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 »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

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]

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

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 »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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 »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

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.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

The typical venture capital investor is still a white, middle-aged man. But the picture might be changing, albeit at a slow pace, according to a report released yesterday by Dow Jones and the National Venture Capital Association. In fact, the report notes, the percentage of VCs with ethnic backgrounds other than Caucasian is already slightly higher among those who have worked less than five years in the industry.

The report is based on a survey of 500 persons working in venture capital. Of these 75 percent were men, 25 percent women. At the same time, 88 percent of these professionals where white, 8 percent Asian Pacific, 2 percent Hispanic, and 1 percent African-American. It’s easy to agree with GigaOm, which calls these findings pretty anticlimactic. But if you look at the newcomers to the profession, those with less than five years experience in the venture industry, you can see the number of whites dropping to 82 percent.

“As you look at the younger professionals entering the industry, we are seeing more women, minorities and foreign-born nationals choosing venture capital as a career,” said NVCA president Mark Heesen in a statement. “We have entered an era of venture globalization which will require different perspectives and experiences and we believe the face of venture capital in 2020 will be much different than it is today.”

The question, of course, is how you define “a much different face”—after all, the shift from 88 percent white to 82 percent is hardly an extreme makeover. Nevertheless, according to some local venture professionals, there is at least some anecdotal evidence that points to ongoing change. “The numbers are still low,” says Karin Klein, a vice president at SoftBank Capital in Boston. “But the good news is we are starting to see, especially at the entry and next step level, a lot more diversity.”

Klein says that the change is even more noticeable in the entrepreneurial ranks, as a number of SoftBank’s portfolio companies are run or founded by women. This includes the Huffington Post and The NewsMarket, a web-based video marketing and distribution platform where co-founder Shoba Purushothaman serves as president and CEO.

Agreeing with Klein’s general assessment is Joe Medved, a SoftBank associate who also serves as co-chair of the New England Venture Network, a group of about 350 young VCs—typically associates, principals, vice presidents, and other non-partners. “I’m certainly not going to call it fairly diverse,” Medved says. “But you are seeing a lot of rising females.” For instance, he says, another NEVN co-chair is Geraldine Alias, formerly an associate at Battery Ventures, now a senior associate at Fidelity Ventures. Medved also points out that venture is “becoming more of a global business,” so it makes sense that venture will also become more integrated ethnically, as firms seek to tap into global markets and need people with experience with different cultures and business styles.

The survey also checked the respondents’ educational background. Your average venture capitalist is a well-educated person, probably with a master’s degree or a PhD from one of the nation’s top universities, with Harvard as the number one favorite. He or she probably has some experience in other businesses as well; only a handful of people go directly into venture capital from a university, while over a fifth have been entrepreneurs or worked in startup companies.

If you aren’t sure what diversity of educational background would look like, check out this article about Yale dropout-turned VC, Chuck McDermott, a general partner at RockPort Capital.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

In March, we wrote about local investment firm Allied Minds, which has a strategy of investing very early in technology developed in university research labs. Today, Allied Minds announced that it has invested in CryoXtract, a startup launched by researchers from Harvard University and Northeastern University.

The inventors of the technology around which CryoXtract was formed, Dale Larson and Jeffrey Ruberti, have developed a new way to take out small portions of frozen liquid biological samples like whole blood or sperm. Instead of first thawing the liquid, withdrawing a part of it, and the refreezing it, Cryoxtract uses a very small, hollow drill to extract a frozen core. This avoids the risk of degrading the samples by repeated thawing and refreezing and takes less time to carry out.

“We are looking for cutting-edge technologies, and this one is quite enabling, there’s nothing remotely similar in the market,” Allied Minds director Vincent Chung told Xconomy. “The market opportunity includes any organization that has a need to take aliquotes [small portions] from frozen samples.”

According to CryoXtract’s webpage, there are more than 500 million stored frozen biological samples in the U.S.. So while the samples are small, the market seems big.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

If you want to search the Internet, you’ll probably use your PC rather than your cell phone. But that’s likely to change in the future, I was told the other night at this month’s Mobile Monday Boston event, which focused on how to make better Web browsers for mobile devices.

This month’s venue was Orange Labs’ fanatically style-conscious (blond plywood paneling, giant screens projecting changing pictures of clouds, long-legged aluminum Emeco chairs) office space in Cambridge. Mobile Monday originated in Finland eight years ago; today events are organized more or less all over the world, for people working in the mobile industry or interested in mobile communications.

According to the organizers, shipments of devices with advanced mobile browsers will grow from 76 million to 700 million per year over the next five years. Already today, most reasonably advanced phones have some kind of Internet browsing capability.

One of the speakers at the event was Franklin Davis from Nokia. He pointed out that with a global population of six billion people, and roughly three billion cell phones in use around the world but only one billion PCs, “the mobile will be the first and dominant way to access the Web in the future.”

In fact, in many places in the developing world, it already dominates. “Nobody has a PC, everybody has a mobile,” as Davis put it.

Getting a decent Web browser on these phones would not only help consumers—it would also make life a little easier for people who are developing screensavers, wallpapers, animations and similar content for mobile phones. Instead of making developers tweak the content to work on different handset models, with different screen sizes, different amounts of memory, et cetera, it should be possible to let the browser do the work. That might mean developers could build new applications faster.

Still, the majority of cell phone owners never bother to use their browsers at all. Part of the problem is that downloading big files takes a while over most mobile networks, and looking at an ordinary Web page filled with flashy graphics on a mobile phone’s tiny screen can be less than rewarding.

“It is like looking at your PC through a paper towel tube. You’ll never want a giant screen in your pocket,” said Davis.

Developers have tried different solutions for this problem. One is to build browsers that automatically discard the less essential parts of a Web page and trim it down to a leaner version. But users and their browsers might not always agree on what parts of a page aren’t essential.

A better solution might be to make sure that the user gets the right content with the minimum amount of fuzz. That could mean, for example, making the browser location-aware, according to David Carson, technical lead for the Android browser at Google. You shouldn’t have to enter a street address to search for the closest pizzerias, when the cellular network already tracks where you are.

This might also mean adding a voice user interface to the browser, said Mike Phillips, cofounder of speech technology developer Vlingo. In other words, just say “pizza”, and your phone will show you the way. Vlingo already makes this possible—or something close to it—with the voice-search application it has developed for Blackberry devices.

Who knows? Eventually you might be able to simply say “hungry” to your location-, time-, and context-conscious browser and have it lead you to a lobster shack if you’re driving on the Maine coast or to a bistro if you’re walking the streets of Paris.

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:        

Software developer Aveksa, based in Waltham, MA, announced today that it will open a headquarters for Europe, the Middle East and Africa in London.  Aveksa’s business is “enterprise access governance solutions”–in other words, controlling who has access to what information inside a company.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share: