Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

From architecture to kids’ videos to online animated ads, Ksenia Oustiougova’s path to founder of Seattle online ad company Lilipip has been unusual. To start, the company was funded not by investors, but on credit cards. The good news: after shutting down the kids’ video version of Lilipip and retooling to its current incarnation, Oustiougova is now paying down the debt.

Oustiougova said Lilipip’s change of focus in the summer of 2008—from children’s videos to online marketing ads—had a straightforward motivation. “We ran out of money. It was as simple as that,” she said. “Either reinvent or close down. And I’m not a quitter by nature.”

Now, together with more than 150 independent creative contractors around the world and a director of business development, Oustiougova makes one-minute animated videos for small businesses. Her team currently works on about four projects at once, she said, but they hope to get up to their capacity of 20 at a time eventually. Oustiougova and the director of business development are not yet salaried, taking a cut of the proceeds from each project, but Lilipip is bringing on four project managers as Lilipip’s first employees in the next six to 12 months. Now starting to pay off her credit card debt, Oustiougova has no plans to look for outside investment.

Asked why fundraising isn’t part of the plan, Oustiougova gave several reasons, among them: “The entire process takes months, and it takes away focus from sales; second, suddenly you have someone looking over your shoulder telling you what to do—we are breaking a lot of conventional rules, and I want to build a company where people don’t feel like they work, but feel like they play.” She added, “I am not interested in growing huge. I want to build an excellent business, and we won’t be necessarily big. But investors want a certain return at a certain time that might force us to do things faster…Some things just take time to get very good, like good wine—you can’t speed it up.”

Lilipip’s animations are mostly used online, Oustiougova said, on businesses’ websites, Facebook, YouTube, or other social marketing sites. She has also seen them played on TVs at trade shows, or used in presentations to clients or shareholders. Lilipip will encode the videos into any format its clients need for free. Many small businesses like having their ads available on their cell phones to share on the go, she said.

“This is really a tool to tell their story in a uniform way through all the new social media channels,” Oustiougova said.

Oustiougova’s first entrepreneurial steps came when, after leaving a career as an architect, she began making PowerPoint presentations for her son to teach him to read in English and Russian (her native language). Her friends soon started requesting custom videos for their kids, and …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Think about the technological tools you use most often. For many of us, cell phones and computers rank high up on that list. But these devices are designed with the hearing and sighted in mind, and are constantly evolving, so there are numerous hurdles to clear to make a phone or a computer usable to the blind or deaf.

The University of Washington’s Richard Ladner, along with students in the electrical engineering and computer science departments, is using engineering and computational tools to work on several of these hurdles—and the commercial applications could have far-ranging impact.

“When you think about a person with a disability, such as a blind person, most people think that’s a medical problem,” he said in a recent interview. “Just restoring the human function may be a solvable problem, but probably not for a long time. But maybe there’s another way to get the same thing done, to allow a person to read a book or talk to their family. So thinking non-medically, as an engineer, there are other ways to solve these problems.”

Ladner, who was born to two deaf parents, also believes that technologies developed for the blind and deaf may eventually lead to broader technological advancements—not such a far-fetched idea, as it’s happened before. Mobile GPS was originally developed as an aid for the blind, Ladner said, as was optical character recognition, a technology developed in the 1960s to turn an image of text (such as a photo of a book page) into digital text, which would then be read out loud using speech synthesizers. Now, the same technology is ubiquitous in turning pictures of text into digital text;Google uses it to digitize books.

Ladner used to work on computational theory before shifting to accessible technology in 2002. He and colleague Eve Riskin, professor of electrical engineering, are now trying to take their long-running project on accessibility for the deaf, MobileASL, to the market. This project uses video compression technology to enable signing over video cell phones on low-bandwidth wireless networks (such as those in the U.S.). Currently, deaf people can’t reliably use video cell phones to communicate using sign language, because the videos are too choppy to be intelligible. Ladner and his colleagues are working with UW TechTransfer on commercializing MobileASL.

“We’re trying to get it out and get it in actual use,” he said. “It’s in high demand. I get hundreds of e-mails about it.”

Although designed with the deaf in mind, MobileASL could be used by anyone who wants better quality video phone calls, Ladner said. Bringing it to market is slightly complicated by the fact that …Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

In the world of cleantech, there’s a lot of focus on alternative energy sources and power generation. But for Seattle’s Powerit Solutions, the name of the game is energy efficiency. Powerit is the North American division of the company, which also has a European division in Sweden (where the company started). It is a leader in energy management and conservation for industry—one of the major strengths of Washington state’s cleantech cluster.

I spoke with chief executive Claes Olsson last week to find out how Powerit is trying to help companies save money and power, and how the firm plans to grow its business globally, all without working on the power generation side of things. “It’s pretty expensive to build up new sources of electricity,” Olsson said. “Energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit.”

The Swedish part of the company has been around since 1994, and the Seattle division since 2002. Olsson joined the company two years later, and in 2005, he said, “that’s when we really got going on the product.” With $6 million raised last month in new funding led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal (together with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners), and an expansion from five employees in 2007 to its current 47 (25 in the U.S.), the company does seem to be on the upswing.

“We have grown immensely,” Olsson said. “Our intention is to continue to grow but be smart about it.”

Powerit makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and electricity bills in industrial facilities. Part of the solution is energy efficiency—figuring out where energy is being wasted in companies and reducing it. But another big part is in “demand response,” which means understanding when utility companies’ rates are highest and tweaking a facility’s energy usage to avoid those costly peaks.

For individuals, avoiding those peaks might just mean remembering not to run your dishwasher until the late evening. For large industries, it means setting up an intelligent system to monitor those peaks and dial down expended energy as much as possible. Utility companies will send a warning that rates are …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle-based Zoodango, a social site that combines map-based navigation and ratings of local businesses, relaunched nationwide today as GeoPage, according to a company announcement. The retooled site features new data on businesses around the U.S., resulting from a partnership with Citysearch. GeoPage uses an algorithm based on Citysearch and Yelp reviews, Zagat ratings, user reviews, and other ratings from similar sites to rank businesses in a given area.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Dan Weld spends a lot of time thinking about the Web and how to get the best information out of it. Weld is a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington and a serial entrepreneur, having co-founded Netbot, AdRelevance, and Nimble Technology. He is also a venture partner with Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group. Some of his research projects include customizable software interfaces and ways to improve information finding on Wikipedia. He is an expert in Web search, information extraction, and adaptive user interfaces, so he seemed like the perfect person to ask: what is the big deal with Microsoft’s Bing, anyway?

In a recent interview, Weld talked about the improvements Bing has made over Google and other current search engines (only slight), the future of Web search, and a hint at a project he is working on that he thinks could change the way we find information online.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: Let’s start with your general impressions of Bing.

Dan Weld: I think it’s a nice, if small, advance. Some of the things they’ve done in this relaunch are primarily architectural and will support their plans for the future. In terms of what is actually available right now, the biggest change is integrating vertical search in a uniform way.

X: What does that mean?

DW: When you think of search, everyone thinks about Google, and maybe Yahoo, but there are many other kinds of search, like people searches (you can think about Facebook as a people search), travel search (Kayak and Expedia), health information sites. You can think about Wikipedia as providing a search for encyclopedic information. Shopping searches—Amazon is great in part because it makes it easy to find so much information about the products, and reviews of products. All of these are examples of vertical search experiences. Instead of having wide coverage, you have a better experience within a narrow range.

Bing has tried to marry those things into an integrated wide search experience. All of the engines have been doing this. If you do a search on Google for a movie, you might see information about show times and trailers at the top, for example. Bing has gone further in some directions than people have gone before, in this aspect. If you look at their tabbed pane, it lets you look at different kinds of information right there.

X: But doesn’t Google do that too?

DW: All the engines are trying to do it, but the way Microsoft has done it with Bing is somewhat better than what Google has done. With the shopping tab, you get a faceted interface, meaning you can narrow your search using categorical information, restricting yourself to a particular brand or price range. Those facets are specific to the object you’re searching.

