The future for most of us is a totally uncharted territory. The noble art of divining doesn’t seem to have made much progress since the days of the Delphic oracle more than 2,000 years ago.

But Recorded Future, an American-Scandinavian startup founded by Swedish entrepreneur Christopher Ahlberg and headquartered in the Boston area, claims to be able to make fairly good predictions on what will happen, by organizing and analyzing information collected from the Internet and presenting the results in useful ways. To quote the company’s own description:

“Recorded Future offers robust tools for temporal and predictive analysis including advanced visualizations, data for predictive modeling, and fine-grain Future oriented alerts.”

The oracle of Delphi was known to be secretive, and Recorded Future has to a large extent embraced the same policy. If you look at its website under the heading “Press” you’ll find the statement: “We don’t grant interviews and we don’t issue press releases.”

There have, however, been some exceptions to the rule. In March, the company’s CTO, Staffan Truvé, gave a presentation of Recorded Future’s technology at a conference organized by students at Linköping University in Sweden.

And Christopher Ahlberg recently granted my colleage Mats Lewan at the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik an interview.

Dr. Ahlberg told Mats that he thinks that today’s search engines have shortcomings when it comes to temporal information: “Google doesn’t understand time. And there are very few systems that understand time. It’s tricky. Internet tends to organize in terms of publication date.”

“It is really not easy to be able to extract temporal information from human texts, especially when it is by journalists who like to write in a colorful way,” says Dr. Ahlberg.
To be able to do that, the software must make sense of vague terms like “early next week,” “on Thursday,” “soon,” “later,” and “towards the end of the year.” According to Dr. Ahlberg, Recorded Future has analyzed thousands of English temporal expressions and is now doing the same for other languages.

For a user, the analysis could result in knowing when a competitor’s new product will hit the market; or help one spot plans for mergers and acquisitions that will influence the stock market. Or maybe just knowing when the market thinks something will happen, and being able to track the rumors in advance, might be good enough for anyone trading in stocks.

The company has funding from Google Ventures and also from another party with a long history of gathering and analyzing information—the Central Intelligence Agency, via its venture capital company In-Q-Tel.

Christopher Ahlberg started out as a researcher in data visualization technologies. In the mid-1990s he started Spotfire, a company focused on analyzing and visualizing business-critical information from large databases. Spotfire had its head office in Cambridge, MA, with several customers in the New England biotech and pharma industry. Tibco, based in Palo Alto, CA, acquired the company in 2007 for about $195 million. Just like Spotfire, Recorded Future has part of its workforce in Sweden, as well as in other parts of the world, like Washington DC.

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Are Americans more social and Scandinavians more interested in making things? These questions came to my mind when we recently compiled our annual list of Sweden’s 33 most innovative startups at Ny Teknik, a Swedish weekly magazine covering business, technology and science news.

The companies in the finished list, as well as those (several hundred) candidates that didn’t make it, seemed to be more geared towards what you might call “hard technology” than those on similar lists from the U.S., where there is a lot of interest in “soft technology.”

“Social” is hot among American entrepreneurs and investors, while manufacturing technology can at most be considered lukewarm.

We, on the other hand, had one company on our final list developing new low-friction coatings for bearings and axles in automotive applications, another focusing on advanced cross-binding agents for polymers, and a third with a highly advanced embossing process for producing holographic signs and stickers. Not to mention the ones that were sorted out during the ranking process, like the guys with a new method for aluminum casting that saves energy, gives better quality in the finished goods, and a more rapid manufacturing process.

I’m not talking about a clean-cut dichotomy. There is a great deal of overlap; biotech and cleantech, especially in the energy field, are clearly attracting a great deal of interest—and money—on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, the difference in focus is evident, but why is that so?

The simplest explanation would be to attribute it to cultural differences, to argue that Americans have more of a knack for making friends and influencing people. While Scandinavians are more concerned with making things. (We, or at least the Danes, gave the world Lego bricks, didn’t we?)

