When people think of innovation in biotech, it’s usually about the whiz-bang science behind new drugs. But after years of sticking to a pretty standard playbook, we’re now starting to see more creative thinking in the business models needed to attract investors who keep the industry afloat.

This is one of the big questions of the day in biotech, so I’m excited that Xconomy is able to bring together so many national thought leaders on this subject to Seattle. This is for our next big event, “Reinventing Biotech’s Business Model,” which will be held from 2 pm to 6 pm on April 3 at PATH’s headquarters in South Lake Union.

This event will bring together an ensemble cast of speakers from around the country to discuss the business models they are experimenting with to get more bang for the buck.

Kevin Starr

We’ll hear stories from people who come at this question from quite different perspectives. From the VC ranks, we’ll hear from Third Rock Ventures’ Kevin Starr, venBio’s Corey Goodman, Versant Ventures’ Brian Atwood, Accelerator’s Carl Weissman, and WRF Capital’s Thong Le. From the entrepreneur’s side, we’ve gathered a standout crew that includes Plexxikon’s Kathy Glaub, AnaptysBio’s Carol Gallagher, Forma Therapeutics’ Steven Tregay, Acylin Pharma’s Bard Geesaman, Cardeas Pharma’s Bruce Montgomery, Blaze Bioscience’s Heather Franklin, and Inception Sciences’ Peppi Prasit.

Corey Goodman

Lastly, we’ll hear from a public company CEO, John Maraganore of Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY), who can speak from experience about keeping short-term thinkers in Big Pharma and Wall Street interested in a long-term, high-science project like RNA interference drug development.

Like most Xconomy events, I’ve banned PowerPoint for this occasion. That means these people will be forced to engage in a lively series of questions and answers about the trade-offs they had to consider when crafting their new business models. I’ll be the emcee, making intros, keeping the trains on time, and moderating a couple of the key sessions. But I’ve also drafted a couple of top-notch guest moderators who will help the speakers tell their stories. Ed Saltzman, a well-known industry consultant with Florham, NJ-based DefinedHealth will be the guest inquisitor for part of the festivities, along with Alex Lash, a San Francisco-based reporter/editor who writes for The Pink Sheet, StartUp, and In Vivo.

There’s only one week left to get the Early Bird discount of $150 for this half-day forum, and tickets have been going fast. There are still a few discounted student tickets left, and some for startup companies with fewer than 20 employees. This is shaping up to be one of Seattle’s biggest national biotech events in a long time. It’s essentially an event that any West Coast biotech entrepreneur, executive, or service provider won’t want to miss. So tell your friends to be there or be square, and if you haven’t already, be sure to get your tickets before they run out. See you there on April 3.

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At first I thought this might be a joke. Some fine wool pulled over the eyes of overworked, underslept journalists.

The same week the “Bostlandia” video spoof comes out (shouldn’t it be Bostonia?) and there are all sorts of rumors flying around at Ruby Riot, surely this thing called “Intelligent.ly” isn’t for real. First of all, there’s the “.ly” which looks like a parody of tech startup names. Second, is this yet another incubator, accelerator, or co-working space for techies around town? Do we really need that?

To get some answers, I talked with Sarah Hodges (see photo above), digital marketer extraordinaire at Boston-based FitnessKeeper, who is heading up Intelligent.ly in her spare time with Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent (part of Dunnhumby/Tesco). Yes, she assured me, Intelligent.ly is for real. And yes, we need it.

Just one thing: Don’t call it an incubator. Or an accelerator. Or a co-working space. Instead, try “peer-to-peer learning” center, Hodges says. Indeed, its name is meant to evoke the idea of “cultivating new skill sets,” she says.

Intelligent.ly is a community space in Boston in which entrepreneurs and innovators of all types can hang out, collaborate, take classes, and create new stuff. The space is on the third floor of 500 Harrison Avenue in the South End, in the same building that houses BzzAgent, Smarterer, ProctorCam, Help Scout, Promoboxx, Eat Boston, and Alphabet Arm Design.

The project is loosely modeled after New York City’s General Assembly, whose “campus for technology, design, and entrepreneurship” started in early 2011 and has supported startups like Postling, Profitably, and Yipit. But no office space or funding is being offered here in Boston. Instead it’s all about sharing and learning—and doing it in person, with one’s peers.

“People want to help each other here, and we have a tremendous amount of talent around Boston,” Hodges says. “But it’s hard to connect people who are eager to learn with people qualified to teach.”

Short classes at Intelligent.ly will cost about $20 to $50 each, to cover the costs of running the program and to pay instructors for their time. Topics will include the basics of branding, marketing, public relations, product management, and programming. Most of the teaching will revolve around the broader spheres of entrepreneurship, leadership, and professional development.

What’s more, the space isn’t meant to appeal only to Web or mobile tech startups, say—or even startups alone. “We want it to be an open forum. … Next Page »

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A little more than 5 million people in the U.S. have Alzheimer’s disease, the numbers are climbing as baby boomers age, and pharma companies have never really come up with a good treatment. But now a group of venture capitalists are betting $15 million that a Cambridge, MA-based startup, Satori Pharmaceuticals, has found a better way to attack the dreaded disease that progressively robs people of their cognitive abilities and memories.

