Here’s a quick update on the agenda for Mobile Madness 2012: Total Mobility, the annual half-day mobile conference we are organizing here at Xconomy Boston. The event is taking place on the afternoon of March 14 at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge, MA. We are looking forward to a packed house and some outstanding talks, discussions, and networking.

I’m pleased to announce a few more startup participants:

—Apperian founder and chief strategy officer Chuck Goldman will join us for a discussion of mobile business strategies, along with Mobiquity founder and CEO Bill Seibel. Goldman is a former Apple exec who leads Apperian’s strategic and business development efforts in enterprise mobile apps. Seibel, for his part, was a founding partner at Cambridge Technology Partners and went on to lead ZEFER, Demantra, and Gumball; he currently leads Mobiquity’s efforts to help businesses develop mobile strategies.

—Fiksu CEO Micah Adler joins us to talk about his company’s approach to marketing mobile apps. My colleague Erin recently wrote about Fiksu’s consumer-facing service, which lets people try out apps from various brands and stores for free.

—Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner will be on hand to discuss his vision for the future of the mobile wallet—banking, shopping, and e-commerce via your smartphone.

Other confirmed speakers include Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Chris Lynch from Vertica/HP, Chuck Kane from One Laptop Per Child, and Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR. We’ll also have a special panel of Boston’s “mobile mafia,” including Lars Albright (Quattro Wireless, Session M); Mike Baker (Enpocket, DataXu); Tom Burgess (Third Screen Media, Linkable Networks); Jeff Glass (m-Qube, Bain Capital Ventures); and Ryan Moore (GrandBanks Capital investor in Enpocket, Where, and Nexage, now with Atlas Venture).

There are more announcements to come, and I will be posting the detailed agenda soon, so stay tuned. Meantime, you can still grab the early bird rate if you register today.

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It was a busy news week in the New England life sciences scene, with acquisitions, clinical data, and partnership deals.

—Thanks to a new co-promotion deal, Genzyme will begin marketing a diagnostic test for thyroid cancer developed by South San Francisco-based Veracyte. Genzyme, the Cambridge, MA-based unit of Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) makes a common drug for treating the disease.

—Cambridge-based Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) presented data from a 16-patient study indicating saridegib, its experimental once-daily pill, could potentially shrink tumors and help people live longer when combined with chemotherapy.

—Millennium, also of Cambridge, nabbed FDA clearance to begin selling a version of the multiple myeloma drug bortezomib (Velcade) that can be injected just under the skin, as well as intravenously. It’s significant because the under-the-skin drug seems to be more tolerable, reducing the drug’s side effect of nerve damage in the fingers and toes.

—Xconomy national biotech editor Luke Timmerman wrote about how Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) and its South San Francisco-based partner Alios Biopharma are positioning themselves to defend their share of the hot growing market for hepatitis C treatments.

—And my colleague Arlene wrote about the family-run business that is Woburn, MA-based Courtagen Life Sciences. Three brothers fill the roles of CEO, president, and chief scientific officer, while their dad chairs the board. Read about more about how it all came together.

—Bedford, MA-based Avila Therapeutics, a maker of so-called covalent drugs for treating cancer, was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million upfront. Potentially $575 million more could come to Avila through milestones. The startup’s venture investors included Polaris Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Abingworth Management, and Advent Venture Partners. Check out investors’ and friends’ reactions to the deal across the Web here.

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Avila Therapeutics, after just five years in business and $51 million in venture capital, made big news today when it agreed to be acquired by Celgene for $350 million upfront plus another $575 million in milestone payments.

Naturally, there are a lot of people celebrating the success of the Bedford, MA-based company today around the web and on Twitter.

Over at Polaris Venture Partners’ blog, Amir Nashat wrote that “early, Series A life sciences investing pays off.”  He added that this portfolio company is the eighth in the last three years to generate returns, either through acquisition or an IPO. “One common thread that binds each of these companies was their compelling scientific foundation and transformative potential for treating disease. In our model, these areas are essential and go hand-in-hand with strong teams. In the case of Avila, we were fortunate to back a truly unique team of repeat entrepreneurs,” Nashat wrote.

Bruce Booth, a partner at Atlas Venture who also invested in the company, wrote on his blog about how Avila (AH-vill-uh) paid off big-time for its early venture investors. The company raised just $51 million in venture capital its five-year history. The company is generating a 5x return on investment on the upfront payment from Celgene, which has potential to balloon to a 15x return if Avila hits its future milestones.

Booth offers some interesting background on the Avila story, and some lessons in four bullet points. “Avila has exhibited many of the hallmarks of a great biotech story today”: Specifically, he said those hallmarks are:

 Commitment to discovering and advancing real innovation

 Healthy focus on ‘equity capital efficiency’

 Dedication to creating strategic optionality for the company’s future

 And, most importantly, a fantastic team

Over on Twitter, Michael Gilman of Cambridge, MA-based Stromedix (@Michael_Gilman) recalled sitting in his living room more than five years ago with Avila co-founder Jus Singh, talking about his idea for the company. “The sweet thing about Avila is that it’s a triumph of data over dogma. People HATED covalent drugs. Avila changed their minds,” Gilman said on Twitter.

Avila Therapeutics CEO Katrine Bosley

You can read the Xconomy story on the deal by my colleague Arlene Weintraub. The one thing I’ll add is that I saw Avila CEO Katrine Bosley along with VP of corporate development Nagesh Mahanthappa and CFO Andrew Hirsch a couple weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Bosley talked a bit about how the company’s lead drug candidate, a Btk inhibitor, was being readied for mid-stage clinical trials against cancer later this year, and that it was thought to have potential against autoimmune diseases.

It was a quick meeting, and there wasn’t any hint that a deal this big was ready to be announced. But Hirsch tried to persuade me that maybe the IPO market for biotech isn’t as barren as some people think, which I took as a subtle hint that Avila might be sniffing around at that option. “I think there is an appetite from the investment community for high-quality stories,” Hirsch said.

And Mahanthappa optimistically noted that some big companies have been doing creative deals to support innovative biotechs. In particular, he singled out Celgene for its partnerships with Cambridge, MA-based Agios Pharmaceuticals and Acceleron Pharma. When I asked him about predictions for the year ahead, he predicted that creative deals like that would continue.

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Mark Twain used to toss around a saying about three kinds of lies. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. This week in biotech, we saw some statistics that could lead some people to get a false impression that everything is just peachy in biotechland.

If you measure the state of life science innovation by the amount of money flowing in, things look swell. Venture capitalists poured $4.73 billion into 446 biotech companies last year, according to the MoneyTree report by the National Venture Capital Association and PricewaterhouseCoopers, based on data from Thomson Reuters. The venture industry association’s press release cheerily noted that overall venture funding jumped 22 percent last year. While software is still the No. 1 and faster-growing sector of the two, biotech held its own, with a solid 22 percent gain in dollars invested compared with a year earlier.

You have to dig deeper to see what’s really going on. There is still a good amount of money going toward late-stage development of drugs people started working on 10-15 years ago. But there is an alarming drop in support for today’s cutting-edge biotech startups. Last year, just 153 U.S. biotech and medical device startups got their first round of financing, the lowest amount of seed investment activity in 15 years, as reported by Ryan Flinn of Bloomberg News.

There’s something really wrong with this picture. Most any biologist will tell you we are living in a golden age of discovery, at a time when we will soon be sequencing entire human genomes for $1,000 in one day. We are able to ask questions about how life works that nobody could even imagine asking a few years ago. It ought to be the time to charge ahead with basic research, and early-stage R&D to test exciting new concepts in diseases like cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, HIV, and more.

But everywhere you look, the story is about cuts, cuts, cuts. The National Institutes of Health, the primary government agency that supports basic biomedical research, used to write checks for one out of every three grant applications, but it’s now down to about one out of every six, NIH director Francis Collins said earlier this month at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Pharma companies are cutting back on R&D, firing workers left and right, and leaning on cheaper outsourced vendors everywhere they can. As many as one-fourth to one-half of biotech venture capitalists are thought to be slowly going out of business, as they are unable to raise new investment funds. The same IPO investors that want to buy Facebook shares look at biotech stocks like a four-year-old looks at lima beans.

There are good reasons why we see all those things happening. Pharma companies have created enormous inefficiencies for themselves through mega-mergers, and now they need to spend years trying to get their houses in order. Biotech as an industry has overpromised and underdelivered, and many investors are tired of it. The FDA, stung by various drug safety scandals, has been cautious about approving new drugs (although there are signs that FDA leadership wants a more balanced approach). And of course, our society is still struggling to come to terms with healthcare reform, and the realization that it’s unsustainable to spend infinite amounts of money on healthcare.

John LaMattina

All that said, an entrepreneur or a bold Big Pharma executive is the kind of person who looks at that picture and believes he or she can overcome the hurdles, and form a plan to turn vision into reality. But there aren’t that many people out there with the can-do spirit, or guts, to put down real money behind really talented teams devoted to the discovery of new drugs. And because everybody’s talking about how to go from Phase I to Phase II with drugs people invented years ago, there’s a real possibility that once those projects run their course, we’ll all look around in 2020 and wonder where all the wonderful new drugs are going to come from.

“You can really get into a vicious cycle when you have to eat your own seed corn,” says John LaMattina, a senior partner with PureTech Ventures, and the former president of R&D at Pfizer.

There are exceptions, of course, with a few people trying creative new ways to plant seed corn. Third Rock Ventures and Atlas Venture are a couple of VC firms that have remained active, continuing to bet big on the edgiest stuff coming out of the labs. Most every Big Pharma company has set aside cash for corporate venture firms that are seeking to help fill the void being created by the shrinkage of traditional VC. Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Sanofi, Bayer, and deserve credit for working on creative new collaborations with top biomedical universities and research centers, which seek to minimize some of the problems with the fruitless alliances of the past. J&J made news this past week when it unveiled an incubator for 18-20 startups in San Diego which looks to fill up some lab space it had vacated through its own internal R&D cutbacks.

Right now, we are in an age of experimentation with new organizational structures for supporting biomedical R&D. The hope is that these new organizations can reduce the time, money, and high-risk profile that has made life sciences such a hit-or-miss investment over the years. Pharma companies know they don’t … Next Page »

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Generations of high school kids have been taught that only about 3 percent of the human genome is actually useful—meaning it contains genes that code proteins—and the rest is “junk DNA.” Cambridge, MA-based RaNA Therapeutics was founded on the idea that the so-called junk is actually gold, because it contains a type of RNA that can flip genes on inside cells, potentially offering a new approach to modulating diseases. RaNA is coming out of stealth mode today and announcing a $20.7 million Series A financing led by Atlas Venture, SR One, and agricultural giant Monsanto (NYSE: MON). Partners Innovation Fund also participated in the funding.

Research done in the last several years has shown that most of what was formerly dubbed junk in the DNA is actually transcribed into “long non-coding RNAs,” which regulate genes on a high level and control the development process. When these RNAs are improperly expressed in cells, they can cause disease. RaNA is based on technology developed by scientific founder Jeannie Lee, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital. Lee discovered that some long non-coding RNAs interact with a specific protein—and that blocking that protein can selectively activate genes.

Arthur Krieg, CEO of RaNA, says RaNA has yet to determine which diseases it’s going to go after, but that the opportunities are vast. Krieg, who joined Atlas in 2011 as an entrepreneur in residence, says part of the process of starting up RaNA involved interviewing doctors about how they’d like to see the technology deployed. “We asked them, ‘If you could turn on any gene in the genome, what would you go for?’” Krieg recalls. That polling yielded more ideas than RaNA can pursue—not surprising, Krieg says, since most drug approaches on the market today involve turning genes off rather than on. “The only approach that comes close to what we’re doing is gene therapy, and that has posed problems,” he says, referring to safety issues that have arisen in some experimental gene-therapy procedures.

Monsanto participated in RaNA’s funding because the startup’s technology might also prove useful in agricultural biotech, says Jean-Francois Formela, a partner in Atlas Ventures’ life sciences group. Monsanto and Atlas formed a strategic alliance last year to search for investments that could be applied to both human health and plant biology, Formela says. The RaNA deal is the first one struck under that alliance. “Monsanto had invested in RNA before. The alliance doesn’t focus solely on that, but it was part of the vision,” Formela says. Monsanto has a board seat with RaNA and an option to collaborate on ag-bio applications going forward, though RaNA is not currently working in that area, Krieg adds.

Atlas, too, has a long-standing interest in RNA. It was an early investor in Alnylam (NASDAQ: ALNY), the Cambridge, MA company that’s working on RNA interference technology. And it invested in Miragen, a Boulder, CO company working on microRNA therapeutics. Krieg had been working on RNA at Pfizer ever since the pharmaceutical giant bought the company he co-founded, Coley Pharmaceuticals, in 2008. When Pfizer eliminated that unit last year, Atlas recruited Krieg to help start RaNA. “We really started it from scratch,” Formela says.

RaNA, which has a staff of about a dozen and is about to move into a new office in Cambridge, is currently picking its targets for human therapeutic development, Krieg says. He hopes to be ready to start human trials by the end of this year. The company is already talking to potential pharma partners and will consider early-stage collaborations with companies that are interested in pursuing RaNA’s new scientific approach, Krieg says. “I’m not aware of other companies working on this,” he says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have one or two partners by the end of the year.”

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Time for our data-driven roundup of the latest deals news from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

$17 to $18 billion—The approximate amount Yahoo could raise by selling off its stakes in China’s Alibaba and Yahoo Japan, according to reports today from Fortune and Dow Jones VentureWire. Yahoo’s board is reportedly considering the transactions this week.

$268 million—The price fetched by Sunnyvale, CA-based Web and mobile content delivery acceleration specialist Cotendo, which was just acquired by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai, the big operator of private content distribution networks. Xconomy’s Greg Huang reported on the story.

$130 million—New financing announced this week for San Jose-based Stion, a maker of thin-film photovoltaic materials. Avaco, a South Korean equipment supplier, and unnamed private equity funds in South Korea led the round.

$94 million—The amount Google has invested in a group of four photovoltaic installations being built outside Sacramento by Recurrent Energy, a San Francisco-based subsidiary of Japanese giant Sharp. KKR and Recurrent itself also invested in the projects.

$40 million—New financing for San Francisco-based Jawbone, best known for its Bluetooth mobile headsets. Deutsche Telekom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and DST Global’s Yuri Milner ponied up.

$27 million—Total venture backing raised by Seeker Wireless, an Australian maker of geolocation software acquired this week by the Safely division of Emeryville, CA-based Location Labs. Financial terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but Ina Fried of AllThingsD pegged the deal at “just over $1 million.”

$11.6 million—Series B funding for Houzz, a Palo Alto, CA-based startup whose website and mobile applications offer renovation design ideas and product leads to homeowners. Sequoia Capital led the round.

$6.5 million—Series B funding for San Francisco-based Keas, a provider of game-based wellness programs for large employers. Existing investors Atlas Venture and Ignition Partners led the round. Xconomy profiled Keas and its big 2010 pivot last month.

$6 million—A Series A financing round for Tactus Technology of Fremont, CA. The company is developing touchscreens with retractable keys, and is funded by Thomvest Ventures.

$5.33 million—Series B funding for Menlo Park, CA-based ScaleArc, a maker of software for managing the deployment of large databases. Trinity Ventures led the round, with existing investor Nexus Venture Partners joining in.

$4 million—A Series A financing round for Menlo Park, CA-based SurDoc, a new startup offering Web-based document storage, annotation, and sharing. Backers include IDG Ventures.

$1 million—Seed funding for Mygola, a San Francisco- and Bangalore-based startup that connects consumers planning trips with human guides who assemble information about flight options, hotels, and the like. Blumberg Ventures and 500 Startups led the investment.

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New England saw a flurry of life sciences news this week, from venture firms, new startups, and established biotechs.

—Boston-based Avila Therapeutics presented data at the American Society of Hematology from early human trials of its lead cancer drug, AVL-292, which is on track to enter more extensive Phase 2 trials next year. This compound, a so-called covalent drug that bonds tightly to disease-causing proteins to shut down their activity over time, is targeting cancers such as chronic lymphocytic leukemia.

—Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) could be onto something in the field of RNA interference, a technology that has fallen out of favor in the industry, my colleague Luke wrote. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech reported at a scientific meeting last month that one of its experimental RNAi drugs was able to shut down production of a protein that causes a rare and deadly disease called TTR amyloidosis.

—ImmusanT, a new startup working on therapies for celiac disease, inked a $20 million Series A financing from Vatera Healthcare Partners. The Cambridge-based company is developing a vaccine and a diagnostic and monitoring test for the condition, which renders the protein gluten toxic in the body.

—Newton, MA-based AesRx kicked off human trials of its lead drug Aes-103, a treatment for sickle cell disease. A partnership formed with the National Institutes of Health helped the company get this far, after it struggled to raise venture funding.

—Boston-based Ember Therapeutics raised $34 million from Third Rock Ventures to develop drugs that fight obesity by burning off … Next Page »

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Atlas Venture has been spending a lot of time lately figuring out how to create new drugs, and new companies, in untraditional ways—and it is showing the results of its strategizing again today through a new partnership with Shire Human Genetic Therapies.

Cambridge,MA-based Atlas said it has formed a multi-year collaboration with Shire to look for opportunities to invest in startups working on rare diseases. Shire, one of the world’s largest players in this field, will contribute by having its scientists conduct experiments to validate some of the scientific claims Atlas would like to test, and it will invest alongside Atlas in new companies, Atlas partner Bruce Booth said on his Life Sci VC blog.

Financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. But Booth said that it will involve “dedicated professionals” working on structuring the new opportunities, and that Atlas and Shire will seek to create a small portfolio of investments over the years of the partnership. Shire will also get option rights in these deals, through which it will have the opportunity to acquire the companies at a pre-determined price if the startups reach certain scientific goals. This isn’t the first time Atlas has collaborated closely with a big company—earlier this year it formed an alliance with ag biotech giant Monsanto.

Bruce Booth, partner at Atlas Venture

It’s all part of a push by Atlas, and other venture firms, to find ways to reduce the amount of time and money that goes into biotech startups, while increasing the odds they can get returns during a lackluster IPO market.

By structuring the investments to give Shire the option to acquire, the partnership “secures access to these innovations for Shire, while mitigating the downstream liquidity risk for the team and investors,” Booth said on his blog. Referring to the Shire and Monsanto deals, Booth said, “We are quite excited about how these unique platforms will enable us to further experiment with the early stage venture model.”

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This is a tale of two CEOs whose reputations precede them. It is a short tale.

The news today is that Cambridge, MA-based Kinvey and Portland, OR-based Urban Airship have formed a technology partnership involving mobile applications. Basically, Kinvey will handle the data back-end for mobile app developers whose apps reach end users through “push notifications” powered by Urban Airship; push notifications are typically marketing or news messages sent by publishers over a data network. Financial terms of the partnership weren’t given.

But this story isn’t really about financials. These are two startups, separated by 3,000 miles, and each has a personal flair. Last year, Urban Airship CEO and co-founder Scott Kveton told me about how his company first got off the ground. It was June 2009, Urban Airship had barely started, and Kveton and his team couldn’t afford to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Instead, they bought $1,500 worth of donuts and camped outside the Moscone Center, chatting up (and feeding) hundreds of developers waiting in line about their mobile messaging needs.

Fast forward, and today Urban Airship’s thousands of customers include ESPN, Fox, LivingSocial, Warner Bros., and the White House. The company has raised more than $20 million, and its investors include Foundry Group, True Ventures, Founder’s Co-op, Intel Capital, Salesforce.com, and Verizon.

Kinvey’s back-story is no less dramatic. The founding team moved to Boston from Austin, TX, and graduated with the most recent class of TechStars Boston. Last July, when founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar and chief technology officer Morgan Bickle were stuck underground for two hours on the Red Line subway, they spent their time chatting up commuters about their mobile-app needs.

Sridhar’s startup has since raised a $2 million seed round from Atlas Venture, Avalon Ventures, and numerous angel investors. Kinvey is building its business around providing cloud-based back-end services like storing and managing app data, handling security and analytics, and enabling purchases. We’ll be watching to see how much its partnerships, like the one with Urban Airship, help boost its profile among developers and publishers.

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How annoying is the Web? I’m not talking about the nonstop distractions, the social-media window into human stupidity, or even the endless pop-up ads that block your view of the screen. I’m talking about the utter loss of privacy that most consumers have suffered online, yet rarely think about.

Sure, the Web is a net positive (we hope), but there are costs. When you visit any website, you leave a record of who you are, where you are, and what you looked at. That by itself might not be traceable to your specific identity, but over time, sites can track you via social media, share buttons (Facebook “likes,” even if you don’t click them or log in), check-ins, and other online activities. Companies can then show you personalized ads based on your product preferences, zip code, and history of Google searches. Worse, they can create a profile of your activities, often combined with data from public records, and sell it to other companies to do whatever they want with it.

Trying to combat all of this is a small Boston tech startup called Abine (pronounced “uh-BEAN”). Its name stands for “A Bit Is Not Enough.” The company is working to give consumers more control over their personal information on the Web. I’ve heard a fair amount about this startup over the past year, but I recently had a chance to meet co-founder Andrew Sudbury and CEO Bill Kerrigan over a beer.

The timing seems good for Abine, what with the massive flak Facebook has been taking over user privacy lately. As Sudbury points out (along with others), Facebook treats its users not as customers, but as products. Meaning that each social network member’s profile, with its likes, recommendations, and social connections, can be thought of as just part of a $100 billion machine for marketers.

“We don’t want our users to be our product,” Sudbury says. Instead, he says, consumers pay Abine to help shield them from Web tracking and other misuses of their personal information. “We want to sell privacy services,” he says. “We want to be at the point of contact between the user and the net. We want them to use the Web without worrying that all their data is flying out the door.” For example, “users think they’re going to Boston.com, but they’re really going to 10 other websites,” Sudbury says. (That’s because their browser fetches different pieces of the website from other sites—things like ads and snippets of code that let advertisers know a little bit about who each visitor is.)

So what does Abine do about it? The company makes add-ons for browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome; at the moment, different pieces of its software work for different browsers. The software, called Do Not Track Plus, blocks unwanted tracking by detecting all tracking requests … Next Page »

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Pixtronix, an Andover, MA-based maker of low-power displays, has been acquired by San Diego tech giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), according to Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. Terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the report cites a price range of $175-200 million, based on sources close to the deal. A source of mine confirmed the deal but couldn’t provide any details on the record.

Pixtronix started in 2005 and has raised a little more than $50 million in venture funding from Atlas Venture, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other investors. The company reportedly has 45 employees, and they’ll stay in Andover. Pixtronix is led by CEO Anthony Zona.

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Big video games studios are a bit old school, with everything from game design, production, execution, and financing done in house, says Boaz Sender, a JavaScript programmer at the Boston-based Web consulting firm Bocoup. But they’re about to go the way that the old Hollywood movie studios did, he says, by outsourcing many of the operations they once tightly controlled.

Sender says that’s all going to happen as a result of traditional video games moving to the open Web, which is a set of standardized, royalty free, HTTP- and HTML-based technologies for building network software. The software design principles and content policies behind it focus on consumer empowerment and third-party integration, he says.

“When you move to the Web, one thing that becomes a lot cheaper is distribution,” says Sender. This enables younger, scrappier startups to get involved in building games, and encourages other startups to sprout up that are developing related games software, for functions like game authoring, payment, advertising, and managing player identities.

Bocoup is looking to seed this trend via Game Lab, a small games incubator it’s running with Cambridge-based Atlas Venture with the “goal of funding companies that help the games industry move to the open Web.” It’s particularly focused on HTML5, the emerging new standard for programming Web pages and services.

Bocoup’s 15-person team has spent two years helping companies develop and adopt open Web technologies, through events, evangelism, and consulting for customers like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla. Sender founded the firm, which consists of a group of (“especially elite,” according to Atlas) JavaScript programmers. They work closely with other Web design-focused consultancies.

Game Lab’s funding model varies from startup to startup, but it could potentially invest in seed rounds for existing companies, help new companies form and seed those, and participate in Series A rounds, says Sender. Atlas is supplying the capital and Bocoup is bringing its expertise in open Web technology to the teams. Entrepreneurs in the Game Lab also get close mentoring from Atlas, and the option of working out of Bocoup’s open source hacker space.

“It’s about how we’re going to fund the building blocks of the open Web games industry,” says Sender. Bocoup is also working with its … Next Page »

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Phil Beauregard is hungry. His scrappy startup, Objective Logistics, is hungry, too. Good thing they are in the restaurant business.

Actually, the truth is they want to turn the restaurant business upside down. But in a good way (if you believe them). OK, I’ve avoided the G-word for as long as possible. Beauregard and company are trying to add a “game layer” to the restaurant workplace. Before you reach for your “gamification” barf bag, know this: they are doing it to help restaurants improve their workforce and customer service, while also helping to reward top-performing employees.

The news today is that Objective Logistics is moving its headquarters from New Bedford, MA, to Cambridge (keeping the old office too), and that it has raised a $1.5 million venture round led by Atlas Venture and Google Ventures. NextView Ventures, Canary Ventures, and individual investors also participated in the round.

It’s a natural step for a young startup that has innovative technology and is still learning how to sell its stuff in an ultra-competitive industry. Beauregard, the company’s CEO and co-founder, says he had been thinking about raising a smaller bridge round (around $400K—he had previously raised a $750K seed round), but he talked to VC Jeff Fagnan at Atlas and decided to make the deal with him and Rich Miner of Google Ventures. (Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR, no stranger to game layers, made the intro to Miner.)

“We want people [investors and partners] who can fill in tons of holes where we’re deficient as a company,” Beauregard says. “These guys are the ones we want to work with. They are so good for the city of Boston.” He adds, “We want to prove ourselves.”

Reached for comment, Fagnan touted Objective Logistics’ “pure perseverance and relentless drive” and said its founders “executed like crazy” over the past year. The five-person company says it is looking to grow to 10-12 employees by mid-2012. Beauregard says he is looking mostly for engineers to join the team.

When I first talked with Objective Logistics back in May, the company sounded like it was pretty set with its technology. Its basic idea is to provide software as a service so that restaurant managers and waitstaff can see exactly how each employee is performing on each shift, relative to others—who sold the most drinks or desserts or got the best tips, for example. The system encourages competition among employees through a game-like leaderboard interface (see left).

But like many startups, it decided to “scrap the whole first version” of its interface, Beauregard says. At least the game-layer part of it. That was partly because of co-founder Matt Grace’s experience waiting tables for several shifts a week in a Watertown, MA, restaurant over the past few months, and using his own software as a customer. (Beauregard also has previous restaurant experience.) “Creating game layers and motivational leaderboards is extremely nuanced and a lot harder than people think,” Beauregard says. “It’s extremely difficult to make something look so simple. We’ve learned a ton.”

In the meantime, he says, the company has gotten lots of interest from restaurants and other businesses—and it is focusing exclusively on restaurants for now. “The pipeline is absolutely beyond full,” he says. “We’re in late-stage talks with chains of all sizes.”

Besides making good hires, Beauregard says, the company’s biggest challenge now is “a matter of focus.” He adds, “There’s a tipping point where you’re receiving so many e-mails, and everyone has a really well-informed opinion.” The key is taking all those disparate opinions and turning them into something productive, he says.

What’s more, the company’s product itself is very polarizing. “The people who really dislike it or rebel against it are the people that aren’t the top performers and who feel they’ve earned a certain status within the [restaurant],” Beauregard says. “That’s what we’re looking to vacate, I suppose, and it’s 5-10 percent of any given company. They’re in jeopardy of being displaced in their lucrative shifts. But that’s also what it’s really meant to do.”

Did I mention Beauregard is hungry? “There’s still a mountain to climb,” he says. “We’re creating a meritocracy through technology.”

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