A more reasonable explanation is perhaps that startups tend to reflect the existing enterprise structure. Sweden has still got a large manufacturing industry; with two heavy truck and two car manufacturers there is a nearby market for a startup in low-friction coatings. There is a pool of talented people who have first-hand knowledge of the sector, including investors, consultants, and experienced managers. While in the U.S., the success of Facebook, Twitter, and the like has fostered a herd of new social-media entrepreneurs and investors. In other words, success breeds success.

If this is the real explanation, it also leads to a somewhat depressing conclusion. What our late-industrial societies need is break-out innovations, the ones that not only reflect what we’ve already got, but can grow into something totally unexpected, like Google did a decade ago. Instead, Larry Page exhorts his employees to be even more “social.”

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The vines are standing in straight rows along the irrigation pipes at Camalie Vineyards, high on the side of Mt. Veeder, in Napa Valley. For each vine a smaller pipe, thinner than a soda straw, runs from the pipe into the earth and down to the roots.

Here and there you can spot some yellow containers just on top of the vines. They are the nodes in a wireless sensor network, which among other things monitors the irrigation system and the soil moisture, and relays the information to a computer with a Web interface.

“The Internet has taken root in the environment,” says Mark Holler, owner of Camalie Vineyards and founder of Camalie Networks, the startup that developed the sensors plugged into the yellow containers and the software that runs them. The nodes themselvess and their communications and networking technology come from San Jose-based Crossbow, which was acquired by Memsic of Andover, MA, early this year.

The climate here is semi-arid. This means that that the harvest per acre is far lower than in the floor of the valley. And water for irrigation can be a big part of the cost of growing grapes. Some of the water comes from the vineyard’s own well, but at the end of the season Holler usually buys water that is driven up in tanks from the valley.

On the other hand, this means that the vines can produce a higher-quality grape that fetches a much higher price. The wineries pay about $100 per ton for “ordinary” Napa grapes, but Holler, the former technical director of neural network research at Intel, can get $6000 per ton for his Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. In other words, the harvest from Camalie is worth a great deal, even though vineyard is quite small—just about 4.4 acres—and the annual harvest only around 12 tons in total.

To get grapes of this really high quality, the wines have to be kept a bit thirsty. In the science of viticulture, this is defined as a certain level of “leaf water potential.” At the same time, if the vines get too thirsty—if their leaf water potential is too low—the plant will wilt.

This is where the yellow containers come into play. Each container is a node in the sensor network, with a wireless transmitter, a solar cell, a battery, and interfaces for up to four different sensors. The network is self-organizing; hook up the sensors you want and … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: Erik Mellgren, a noted Swedish business and technology journalist who worked with Xconomy as an Innovation Fellow in 2008, sends this article from Stockholm, just as the United Nations climate change conference is winding down in nearby Copenhagen, Denmark.]

Massachusetts startup FloDesign Wind Turbine was singled out by U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu as an example of a groundbreaking new energy technology company when he visited United Nations conference on climate change earlier this week.

Chu also challenged his Danish hosts and told the audience that today’s wind energy technology simply isn’t good enough, if wind power is to have any impact on CO2 emissions. Denmark may be the world leader in wind energy technology at present, but the United States will take over the leadership in the future, Chu said.

His presented his vision of the next generation of wind turbines and said that they needed to be highly efficient, ultra compact, and low in cost. He then pointed to the Wilbraham, MA, company FloDesign and its turbines, which differ radically from today’s ordinary propeller-like windmills. The company’s design looks a bit like a jet engine, with a multi-bladed turbine enclosed in a shroud.

FloDesign was one of 37 companies across the United States, and six in Massachusetts, to win R&D grants through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E competition in October; it will receive $8.3 million.

The Danish wind energy community has already reacted to Dr. Chu’s comment, according to an article in the engineering magazine Ingeniøren. The article quotes Flemming Rasmussen, researcher at the prestigious Risø Institute. He says that even though the FloDesign concept may give a higher efficiency, it will probably not be competitive against today’s traditional designs, the reason being that the new design requires far more material in its construction.