Satori is announcing today that the new financing round was led by existing investors InterWest Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Prospect Venture Partners. The company also said Donald Hayden, the former president of worldwide medicines at Bristol-Myers Squibb, has been named chairman of the board, and that David Schnell of Prospect Venture Partners and Stephen Muniz of PureTech Ventures have also joined the board. The company, founded in 2005, had previously raised $25 million.

The new investment will be used to advance Satori’s efforts to make drugs that reduce the buildup of a peptide known as amyloid beta 42, which researchers believe is a so-called bad actor that accumulates and leads to the nerve damage that characterizes Alzheimer’s. Satori’s bet is on a family of drug candidates, licensed from the Mayo Clinic, that selectively binds with an enzyme called gamma secretase. That strategy has shown promise in animal studies, Satori says, by reducing production of amyloid beta 42, without altering overall levels of other normal forms of amyloid beta. Satori says it plans to file an application with the FDA this year for permission to start the first clinical trial of its lead drug candidate.

Satori Pharmaceuticals CEO Jeff Ives

“The Hail Mary pass is that with a highly selective and safe compound, we can actually start to think about a preventive therapy,” said Jeff Ives, Satori’s CEO, in a meeting last month at an investor conference. “For now, stopping the progression of the disease is the primary focus of the company.”

Satori’s team has been around the block, and has seen various Alzheimer’s programs show promise in early clinical trials before fizzling out. Before joining the startup, Ives was previously a senior vice president in Pfizer’s R&D operation. Satori’s VPs of chemistry and biology, Brian Bronk and Barbara Tate, both come from Pfizer as well. They are quite familiar with the stories of a couple of other gamma secretase inhibitors from the past (Myriad Genetics’ Flurizan and Eli Lilly’s semagacestat are a couple notables) that failed.

The difference this time, they say, is that Satori’s drug is made to be more selectively targeted to gamma secretase. If all goes well, Satori will be ready to test its concept in human beings for the first time this year.

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Updated 9pm Pacific
Tableau Software is taking more steps toward a possible initial public offering of its stock, a move the data visualization company has publicly entertained for some time.

The nearly 10-year-old company doesn’t seem to be in a rush, however, with its venture capital backer saying next year is the timeframe being discussed and a newly appointed board member saying the company will be IPO-ready “when the timing and climate are appropriate.”

The latest news about Seattle-based Tableau’s IPO ambitions bubbled up Wednesday afternoon, when Fortune reporter Dan Primack talked with New Enterprise Associates partner Scott Sandell about Tableau’s plans. (Primack’s digging was prompted by what looks like a fantastically fumbled public relations pitch.)

New Enterprise Associates is Tableau’s largest outside shareholder—in fact, Tableau has never spent a dime of the $15 million in VC it’s raised from NEA over the years. Sandell was quoted as saying there are “‘board-level discussions’ about taking the company public next year, even though it has the numbers to go out now.”

The Stanford University-bred company, which makes easy-to-use software that turns data into interactive graphs and charts, has long been a quiet success in the tech world. That’s partly because its particular innovation is in the traditionally dry world of “business intelligence” data analytics for big companies.

Tableau has long been profitable, and has recently reported a few years of large revenue growth—the latest was a near-doubling of sales bookings to $72 million in 2011. Tableau started this year with about 350 people worldwide, and plans to add another 300 to its roster in 2012 as it expands into new international territories.

I asked Tableau CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot about the Sandell remarks, and he declined any immediate comment. But Tableau has now announced that it is appointing to its board software executive Brooke Seawell, who already is on the boards of publicly traded Informatica and NVIDIA. He also is being named chairman of Tableau’s audit committee, a group that would be called upon to help get Tableau’s books in order for the public markets.

The Seawell release is one of those masterpieces of read-between-the-lines corporate communication, which has some necessity behind it since executives are always wary of getting slapped by securities regulators for soliciting buyers too early.

In it, Tableau notes Seawell’s “extensive experience in public company finance, accounting, governance and technology company operations.” And, of course, he’s quoted saying of Tableau: “It has the right team in place and will be well-positioned to go public when the timing and climate are appropriate.”

In a subsequent rundown of the company’s leadership team, several other executives are called out for their public-company experience.

Tableau has never really made its general IPO ambitions any secret. As Chabot told me recently, “Tableau’s intention as part of its business plan is to be a big, independent, global, publicly traded company. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. This company is not for sale. … Our intention is to take the company public, and be a great public stock.”

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As San Diego’s point man for Xconomy, I must say I admire the xtremely hip name of Xpenser, a startup that helps people track and manage their work-related expenses.

Founder Parand “Tony” Darugar tells me the basic concept of the company came to him out of necessity in 2008, while he was a Yahoo director of architecture on “Panama,” a project that overhauled Yahoo’s advertising systems after the $1.6 billion Overture Services acquisition. Darugar says he was overseeing teams in San Diego, Sunnyvale, CA, and the Los Angeles area, so he was traveling a lot. His airfares, hotel bills, and other expenses were piling up. But Darugar says he continually put off his personal expense reports because there was a general sense of urgency surrounding the project.

Over one six-month period of procrastination, Darugar says he accumulated more than $30,000 worth of unreimbursed expenses.