X: So if this is just a small change, what kinds of big changes can we expect to see in the future?

DW: Lots of people are happy with search today, but that’s because they set their sights too low. I think search is going to change enormously in the future, and I think it’s going to do so by …Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

[Updated with comments from Kelly Jo MacArthur on page 2]
In recent years, we have seen an explosion of alternative energy devices, yet most of these technologies remain out of the reach of the average homeowner. To outfit your roof with solar panels, you’d probably be out $10,000 to $20,000 as an initial investment. Clarian Technologies, a brand new, three-employee Seattle startup, wants to change all that. With its products slated to hit the market in 2010, the company aims to bring affordable wind and solar energy devices to the masses. I spoke with Clarian founder Chad Maglaque to find out more.

The two products that he hopes are coming to stores near you soon are the Jellyfish (wind turbine) and Sunfish (solar panels). Maglaque’s vision is that an ecologically-minded but not necessarily wealthy homeowner could pick up one of these at Home Depot, Best Buy, or Costco, set it up on their roof or in the garden, plug it into a regular power outlet, and start generating electricity—without having to bring in a contractor, electrician, or inspector.

The cost? The starting price for the Jellyfish is $399, and the Sunfish is $899. Clarian is already talking with Costco about stocking the devices, Maglaque said.

In currently available wind and solar technologies, a device called the inverter is a big cost hurdle, Maglaque said. That’s the part of the technology that converts DC to AC current that can be used in your home, and adds at least $3,000 to $4,000 to the price tag. “We wanted to tackle that with the view that smaller is better,” Maglaque said.

So Clarian’s products don’t actually need the inverter. This isn’t a new concept, Maglaque said. Large industrial wind turbines don’t use inverters either.

When Maglaque explains how few obstacles there are to a plug-and-go wind or solar energy generator, it seems like there’s a huge hole in the alternative energy market. The existing plugs in your house are coded to take an appliance up to 1,500 watts. But a 1,500 watt solar panel array would normally cost $15,000 to $20,000, Maglaque said. “There are not many people who can afford to do that,” he said. “That’s where there is this disconnect in the market.”

Enter the Jellyfish, which is three feet tall and can be mounted on a roof …Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

Burt Hamner, founder and CEO of the tiny Seattle startup Hydrovolts, has an idea he hopes will revolutionize the hydropower industry.

His invention, the “flip wing” turbine, is still in development. It is a simple and cheap spin on the paddle wheel, but comes with a twist that boosts its power production. The turbine is designed to sit in flowing waterways, such as rivers or canals. The flowing water pushes each blade from the front of the turbine to the back, but unlike a traditional paddle wheel design, the “paddles” on Hamner’s turbine flip open on their way back around, reducing drag and increasing power-harnessing ability.

I met Hamner at Williamson & Associates, a marine engineering company in Ballard that is helping Hamner with all the engineering for his turbines. The Ballard shop contained several giant pieces of marine equipment under construction, including a massive drill designed to test for methane 12,000 feet under the sea. “These guys can make anything work underwater,” Hamner says.

In contrast, Hydrovolt’s prototype turbine is about three feet long and sits against the wall in a conference room. It was built with motors scavenged from a washing machine. Hamner cranks it by hand, and a light bulb attached to the end lights up.

Washington state produces the most hydroelectric power in the nation, and the Columbia River’s Grand Coulee Dam is the largest hydropower plant, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. But water-generated power on such a scale requires massive amounts of construction and maintenance, Hamner says, and you can’t just go building a dam wherever you feel like it (not to mention the environmental impact).

Hydrovolts’ technology is a little simpler. While the prototype turbine is a few feet long, the working turbines will be about the size of a refrigerator, Hamner says. “It’s a very simple thing,” he said. “I can deliver this in a pickup, and have it in the water and producing power in 30 minutes.”

