After Carlsbad, CA-based Verdezyne disclosed last month that it plans to raise more than $15 million in venture funding, I arranged to sit down with Damien Perriman, the company’s vice president of business development.

As it turns out, the startup that was founded in 2005 as CODA Genomics has essentially re-engineered itself over the past 18 months. The company overhauled its core business strategy, recruited a new CEO, E. William Radany, along with a new management team, changed its name, and moved its headquarters from Orange County to Carlsbad, CA, about 28 miles north of San Diego. In changing its name to Verdezyne, the company created an identity that is better aligned with its revised focus on the “green design” of biofuels and industrial chemicals.

The company initially was focused on technology spun out from UC Irvine that used specialized computer algorithms to design synthetic DNA. The company offered its services in Computationally Optimized DNA Assembly, or CODA, to help drug discovery teams at pharmaceutical customers like Eli Lilly and Genentech design synthetic genes that could be used to maximize the production of certain proteins for their biotech drug manufacturing processes.

Perriman, who joined Verdezyne in February, tells me, “Our investors made a decision in 2008 that we could make a lot more money by doing the production ourselves.”

With its extensive experience in computational biology and bioinformatics, Verdezyne saw the value in creating high-diversity libraries of genes, so that various genes could be inserted into fast-dividing yeast cells (and other micro-organisms), essentially programming the microbes to produce enzymes it would not otherwise produce. Verdezyne landed a federal grant last month to help build out its genomic library.

“We prefer to work with yeast,” Perriman says, “but we can work with any fungi or bacterial organism.”

The company, which now has 26 employees, has identified three primary markets for its technology.

The first and most obvious target is an …Next Page »

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Aptera, the sleek carmaker backed by Google and Idealabs, didn’t respond to my inquiry earlier this week about reports of an internal split in which founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony had left the company. But in an online report published today by The San Diego Union-Tribune, Aptera officials rejected accounts that Fambro and Anthony were ousted in a boardroom showdown.

The company’s status is a keen issue to some 4,000 people, including celebrities Tom Hanks, Robin Williams, and Shaquille O’Neal, who have put down $500 deposits to be the first to buy one of the three-wheel, two-seater vehicles. The Aptera 2e, the company’s first production vehicle, resembles a wingless plane and is expected to cost between $25,000 and $40,000. Aptera is based in Vista, CA, about 30 miles north of San Diego.

Citing a statement issued by Aptera CEO Paul Wilbur, the Union-Tribune says the carmaker had to adjust its production schedule “to align with financing realities.” Instead of producing its first fuel-efficient model in the fall of 2009, as Aptera announced at the beginning of this year, Wilbur says the company will complete its first vehicles in 2010. About 10 of Aptera’s 40 employees have been laid off.

The company, which has raised at least $27.5 million from Google, Idealabs, and other venture investors, is seeking additional funding, according to Popular Mechanics. Aptera says it also intends to resubmit its application for a $75 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Incentives Program.

Aptera says co-founders Fambro and Anthony were not asked to leave. Fambro remains on the board, but has taken a leave of absence from the company until next year. Anthony is now the CEO of Flux Power, a startup in the San Diego area that is developing battery-management systems. In another online account published by Popular Mechanics magazine, Fambro also voiced his continuing support for CEO Wilbur.

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As startups developing next-generation biofuels emerge in San Diego, Boston, and elsewhere, a business model for rapidly expanding to commercial-scale operations already can be found in the biotech industry, experts said yesterday. The premise of presentations organized by Biocom, San Diego’s life sciences industry group, is that collaborations being formed between biofuel startups and big energy are comparable to the partnerships formed between biotech startups and big pharmaceutical companies.

Biofuels development partnerships will be crucial to meeting renewable fuel standards that the federal government set in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Wain Fishburn, a founding partner of the Cooley Godward law firm’s San Diego office, said the standards require the U.S. biofuels industry to increase its production fourfold—from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons in 2022. Fishburn, who introduced the speakers at the Biocom event, said the ability to meet the federal goal depends on a variety of factors, including the ability to lower the cost of biofuels to be competitive with petroleum-based crude, and the scalability of feedstock, production facilities, distribution, and related infrastructure.

But what it really comes down to, as Verenium (NASDAQ: VRNM) executive William Baum told the audience, is capital.

Baum, who became Cambridge, MA-based Verenium’s executive vice president of business development in 2007 (following the 2006 merger of San Diego’s Diversa and Cambridge’s Celunol) said the need for capital was the theme he heard “over and over again” during a recent meeting that focused on the biofuels industry. “We’ve got hundreds of biofuel companies that are trying to get to the next stage. If you don’t have a big brother with deep pockets, like a BP, Exxon, Shell, or a Chevron, it’s going to be very difficult.”

A number of partnerships already have been established between biofuels startups and major energy conglomerates, Fishburn noted. He listed the following collaborations:

—BP, the London-based global energy conglomerate, has formed two strategic partnerships with Verenium, which has been developing technology to produce cellulosic ethanol using proprietary microbes to accelerate the breakdown of non-edible, high-cellulose plant material into ethanol. Baum described the first collaboration, announced in August 2008, as a technology joint venture for IP. (BP agreed to put up $90 million to develop “low-cost, environmentally sound cellulosic ethanol production facilities in the United States.”) Through a second deal announced nine months ago, BP agreed to provide an additional $45 million and to form a …Next Page »

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Sony Ericsson says it plans to close its operations in San Diego as part of a global consolidation that the cell phone handset maker announced today. The London-based joint venture between Sweden’s LM Ericsson and Japan’s Sony Corp plans to move its North American headquarters from Research Triangle, NC, to Atlanta, and consolidate its product development operations by closing sites in six locations—San Diego; Research Triangle, NC; Seattle; Miami; Kista, Sweden; and Chennai, India. About 1,600 jobs are being eliminated.

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Long before San Diego was known as a hub of telecommunications innovation or for its proliferation of biotech companies, it was a leading center for the development of deep underwater technologies.

During the 1960s and ’70s, scientists from the U.S. Navy laboratories on Point Loma and UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography founded numerous startups with technologies derived from underwater sensors, acoustics, and signal processing techniques that had been developed for the Navy’s cat-and-mouse games with Soviet submarines. Robotic technology that the Navy had developed to recover a hydrogen bomb from the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea in 1966 led almost directly to the formation of Hydroproducts and Ametek Straza, two companies that made deep ocean ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles) in San Diego during the 1970s. Hydroproducts and Ametek Straza faded from San Diego, however, after they were acquired by bigger companies that wanted to introduce ROVs to the offshore oil and gas industry.

It might not be apparent on the surface, but much of that expertise in subsea technologies remains in San Diego today, according to Leonard Pool, who founded Sidus Solutions in 2000 to develop deep underwater pan-and-tilt camera systems and related ROV positioning equipment. Pool, who is moderating a panel discussion today on “marine technology as an important growth industry” for San Diego, says close to 150 companies continue to ply their trade here.

Alvin Diving off California

“When the U.S. Navy decided that San Diego was going to be a port for submarines, all these companies sprang up,” Pool tells me. “We do get looked at as a cottage industry.” He says these companies have thrived, despite a post-Cold War decline in defense funding for new submarine-hunting technologies. One likely reason, Pool says, is that the “oil and gas community continues to look at San Diego as a hub for subsea technology development.”

Pool’s panel discussion is part of “The Maritime Collaboration Summit,” a two-day conference organized by the Maritime Alliance, a San Diego non-profit industry group, aboard the tourism ship Inspiration Hornblower. The summit, which ends today, is intended to increase awareness of San Diego’s importance as a hub for technology innovation, and to encourage collaboration between the scientific community and commercial maritime innovators, according to Michael B. Jones, president of the Maritime Alliance.

“Right now, the maritime community in San Diego is very fragmented with little visibility or public understanding of its importance,” says Jones, who also heads …Next Page »

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San Diego’s NextImage Medical, Inc., which has developed a Web-based system for scheduling and managing diagnostic imaging services, says it has raised $5 million in Series A funding in a round led by Chrysalis Ventures of Louisville, KY. Liz Griggs founded NextImage Medical last year as a way to provide high-quality, low-cost radiology services, either through insurers, self-insured employers, or direct-to-consumer. A statement from NextImage Medical says Griggs previously was the founder of New Jersey-based One Call Medical, a radiology preferred provider organization (PPO) that was sold in 2003 for $115 million.