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The Baseball World Cup qualification series started this week over here in Sweden, as well as in several other countries in Europe. South Korea, Canada, the Dutch Antilles, and Sweden will meet each other at a field in the Stockholm suburb Sundbyberg. The finals will take place at the end of the month in Italy.

Since baseball lost its place in the Olympic Games, the world championship is supposed to be the most important international baseball event, even if you Americans are more interested in your not-so-global World Series. Even though I root for the home team, I have to admit that Sweden’s chances are slim against both Canada and the big favorite, South Korea. To be honest, what else could you expect when the game is a very small sport in a small country, with just over a thousand registered players. (The actual Swedish expression is “licensed players;” you have to register for a license to get insurance during the games.)

To give a sense of proportion for those of you who are used to the lines outside Fenway Park; the venue in Sundbyberg normally seats just 100 spectators, although it’s been upgraded with temporary bleachers during the championship to 2,436 seats.

Baseball is just a newcomer on the Scandinavian sports scene, with teams trying to recruit players, fans, and financing, and facing fierce competition from well-established team sports like soccer and ice hockey. (Even though Boston author Robert Skole has written a baseball fantasy novel in which an American bomber crew introduces the game to Sweden during WW2.)

In my opinion, the situation for the fledgling baseball league in Sweden mirrors the challenges facing start-ups and entrepreneurs everywhere. You have a great new idea, maybe even a developed product, and you’re convinced of its great qualities, but now you have to … Next Page »

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) said today it is providing $42 million to The Human Microbiome Project’s three large-scale sequencing centers. One of the centers is J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, MD, with its headquarters in San Diego, which gets $8.8 million as part of the government’s economic stimulus package for research that focuses on the microscopic organisms in our bodies. Venter recently told Xconomy in Sweden he was optimistic about receiving the economic stimulus funding.

Venter became known as one of the world’s leading scientists for his work in sequencing and analyzing  the human genome. He will give a speech about his revolutionary synthetic biology plans tomorrow in Sweden. Venter, the founding chairman and CEO of San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics arrived in Stockholm’s medieval Old Town aboard a Volvo Ocean Race competition ship to meet his research vessel, the 95-foot-long sailing yacht Sorcerer II, which has been sailing in its second global sampling expedition and was moored at the same location as the VOR boats. The Sorcerer II left San Diego in March following a bon voyage party.

The stopover in Stockholm is part of the J. Craig Venter Institute’s quest to map and sequence the genetic diversity of the Baltic Sea, using the same shotgun principle Venter and his company Celera used in sequencing the human genome. The Institute’s current effort involves filtering seawater pumped up from both the surface and the deep to collect the microbial organisms. The filtered biomass is then sequenced at the Institute’s lab. Sorcerer II collected the first samples in 2003; to date, the expeditions have collected a total of about 650 samples. Fifty of these are from the present journey, and stored on board Sorcerer II.

“There is a lot of genetic diversity to be discovered in the sea, far more than we expected when we started, one to two orders of magnitude greater,” Venter told me in a brief interview in Stockholm. Conventional wisdom says that the Baltic Sea, from Denmark to Finland, Sweden, and Russia, is a brackish body of water with lower diversity than the salty oceans, at least when one looks at the macrofauna, but Venter does not necessarily agree. “That is the conventional wisdom. But a hallmark of my career has been to not take the conventional wisdom for granted. The Baltic is a body of water unlike any other, with tremendous salinity and temperature gradients and very influenced by human activity.”

Venter also hinted there could be more news of Synthetic Genomics’ algae fuel plans in a month or so. He will be speaking more on the expedition’s goals and findings, and the prospects for synthetic biology at the seminar in Stockholm tomorrow. 

[Xconomy's Juha-Pekka Tikka contributed to this story]

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Realizing that my visit to the USA is coming to an end in a few days, I spent the weekend hectically sightseeing around western Massachusetts and upstate New York. Even taking into account my big win—a net gain of $1.20 after expenses—at the Saratoga raceway, the most fascinating experience was my visit to Hancock Shaker Village just outside Pittsfield, MA.

Today, the village is a museum, but it was a living Shaker community from 1783 until 1960, when the Shaker Central Ministry decided to close it. When the community was at its peak in the early nineteenth century, more than 300 Shakers lived on the 3,000-plus-acre farm. They had chosen to distance themselves from the ways of “the world,” but that didn’t keep them form being thrifty and innovative businesswomen and businessmen with a keen understanding of marketing.

The Shakers produced furniture, brooms, baskets, medicaments, and clothing for sale—and they were also the first to sell dried packaged garden seeds in America. They harnessed their waterpower with an energy-efficient turbine in order to power lathes, saws, and other machinery. And when automobiles began to appear on American roads, the Shakers (not to be confused with the Quakers) were among the first to buy and use this new means of transport.

I’ve been working together with the great staff of Xconomy here in Boston since early April, as part of a fellowship program in “Innovation Journalism” at Stanford University; this week I’ll return back to Sweden and to my job as one of the editors at the weekly news magazine Ny Teknik.

One goal of the Stanford program is to provide the Fellows with a better understanding of the “innovation ecosystem” in the USA. This is where I think that the history of the Shakers has something important to tell us about the factors driving entrepreneurship. Of course, the Shakers were in business for the money—but not just for the money. Their businesses were a means to help them pursue their way of living, using their worldly profits for a spiritual goal. I have found the discussion in the U.S. on what motivates innovators and entrepreneurs much more interesting than the debate in Sweden, which nearly always homes in on the need for tax subsidies. You seem to have an understanding that just getting rich isn’t enough, not even getting filthy rich. If you’re going to be one of the really great entrepreneurs, you’ll have to be in the game to prove yourself, make your vision come true—and use the money you make as a means to even bigger goals.

My four months in Boston has been a great experience. I came here after spending one month in Palo Alto, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Californians pride themselves on their easy-going, laid-back culture. Well, to me people in Boston seem … Next Page »

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Venture capital funds are still more profitable for their investors than the stock markets, according to new statistics released today bythe National Venture capital Association and Thomson Reuters. But their profitability decreased during the first quarter of 2008.

One reason is the increased difficulty of making an exit in the current economic conditions. “The IPO market has now been essentially shut down for venture-backed companies for over seven months,” NVCA president Mark Heesen said in a statement accompanying the report. “Combined with a skittish M&A [mergers and acquisitions] market, shorter term performance returns are and will be impacted.”

According to the NVCA report, the “one-year private equity performance index” was 13.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008. That is 7.6 percentage points less than in the fourth quarter of 2007, but still far better than the performance of the major stock markets—during the same period the NASDAQ and S&P indexes fell with 5.5 and 6.4 points respectively. When making the same comparison for longer periods, up to 20 years, the venture funds outperform the public markets in nearly all time horizons, the exception being the five year horizon.

I found an interesting trend in the data: In the long run, early stage investing seems to be far more lucrative than putting money into the later stage VC funds. Measured over the 10-year period, early stage funds performed roughly four times as well as later stage funds. Over a 20-year period the early stage funds returned roughly 1.5 times as much as the later stage funds.

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IRobot, (NASDAQ: IRBT) of Bedford, MA, announced today that the Army has ordered 220 of its PackBot 510 robots, worth a total of $17.5 million. The bots allow soldiers to detect and investigate explosive devices and other hazards while keeping a safe distance.

The new order is the fourth that the Army has made under the $286 million xBot contract, which iRobot won back in December in the midst of a high-profile legal battle with Illinois-based rival Robotic FX, to which the Army had initially awarded the contract. (IRobot would go on to win that fight just days later and to absorb some of Robotic FX’s assets as the settlement put that firm out of business.) Orders under the contract now total $44.5 million.

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When we are riding a bus along Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, a man strikes up a conversation with my wife and me. “You know, I’m a ‘DEC:ie,’ that’s what we used to be called when I worked for DEC, Digital Equipment,” he tells us.

It’s been 10 years since the company ceased to exist, after being bought by PC manufacturer Compaq in 1998. When people still, a decade later, regard themselves as “DEC:ies,” it says something about the impact DEC once had, as the first, largest, and most successful firm in the once flourishing Massachusetts minicomputer industry.

When the cluster was at its heyday during the 1970s and 1980s, it was home not only to DEC but to a number of other minicomputer manufacturers, including Wang, Prime, Data General, and Apollo, as well as suppliers of everything from motherboards to software. Today, it may hard to believe that only 20 years ago Route 128, the beltway around Boston, rivaled Silicon Valley as a symbol of innovation and cutting-edge computing technology. Nobody talks about minicomputers any more, the firms have virtually all disappeared, either by being bought up or by going out of business. But the legacy of the minicomputer cluster is still important to the economy in several ways; in fact, some of the product lines that originated from it way back when continue to generate billions of dollars in revenues.

I have my own memories of Digital Equipment. In 1988, I interviewed the company’s founder and CEO Ken Olsen for the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik, where I will return to work after finishing my fellowship at Xconomy in a few days.

The company’s headquarters was in an old textile plant called The Mill—a huge maze of dark red brick buildings in Maynard, MA. The place had a certain austerity to it, with Ethernet cables running on naked metal cable troughs through corridors and offices, and a reception lobby furnished with rustic shaker chairs.

Olsen and Harlan Anderson, his coworker from MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, had founded DEC in 1957 with $70,000 in seed money from venture capital pioneer general Georges Doriot. They put out their first minicomputer, the PDP-1, two years later. It was followed by an enormous range of other products, not only computers like the PDP-8, PDP-11, and the famous VAX models, but also terminals, printers, communication units, and software.

Ken Olsen was an impressive, tall man who downplayed his own importance during the interview, talking about helping other people grow and delegating responsibilities. But at the same time, he was known to be strong-willed and emotional.

I got a small taste of his well-known hot temper when I asked why DEC was so ambivalent in its support for the Unix operating system—a common complaint among users of the company’s machines. “Nobody supports Unix more than we do, it’s running on more of our machine’s than on any one else’s,” he told me. After the outburst, I decided not to confront him with his notorious characterization of Unix vendors as “snakeoil salesmen.”

When we met, DEC had grown to be the second-largest company in the computer industry. Olsen was generally regarded as one of the USA’s most successful managers, and many expected DEC to surpass number one IBM in sales within a few years. But in reality, the company had already reached it peak. The staff had expanded rapidly, but sales were stalling and profits had begun to erode. Ken Olsen abruptly left the firm in 1992, six years before Compaq bought the troubled company. DEC’s sale also heralded the end of the Massachusetts minicomputer era.

It is hard to define a minicomputer in specific technical terms. Firms like Apollo, Prime, and Data General each had different approaches, and it might be easier to regard “mini” as more of a cultural identity. The term set the industry apart from the traditional mainframe builders of that time such as IBM or Univac. A fascinating account of the inner culture of a minicomputer company is Tracy Kidder’s 1981 book The Soul of a New Machine, in which the author closely follows a development project at DEC spin-off Data General, a company that had been founded by PDP-8 chief designer Ed DeCastro.

Minicomputers were of course smaller and less expensive than mainframe machines, but they … Next Page »

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A huge new biotech lab complex is being planned for Burlington, MA, according to a report in the Boston Globe. The proposed $2 billion development is the brainchild of developer Patriot Partners, which is already building out the nearby 96-acre Lexington Technology Park at the site of the old Raytheon headquarters. If realized, the Burlington plan would produce New England’s largest life sciences complex, including 2 million square feet of lab and office space, as well as shops and 2,000 units of housing for the elderly. The plan seems to be rather preliminary, though, given that the company still doesn’t own the land and probably would have to build bridges and ramps to make it accessible.

As the Globe notes, there are already a number of other big developments aiming at the needs of the life science industry under way, like Alexandria Real Estate Equities’ planned 1.5 million-square-foot lab complex near Kendall Square in Cambridge.

Taken together, these Burlington and Cambridge developments would add 3.5 million square feet of life sciences labs to what’s already in existence in the region. If I have done my mental conversion to metrics correctly, that is nearly six times as much space as the former Pharmacia corporate R&D labs used to occupy in my Swedish hometown Uppsala some years ago. Will there really be a demand for all these facilities? (As a Scandinavian, raised on soccer, not baseball, I can’t just believe that if you build it, they will come.)

Patriot Partners doesn’t have any future tenants lined up for the Burlington site, though it hopes that life science companies will continue to move to the suburbs. At the same time, rising gas prizes, and energy costs overall, might make more central locations more attractive. That is why Alexandria is betting on a location close to the Kendall Square subway stop instead, as Xconomy reported in June.

“I think that in the long run the life science industry in the region will continue to grow. Will the growth be adequate to fill all the properties being proposed? That remains to be seen,” says Tom Andrews, senior vice president at Alexandria.

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The giant Dutch company Philips Electronics will move its North American headquarters from New York City to Andover, MA, according to reports in Andover’s Eagle Tribune and the Boston Globe. The move is expected to be announced at a press conference with representatives from Philips and governor Deval Patrick tomorrow.

Philips’ healthcare division has had major operations in Andover since the company acquired Agilent Technology’s healthcare unit eight years ago. The company also has a number of other operations in medical devices and lighting systems in Massachusetts, bringing the total number of Philips workers in the state to almost 4,600.

The company has not been lured to Massachusetts with any tax subsidies or other incentives, Ted Weissenhoff, chief executive of Philips Electronics North America told the Globe. “We didn’t ask for any assistance,” Weissenhoff said. “We are thrilled to death with the innovation we have seen in Massachusetts.”

With sales of roughly $43 billion last year and around 133,000 employees total, Philips is one of the world’s largest electronics firms. The company is the leading producer of lighting equipment, from incandescent lamps to LEDs, and it has a big presence in the medical technology sector. But Philips is best known for its broad range of consumer electronics, from kitchen blenders to electrical shavers and the compact disc.

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Boston-based investment firm Allied Minds has founded a new medical device company, Precision Biopsy, in cooperation with the University of Colorado. The new firm is developing an “optical” biopsy needle for diagnosing prostate cancer; the device uses spectroscopy to differentiate between normal and malignant tissue in real-time. Allied Minds specializes in very early-stage investments in projects spun out of academia.

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Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) of Marlborough, MA, seems to have struck the right tune with its customers. Today the company announced yet another long-term order for its photovoltaic solar panels, this time from German-based IBC Solar. The order, worth $1.2 billion, brings Evergreen’s total contractual backlog to nearly $3 billion.

“This contract represents the single largest contract in the history of our company and is one of the largest contracts ever between a panel manufacturer and a distributor,” Evergreen CEO Richard Feldt said in a statement.

The new order is the latest of several similar big multi-year contracts for the company. Evergreen manufactures its photovoltaic products with a proprietary technology that uses less silicon than conventional processing methods. The company opened a new factory in Devens, MA in June, and plans to open yet another in 2010.

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For more than 60 years, the number of jobs in manufacturing has been on the decline in Massachusetts. But that trend is finally at an end, say the authors of a new report, Staying Power: The Future of Manufacturing in Massachusetts.

The large employment losses are over because most of the firms that couldn’t survive in the new globalized economy have already shut down or left the state. “What’s left consists of highly sophisticated producers that contribute mightily to state output and employment, and that, for the most part, are able to survive in this new economic environment,” according to the report, which was prepared by Northeastern University’s Center for Urban and Regional Policy and was presented today at a public forum at the Boston Foundation.

In fact, most of the employers reckon that they will increase their workforce during the coming years, according to a survey of more than 700 Massachusetts manufacturing firms that’s included in the report. More than 60 percent of the firms expected to have more workers five years from now, while just 12 percent expected their employee base to shrink during the same period.

Still, manufacturing isn’t what it used to be in Massachusetts. Just after WorldWar II, four out of 10 workers in the Commonwealth were employed by manufacturing firms, producing a range of goods “from textile fabrics to aircraft engine parts,” according to the report. Today, barely 10 percent of the state’s jobs are in manufacturing.

The really big dip started in the mid-1980s. Up till then, more than 600,000 people worked in industry, a number that has now dropped to 300,000. But there are big differences between sectors, say the report’s authors, with relatively small job losses occurring in high-tech sectors like electronics and computer hardware.

Of course, the future of manufacturing is not just about jobs, but about making money by producing goods. This in turn means keeping productivity high, to compete with low-cost competitors in other parts of the world. Evidently, that’s something people are good at around here. During the period from 1997 to 2006, manufacturing productivity grew twice as fast in Massachusetts as in the nation as a whole. During the period the state’s output “increased by an extraordinary 61 per cent to nearly $40 billion,” the report says.

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Two local venture firms, Flybridge Capital Parners and General Catalyst Partners, have joined forces with Khosla Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, and invested in Boston University spin-off Sand 9, a start-up founded in 2006 to develop “nano-mechanical resonators” for wireless devices. Flybridge led the $8 Million A series round.

A resonator can be regarded as kind of timekeeper, a very exact clock that makes sure that the circuits in devices such as cell phones, GPS receivers and wireless routers work on the right frequencies. Today’s resonators are based on quartz crystals, just as in most wristwatches, and are fairly big. Instead, Sand9 has developed a technology that can shrink the resonators to nanoscale dimensions, according to the company’s technical founder, BU physics professor Raj Mohanty.

“We can do these components on a much smaller scale and then use them to build switches, filters, mixers and similar components,” says Mohanty. “And as we do them in silicon, it is possible to integrate them with CMOS electronics on the same chip.” CMOS, for complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, is the leading technique used to build microelectronics.

Much of the initial development of Sand 9′s devices has been carried out at Mohanty’s lab at BU during the last six years, with support from the National Science Foundation. He expects that the company’s first products will be ready for market some time during 2009.

As part of the funding, Flybridge general Partner David Aronoff will join Sand  9’s board of directors.

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When I visited Palo Alto earlier this year, an attorney at a big law firm specializing in intellectual property told me about a mythical eatery in Silicon Valley—Mountain View’s Taqueria La Bamba. At lunchtime, a mix of suits and engineers line up outside the small Tex-Mex restaurant. According to the story, while they are waiting to go inside and get their burritos, people start to talk to each other, brag a little about the projects they are working on, and trade gossip from their respective workplaces—in clear breach of every hush-hush policy their managers have tried to impose. In short, spilling the beans while waiting for the beans.

In this way, the queue at La Bamba has become an information exchange, helping people hunt for new and better jobs, learn about their competitors’ hot projects, and connect and get ideas for new great startups. One could even speculate that one reason why there are a bunch of in-house restaurants at the Googleplex is to keep Google employees from La Bamba peril.

But that’s not the way things work around here, a venture capitalist told me when I came to Boston. In his view, the networking on the East Coast relies much more on organized events—Mobile Monday, Tech Tuesday, and the like.

Well, I’ve got news for you. Earlier this week, standing in line outside Xconomy’s favorite burrito place, Boca Grande Taqueria at First Street in Cambridge, I couldn’t help but overhear a discussion between the guys just down the line from me. Evidently, their new prototype is really fascinating stuff, but they are two weeks behind schedule.

No, I don’t know which company they came from, but I bet I’ll be able to figure that out if I just keep having chicken burritos for lunch for a few more days. Boca Grande is well on its way to becoming the La Bamba del Este. And who knows, some day even those folks at Google’s new lab in Cambridge might feel like having a lemon chicken burrito with pinto beans.