The fridge-sized turbines will cost $13,000 and will produce on average two to three kilowatts per day, or as much as 20 kilowatts per day, depending on where they are installed, …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Connie Bourassa-Shaw has been the director of the University of Washington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) in the Foster School of Business for just three years. But her ties to the UW go back to 1987, when she was a writer for the UW economic and business magazine, Pacific Northwest Executive. She has played various roles in the UW business scene since then, including director of communications at the business school and executive director of the Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship—a program for business school students only that Bourassa-Shaw later developed into the CIE, which serves students from all disciplines.

After a brief stint away from the university as the executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, Bourassa-Shaw returned in 2006 to head the CIE. I called her up to find out more about her thoughts on UW’s take on business, how her center helps academics find their way in the commercial world, and what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Despite the dismal economy, which has impacted the CIE directly (she has had to put plans for new programs on hold due to budget constraints), Bourassa-Shaw remains optimistic that Seattle will continue to grow as a hub for startups.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: What is the role of the CIE at UW?

Connie Bourassa-Shaw: We do all entrepreneurship, all the time. We are really trying to instill entrepreneurship into the fabric of the University of Washington, so that any student, any faculty member, any staff member who is interested in entrepreneurship can take classes, participate in activities, find the resources they need to do a startup, which include broad accessibility to the entrepreneurial community. We have very strong inroads into the community at large, both the venture capital and angel side, the equity side, and entrepreneur side. Serial entrepreneurs who understand the process from one end to the other can be a resource in terms of being a mentor or a coach.

We provide a special program for faculty, who are different from students doing our entrepreneurship curriculum. I work closely with TechTransfer, because that’s where any faculty or student has to go if they are working on something with commercial potential.

X: What are the student programs, and where do they fit into the Seattle innovation scene?

CB-S: We provide a curriculum for students. We have about 700 MBAs, and 88 percent of those take at least one class in entrepreneurship. I get asked the question a lot, how can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? My sense is that you can’t turn anyone into an entrepreneur. But there is a type of person who is destined to be an entrepreneur. I usually say it’s a genetic defect. For those people …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

If you work in a commercial building, you’re probably familiar with the vagaries of large-scale heating and cooling systems. Hear that whir click on and cold air suddenly gusting through the vents? That’s the sound of your building hemorrhaging money and energy.

Seattle cleantech software company Optimum Energy wants to stanch the energy drain of the U.S. commercial sector, one building at a time—and soon, hundreds of buildings at a time—by slowing down the motors that power those buildings’ heating and cooling systems.

I traveled down to Optimum’s Georgetown office, which houses 22 of the three-year-old company’s 30 employees, to find out from founder and CEO Nathan Rothman how Optimum plans to save companies hundreds of thousands of dollars every year with a simple software program.

The company’s software products have the potential to halve the heating and cooling bills of about 110,000 large buildings in the U.S., Rothman said. That’s no small potatoes, when you consider that commercial buildings use 18 to 20 percent of the country’s energy, and that in hot climates like California or Texas, air conditioning accounts for more than half of their energy bill.

“If we implemented our technology just in Manhattan, we’d save enough electricity to light the other four boroughs all the time,” Rothman said. “And that doesn’t include the CO2 and greenhouse gases you’re saving.”

Large buildings maintain temperature control (or HVAC, for heating, ventilating, and air conditioning) using a massive network of cold water that courses through the building, absorbing heat and venting it through steam. That cold water is generally kept at a chilly 44 degrees Fahrenheit by a large machine aptly dubbed the “chiller.” High-powered motors and pumps drive the water around the building.

So what happens when a hot building cools down to, say, 70 degrees? The motors shut off, but then power back on the second it bumps up to 71—an incredibly inefficient process, Rothman said, as powering down and up uses a lot of energy.

That process starts to sound even more inefficient when you take into account …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Oren Etzioni, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Washington, has certainly ventured out of the ivory tower since he first came to Seattle 18 years ago. The Israel-born computer scientist founded three startup companies out of UW: Netbot, a comparison shopping agent acquired by Excite in 1997, Clearforest, a text-miner acquired by Reuters in 2007, and Farecast, an airlines fare prediction tool acquired by Microsoft just last year.