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I had an opportunity to sit down recently (along with several other journalists) for an informal chat with Ellen Pao, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and a member of the famed Menlo Park, CA, venture firm’s GreenTech investment team.

Pao was in town to be the keynote speaker at the inaugural Cleantech San Diego Showcase, an event the non-profit industry group intends to hold four times a year as a way of calling attention to emerging green technologies and the local companies developing them. Pao provided an overview of KPCB’s GreenTech team, which consists of 20 partners in the United States and China. The firm has invested about $680 million over the past five years in nearly 50 startup companies, most of which remain in stealth mode.

Pao was gracious, but not especially forthcoming. For example, she told us that KPCB’s greentech investments include funding San Diego-based V-Vehicle Co., which announced plans earlier this year to build a new line of “environmentally friendly and fuel-efficient” cars in Northeastern Louisiana. The green aspect of the V-Vehicle’s design apparently figures in the startup’s request for a $250 million low-interest loan under the Department of Energy’s Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing program. But V-Vehicle has not explained publicly how or why its car is eco-friendly, which has led to conflicting media reports (with some describing it as an electric vehicle). But Pao declined to explain why V-Vehicle is green, saying KPCB doesn’t talk about portfolio companies that are still in stealth mode—even though partners John Doerr and Ray Lane participated in a news conference that Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana held in June to announce the state’s support for the project.

Pao said KPCB’s cleantech investments are divided among startups that are focused in a variety of green categories, including energy efficiency, cars and transportation, batteries (especially companies developing new energy storage capabilities for electric utilities), renewable energy, and “carbon management and sequestration,” i.e., technologies for preventing carbon dioxide from wafting into the atmosphere by capturing the gas and piping it underground.

“There’s a lot of passion around trying to solve the global warming problem,” Pao said. “We’re looking, though, for big solutions. We have some projects, and we think it’s a big opportunity once there is a price on carbon.” She was referring to a “cap and trade” proposal put forward by the Obama Administration that would set strict limits on pollution that causes …Next Page »

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Paul Wilbur, a Detroit auto industry veteran who was named CEO of Carlsbad, CA-based Aptera 14 months ago, gave no indication of internal turmoil at the futuristic car’s headquarters when he appeared last week at an event sponsored by Cleantech San Diego.

But as Darryl Siry reports today on Wired’s Autotopia blog, a prolonged power struggle that pitted Aptera founders Steve Fambro and Chris Anthony against Wilbur and Aptera board members apparently came to a head in recent weeks. Wired says rumors about the founders’ departure, as well as layoffs amid financial difficulties, began appearing last week on the Aptera Forum, an online message board for Aptera car enthusiasts. Aptera did not immediately respond to an e-mail query seeking the company’s response to the reports. According to Wired, the company says it’s slowing down its burn rate while waiting for the Department of Energy to review its loan application, and maintains that its relationship with Fambro and Anthony remains positive.

Fambro, who founded Aptera about six years ago, has previously said his aim with the company was to build a safe and comfortable passenger vehicle that was more fuel-efficient than anything else on the road. The company says the prototype of its aerodynamic pod-shaped, three-wheel vehicle gets 230 miles to the gallon.

Aptera raised about $24 million roughly 18 months ago from investors that include Google and Idealab. CEO Wilbur told me last year that the company was having no trouble attracting additional funding, but the Wired blog reports that additional funding has in fact been difficult to secure during a drawn-out battle over which course the company should be steering.

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San Diego’s Global Analytics Holdings says it has raised $10 million of a targeted $14 million round that consists of equity investments, options, and rights to securities, according to a recent regulatory filing. The company provides consulting services for business customers and specializes in developing software for statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and neural networks.

The filing indicates the capital is being raised in connection with a merger, acquisition, or exchange offer, but founding CEO Krishna Gopinathan did not respond to a call or e-mail seeking further information. According to the Global Analytics website, Gopinathan was the primary inventor of Falcon Fraud Manager, a neural-network technology developed at San Diego-based HNC Software (now part of Fair Isaac) that is used to protect most credit cards worldwide.

Global Analytics has been operating at least five years and has more than 100 employees, according to its website. A number of key executives at Global Analytics, including the executive vice president of analytics, vice president of products, and vice president of software development, are former HNC employees.

Last year, Global Analytics named Larry Rosenberger, the former CEO of Minneapolis, MN-based Fair Isaac, to its board of directors. The company also noted that Rosenberger and his wife Diane invested in the San Diego startup. Peter Rip, a general partner at San Francisco’s Crosslink Capital, also is on Global Analytics’ board, although Crosslink does not identify Global Analytics as a portfolio company.

Global Analytics also has formed a strategic partnership with Hewitt Associates, the Illinois-based human resources and outsourcing firm, and has been working on what it calls “the objective quantification of the value of human capital investments.” The company says it has been working with Hewitt in recent years to pioneer development of comprehensive models that tie such human resources metrics as talent attraction, retention, and engagement to shareholder value, creating what Hewitt calls its Human Capital Foresight.

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San Diego serial entrepreneur Michael Robertson is going to have to find something else to do now that Gizmo5, the VoIP (voice-over-Internet-protocol) company he founded in 2003, has become part of a certain search giant to the north. We have that news and more.

—Google confirmed that it’s buying San Diego-based Gizmo5, a six-year-old company that provides Internet-based calling software for mobile phones and computers. The service will become part of the Google Voice number-unification service. Google did not disclose the purchase price, which media reports put at about $30 million. Gizmo5’s 6 million users will still be able to use the service, according to a statement. But Google is suspending new Gizmo5 signups, and existing users can no longer sign up for a call-in number.

—Platformic, a Web-based startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites, said it is adding social media capabilities. The two-year-old San Diego-based company, which has targeted broadcast companies, says its expanded software-as-a-service product will help a broadcaster’s audience share photos, create their own user profiles, and create personal blogs on the broadcaster’s Platformic-powered website.

—Qualcomm’s No. 2 executive opened a regional mobile technology conference in San Diego by providing an overview of steps the chipmaking giant is taking to help ease the pressure on wireless network bottlenecks as mobile data traffic soars. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) Chief Operating Officer Len Lauer told the 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference that in the year 2014, worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

—Technology innovations that help companies optimize their profitability will likely lead to the next wave of analytics-based software startups, according to Stephen Coggeshall of San Diego-based ID Analytics. Another hot area will be analytics that can help forecast consumer behavior, said Coggeshall, who was participating in a discussion about new opportunities in analytics during the San Diego Software Industry Council’s annual forum on analytics.

—Israel’s Panoramic Power won $250,000 and became the first winner of the top QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power is developing energy-monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy so-called “smart grid” technologies within their existing facilities.

—The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group said is getting $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a giant wind farm in eastern Washington state, about 110 miles east of Portland, OR. The $1 billion Windy Point/Windy Flats project is expected to generate enough electricity for 250,000 homes.

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When Tom Clancy introduced a panel discussion yesterday at a forum on analytics software, the founder of San Diego’s Tao Venture Partners said the forum was “founded four years ago by people who had an interest in seeing San Diego get established as a leading cluster in the analytics space.”

The forum, which is sponsored by the San Diego Software Industry Council, offers an annual snapshot of local developments in a booming industry that has become crucial to business intelligence, data storage and management, and complex decision-making.

Since Robert Hecht-Nielsen founded HNC Software here in 1986, the number of companies that focus on analytics software in San Diego has mushroomed, with more than 100 companies specializing in neural networking, data mining, pattern recognition, and related algorithms and technologies for analyzing data. Yet Clancy and local experts who discussed “opportunities in analytics” lamented that San Diego’s standing as the birthplace of some key companies and technologies has gone largely unrecognized. Among the examples cited:

— HNC, which specialized in technology to analyze credit card transactions, was acquired for $810 million in 2002 by Fair Isaac and Co. and integrated with the Minneapolis, MN-company’s credit-scoring business.