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Could anything be a more secure investment than buying into the very paper that dollars and a bunch of other currencies are printed on? The over-200-year-old Crane & Co paper mill in Dalton, MA, has manufactured paper for U.S. dollar bills since 1879. Up until now, the company has been family-owned. But in order to accommodate family members who want to liquidate their stock, the company “will sell a 20 percent minority ownership stake to an affiliate of New York-based investment firm Lindsay Goldberg for an undisclosed sum,” the Berkshire Eagle reports.

The Crane mill makes paper from “recovered cotton fibers”—in other words, rags. Though you might think that your dollar bills have a tendency to just disappear into thin air, the long cotton fibers makes the currency paper extremely resistant to wear and tear. Today’s currency paper also includes a number of advanced security features, like embedded metal threads, watermarks, fluororescent markings, and other special additives.

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Billerica, MA-based GSI Group (NASDAQ: GSIG) announced today that it will buy Excel Technology, (NASDAQ: XLTC) of East Setauket, NY, for $360 million in cash. Both companies produce lasers and laser systems and have operations in numerous locations around the world.

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During the last academic year, the entire faculty of a brand new university has enrolled at MIT, immersing themselves in the institute’s culture, values, and way of doing research. They are the staff of the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, which will admit its first post-graduate students in 2009. The institute is just one of the components in the Arab emirate’s huge Masdar initiative, set up by the crown prince, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, with $15 billion in seed money. (The word “masdar” is Arabic for “the source.”)

Mateo Chiesa, a Norwegian of Italian ancestry, who first came to MIT as a post-doc in nanotechnology 2006, is one of the new faculty members.

“I heard about Masdar from my professor and thought ‘Why don’t I give it a try?’” says Chiesa. “First of all, it is a possibility to really make a change. There is no other project of this size concentrating on alternative energy, at least not in Europe.”

At MIT, Chiesa has worked under professor Gang Chen on a new technology for converting solar energy to electricity, and the plan is to continue that research cooperation. While conventional solar cells work for just a narrow part of the visible spectrum, the MIT technology can capture radiation that would otherwise be wasted as heat.

The agreement between Masdar and MIT’s Technology and Development Program was announced in February, 2007. The soon-to-be institute will have programs in a range of engineering disciplines, with a focus on sustainable technologies.

The institute’s campus will be at the center of the new Masdar City, a town planned for 50,000 inhabitants that is being built from scratch and where emissions of carbon oxide and other pollutants are to be kept as close to zero as possible. That means streets shadowed from the burning sunlight by photovoltaic panels, recycling of waste water, and new personal transport systems instead of cars. All power is to be produced from solar and wind energy.

All together, it sounds like a tree-hugger’s utopian dream—not something you would expect from an extremely oil-rich country, the largest (in territory) of the United Arab Emirates.

“The Abu Dhabi government wants to make the transition from a natural resource based economy to a knowledge based economy—but not get out of the energy market,” says professor Fred Moavenzadeh, who heads the MIT Technology Development Program. “They see some major shift in their economy where oil may become a liability, not an asset, due to carbon dioxide emissions. They want to be in the market for clean, sustainable energy.”

The Masdar Institute will be a private, not a state, university for graduate students only, according to Moavenzadeh. Students will spend more than half of their time doing research. MIT is supporting the institute because of its commitment to science and technology education worldwide, Moavenzadeh says. “We have supported universities in Latin America, The Middle East, Africa, Japan, South Korea and now again the Middle East,” he says. “We are enhancing the quality of academic institutions or establishing new institutions. We will work with Masdar as long as they respect our decisions.”

Plans call for Masdar City to be ready for its first inhabitants next year—at the same time as the Masdar Institute opens its doors, in other words—and fully constructed by 2016. It is located inside a newly established economic free zone east of downtown Abu Dhabi (see Google Earth image above; click for a larger version), with an area of close to 1,500 acres.

Another component of the initiative is the Masdar Clean Tech Fund, a $250 million venture capital fund for investments in cleantech, financed both by the Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, which is leading the Masdar City project, and foreign investors like Credit Suisse and Siemens.

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