Darugar confides that his wife, a financial planner, didn’t exactly give him a high-five for his personal record. Still, he says that point marked the beginning of Xpenser. In addition to clearing his backlog of expenses, Darugar created a Website for tracking his personal expenses and wrote a mobile app that enabled him to send a text message on his BlackBerry as he incurred each expense. For example, he could send himself a message saying, “$60 for taxi from airport to hotel.”

His concept was to immediately send himself the pertinent information about his business trip expenses while they remained fresh in mind, instead of trying to remember the details weeks or months later.

Darugar says his friends and co-workers asked to join the system, and he added more features to the Website over time. “I started doing it to scratch my own itch, and the Website just kept growing.” When he described what … Next Page »

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Ann Arbor SPARK and Wayne State University recently announced that eleven Southeast Michigan startups have received investments from the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund and microloan awards from the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Local Development Financing Authority (LDFA). The investments are meant to help early-stage companies commercialize their technology.

Three companies from TechTown’s business accelerator program received pre-seed capital funding:

• Angott Medical Products, founded by serial entrepreneur Paul Angott, received $250,000 to further work on a prototype device that detects breast cancer.
• Clean Emission Fluids, which has created a stand-alone, portable unit that allows gas stations to easily incorporate biofuels into their offerings, received $210,000 in matching funds. The pre-seed investment allows the company, which already employs six people, to expand the R&D operations and scale the pace and volume of production.
• Cleantech firm ENRG Power Systems received a $50,000 loan for development of its plasma ignition system, which bolts onto existing fleet vehicles to increase fuel efficiency between 14 and 21 percent.

Eight Ann Arbor companies snagged microloan awards of $10,000 to $50,000 from the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti LDFA:

• Buycentives, an online consumer-incentives platform.
• CareCheq, a Web portal that allows care-givers and patients to communicate through social media.
• Freestride Therapeutics, which is in the process of commercializing products aimed at people with bone-related conditions.
• Ix Innovations, a company developing a line of instruments to measure power and electrical currents.
• My Repair Facts, an online resource that allows buyers and sellers of used cars to access a vehicle’s repair history.
• Open World Energy, which uses proprietary energy management software to help commercial and industrial buildings to become more energy efficient.
• Reveal Design Automation, a developer of quality control software for use with semiconductors.
• Therapy Charts, a software as a service platform for independently practicing therapists.

Skip Simms, Ann Arbor SPARK senior vice president and administrator of the Michigan Pre-Seed Capital Fund and microloan programs, says that microloans in particular are often needed to get a company to hit the milestones that will generate more investment.

A few years ago, the state recognized that many early-stage tech companies were stuck after burning through initial investments from friends and relatives. They offered products or services that sounded promising, but they weren’t quite far along enough to attract additional investors.

“The state put the fund together to give entrepreneurs a fighting chance,” Simms says. “We know not all of them will succeed, but at least they have the opportunity.”

Simms says that after companies get microloan funding, they can come back later for pre-seed funding. For those who may grumble that this is another money-losing folly undertaken by state government, Simms says loans awarded in 2009 and 2010 are now being paid back and re-loaned.

To date, a total of $2 million has been loaned through the Michigan Microloan Fund program .

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Out-of-towner Amory Lovins drew a packed audience to Kendall Square last Thursday for a chat about his vision for our energy future—and how it can be achieved with better economics, no new acts of Congress or government regulation, and no major shift in our lifestyles. Lovins—co-founder, chairman, and chief scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute—co-authored the book, Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era, in which he outlines how to run a 2.6-times-bigger economy by 2050 without oil, coal, or nukes, and with one-third less natural gas and much lower costs.

He took the stage with Flagship Ventures general partner Jim Matheson, a leading local authority on energy and sustainability, and answered questions from the audience. Those who had purchased the book flocked to the stage after the program to get their Lovins autograph. Our host Draper Laboratory provided a great setting for the event.

Below is a mix of photos that give a glimpse into the evening. We didn’t get everyone’s name in there, but attendees, hopefully you will see yourself in the mix.

Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	Reinventing Fire, An Evening with Amory Lovins — It was an especially energetic crowd that gathered to hear Lovins–there was lots of networking and discussion before and after the chat.
	Photo by Keith Spiro Photography courtesy of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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On the hunt for techies with entrepreneurial spirit, enterprise software developer AppSense announced today it formed a research division that has its epicenter at the company’s New York headquarters. AppSense Labs, as it is called, aspires to do more than hire new experts; it aims to disrupt the way the company’s technology is developed by adopting a more nimble strategy to compete with rivals.

“The model of innovation that is traditionally ‘enterprise’ doesn’t work anymore,” says Harry Labana, chief technology officer for Britain-born AppSense. “You’ve got to get new ideas out faster that may or may not fit into your core enterprise product.”

The new division, he says, will give the company an edge in technology development while also putting AppSense on the prowl for talent where it has offices in New York, Santa Clara, CA, and Britain’s Warrington. Shaking off some of the inertia common to enterprise technology may help the company be more versatile, Labana says. “We don’t see that many people focusing on making enterprise software cool and useable in a multiplatform world,” he says. “We’re focused on that problem moving forward.”