He’s also a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group, a Seattle VC firm that funds technology startups. And he’s been involved as a consultant or advisor to numerous other startups and local businesses, most recently Eggsprout, a new Seattle startup by UW alums that combines social networking with job hunting.

I sat down with Etzioni in his office on the UW campus to chat about his philosophies on technology, startups, and investing in a tricky economy. He also showed me his latest projects—two new software technologies that search the Web in innovative ways.

PanImages, an image search tool, mines Google Images and Flickr for pictures—but the twist is, it works in hundreds of different languages (online translation tools currently don’t work for many of these). So you can not only perform image searches if you happen to speak a language that doesn’t have its own Google Images page, but you can also type in a query in one language and see its translations and corresponding images in other languages. I typed in “shoes,” and we looked at the top image hits for shoes in Italian (pointy), English (sporty), and Serbian (boots).

His other new software application, TextRunner, searches 500 million Web pages for relationships between words. You can type in a question like “What kills bacteria?”, and it finds everything in these 500 million pages that has the relationship “kill” to bacteria, returning answers ranked by the number of hits. So, antibiotics are at the top of the list with 304 hits, but down the list you find that “garlic” came back with seven hits. (More on these projects below.)

Here are edited excerpts from the rest of our conversation:

Xconomy: What do you think academia can bring to business?

Oren Etzioni: The primary mission of a professor is teaching and research, but I want to maximize my positive impact on the world, and I’ve learned over the years that there are lots of ways of doing that. I started out focused on research and writing research papers,and then found out that few people read those. Then I found that mentoring a graduate student can be a very meaningful way to have an impact. Another way to have an impact is that some research ideas have practical applicability, and the best way to get them out to the real world is through commercialization.

To give a concrete example, one of my graduate students, Erik Selberg, and I built the first meta-search engine, MetaCrawler. We were running it here and it became very popular. After a while, the head of the lab staff came to me and said, ‘This MetaCrawler thing is generating so much traffic on our network that people can’t get access to their homework, you have to get rid of it.’ So now I have this problem, I’ve created this thing that people love, so now what? The ideas were already out there in research papers, but we didn’t want to kill the application. We found that by licensing it to a startup company, we gave it some life and millions of people were using it every day at its peak. So it was very gratifying.

X: How do you decide if a research project you’re working on will have commercial applications?

OE: The first question I ask myself is, do people really badly want to use this? And I like to see evidence of that. In both the cases of MetaCrawler and Farecast, I was surprised how much …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

A new startup company is in the works at the University of Washington, based on inexpensive, portable solar cells that could go far beyond the standard rooftop model. Conventional solar cells are made from expensive silicon, but the UW group, led by materials science and engineering professor Alex Jen, has come up with a way to harness solar energy using thin polymer film—akin to really thin cling wrap.

“You can potentially make it to cover a large area,” said Jen, an expert in nanomaterials and organic polymer-based electronics. “It’s low-cost, lightweight, flexible, and could be conformed to any substrate you would like to use.”

The “large area” part of that equation is especially important, Jen said, as energy experts have estimated that solar cells covering 150 square miles in the Southwest working at 10 percent efficiency could generate enough electricity to power the entire United States. Jen’s technique could eventually help meet that goal.

The plastic film, which Jen said can be printed in a similar process to newspaper printing, is highly adaptable. It can be made in a semi-transparent form, so you could sandwich sheets of it between two glass plates and have tinted windows on your home or office building that double as solar panels.

It could even be used to power portable electronic devices, Jen said, just by sticking these thin films to the back of a computer or iPod. His group has made several versions of the polymer solar cells, and is in the process of scaling it up to make a prototype for large-area use. “Sunlight is very abundant,” Jen said. “The exposure of sunlight in one hour contains the amount of energy equal to the whole human population’s use in one year.”