—Urchin Software, a suburban San Diego Web analytics company that developed an assortment of tools for measuring website usage, page views, and other statistics, was acquired by Google in 2005 for an estimated $30 million. Seven months later, Google renamed its Urchin business Google Analytics, and made analytics tools available to Web users for free.

—WebSideStory, a San Diego company that developed website traffic analysis tools, rebranded itself as Visual Sciences in 2007 and was acquired later that same year for $394 million by Utah-based Omniture. (Last month, Omniture was itself acquired by San Jose, CA-based Adobe Systems in a $1.8 billion deal.)

—Carlsbad, CA-based analytics software developer Keylime Software was acquired for $9.5 million in 2003 by Pasadena, CA-based Overture, an advertising distribution network that was later acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion.

Such deals reflect a surging awareness of the value of data, says Stephen Coggeshall, a co-founder and chief technology officer for San Diego-based ID Analytics, which uses advanced analytics to search credit databases for telltale signs of identity theft. In terms of technology innovations that will likely lead to forming new companies, Coggeshall says …Next Page »

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San Diego-based Cyntellect , which makes work stations used by biotechs for cell analysis, purification, and processing, has raised $15.5 million so far in a secondary round that aims to raise a total of $18.6 million, according to a recent regulatory filing.

Cyntellect says its instruments are used in life sciences research, biopharmaceutical production, stem cell research, and drug discovery. The company says its cytometers provide scientists with rapid, high-quality imaging and analysis of cells in every well of a 384-well microplate array. Cyntellect says its instruments can scan an entire well while maintaining consistent illumination for accurate cell identification from the center to the well edge. The company’s product line also includes an automated system for cultivating cell lines used in biopharmaceutical manufacturing.

The current venture round consists of equity investments and convertible warrants, according to the filing. Cyntellect was founded in 1997, and earlier investors in the company include Bru II Venture Capital Fund, Iceland Genomics Ventures, Sigma-Aldrich, Sumitomo, and Third Security, according to VentureWire.

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San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says Panoramic Power, a wireless sensor startup based in Kidron, Israel, is the winner of the first QPrize, the incentive prize competition launched earlier this year by Qualcomm Ventures. Panoramic Power has developed energy monitoring wireless technology that enables a company or institution to deploy Smart Grid technologies within their existing facilities. Panoramic Power, which previously won $100,000 as a QPrize regional winner, was awarded another $150,000 and the opportunity to compete in a global business plan competition held at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

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The San Diego-based Cannon Power Group says it has received $19.4 million in federal renewable energy grants to help fund construction of a 400-megawatt wind farm in Klickitat County, WA, about 110 miles East of Portland, OR. Total investment in the project will be more than $1 billion. When completed, the Windy Point/Windy Flats project will be one of the largest wind farms in the nation, producing enough electricity for more than 250,000 homes per year. The project power has been designated for use by California municipalities.

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[Corrected 11/11/09, 3:15 pm. See below] Qualcomm chief operating officer, Len Lauer, says the San Diego wireless chipmaking giant is working across a broad front of technology development to accommodate a surge in wireless data traffic.

“The mobile Internet has arrived,” Lauer says in the opening keynote talk yesterday at the 2009 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference. With more than 4 billion wireless subscribers around the world now—including 885 million 3G phone users—Lauer says the growth in wireless data is reflected by a roughly one-third increase in revenue reported over the past year by Verizon, AT&T, and other major carriers.

[Corrects to say Lauer was comparing monthly data traffic in 2014, not monthly growth in data traffic] By 2014, or just five years, Lauer says  worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed total mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

Qualcomm founder and former chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul Jacobs, who is Qualcomm’s current chairman and CEO, sounded a similar theme when they warned of capacity constraints last month during a keynote appearance at the CTIA Fall 2009 conference in San Diego.

In addition to the increasing demand for mobile data from smart phones and netbooks, Lauer says the trend can only accelerate as new wireless device categories proliferate, especially in what he calls machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Examples of M2M technology developers include CardioNet, a Pennsylvania wireless health company that uses wireless sensors to continuously monitor heart patients for irregular heartbeats; wireless smart grid technologies being deployed by electric utilities (including San Diego Gas & Electric), and eBook devices like Amazon’s Kindle.

