them in their blogs. Here’s an example:

“A big part of our strategy is to use social media to promote Skqueak as a platform, and then to build different verticals,” Nichani says. For example, users could create a multimedia classified ad that could be embedded on Craigslist by taking a photo of something they want to sell—say, a car—and using the Skqueak app to draw arrows that point out the custom wheels, tinted windows, and other features. “There are a lot of possibilities for working with other partners,” Nichani adds.

In developing Skqueak, the partners conducted a … Next Page »

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[Updated: 1:30 pm PT, 5/17/12] One of the big dreams in biotech over the past 35 years has been to make drugs that work like “smart bombs” by destroying tumors while minimizing collateral damage. Scientists have learned this is no easy thing, but now that a couple of these types of drugs have been shown to work, a new wave of companies is emerging to see if they can finally turn this vision into reality.

Targeted antibody drugs have been around for a long time, and have been shown to do a lot of good for patients. Some of the world’s best-selling medicines are designed to specifically hone in on cancer cells while mostly sparing healthy tissues. Yet it’s only been in the last several years that a couple of companies—Seattle Genetics and Genentech—have shown proof in clinical trials that they can go a step further than what’s been done with so-called “naked” antibodies. The concept is simple: Take a regular antibody, link it to a toxin, and design the combination so that it unleashes a killer payload on tumors. Done right, you ought to have a drug with more punch than traditional antibodies or chemotherapy.

The idea of making “empowered” or “armed” antibodies is known more formally in industry circles as the antibody-drug conjugate (ADC) business. Most previous attempts to amplify antibodies in the past failed because the toxins broke off and started floating around the bloodstream. That meant the drug never got to the right place, and the treatment caused similar side effects to standard chemotherapy. Seattle Genetics overcame that hurdle with the FDA approval last year of its lymphoma drug brentuximab vedotin (Adcetris). And Genentech is in late-stage trials of its souped-up version of Herceptin called trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1). Both of these drugs have shown in clinical trials that they can be powerful anti-tumor weapons in very sick cancer patients. And not surprisingly, these successes have inspired a new group of genetic engineers to see what they can do to turn antibody-drug conjugates into mainstream cancer medicines.

“We as an industry now have a lot of experience with naked antibodies for cancer, and some of them are very good, but we know they aren’t perfect,” says Bill Newell, the CEO of South San Francisco-based Sutro Biopharma, a venture-backed startup. “They aren’t magic bullets. But I think as people recognize the valuable contribution antibodies have made to cancer, they naturally ask themselves, ‘how can we make them better?’ Essentially, antibodies are good, but antibodies with a payload may be even better.”

There is so much enthusiasm for the emerging antibody-drug conjugate movement that there’s even a World ADC Summit, now in its third year, scheduled for this October in San Francisco. Given the increasing interest among venture-backed companies that are seeking to come up with new antibody-drug conjugates, or provide new enabling technologies, I thought it would useful to put together a list of companies seeking to play a role. If I’ve overlooked a company you know of, please send me a note at ltimmerman@xconomy.com so I can update the list.

T-DM1. Image courtesy of Genentech

Genentech (South San Francisco). The biotech giant, part of Switzerland-based Roche, has the broadest and deepest experience with antibody-drug conjugates in the world. The company uses technology from Seattle Genetics and ImmunoGen in some cases to make ADCs, but it also has its own proprietary techniques which it doesn’t license outside the company. Genentech has had its most high-profile success with T-DM1, but that’s just one of 25 different antibody-drug conjugates in various stages of development, from discovery through late clinical trials. Nine of Genentech’s 38 cancer drugs in clinical trials—roughly one-fourth of the portfolio—belong to this new class of empowered antibodies. “We’ve really invested heavily in this technology and have the breadth and depth of our pipeline to show for it,” says Genentech spokeswoman Krysta Pellegrino. For a detailed rundown of Genentech’s ADC programs, click here.

Seattle Genetics (Bothell, WA). Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) is one of the two mainstays of the armed antibody field, along with Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN). The company was founded in 1998 after Bristol-Myers Squibb closed down a Seattle research center that had been dedicated to developing antibody-drug conjugate technology. Besides its work on the new lymphoma drug Adcetris, the company lists six other empowered antibodies in clinical and preclinical development on its website. The company also licenses out its antibody-drug linking technology to other drug developers working on specific projects. The list of collaborators includes Genentech, Bayer, Celldex Therapeutics, Progenics Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharma, Daiichi Sankyo, Millennium:Takeda, GlaxoSmithKline, Genmab, Pfizer, and Abbott Laboratories.

ImmunoGen (Waltham, MA). ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: [[ticker:IMGN]) is the other stalwart of the empowered antibody world, having been founded way back in 1981. The company has never made a profit in all those years, and has had some very lean years, but it has been resurgent of late. That’s because it licensed its antibody-drug linking technology more than a decade ago to Genentech, which has used it to make T-DM1. That drug isn’t yet FDA approved, but it passed a pivotal clinical trial back in March, which was the last major milestone it needed to clear before seeking the regulatory green-light. ImmunoGen stands to collect a modest royalty on that product, and like Seattle Genetics, it seeks to use its antibody-drug conjugate technology for its own internal drug candidates, while also making some money by licensing it to other companies working on specific projects. Eli Lilly, Novartis, Amgen, Genentech, Biotest, Bayer, and Sanofi are among its collaborators.

Bristol-Myers Squibb (New York). The pharmaceutical company (NYSE: BMY), which once invested so heavily … Next Page »

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) plans to use its well-established model in technology licensing as it advances innovations in wireless charging of electric vehicles (EVs), smartphones, and other devices, according to Qualcomm’s top European executive, Andrew Gilbert.

The San Diego wireless giant, which announced the formation of a wireless charging standards organization with Samsung last week, also remains on track to demonstrate its new charging technology for electric vehicles (EVs) in London this year, Gilbert said. The San Diego wireless technologies giant announced its plans to showcase the new technology with as many as 50 battery-powered taxis in November, shortly after acquiring HaloIPT, the startup developing the technology.

PM David Cameron (left) and Andrew Gilbert

Gilbert came through San Diego accompanied by a deep-green, all-electric Le Mans prototype racer that England’s Drayson Racing Technologies unveiled in London a few months ago. The Lola-Drayson B12/69 EV, which replaced a 5.5-liter Judd engine with a pure electric drive on a standard Le Mans chassis, is projected to reach speeds of 200 mph, and was designed for pit stop recharging with the HaloIPT charging system.

The Drayson racecar traveled thousands of miles to get to San Diego, but Drayson has not conducted any road tests with the vehicle yet. Gilbert said Drayson plans to begin testing its EV racer in coming months as part of a broader campaign to get the International Automobile Federation to sanction an EV competition—perhaps as soon as the souped-up EVs can race for more than 15 minutes before recharging.

During his San Diego pit stop, Gilbert also noted that Qualcomm and Samsung announced the formation of the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) last week during the CTIA conference in New Orleans. As Gilbert noted, wireless electricity transmission has been around since the days of Nikola Tesla (1856-1943) and there may be as many as 20 other companies developing wireless charging technologies. The alliance plans to focus initially on wireless charging technology for devices, but the group expects to gradually draw in members from the automotive sector as well.

Qualcomm has been working in the transportation sector since the company began, mostly in telematics, and continues to provide “silicon and software” for content streaming, navigation services, and related technologies, including GM’s OnStar service. “We work directly or indirectly with … Next Page »

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