But conventional solar panels are costly. Solar energy currently costs about four or five dollars per watt, compared to less than one dollar per watt for fossil fuels, Jen said. His group’s technology could bring the costs of solar energy down to similar prices as fossil fuels, in part because the manufacturing process could be done on a much larger scale than silicon solar cells. The challenge is to …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

The University of Washington’s TechTransfer department has launched a new program over the last four months that brings local entrepreneurs into the university to help academic researchers in the early stages of starting a company. This program, which is part of UW’s startup-support service, LaunchPad, matches volunteer entrepreneurs with faculty and other researchers interested in learning what it takes to build a successful company. (Xconomy previously wrote about LaunchPad here.)

Unlike more traditional entrepreneurs-in-residence programs (which UW also has), where entrepreneurs come in later in the game to help shape a particular company and often take on the role of CEO in that company, these new advisors will help with a range of projects well before they’re at the startup point.

Janis Machala, the director of LaunchPad since November, is spearheading the new program, which is being formalized this month. The experts she’s bringing in are tentatively being called LaunchPad “entrepreneur advisors.”

“Vetting research early with industry, with people who have had to go through the funding process, with people who have had to pitch their deals to strategic investors, will help give the researchers a sense of the reality of what it takes to make something translated into the commercial world,” Machala said in an interview. “This is really about trying to narrow that gap between the lab and the commercial.”

To find these expert advisors, Machala looks to her extensive network of local contacts. She just came to UW from an extensive background in the startup world, most recently from Paladin Partners, a Kirkland-based consulting firm for startups she founded in 1995. Machala keeps her ear to the ground for news of senior executives going through some kind of transition—retirement, company mergers, and so forth—someone who would have some spare time to volunteer with the researchers.

“People are really excited about this program and the idea that they can help in a meaningful way,” Machala said. And it helps that she is only asking for their time and not a check, she added. “So many of these people are being pitched to be an angel or to be on a board. They don’t have to have a formal relationship here.”

Jeff Canin, a local serial entrepreneur and consultant specializing in clean technology, just started as one of the entrepreneurial advisors last week. One of his first orders of business will be helping some UW researchers start a company around new solar cell technologies. Starting a successful cleantech company is not so different from any other successful startup, Canin said. “You have to have a differentiating solution to a large problem,” he said. “Often one finds a researcher or a technologist may have a grand idea, but it doesn’t serve a specific market.”

Among other advisors recently signed on at UW are Chris Porter, formerly of Cellpro and Pfizer; Joe Eichinger, co-founder and president of Redmond-based CoAptus Medical; Michael Hovanes, a serial entrepreneur in medical devices and imaging; and John Hansen, the former CEO of Bellevue-based Vallent (acquired by IBM in 2006). We’ll be keeping an eye out to see what impact this distinguished group has on the UW startup community.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Cisco Systems announced today the release of software developed in partnership with Seattle-based Verdiem to automatically save energy in idling computers, phones, networked devices, and eventually, whole buildings. The first version of the product will be available in February as a free upgrade to Cisco’s network switch, to manage energy usage of IP devices. Next summer, Cisco will release a version based on Verdiem’s software to save PC energy, and in 2010 a version will be released that monitors whole-building energy, including lighting and heating. Customers can adjust settings to have computers or other appliances automatically shut off overnight, for example.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Micronics has been around since 1996, so it hardly qualifies as a startup anymore. But the Redmond, WA-based biotech company has been moving in new directions over the last few years, and is now getting ready to bring its first diagnostic tests to the market.

The 28-person company has been in the microfluidics business—the design of tools to manipulate very small amounts of liquid (sometimes called “lab on a chip”)—since its inception 13 years ago, when it spun out of research from the University of Washington. More recently, says president and CEO Karen Hedine, the company has shifted into using its knowledge and inventions in microfluidics to create novel diagnostic tools.

Micronics has raised a total of about $25 million in funding, Hedine said, including $9 million in 2008 through private Series B investors and a Series C financing round led by the Southwest Michigan First Life Science Fund.

The company has decided to focus on infectious diseases, Hedine said. Micronics’ first diagnostic product, which it hopes to debut by the end of 2009, will be a small, disposable test for malaria. “We look at targets that are unmet needs,” Hedine said. “A malaria diagnostic is one of the most unmet needs out there.”