As more companies include smartphones and tablets in their IT tool boxes, enterprise software developers must change to embrace these devices, Labana says. That means finding developers and engineers with the skills to transform this sector. AppSense’s technology lets users within enterprises operate smoothly across different computing environments such as variations of Windows. Layoffs among financial institutions in New York, he says, presented an opportunity for … Next Page »

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The world of car-sharing just got more interesting. Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), the Cambridge, MA-based pioneer in the sector, said today it has led a $13.7 million Series A investment in Wheelz, a Palo Alto, CA-based car-sharing startup that targets college students. Detroit-based Fontinalis Partners, a transportation tech investment firm, also participated in the round.

As part of the deal, Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith has joined the board of Wheelz, along with Mark Schulz, a founding partner at Fontinalis and longtime auto industry veteran (he was president for international operations at Ford). Zipcar, which went public last April, does not have majority ownership in Wheelz, according to the press release.

Griffith says in a statement that “interesting new mobility models and transportation-related technologies are emerging. This investment is our first step in the direction of potentially offering a broader array of mobility services.”

Wheelz is going after the college campus market using a peer-to-peer auto sharing model. The company, which is led by CEO Jeff Miller, rolled out its service at Stanford University last September. Wheelz is also rolling at UC Berkeley, USC, and UCLA.

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Biotech pioneer Leroy Hood has spent years outlining a vision of finding networks of proteins in the blood that can offer an early warning sign of cancer on the move. Now the startup that Hood and Caltech’s Jim Heath founded to pursue that idea, Seattle-based Integrated Diagnostics, has raised another $10 million to turn it into a commercial reality in the next year.

Integrated Diagnostics, or just InDi for short, is announcing today it has pulled in the third and final $10 million segment of its $30 million Series A venture financing from October 2009. InterWest Partners, The Wellcome Trust, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg all contributed to this next phase of development. The company, after filling out its executive team with a new chief financial officer and chief business officer, is plowing ahead with a plan to roll out its first commercial product within the next 13 months, says CEO Al Luderer.

If InDi can hit that next goal, and persuade insurers to start paying for this new kind of diagnostic test, then it will be in position to attempt an IPO shortly thereafter, Luderer says.

“This is the realization of Lee Hood’s vision,” Luderer says. “We’re in great shape for the year ahead.”

Al Luderer, CEO of Integrated Diagnostics

The vision at InDi is to create a new class of diagnostic tests that can spot specific proteins that can be shown to be early warning signs of disease. Hood has said he hopes this could shake up the healthcare system by making it possible for doctors to detect diseases much earlier than they can be caught today, giving physicians more information before they make hard decisions about treatment.

InDi has pursued this opportunity in lung cancer first. This is the leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., and a tough malignancy to diagnose and treat in the early stages. An estimated 3.3 million people each year end up having a single nodule in the lungs show up on a chest X-ray or CT scan, which raises the question about whether it’s cancer. About 2 million of those scans come from high-risk populations like smokers or the elderly, while the rest come from incidental findings, Luderer says. If the lesion is large, doctors go ahead and perform a biopsy to analyze the tissue for malignancy.

But if it’s small—generally two centimeters or less in diameter—the lesion presents a conundrum, Luderer says. Chances are it is benign, and not really worth the invasiveness of a biopsy. So those patients tend to go on “watchful waiting,” in which doctors will periodically follow up with imaging scans. But sometimes those small nodes can be … Next Page »

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Multi-talented scientist Yoky Matsuoka is making it official: She won’t return to the University of Washington, choosing instead to focus on her new job as vice president of technology for Silicon Valley “smart thermostat” startup Nest.

It’s a loss for the UW computer science and engineering department, but not a huge surprise. Matsuoka—a past winner of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grant”—took a leave from the university in spring 2010 to work on a research project at Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA.

She quickly moved from that position to her spot at Nest, a consumer device company founded by former iPod project leader Tony Fadell.

Yoky Matsuoka

We’d been hearing that Matsuoka would soon officially resign from UW, and Ed Lazowska, a top professor in the computer science department, confirmed the move in an e-mail. Matsuoka is expected to formally hand in her resignation in the middle of next month, he says.

“It’s a significant loss, of course—Yoky is superb. But these things happen,” Lazowska says, noting the flow of high-profile engineers and scientists that move between UW, other universities, and major tech companies around the world.

One notable example of that exchange is Brian Bershad, a former UW professor who joined Google as its Seattle site director and recently transferred to work for the search company in Russia (he was replaced at Google Seattle by cloud-computing expert Doug Orr).

Nest’s digital thermostat employs machine learning to adjust home temperatures and adapt to user preferences. It’s also a slick-looking, physically well-designed unit that definitely calls the founder’s Apple heritage to mind.

Nest’s pleasing industrial design, interesting computer science guts and star-studded founding team have earned the startup a lot of interest and positive public exposure recently. That, in turn, has drawn a patent-infringement lawsuit from thermostat industry stalwart Honeywell, which claims that Nest is copying everything from its round shape to its digital user interface.

At the UW, Matsuoka worked on advances in human-computer communication that could make it possible for injured people to precisely control devices like prosthetic limbs with their brains. She spurred the creation of a National Science Foundation-funded lab—the Research Center on Sensorimotor Neural Engineering—that is led by UW, with major partners at MIT and San Diego State University.

Lazowska says Tom Daniel from the UW biology department will take over as director of the center, which won an $18.5 million NSF grant last fall. Daniel had been officially serving as deputy director under Matsuoka.

(Matsuoka and Lazowska are both Xconomists, part of our roster of guest columnists.)

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Michael Duda uses the word fun quite a bit when talking about what he does. It’s not hard to see why. He’s co-founder of Consigliere Brand Capital, a New York-based investment and consulting firm focused crafting great brands from the ground up. Duda comes from the advertising agency Deutsch, and is joined by others from Madison Avenue (Brent Vartan), Wall Street (Andrew Mitchell), even the NBA—Phoenix Suns player Steve Nash is co-founder of the firm.

So far they’ve invested in startups offering subscription services for beauty products (Birchbox) and kids’ activities and toys (Kiwi Crate); a jewelry e-tailer (Chloe + Isabel); a company developing online customer service ratings (StellaService); and an online platform for connecting writers and publishers (Contently). Consumer-oriented businesses are a major focus, as are entrepreneurs who are genuinely nice people. In addition to backing and advising startups, the firm works as a consultant for companies like GNC and Under Armor to develop their brand messages.

Below are Duda’s answers to some questions I threw his away about his firm, his co-founder, his portfolio, and his ad agency past.

Xconomy: What’s the mission behind Consigliere?
Michael Duda: We launched in September 2010 with the premise that money and marketing were not on the same page. We were really amazed that brands, no matter what size they were, would come to agencies with big issues and big problems, and compensation was fee for service. The agency got paid the same amount if things go well and if things don’t well. With publicly traded companies, if you didn’t make your numbers, people were going to start looking at deck chairs to throw off the Titanic. Marketing is an expense that people cut. But marketing strategy, when done right, can be an accelerant to business success.

X: How does Consigliere work with its companies?
MD: We invest at the Series A and seed level. We work with bigger companies on the marketing side and in the marketing practice within publicly traded companies. We’ve made eight investments in five companies.

VCs write checks. We’re a service-oriented VC. We’re not leading deals right now. We’re looked at as the brand people who can bulletproof a board. Consigliere can be attractive because we’re going to be focused on building your brand at a profitable foundation level.

We’ve seen over 850 deals and invested in 5 companies. I don’t want to do a portfolio size that’s so big that we’re struggling and don’t know what’s going on in each of the businesses. We want to work with them to build brand phenomena. With five companies, we doubled down on our investments three times. Why wouldn’t you want to stay involved with it for as long as possible?

X: How did Steve Nash get involved with the firm?
MD: Steve and I met in 2007 on a potential business deal he wanted to do. I had known his agent for a number of years. He was not just a name on a … Next Page »

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VC, cleantech, and biotech players populated the New England deal news this week.

—Cambridge, MA-based coal-to-natural-gas company GreatPoint Energy formed a $1.25 billion partnership with China Wanxiang Holdings, according to a report in Dow Jones VentureWire. The deal also included $420 million in a Series D investment.

—On-Q-ity, the Waltham, MA-based cancer diagnostics startup announced a new $5 million fundraise alongside the hiring of its new CEO and president Michael Stocum. The Series B funding was led by existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Atlas Venture, and Physic Ventures, and will go toward research and partnership efforts.

—Cambridge, MA-based Hydra Biosciences, formed a collaboration with Zalicus to develop multiple novel drug candidates for the treatment of pain. The deal gives Hydra an upfront payment and funding for development for two years.

—Enanta Pharmaceuticals of Watertown, MA, nabbed $34 million upfront payment from Novartis as part of a deal to co-develop an experimental hepatitis C drug called EDP-239. Enanta is also eligible for another $440 million in milestone payments if the drug hits certain goals, as well as royalties on a double-digit percentage of worldwide product sales.

—Boston-based micro-VC firm NextView Ventures has closed on its first fund with $21 million in capital commitments, as first reported by Dan Primack of Fortune. The firm, founded by David Beisel, Rob Go, and Lee Hower, already has 16 portfolio companies and plans to add another 15 to 20, according to the report.

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When I walked into the Madison Building Sunday night for the final round of Startup Weekend Detroit pitches, I worried for a moment that I might be the oldest person in the room. As MGMT and Deadmau5 throbbed from the auditorium’s speakers, groups of mostly male twentysomethings huddled in groups, intently pecking away on various electronic devices. The gentleman sitting next to me gnawed on a pack of Twizzlers despite the many “NO FOOD OR DRINK OTHER THAN WATER” signs, and the teenager in front of me alternated between repeatedly running a video game demo and posting photos and updates to Twitter (see all the weekend’s Twitter updates at #SWDET).

Still, if Startup Weekend Detroit’s competitors represented a chunk of Michigan’s best and brightest, then we’re in good hands. I was impressed with the overall quality of the ideas and the technology being created. As I listened to the fifteen final teams make their pitches in the building so carefully renovated by Detroit Venture Partners to appeal to young entrepreneurs, I felt like the city outside the auditorium doors could be San Francisco or Seattle.

Startup Weekend was started in 2007 with the purpose of putting a group of entrepreneurs, web developers, hackers, and futurists in a room for 54 hours to see if they could create working companies. The events have taken off since then; this is the fourth time it’s been held in Detroit. According to local organizer Brandon Chestnutt, there are 300 Startup Weekends scheduled across the world this year, and, in addition to Detroit, there were events taking place in Pakistan, Romania, Guadalajara, and Miami of Ohio this weekend.

Competitors deliver an initial round of pitches on Friday night, and from there the most interesting and viable company ideas move on to the next round. Then competitors form teams according to the skill sets needed and set about creating the technology required to bring the companies to fruition.

At the Madison Building, judges from Bizdom U, Billhighway, DVP, Ludlow Ventures, and Fathead listened to the pitches, asked tough questions, and gave candid critiques. (“Let me tell you why this will never work,” said judge Dan Izzo at one point, as the young man on stage looked like he had just been punched in the gut.) The companies, while all rooted in Internet and mobile technology, were all over the map: video games, plug and play credit card readers, an auto rebate aggregator, and, interestingly, two apps devoted to helping people achieve their goals.

Two of the more compelling ideas were Detroit-centric: Get Off Your Butt and turnDetroit. Get Off Your Butt is designed to help Detroit’s newcomers find things to do in a space crowded with local content on the subject (Yelp, visitDetroit, Metro Times, et al). The landing page already knows the day’s weather, so users choose the amount of time they have free and the Web site suggests a fun thing to do, like biking the Riverfront or catching an art flick at Cass City Cinema, along with a map and description. TurnDetroit involves crowdsourced cultural rejuvenation and land development as a response to “mass-market editorial exploitation.” (We’re glad we’re not the only ones who noticed.) TurnDetroit would place signs around the city containing QR codes, which would direct smart phone users to a list of volunteer projects. Even though these companies didn’t win, I hope their creators keep at it.

The winner of Detroit Startup Weekend was LiveSnip, which uses brand-new technology to allow users to snip blocks of content from up to 10 different websites … Next Page »

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Here in Boston we can get a little provincial. It’s us against them, East Coast vs. West Coast, Boston vs. New York, the list goes on. This focus on local applies to the tech community as much as anything else: Who’s leading the resurgence of Boston startups? Why don’t Boston VCs invest in more local companies? Is New York going to eat our lunch? How do we keep the next Facebook here?

These are all fair concerns, but let’s think bigger. Geography need not limit the opportunities for innovators, even if they are based here. (Maybe especially if they’re based here.) Certainly in fields like cleantech and energy, opportunities abound in China, as seized by local companies such as GreatPoint Energy, Boston-Power, and A123Systems.

On the tech side, plenty of Boston startups are thinking global. Jana (mobile marketing), Yottaa (Web optimizing), PeerTransfer (global payments), and Movik Networks (mobile content delivery) are a few that come to mind. It’s the last one that I’d like to take a look at here, with some historical context and investor perspective.

Westford, MA-based Movik Networks started in 2006 (formerly called Lyra Networks). The company has developed networking technology for helping wireless operators distribute content like websites and video to subscribers’ mobile devices more efficiently. What’s intriguing is that some are calling the company “Starent 2”—partly because of its global focus and strategy.

Starent Networks would be the Boston-area mobile tech company that started in 2000, went public in 2007, and got bought by Cisco for $2.9 billion in 2009. That company went after the Asian market for wireless data infrastructure, choosing to focus on the CDMA wireless standard (which was only 25 percent of the global market) rather than GSM (used in Europe, and 75 percent of the market). CDMA turned out to be lower-risk for mobile operators—they could use the same infrastructure for voice, unlike GSM, if the data business didn’t take off—and Starent was able to beat out Cisco and 3Com for a big partnership with Samsung, which helped catapult the company to success. (You can see an in-depth chat with Starent founder and serial entrepreneur Ash Dahod here.)

At a high level, Movik is following the same playbook. For starters, the company has Sean Dalton, a general partner with Highland Capital Partners, as one of its key investors. Dalton led Highland’s investment in Starent and served on its board. Movik is led by CEO John St. Amand, a been-there-done-that telecom veteran from Alcatel-Lucent and Telica (another Highland investment). Also, Movik has established a major R&D facility in India, like Starent  … Next Page »

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—CommNexus, the non-profit group for San Diego’s tech industry, held an open house for the new downtown EvoNexus incubator, which is intended to spur a proliferation of tech startups in the downtown area. While a baker’s dozen of startups are settling into the EvoNexus operation at 101 W. Broadway, companies like Take Lessons, Stay Classy, FanBox, and Climber.com already have established offices in the downtown area.

—San Diego’s AirHop Communications and Pennsylvania-based InterDigital (NASDAQ: IDCC) said they’ve been collaborating to combine AirHop’s technology for self-organizing networks with InterDigital’s bandwidth management technology. InterDigital set up an outpost in San Diego last year.

—SAIC founder J. Robert Beyster gave the University of Michigan’s engineering school $15 million, a gift that includes at least $9 million to endow a fellowship program that will fund up to 10 engineering doctoral students each year. In a statement from his alma mater last week, Beyster said he wants his gift to Michigan to help keep the United States at the forefront of global innovation and competitiveness.

—San Diego-based Extrabux, a comparison shopping Website that integrates discounts from cash back and online coupons, said today it has generated more than $1 million in cash back for its members. In a statement from the company, Extrabux CEO Jeff Nobb said the recent holiday shopping season accounted for a quarter of the total.

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The University of Michigan Board of Regents agreed to name its computer science and engineering building the “Bob and Betty Beyster Building” in recognition of a $15 million gift from J. Robert Beyster, 87, who founded SAIC (NYSE: SAI) in San Diego 43 years ago.

Beyster, who also is a San Diego Xconomist, received his bachelor’s degrees in engineering physics and engineering math at the University of Michigan in 1945, and his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics in 1947 and 1950, respectively.

He spent much of his career studying nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and founded the company also known as Science Applications International Corp. with the idea of tackling difficult problems that were important to national security. He told a San Diego audience in 2007, “I wanted to create a good place to work. I really wasn’t interested in making money.”

Beyster allocated nearly all of his shares in SAIC to recruit prominent scientists and other employees, offering them an ownership stake as an incentive to share in the company’s success. His unusual share-the-wealth philosophy made SAIC the largest employee-owned research and engineering conglomerate in the United States. He designated $1 million of his UM donation to the Center for Entrepreneurship to educate students and the community about the benefits of employee ownership.

Beyster’s gift provides at least $9 million to endow a fellowship program that will fund up to 10 engineering doctoral students each year—the largest sum dedicated to fellowships in the engineering college. The gift also includes up to $5 million toward renovating the Ford Nuclear Reactor Building, pending project approval.

“The fields of energy and defense were greatly advanced under Dr. Beyster’s leadership,” says Ronald Gilgenbach, chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences in a statement from the university. “He is also known as a visionary who spearheaded the use of particle accelerators in nuclear measurements and engineering. So it is fitting that his gift will help construct the world’s premier nuclear measurements laboratory.”

The Beyster Fellows Program is intended to support students in fields that link high-performance computing to such real-world problems as network security, renewable energy materials, advanced imaging and stealth technologies, nuclear reactor safety and robotic systems for automotive safety and military vehicles.

SAIC moved its corporate headquarters from San Diego to McLean, VA, in 2009, five years after Beyster had retired as chairman. Today SAIC is a Fortune 500 company with more than 43,000 employees, and generates close to $11 billion in annual revenues.

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Watertown, MA-based Enanta Pharmaceuticals just took a step ahead in the hepatitis C drug development derby.

Enanta said today it has secured an exclusive deal with Novartis to co-develop an experimental hepatitis C drug, dubbed EDP-239, that’s designed to work by blocking a protein called NS5A. The deal provides Enanta with $34 million in upfront cash, another $440 million in milestone payments if the drug reaches certain goals, plus royalties on a double-digit percentage of worldwide product sales. Enanta has also retained the right to co-market the drug in the U.S. The product was recently cleared by regulators to start human clinical trials.

The alliance is just the latest in a feverish string of deals in the hepatitis C field. Within the past few months, Gilead Sciences made an $11 billion acquisition of Pharmasset, and Bristol-Myers Squibb acquired Inhibitex for $2.5 billion to obtain hepatitis C antiviral drugs from a class known as nucleotide polymerase inhibitors. Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Merck are attacking the virus with protease inhibitors that were approved by the FDA last year. Others, including Vertex and Roche, are testing another class of drugs known as non-nucleotide polymerase inhibitors—all in an effort to create a cocktail to stop the fast-mutating virus that causes chronic liver damage.

NS5A is a protein that scientists say plays a critical role in hepatitis C viral replication, and the body’s ability to respond to traditional interferon therapy. The class has a few other well-known rivals in development, from Bristol-Myers, Cambridge, MA-based Idenix Pharmaceuticals, and San Francisco-based Presidio Pharmaceuticals.

“We believe EDP-239 has great potential as a potent ingredient in combination drug therapy, and our preclinical studies have demonstrated high potency against multiple genotypes of the virus, excellent safety profile and a preclinical pharmacokinetic profile amenable to once-a-day dosing in humans,” said Jay Luly, Enanta’s CEO, in a statement.

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As if they didn’t have enough headaches to deal with, here’s some fresh fear, uncertainty, and doubt for small-business IT guys: Employees are not going to stop hauling their smartphones to work, and you probably don’t have a good idea of just who is tapping into your system.

That’s the word from Seattle startup Mobilisafe, which is developing a software service to help small and medium-sized IT departments better track and manage employee devices at work. Big companies have been dealing with this trend for several years now—it’s called BYOD (bring your own device)—but, Mobilisafe CEO Giri Sreenivas says, there aren’t a lot of good options for smaller companies yet.

As they develop their product, the venture-backed Mobilisafe has been studying employee device use through a private beta test. Sreenivas says that, over the course of about three months, the study tracked around 40 million mobile device “connections” with a company IT system in a broad array of industries (a single e-mail would represent one connection).

Obviously, IT professionals are aware that more people are toting personal smartphones or tablets that they use to do some work. But Sreenivas says that at smaller businesses, IT pros didn’t have a good way to put their arms around how much that was actually happening.

“These small and medium-sized business IT managers are significantly underestimating the number of mobile devices and the kinds of mobile devices that are coming in,” Sreenivas says. “It’s a blind spot, and they’re fully aware of it.”

The Mobilisafe trial is finding that there’s potentially a higher degree of consumer mobile devices in smaller businesses —around 80 percent of employees using their personal device at work in small and medium-sized businesses, versus figures seen elsewhere in the 60 percent range for enterprises, Sreenivas says.

He says that’s probably because smaller businesses have been subsidizing employee cell-phone plans for longer than big companies, which would tend to just issue corporate phones instead.

Another finding that stood out was a pretty high degree of Apple device users—56 percent—with an operating system that wasn’t up to date. That could leave the device open to malicious exploits that were fixed in later versions of the OS. Sreenivas points to a recent exploit of the PDF file format, which hackers offered as a simple way to “jailbreak” an iPhone for users.

“There were PDFs on the Web that were taking advantage of this exploit, and there were a number of attacks,” Sreenivas says. “Corporate data could be leaked off the device to a random server in China or Russia.”

Companies also saw nearly 40 percent of personal devices go inactive for more than a month during the course of the study—leading some to question whether a phone had been sold, and whether it might have some sensitive data buried somewhere inside.

Mobilisafe, of course, sees an opportunity to build a business here. The company, founded by T-Mobile veterans Sreenivas and Dirk Sigurdson, is operating on seed funding of $1.2 million raised last year from Madrona and Trilogy Partners.

Others are paying attention to the problem—Cisco, for instance, built its own internal fix to boost security in the face of the BYOD surge (although it reportedly took three years). But not every company has the heft of a Cisco. And there are plenty of “mobile device management” startups heading on the case as well. Mobilisafe wouldn’t tell me what sets their approach apart from all the others, so I guess you’ll have to stay tuned to hear how they’ll hope to make a dent in this market.

“These organizations are still getting comfortable with mobile devices,” Sreenivas says. “But frankly, there have not to date been great products on the market to deal with this.”

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You can’t talk to a Googler for very long without hearing them recite the company’s mission statement: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Not only does it sound noble, but it’s an all-purpose answer for the sorts of nosey questions tech journalists pose, like why Google would want to buy a company that compiles restaurant reviews (i.e. Zagat), or why it cares about flight reservation systems for airlines (ITA), or why it’s spending $30 million to encourage private companies to send robots to the Moon (the Google Lunar X Prize).

Of course, Google’s mission statement long ago ceased to be a full explanation of its intentions, or of its true impact. Google might like to be seen as a mere arranger of information—the meekly efficient librarian who puts the books back in the stacks every night. But the reality is that the company is too big, too wealthy, and too ambitious to step lightly on the world’s data. There isn’t a marketplace or a category of knowledge that Google can “organize” without remaking it in the process.

In areas like book publishing, video entertainment, and mobile communications, Google’s expanding reach has been exhaustively covered by the press. But there’s one area where Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has exercised a transformative influence almost completely outside the spotlight of media attention: public transportation. The changes are easy to overlook, especially if you never step out of your car, or if you only ride the bus or subway in your own city. But there’s been a dramatic shift over the last five years in the way people plan trips on public transportation and the way transit agencies communicate with their riders—and Google is the main instigator.

This revolution, as with almost everything the company does, is proceeding at Internet scale. More than 475 transit agencies in the U.S. and around the world now submit their operating schedules to Google, which publishes the data as part of its Google Maps service. So whether you’re accessing a map from a desktop browser or a smartphone, you can figure out how to get where you’re going by bus or train, not just by car. To see arrival and departure times for thousands of bus and train lines, you can simply click on the little blue icons that connote transit stops (at least, you can if you’re using a desktop browser or an Android phone).

Live departure times in Google Maps for Mobile

The file format that Google invented in 2006 to make all this possible, called GTFS, has become the de facto world standard for sharing transit data. And now Google is pushing a related standard that enables agencies to alert riders about service delays in real time—thus answering that age-old question, “When’s my bus coming?” So far, Google is displaying these live transit updates for only four U.S. cities (Boston, Portland, OR, San Diego, and San Francisco) and two European cities (Madrid, Spain, and Turin, Italy). But it hopes to add many, many more.

Google’s activism in public transit is having widespread ripple effects. Most importantly, the company’s services are making it easier for public-transit users to plan their bus or train trips to minimize waits and missed connections. In theory, better experiences for riders translate into higher ridership, greater revenues for transit agencies, and less congestion on streets and highways.

On top of that, Google’s leadership has opened up space for a whole ecosystem of transit-app startups. It’s not as if Google invented the idea of putting transit data online—that’s been going on since at least 1998, when a pair of University of California students created a website called Transitinfo.org to tie together data from 26 transit agencies around the Bay Area. (It’s now called 511 Transit.) But the emergence of a common standard for publishing transit schedules has enabled independent developers who started out building apps tailored to their local systems to think much bigger.

Just look at Embark, a Y Combinator-funded startup in San Francisco. The company’s first mobile trip-planning app in 2008 covered only the Bay Area Rapid Transportation (BART) system. Now the startup makes apps for … Next Page »

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