“Other operators are seeing this as a viable market, but it is going to take awhile to develop,” Lauer says, citing estimates that 229 million M2M cellular connections are forecast for 2013. “We do see from Qualcomm’s standpoint this being a very large opportunity for our chips.”

To cope with the surge in wireless data traffic, Lauer outlined a range of technology advances that Qualcomm has underway:

—The latest generation of advanced wireless receivers, which include updated revisions to the EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) telecommunications standard (part of Qualcomm’s CDMA2000 family), operate …Next Page »

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Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), the Carlsbad, CA-based provider of biotech instruments and lab supplies, says it has agreed to acquire Woburn, MA-based BioTrove, which has developed a high throughput gene expression and genotyping analysis system. BioTrove, which withdrew plans to raise $75 million in an IPO last year, says the flexible array format of its OpenArray technology enables researchers to perform more than 3,000 PCR or qPCR gene expression assays at a time. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Mark Underhill says he was doing Web design and applications development for Clear Channel Communications when the San Antonio, TX-based media company announced plans to sell 448 of its 1,150 radio stations, along with its 42-station TV group. That was in November 2006.

Underhill, who had initially been hired in San Diego six or seven years earlier to run 11 Clear Channel websites, says he remembers thinking at the time, “I’ve learned so much doing this. But I could do better than this. I could build a better mousetrap.”

The following year (just a few months after Clear Channel completed its $1.5 billion sale), Underhill and his longtime friend Claudio Canive started Platformic, a San Diego startup that enables customers to create and manage their own websites. The company, which acquired its first customer by the end of 2007, has targeted the broadcast industry and now counts Comcast, the Tribune Co., and Fox Broadcasting among its biggest customers.

Platformic-based Web design

Platformic’s software-as-a-service model provides simple point-and-click tools that do not require users to learn Adobe’s Dreamweaver Web design software or to write computer code. The company says its hosted system enable customers to “come up with any look and feel” for their own websites by empowering people who know what a website should look like, but who don’t necessarily know how to create it. Websites using Platformic’s technology include Los Angeles TV station KTLA and San Francisco’s AM sports radio station KNBR and its San Mateo sister station, KTCT. Last week, Platformic helped launch 12 Fox regional sports websites throughout the country.

Platformic’s roughly 200 customers also include what Underhill describes as small “mom and pop” businesses operating …Next Page »

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San Diego’s Gizmo5, which was rumored to be a Skype acquisition target for $50 million about three weeks ago, is now reported to have been sold—except the buyer is identified as Google, and the price is put at $30 million.

Both the Skype and Google reports were exclusives from TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, who initially explained that Skype’s acquisition of Gizmo5 was the perfect backup plan in case Skype lost control of certain patents to its core technology that were the subject of lawsuits filed by Skype’s prospective buyers. Now Skype doesn’t really need Gizmo5, since eBay reached a comprehensive settlement with Skype’s founders last week. TechCrunch now says, citing “multiple sources with knowledge of the deal,” that Google has therefore stepped in to acquire Gizmo5.

Gizmo5, which was founded by Michael Robertson of MP3.com fame, provides free VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) software and related technology for making Internet-based phone calls. After seeing the TechCrunch account earlier today, I sent an e-mail to Robertson asking, “Can you confirm? Can you discuss?”

He replied by e-mail, saying, “No and no. Can’t comment on any rumors. Sorry.”

The deal could make sense. While Google Talk is among Google’s many free offerings, the on-line chatting service is not set up to call specific phone numbers, and both parties in a call must have the Google Talk client running for it to work. TechCrunch says, anyway, that the Gizmo5 acquisition would enable Google to combine Google Talk with Google Voice, the application it has been testing that allows users to have a single phone number that connects to a variety of features, including conference calls, phone call recording, and text messaging.

While Google was mum on the Gizmo5 report at the time of this writing, it did confirm one acquisition today, saying that it has agreed to pay $750 million to acquire AdMob, a mobile display ad technology provider based in San Mateo, CA. Wade offers his perspective and some reaction among Boston’s mobile ad startups to the deal here.

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San Diego’s Trius Therapeutics, a venture-backed biotech developing a new antibiotic for treating acute and life-threatening bacterial infections, submitted a regulatory filing Friday to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public stock offering. It marks the third IPO filing by a company in the San Diego area so far this year.

The biotech was founded in 2004, and has posted a loss every year since then. No pricing terms were disclosed in the filing. Trius plans to list on the NASDAQ under the symbol TSRX.

The San Diego biotech passed a key Phase 2 test of its antibiotic in June, with an overall cure rate of 96 percent at three different doses for patients with complicated skin infections. The company has been looking to proceed to Phase 3 clinical trials of its antibiotic, torezolid, which Trius describes as a second-generation successor to linezolid, the Pfizer antibiotic known as Zyvox.

Even when I sat down with Trius CEO Jeff Stein seven months ago, he was looking ahead to fund its Phase 3 trials from another fundraising round, or by striking a development deal with a strategic partner.

Trius licensed torezolid from South Korea’s Dong-A Pharmaceuticals, but the company says it has developed new techniques that use antisense technology to identify other potential antibacterial drugs.

Trius says its lead antibiotic, like Pfizer’s linezolid, is particularly effective against drug-resistant strains of bacteria, such as MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus). Torezolid also appears to be more potent than linezolid, allowing for lower dosing, and can be administered intravenously. Stein told Luke an estimated 19,000 people in the U.S. die from bacterial infections each year. Total U.S. sales for the four existing antibiotics labeled for MRSA grew from $778 million in 2005 to $1.4 billion in 2008, according to Trius’ IPO filing. Sales of linezolid alone were $1.1 billion.

With the additional funding, Trius says it plans to conduct two Phase 3 clinical trials to evaluate the 200 milligram dose of torezolid for treating acute bacterial skin infections. The first trial, which is expected to begin by June 2010, is intended to evaluate the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of the dosage in adolescent and adult patients in comparison to linezolid. The second trial will begin by administering torezolid to patients intravenously and subsequently switch to oral tablets.

Trius has raised close to $51 million in venture capital, and recently secured a $19.2 million loan from a number of existing investors that is convertible to stock. According to its IPO registration, San Francisco-based Sofinnova Ventures holds a 21.3 percent stake in the company; Menlo Park, CA-based InterWest Partners holds a 17.7 percent stake; San Francisco-based Versant Partners, 17.7 percent; Westwood, MA-based Prism VentureWorks, 13.5 percent; and Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, 11.9 percent. None of the firms will retain their current shares following the IPO.

MaxLinear, a Carlsbad, CA, semiconductor designer, also filed for an IPO Friday. San Diego-based Bridgepoint Education went public through an IPO earlier this year.

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PaxVax, a San Diego startup backed by Seattle’s Ignition Capital, has raised $2 million of a planned $6 million investment round, according to a document filed Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The biotech was founded in early 2007 to develop new oral vaccine technology based on a common cold virus called the adenovirus. The company says its vaccine, which is administered as oral tablets, avoids much of the requirements that conventional vaccines require—including cold storage for the vaccine itself and inoculation by qualified medical personnel. PaxVax says its oral tablets can be stored and distributed at room temperature, and are self-administered.

PaxVax says its vaccines also can be produced in large quantities and at record speed and low expense compared with traditional vaccines derived from egg culture. The company also says an oral vaccine may yield a more robust immune response than traditional vaccines.

The biotech was co-founded by Ken Kelley, who has worked in biotechnology for more than 25 years, including such companies as IntraBiotics Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, CA, and Integrated Genetics (acquired by Genzyme), and with such venture capital firms as K2 BioVentures and Latterell Venture Partners, according to the PaxVax website.

PaxVax’s board includes Ignition Capital operating partner Rennie Coit, who represents the Seattle VC firm at PaxVax. A pediatrician who got his medical degree at UC San Diego, Coit previously worked as a strategic planning consultant to clients that included academic medical centers, health insurance proviers, medical research organizations and global health providers. He also served as the chief operating officer of the University of Washington Medicine Neighborhood Clinics.

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