Right now, Hedine said, even in a best case scenario like a Western world clinic, diagnosing the disease usually requires several clinic appointments and at least a few weeks to get an answer back from the lab. Micronics hopes to turn those weeks into minutes, and reduce the amount of blood or urine required from a large vial to a few drops.

The malaria tests are aimed for use in developing countries, where the disease is most prevalent. Hedine said she expects Micronics’ customers might include clinics in these areas, as well as charity organizations, governments donating aid, non-governmental organizations, or militaries stationed in countries where malaria is common.

So far, Micronics’ money has come from three avenues, Hedine said: investment financing, revenue from lab equipment and consulting services, and grants or contracts for the development of some of its diagnostic tools. The tools are built on small, disposable plastic cards, and use minute amounts of fluids—for both the sample required from the patient and the chemical reagents needed to process it, Hedine said. They’re designed to run on a “finger-stick” worth of blood, similar to home blood-sugar monitors for diabetics.

After the malaria tests, Micronics plans to release a similar test system for E. coli, which has been a recent culprit in widespread food poisoning scares in the United States, as well as a portable, rapid blood-typing test whose development was funded by the U.S. Army. The company is also working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop similar tests for HIV. Hedine said diagnostic tests for a panel of other STDs are further down the pipeline.

The malaria and E. coli tests will be ready for regulatory testing by the middle of the year, Hedine said, and she hopes they will be approved in time to be released before 2010. “We’re really revolutionizing the way testing is done,” Hedine said.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Theo Chocolate, Inc. wants to unlock the cocoa bean’s secrets. Together with chemists at the University of Washington, Theo’s chief operating officer and food scientist Andy McShea is using “electronic nose” lab techniques to identify the best organic bean he can find.

I met with McShea in the Seattle chocolate company’s office, which overlooks the factory floor and is filled with the pungent smell of roasting cocoa. McShea, a transplant from England and more recently from biomedical research (he came to Theo two years ago from the biotech company CombiMatrix, and before that worked at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), is really enthusiastic about chocolate—good, organic chocolate, that is.

Last week, the organic and fair-trade chocolate company, which has been in production for three years, won a one-year grant from the Washington Technology Center (WTC) to develop new lab techniques for quality and safety tests of cocoa beans. Together with UW chemistry professor Rob Synovec, McShea aims to take chocolate production beyond the “look and sniff test,” the currently used, less-than-quantitative means of assessing bean quality.

In part, the research could help them consistently find a better bean. But the technologies can go further than that, McShea said. The company wants to increase production—the factory is currently operating at less than 20 percent capacity, McShea said—but to do that, it needs a bigger supply of high quality, organic cocoa beans from fair-trade sources.

“There are actually very few farms with great organic cocoa and high production levels, and they usually sell out,” McShea said. Since going for lower quality is not an option, Theo wants to use its knowledge of the bean to convert cocoa farms from conventional to organic—raising the quality of the beans and chocolate in the process.

Theo and the UW’s proposal for the WTC was entitled “Magic Bean.” “It’s more in reference to, ‘What is the magic of the bean?’” McShea said. “We’re not trying to create chocolate flavor out of some …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

In a market glutted with free cell phone applications, and as advertising budgets dive along with the rest of the economy, what’s a mobile-media company to do? Seattle’s Zumobi has a few tricks up its sleeve. Namely, don’t charge your sponsors anything upfront, and find innovative ways to drive users of one of your applications to your others. Ken Willner, Zumobi’s CEO, described these strategies to me in an interview yesterday.

The company spun off from Microsoft Research in 2006 to create a widget-based mobile platform. In the last year or so, however, it has changed its focus from cell phone platforms to mobile-media applications for “superphones” (iPhone, Android G1, BlackBerry, and their ilk). Zumobi currently has five such apps on the market, all free for users to download. The more well-known among them are the REI Ski and Snow Report, which combines ski and weather conditions for more than 1,800 resorts around the country with a targeted REI catalog, and Inside Xbox 360, a news site and forum for Xbox gamers.

In November, Zumobi debuted Ziibii, an iPhone app that Willner calls a “social ticker.” It combines updates from social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, as well as RSS feeds, and sends them across your iPhone screen in random order as rafts on a virtual river.

With so many companies out there making free iPhone (and other cell phone) applications, I wondered what could make Zumobi stand out to users and advertisers. Willner, who has an extensive background in advertising and wireless media, thinks it’s all about branding the applications, and making them appealing enough to drive repeat usage.

“There are more than 10,000 apps in the iPhone store, most of them free. There’s just a lot of clutter out there,” he said. “There’s a real lack of sustained-usage type of apps that give the user a reason to come back, day after day or month after month.”

To that end, Zumobi is trying to build a network of applications, centered around the “Z-button,” a button on all of their applications that takes the user to a gallery of Zumobi’s other applications. This strategy is driving four to five times more usage of its other applications compared to average click-throughs from Web or mobile advertising, Willner said.

As for making sure people want to use its applications over and over again, that’s a trickier concept. Zumobi is just trying to come up with applications that provide some repeated usefulness for its users, Willner said. And then tie them to a sponsor, like REI.

The branded applications seems like a risky strategy when the ad market is tanking, but Zumobi is absorbing most of that risk itself, Willner said. When approaching a partner such as REI or Lenovo—Zumobi and the laptop-maker released an application tied to the Beijing Olympics for users to follow games on their phones—Zumobi pays for all the initial development and marketing of the application. Sometimes it creates the application for the partner company, sometimes it’s the other way around. Either way, through Zumobi’s performance-based business model, the partner only pays once the app is on the market and being used, said Willner.

“When you meet with a potential partner and tell them that you’re willing to put your skin in the game, willing to take the risk yourself, that’s a great message in this market,” Willner said.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

For James Sun, runner-up on season six of The Apprentice and CEO of Seattle-based Zoodango, it’s all about getting people together. And he wants to help them find meeting spots. Yesterday, he announced the launch of the re-tooled Zoodango, once a social-networking site and now a map-based service where users use a “geo-search engine” to find local businesses based on location.

Zoodango’s new angle to finding restaurants, shops, and other businesses is the way you search—by location instead of search term, so those with subpar Google-fu still have a chance. It also allows you to see multiple categories of businesses in one location, a task that requires several clicks on sites like Yelp and Citysearch.

“We help people plan their whole evening,” Sun said in an interview. “Say you want to go to a sushi restaurant, then round two, you want to go get some drinks, then later go on to a club.”

Yesterday’s launch includes sites for Seattle, Spokane, Portland, San Francisco, and Oakland. In two weeks, the company will add Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Reno, and Tucson. By February, Sun says, Chicago and the East Coast will also be on the map.

Like Yelp and other review sites, users create profiles, and then rank and score local businesses. But Zoodango comes with a social twist, keeping track of its users’ preferences to customize output and make meeting up easier. Say you want to grab dinner with five of your friends, all of whom are also Zoodango users (not likely yet, perhaps, but give it some time). You can choose a few restaurants and Zoodango will show you how much of a hit they’ll be—if one of your friends has only reviewed vegetarian restaurants, for instance, you’ll know not to suggest the latest steakhouse.

For picky types, the site also uses an algorithm to rank businesses based on Zoodango user scores and outside ratings from other review sites, so instead of facing a list of 30 four-star pizza joints and having to read through all their reviews, you’ll know exactly how your local pizza shop ranks compared to all of Seattle’s other pizza spots.

Sun, a University of Washington grad who previously worked at Deloitte Consulting, started Zoodango nearly two years ago, intending it to be a local social-networking site. But when Facebook …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

ZeaChem, a Colorado-based clean fuel company, announced that they have raised $34 million from investors, led by Globespan Capital Partners and PrairieGold Venture Partners, to fund a green fuels refinery plant in Oregon. The company is developing technology to convert inedible plant matter into ethanol. ZeaChem announced last year that the plant will be built on a tree farm in Boardman, OR, which will supply poplar trees for refining. The plant will initially produce 1.5 million gallons of fuel per year, company officials said.

Comments | Reprints | Share: