Heading into the holiday weekend, I thought I’d pull out a few highlights from recent discussions I’ve had with some Boston-area tech companies that are generating buzz. None of them will be taking the holiday off, I’m guessing.

So here’s a snapshot of five companies in different fields, and at different stages (with some common themes of communication, security, and location tech):

ByteLight
This is a new Cambridge, MA-based startup that’s heading to New York this weekend for the big annual National Retail Federation expo. ByteLight, led by founders Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan (both Boston University grads), is developing technology for indoor positioning based on the circuitry in LED bulbs, together with smartphone cameras, for applications in sales automation, targeted deals, museum tours, and so on. “We view this as the next frontier in location based services,” Ryan says.

HeyWire
This Cambridge-based mobile startup makes an app for free texting and social messaging. But HeyWire has much bigger ambitions around creating a unified platform for social communications. Don’t want to give too much away here, but as engineering and marketing VPs Bill Gianoukos and Glenn Kiladis told me recently, an upcoming release from the company was inspired by the question, “How do we get Bieber to text us?”

Rapid7
This security assessment software company, based in Boston, recently raised a big $50 million venture round and is growing fast—and looking to make acquisitions. Rapid7 has well over 200 employees, and CEO Mike Tuchen says he is looking to add 100 more this year. One security tidbit he passed along: Many companies’ video conferences are surprisingly easy to hack into, because they put them directly on the Internet without security.

The Tap Lab
This Cambridge-based mobile gaming startup is working on its much-anticipated next release, which is still under wraps (but looks like it’s trying to reinvent the concept of location-based gaming—no pressure). In the meantime, CEO Dave Bisceglia is also working on a project to “increase the frequency and quality of hackathons” in Boston, he says. Stay tuned for more on this.

Vivox
This voice and communication software firm, based in Natick, MA, has been making strides through partnerships with T-Mobile and Facebook. Vivox, best known for its voice chat software that lets gamers and virtual world inhabitants talk to each other, is now applying its technology to the broader markets of social networking and messaging (see T-Mobile’s recent Bobsled voice chat app). CEO Rob Seaver told me that his company’s platform is “very scalable and stable for large-scale social interactions.” What’s more, he says, the fields of gaming and communication are “not that separate.”

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“Utilities have a big problem,” says Swapnil Shah, CEO and co-founder of Waltham, MA-based FirstFuel Software.

“They have a big pile of money they have to spend to achieve certain goals,” he continues. “If they don’t achieve it, they get penalized by the state.”

The goal is to increase home and commercial energy efficiency so that they don’t have to spend huge money building new power plants. And the “big pile of money” comes from a tax portion of utility bills that’s put aside to provide incentives to increase energy efficiency, says Shah. (That budget—across the roughly 30 states that participate—was $6.6 billion in 2010, more than double the $3.1 million pool from 2007.) About 40 percent of that budget on average goes to improving energy efficiency in commercial buildings, he says.

Utilities have been sending auditors to buildings to analyze the structure and energy use and recommend improvements, but that method is expensive, inconsistent, and not scalable across thousands of properties. It’s a particular problem for commercial buildings, which can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 to audit, compared to the $200 or so it takes to perform a residential energy audit, Shah says.

That’s where FirstFuel’s software comes in. The analytics engine just needs utilities to supply a building’s address and a year’s worth of energy consumption data, culled from the hourly meter readings at the buildings. FirstFuel pulls in hourly weather patterns from outside sources and uses GIS mapping and satellite imaging to determine a building’s physical attributes.

Using this information, the software creates detailed reports that show where exactly energy is going in a building, and can offer detailed recommendations on how to reduce energy consumption—either through changing behavior patterns in the buildings or retrofitting. All this is done without an auditor stepping foot in the building or installing any devices, which other energy monitoring technologies often rely on.

“It can analyze hundreds to thousands of buildings in the time it takes to do one on-site visit,” says Shah. “It makes it a very scalable service.”

FirstFuel’s data is reported via a portal that utilities and building managers log into, as a white label solution that is branded as the particular utility’s own. Utilities can see … Next Page »

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Highland Capital Partners has announced the 10 college startup teams participating in its 10-week Summer@Highland mentorship program in Cambridge, MA, and the San Francisco Bay Area. The venture firm provides coaching, networking, office space, and a $15,000 stipend; the teams don’t give up any equity stake and are under no obligation to Highland afterwards, the firm says. The teams based in Cambridge are: additup (Boston College), ByteLight (Boston University), Tivli (Harvard University and University of Michigan), and Type-U (Babson College). The Bay Area teams are: 27Bards (Stanford University), Adpop (Stanford), Clinkle (Stanford), Imprint Energy (UC Berkeley), Lemonwi.se (University of Pennsylvania), and Waddle (Northwestern University).

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Boston tech and life sciences companies kept busy even through the holiday weekend with partnership, IPO, and financing news.

—Proteostasis Therapeutics of Cambridge, MA, received an initial payment of $20 million from Elan to develop traditional small molecule drugs and diagnostics against neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, and multiple sclerosis. The partnership could also include another $30 million for Proteostasis over the next five years.

—Nashua, NH-based AutoVirt, a maker of file virtualization software, took in $5 million in equity financing from five investors, an SEC filing showed.

—Woburn, MA-based Excelimmune, which develops drugs made with human recombinant polyclonal antibodies, said it pinned down a $10.5 million Series B funding round, from both new and existing individual backers. The biotech said the money will go to enhancing its discovery platform and manufacturing processes, as well as advancing development of its treatment for methicillin-resistant staph infections, Staphguard.

—Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO) of Cambridge said that it had entered into a licensing deal with Centocor Ortho Biotech, a unit of Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), taking in $15 million upfront and potentially $540 million more in milestone payments and royalties. The companies will work together on Aveo’s antibodies targeting a receptor that may be involved in the regulation of tumor growth, cancer survival and metastasis, and bone disruption.

—Novophage, a Boston-based startup engineering viruses (phages) to combat bacterial contamination in industries like oil and gas, paper, and heating and cooling systems, drank up $5.7 million in Series A financing. The deal was led by Flybridge Capital Partners, and also included Founder Collective, Boston University, and strategic investors Chevron Technology Ventures and The Kraft Group.

—Quincy, MA-based biochemical developer Myriant Technologies plans to raise $125 million in an initial public offering, an SEC filing revealed. The company reported a $16 million loss on $14 million in revenue in 2010, and is looking for the IPO proceeds to fund the completion of its plant in Louisiana, as well as working capital, research and development, and general corporate purposes.

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Boston-based Novophage has raised $5.7 million in a Series A financing round led by Flybridge Capital Partners. Founder Collective, Boston University, and strategic investors Chevron Technology Ventures and The Kraft Group also participated in the round. The news was first reported by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe. Novophage engineers viruses (phages) to combat bacterial contamination in industries like oil and gas, paper, and heating and cooling systems. As part of the financing, Micah Rosenbloom (co-founder of Brontes Technologies) has joined the firm as CEO. Xconomy profiled Novophage back in March 2009, when the company was more focused on therapeutic applications.

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Besides snow and rain (and other April Fool’s jokes), ‘tis the season for business plan competitions around Boston. You might know all about MIT’s $100K contest and Harvard Business School’s equivalent, but there’s a lot more going on out there—and a lot of talented young people vying for a taste of entrepreneurial success.

Here’s a quick sampling of five university-based contests going on around town, and their finalists (certainly not a comprehensive list):

—Tufts University is running its seventh annual $100K business plan competition. The final pitches are happening next week, April 6. Here are the five finalists in the social entrepreneurship bracket: Educate Lanka (student scholarships, Manjula Dissanayake), Give 2App (smartphone apps for nonprofits, Artem Efremkin and Shabazz Stuart), Kabuk (earthquake kits, Mustafa Tuzcu), Saathi (sanitary pads, Nithyaa Venkataramani), and Sanergy (green toilets, Gaurav Tiwari).

And the six finalists in the classic competition: InstaCard (cash in gift cards, Warren Davis), Rentcycle (local business rentals, Kevin Halter and Sean Zinsmeister), Roof For Two (motorcycle accessories, Andrew Altman), RxCap (smart pill containers, Nathan Scott), Salary View (college career services, Kenny Berlin), and Saves on a Plane (airfare deals, Ade Baptista).

—Babson College, which says it founded the first college business plan competition in 1984, is in the midst of its $100K+ undergraduate and graduate business plan competitions. The final round takes place on April 14. Here’s a rundown of the three graduate finalists: Atiken Renewables (agricultural waste to energy), Golden Health Guide (online reviews of home medical products), and SkyCrepers (fast-serve crepe franchise).

And the three undergrad finalists: Down to Earth Waste Solutions (small-business waste collection and composting), Nodes (online collaboration and group social networking), and Redeemr (business intelligence and customer retention for small to businesses).

—Boston University’s $50K “new venture competition” is down to its final four, just like March Madness. The BU finals are next week, April 6. Here are the four finalists: ACCEasy (accounting software for Russian businesses, Katsiaryna Akhlopkava), Handlebikes (better bicycles, Fredrik Fjellsaa), Nyumba (pneumonia diagnostics by cellphone, Andrea Fernandes), and RayVio (efficient ultraviolet LEDs, Yitao Liao).

—The MIT Entrepreneurship Competition’s $100K business plan contest is well underway. The semi-finalist teams (five teams in five tracks, plus wild cards) are currently in their mentorship program hurtling towards the finish line on May 11. You can see a full list of the semi-finalists, which were announced in early March, here. A few that caught my eye, mostly because they have interesting names: SaferTaxi (mobile track; cab rating and registration system), iHelmet (products and services; no idea what they do), Boss (life sciences; bone graft tool), Waste to Watts (emerging markets; sounds self-explanatory for power generation), and All Cows Eat Grass (music lessons) and VisualizeMe (social graph), both in the Web/IT track.

—Lastly, Harvard Business School’s business plan contest is just getting started. Business plan entries are due next week, April 7; there’s a “business venture” track and a “social venture” track. The whole competition is done by the evening of April 26.

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If your name is Borya Shakhnovich, people tend to make assumptions about you. One, they don’t want to play you in competitive chess. Two, they wouldn’t be terribly surprised if you introduced yourself by saying something like, “I am scientist.”

OK, I’m stereotyping here (a real time-saver, I know), but at least one of those assumptions has some basis in fact. Shakhnovich is the founder and CEO of Brookline, MA-based iAMscientist, a global community and resource site for researchers and institutions in science, technology, and medicine. He has raised $1 million in seed financing from angel investors including George Whitesides, the famed Harvard University chemist and co-founder of more than a dozen companies including Genzyme (which was acquired last week by Sanofi-Aventis for some $20 billion).

What iAMscientist does is give researchers and institutions some interesting new tools to connect with each other. The idea is to create an online community and directory of top-tier people so that research teams, companies, and other organizations can find the right person to answer a difficult question, decipher a new paper, or lead a research project. All of this is especially important for interdisciplinary ventures—like when biologists team up with physicists, computer scientists, or electrical engineers to model things like genetic pathways or disease mechanisms, and then someone wants to commercialize the findings.

“We provide an organization with the ability to find that one person who is the foremost expert in an obscure area—our value is in that matching mechanism,” Shakhnovich says. Some of the most valuable knowledge and experience that researchers have “isn’t really in their papers, it’s in their heads,” he says. “You want to get in touch with them and maintain a relationship.”

Academic social networks are not new, of course. Services like Academia.edu, Epernicus (Boston-based), Labmeeting (founded by a Harvard grad), Nature Network, Pronetos, ResearchGate (which started in Boston but recently moved to Germany), and, to some extent, LinkedIn, all help … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: This post was co-authored by Peter Rothstein, President of the New England Clean Energy Council.]

Over the next 10 years, over $1.7 trillion will be invested in clean power projects across the globe, according to recent projections from the Pew Charitable Trusts. That estimate is if nothing changes to strengthen our clean energy policies. Under a more aggressive policy scenario, Pew projects global investment of $2.3 trillion in this decade. Clearly, the clean energy industry is poised for tremendous growth.

New England has emerged as an early mover and hotbed of clean energy innovation, and is well positioned to grow into a global leader in this industry. This success is owed in large part to the strength of our universities, which serve as an incubator for tomorrow’s technologies. For the technologies of the future to become the technologies of the present, they must be shepherded into the market by experienced entrepreneurs and executives as innovative as the technologies themselves. There is often a gap, however, between innovative and early-stage clean energy companies and the executives who have both knowledge of the industry and seasoned experience to raise financing, scale the product, and take it to market. Even established clean energy companies and investors cite top-level recruitment for executive positions as an on-going issue.

Our region—and the greater Boston area in particular—is the home for world-leading research institutions and has no shortage of talented, experienced entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs. The trick is helping these successful innovators transition from sectors like IT or biotech into clean energy.

To that end, the New England Clean Energy Council (of which one of us is President) has partnered with the Boston University School of Management (of which one of us is Faculty) to offer a certificate program entitled Leading Clean Energy Ventures which offers a deep dive into the technologies and business of clean energy, and which begins this month. To address the lack of repeat entrepreneurs and seasoned executives in the clean energy sector, this program targets successful individuals who are eager to transition into the clean energy sector. We based Leading Clean Energy Ventures on the Clean Energy Council’s signature Fellowship program. Combining the Clean Energy Council’s knowledge of the sector with the world-class faculty and resources of Boston University, we have evolved that novel education model into an effective and timely program.

Clean energy is our future. If our region and our nation hope to capitalize on the massive opportunity represented by clean energy—and to do so in time to save our climate—we must embrace new means of attracting and developing truly innovative clean energy executives and entrepreneurs. In the face of accelerating climate change we simply do not have the luxury of doing it any other way. To fuel a robust New England clean energy economy that can compete with global leaders like China and Europe, we must build a skilled workforce well versed in clean energy. Our aim is to offer a new generation of clean energy capitalists the knowledge and the tools they need to capture a $2.3 trillion opportunity.

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I generally hate cocktail parties, but the one at Cambridge, MA-based Performable on Tuesday night was pretty good (you can see some photos here). Not that many VCs were there, which was just as well, because I got to meet tons of entrepreneurs from Boston and beyond, all working on interesting startups.

Plus, who knew that Performable had hired Andrew Bialecki, the son of Greg Bialecki, Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development, as a developer? (I met them both at the party and I’d say it’s a smart move, Performable.)

At such gatherings, and elsewhere, I’ve been hearing about lots of interesting Boston-area tech startups—some still in stealth, others not. Let’s call these “quiet startups.” In any case, they’re early-stage but won’t stay quiet for long. Some of them might not want the attention yet, but hey, that’s my job: Dig up the news and write about it here.

So here are five startups I’ve been hearing about:

—Take the Interview, led by founder and CEO Danielle Weinblatt, a former private equity associate and investment banking analyst (and current MBA student at Harvard Business School). This company has scored angel financing and is already gaining some traction. The idea is a Web-based video interviewing system for employers and job seekers—basically trying to make the recruiting process more efficient by screening more candidates before doing in-person interviews. My colleague Wade wrote about a similar-sounding Y Combinator startup last summer called HireHive; that company is now defunct, though I’m not quite sure what happened.

—Open Mile, led by Evan Schumacher, the former CEO of Going.com (and a few other tech startups). This company got money about a year ago from Charles River Ventures, and is using Web and mobile technologies to help shipping companies like UPS and FedEx match up supply and demand in an effective and economical way.

— Loom Décor (co-led by Jessa McIntosh) and CustomMade (led by Mike Salguero). These two are in honor of the recent activity around town in “mass customization,” which may start to redefine some segments of e-commerce. Loom Décor hasn’t quite launched yet, but it seems to focus on fabrics and home furnishings. More importantly, it is a Boston company masquerading as a New York company, but we know better (the founders come from BU and MIT Sloan). Meanwhile, CustomMade is based in Kendall Square, has quietly grown to 27 employees, and focuses on selling a wide variety of furniture, displays, jewelry, and other items.

—Locately, led by Thaddeus Fulford-Jones, Eric Weiss, and Drew Volpe. This location-based mobile tech startup is roughly following Compete.com’s business model—sell competitive insights to businesses through subscriptions. I recently spoke with Volpe, who said, “We think location analytics will become like Web analytics. We think there’s a huge company here. Our goal is to get there first, build really great technology, and build a great company.” (Volpe will be speaking in the “location smackdown” portion of Xconomy’s Mobile Madness event on March 9.)

Locately’s goal applies to all of the above startups, I suppose. We’ll be watching closely to see what happens.

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If you’re in the Faneuil Hall area of Boston today, look out for the trike. That would be the Google Street View Trike, a pedicab-like contraption mounted with a camera and computer equipment. It’s meant to capture 360-degree, street-level images of places where Google’s fleet of Street View cars can’t go—pedestrian malls, university campuses, parks, hiking trails, and so forth.

As my colleague Wade reported last November, Faneuil Hall was a finalist for the trike treatment, competing against Chicago’s Navy Pier and San Francisco’s Pier 39 in the pedestrian mall category (via online voting). Well, the cradle of liberty won out, and today, Google is showing up to take the pictures. They should be viewable in Google Maps sometime in the coming months, the company says. (You can read more about the nuts and bolts of the trike project in Wade’s interview with senior mechanical engineer Dan Ratner.)

Of course, it’s all great marketing for Google. But it’s also a really interesting step in the evolution of digital imaging technology, and how consumers can experience the richer details of the real world while online. And it could eventually tie into Google’s local search business.

So I decided to do a deeper dive into Google Street View, which is an ongoing project in all 50 U.S. states and dozens of countries around the world. Yesterday I spoke with the mastermind of the Street View project, engineering director Luc Vincent, who’s based in Silicon Valley.

Vincent is a renowned expert in image processing and computer vision. A native of France, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Robotics Laboratory in the early 1990s before developing his career at Xerox Imaging Systems in Peabody, MA. From there, he moved out west and spent time at ScanSoft, Xerox PARC, and LizardTech, before joining Google in 2004, originally to work on Google book search.

We talked about the genesis and history of Google Street View, as well as the future of geo-search and imaging—its significance to the company, how far Google wants to go (hint: everywhere), and how it deals with privacy issues. Here are some edited highlights from our chat.

Xconomy: So how did Street View originally come about?

Luc Vincent: I worked mostly on books for the first two years. But the same day I joined Google, I was put in meetings about collaborations with Stanford to do research [on gathering images]. I turned this into a Google “20 percent” project, and found some more people to work on it. Pretty soon I was herding cats.

Larry Page himself was interested in this when I joined Google. We were not really motivated by money originally—just building compelling services. We focused on the scale. We were really willing to spend money and engineering [resources] because we thought it would be useful to people. At Google, we start small, we show demos, and we iterate.

X: What was the biggest challenge in getting the project going?

LV: There were tons of challenges. Early on, we had no funding per se. We got people to help with time and equipment. When we started with Stanford, we were working with the DARPA Grand Challenge [robotic car] team. We used [one of their cars, with a driver] to collect our first test imagery. These cars were too fancy and automated, so we drained the battery multiple times. If you drain the battery, the A/C stopped working. It was summer and we were trying to collect data, and we had … Next Page »

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Another few months have gone by, and another few million bucks have arrived in the corporate treasury for HemaQuest Pharmaceuticals. The Seattle-based developer is announcing today it has raised $4 million for its experimental treatments for sickle cell anemia and other blood disorders.

The financing comes from a new investor, Latterell Venture Partners. This latest shot of cash brings HemaQuest’s Series B venture round up to a total of $16 million, after the company said it raised $6 million in January, and another $6 million in April, from its existing syndicate of backers—Aberdare Ventures, De Novo Ventures, Forward Ventures, and Lilly Ventures. As part of the deal, James Woody of Latterell Venture Partners is joining the startup company’s board.

The financing will be used to help push HemaQuest’s two lead drug candidates through mid-stage clinical trials designed to show they are safe and effective. HemaQuest is led by CEO Ron Berenson, the co-founder of Xcyte Therapies and CellPro. Those two companies didn’t survive, but Berenson found a new beginning with HemaQuest, as it raised a $20 million Series A venture round in November 2007. The company was based on research from the University of Washington, Boston University, and Colorado State University. The idea is to develop “short-chain fatty acid” molecules for life-threatening blood disorders. The company’s top two drug candidates from this class are for sickle cell anemia, and for a lymphoma linked to Epstein-Barr virus infections.

“The company, with excellent leadership and considerable skill in the hematology and oncology space, has made great progress with the two lead compounds, with promising results in early clinical trials,” Latterell’s Woody says in a statement.

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This week we ran several meaty profiles spotlighting strategies of New England biotech companies powered by some big life sciences players.

—Lebanon, NH-based Adimab struck a research deal with Novartis, in which the startup will use its technology to discover antibodies that could potentially be used in drugs against two undisclosed diseases that Novartis chooses to target. Financial details of the deal weren’t released, but the announcement adds to Adimab’s arsenal of big drugmaker partners, which also include Merck, Roche, and Pfizer.

—Ryan took a look at Lexington, MA-based Synta’s moves to regain its footing after it halted a clinical trial for its drug for treating skin cancer in 2009, causing its stock value to fall more than 80 percent in a day. The company’s CEO sees promise in its mid-stage cancer drug, STA-9090, as well as the several years’ worth of cash it still has in the bank, Ryan wrote.

—Sylvia used her column this week to spotlight her conversation with Jeffrey Shuren, who leads the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, and discussed subjects such as the agency’s moves to balance medical device safety with efficacy and a controversial new approval program.

—Life sciences entrepreneur and Boston University engineering professor Franco Cerrina was found dead in a lab at the school’s Photonics Center on Monday morning. The cause of death is not known, though police are not treating it as a criminal matter, according to the university. Cerrina co-founded five companies, including NimbleGen Systems, a Madison, WI-based developer of DNA microarray technology that sold to Swiss drug giant Roche for $272.5 million in 2007.

—Metamark Genetics, a Naples, FL-based startup in the process of relocating to Cambridge, grabbed a $22 million Series B funding round. The company is developing diagnostics to identify genetic markers and other indicators of tumor progression, using technology from the research lab of Harvard Medical School dermatology professor Lynda Chin.

—Concert Pharmaceuticals, a developer of technology to make drugs safer and longer lasting, inked a deal last year with GlaxoSmithKline that could have a payoff in the neighborhood of $1 billion. CEO Roger Tung talked to Ryan about how the company is exploring new ways to generate human data on its compounds, to nab as much of the potential $1 billion as possible.

—Ryan wrote about Tempero Pharmaceuticals, a biotech startup founded and funded by GlaxoSmithKline, and its work in a new slice of immunology research that’s exploring the forces behind autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis. The company’s roster includes three top Harvard immunology experts as scientific co-founders, as well as Alnylam Pharmaceuticals CEO John Maraganore and life sciences investor Rich Aldrich as independent directors.

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Franco Cerrina, a Boston University engineering professor, was found dead in a lab at BU’s Photonics Center on Monday morning, the university reported yesterday. He was 62. Colin Riley, a BU spokesman, said in an e-mail this morning that the cause of death is not yet known. Police are not treating Cerrina’s death as a criminal matter, according to BU. Cerrina joined the faculty of BU in 2008 after spending 24 years on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He co-founded five companies, including NimbleGen Systems, Genetic Assemblies (merged with Codon Devices in 2006), Codon Devices, Biolitho, and Gen9, according to Nanowerk News. NimbleGen, a Madison, WI-based provider of DNA microarray technology, was sold to Basel, Switzerland-based Roche in 2007 for $272.5 million.

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Microsoft Research announced today at its annual Faculty Summit that it has awarded a $200,000 fellowship grant to each of seven young computer science faculty members: Raanan Fattal from Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Cyrill Stachniss from University of Freiburg; Evimaria Terzi of Boston University; Haiying (Helen) Shen of Clemson University; Doug Downey of Northwestern University; Abhi Shelat from University of Virginia; and Sinan Aral of New York University. The goals of the Microsoft program, which has existed since 2005, are to build relationships with universities and faculty and to help advance the state of the art in computer science. This is the first year the program has awarded grants to researchers outside the U.S.

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Governor Deval Patrick had good intentions of wanting to grow the cleantech space when Ian Bowles consolidated all of the available money the state had slated for solar initiatives into a new group called the Clean Energy Center (CEC). This group essentially places bets on which startups will make it big and then provides them with grant money.

Why is it unlikely for this model to be successful? Venture capitalists hire the best and brightest to do serious due diligence on a startup prior to investing, and most of these startups fail. This formula has worked for VCs because the 20 percent of their portfolio companies that do make it, make it big enough for the VC to be successful. The same formula does not work for governments. It is unreasonable to think that the civil servants at CEC have the ability to make an impact through placing the right bets when VCs do it much better and still fail. There is a better solution for the Governor to make a real impact without placing bets.

Having seen many so many brilliant students from MIT, Harvard, BU, Olin College, and Northeastern come up with equally brilliant technology ideas, it is frustrating to see them faced with the following choices as they graduate:

1. Take a job with an established company (most likely outside the state), or

2. Continue to work on their technologies to prove out the concept in a lab/work shop.

The solution is for the State to be a facilitator for these potentially significant technologies by setting up a shared incubator space in the heart of these universities, where these engineers of the future can physically build their prototypes and go on to get funded for the right reasons. I actually asked Bob Healy, the Cambridge City Manager, if he would be able to find an empty basement near MIT to pull this off, and he was very much open to the idea. The model could follow what Tim Rowe’s Cambridge Innovation Center has done for office space. This way, engineers can access the necessary heavy tools and equipment to complete their prototypes where they would meet other brilliant engineers trying to do the same. It would create a powerful ecosystem of brilliant engineers.

Knowing that politicians need to show their worth within the four-year election cycle, is it possible for government to pull this off? Well, I say it’s worth the lobbying effort. We can follow the successful model of Jim Newton of TechShop in Menlo Park, CA. TechShop has become a de facto incubator for an astounding array of startups there. Cash-strapped inventors have used the shop’s lathes, laser cutters, welding equipment, 3-D printers, and shop tools to make prototypes.

Engineers with passion about their technologies only need a space to work out of and a bit of food to keep them going. Combining space from Bob Healy, donated tools from the private sector, and some pizza from Governor Patrick might just be the realistic key to fostering new jobs of the future in Massachusetts.

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Seattle-based HemaQuest Pharmaceuticals has nailed down a full Series B round of financing worth $12 million, according to a company statement. This means HemaQuest has secured a second installment of $6 million, after grabbing the first chunk of cash in late January, which we first reported based on a regulatory filing.

The complete deal is being led by a new investor, San Francisco-based Aberdare Ventures. The financing also included HemaQuest’s crew of original backers: Palo Alto, CA-based De Novo Ventures, San Diego’s Forward Ventures, and Lilly Ventures, the startup investment arm at Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY). Naheed Misfeldt, a partner at Aberdare, is joining the HemaQuest board in connection with the financing, the company said in a statement.

HemaQuest is led by a familiar biotech name in Seattle—Ron Berenson, a former cancer physician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who went on to be a co-founder of Xcyte Therapies and CellPro. Those two companies failed, but his third venture, HemaQuest, got off to an auspicious start when it raised a $20 million Series A venture round in November 2007. The company, based on research from the University of Washington, Boston University, and Colorado State University, was founded in Newton, MA. HemaQuest never issued a statement when it moved to Seattle, but it appears to have arrived here last spring, based on scanning datelines from its press release archive. (It sure looks like a Seattle company now, with a beautiful picture of the Space Needle and Mount Rainier on its website.)

What is HemaQuest doing with that $32 million it has raised in the past few years? It is developing “short-chain fatty acid” molecules for life-threatening blood disorders. The company has two experimental drugs now in the middle stage of drug development—one for sickle cell anemia, and one for patients with lymphoma that’s associated with an infection of Epstein-Barr virus. If those trials are successful, Hemaquest says it’s possible it could enter the third and final phase of clinical trials as soon as 2011.

“HemaQuest is working in areas of increasing interest to investors and the pharmaceutical industry; serious and life‐threatening orphan diseases in which patients have few therapeutic options,” Aberdare’s Misfeldt said in a statement. “They have made great progress with their first two drug candidates.”

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Allegro Diagnostics is on track to launch a major clinical trial of its lung cancer test this year after a long process, completed in October, of designing the goals of the study and submitting paperwork on it to the FDA, CEO Dan Rippy says.

The FDA has granted the Boston-based startup conditional approval to conduct an 800-patient study of its genetic test for lung cancer; the company expects to begin enrollment early this year. The hope is that the trial will lead to product clearance from the FDA, but Rippy says it’s too soon to predict when that may happen. Last year the company secured a $2.8 million Small Business Innovation Research grant from the National Cancer Institute to support the study.

The company also hopes to get permission, under a separate program run by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), to get paid to analyze samples with its lung cancer-screening technology in its own labs in the second half of 2010, Rippy says. Pursuing both paths at the same time could protect the firm if the rules for how such diagnostics are regulated change.

“It certainly has been a dynamic and evolving [regulatory] process,” Rippy says. “At the end of the day, Allegro wants to do world-class science, and so we want to and intend to be compliant with whatever regulations emerge.”

Allegro‘s efforts are significant because the firm offers a new, genetic-based approach to detecting lung cancer that has the potential to spot tumors before they spread out of control. Allegro’s test screens cells from the lining of a patient’s airway for RNA molecules that show whether certain genes linked to lung cancer are overactive or underactive. The cells are collected as part of a procedure called a bronchoscopy, during which a scope is placed down a patient’s nose or throat to look in the lungs for suspicious tissues that could be cancerous. Bronchoscopy has historically yielded many false positives, according to Rippy; Allegro’s test is intended to boost its accuracy. Doctors also use X-rays, CT scans, and biopsies to detect lung cancer. Yet medical images can be misleading, and doing surgeries to gather tissue samples from the lungs is more invasive than Allegro’s method. (Rippy discussed some of this with Xconomy when he spoke to us back in March 2008.)

Molecular tests like Allegro’s are viewed as the next frontier for diagnosing lung cancer. Naturally, there’s competition in this field. For instance, … Next Page »

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Hemaquest Pharmaceuticals, the Seattle-based company developing a new treatment for sickle cell anemia, has pocketed a $6 million equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The financing could eventually total as much as $12.7 million.

The filing doesn’t say who participated in the deal, but it lists some familiar biotech names as members of the Hemaquest board. The directors include CEO Ron Berenson, the former top executive at Seattle-based Xcyte Therapies; Ivor Royston of San Diego-based Forward Ventures; Frederick Dotzler of De Novo Ventures in Palo Alto, CA; George Stamatoyannopoulos of the University of Washington; and Bryan Dunnivant of Lilly Ventures in Indianapolis. Hemaquest didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment this morning.

The company was founded in 2007 by scientists at UW, Boston University, and Colorado State University, and backed by Forward Ventures, De Novo Ventures, and Lilly Ventures, according to the company website. Hemaquest’s strategy is to develop “short-chain fatty acid” molecules for treating life-threatening blood disorders. It has two experimental drugs now in the middle stage of drug development—one for sickle cell anemia, and the other for viral-related blood cancers. If those trials are successful, Hemaquest says it’s possible it could enter the third and final phase of clinical trials as soon as 2011.

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Delhi, January 5, 2010—The biggest challenge and therefore opportunity faced by India is its demographic dividend: there are over 500 million youth under 25 years of age and 350 million under 15 years. Thirty percent of them are in cities. Only a small percentage of these youngsters will obtain university degrees. The majority will need vocational training.

The government has understood this challenge and has set up the National Skills Development Corporation, which is developing policy to educate 500 million people in the bottom of the pyramid in vocational skills. These people will become retail staff, telecom field workers, commercial vehicle drivers, rural consumer sales, mechanics, factory workers, et cetera.

While the scale of the opportunity is huge, the cost of training these workers has to be extremely low, as most of them don’t have any assets and will either have to be subsidized by the government or will have to take loans. Most come from families that are not in the organized sector—in other words, they do not have any concept of structured employment—so the dropout rate is high. Many entrepreneurs have entered the education market in India—the number of new universities and K-12 schools is staggering—but very few are willing to enter the vocational training market, as it is very difficult to make money.

That is why the national government has begun to take the lead in vocational training. For example, the government has taken 150 of 1,500 government-run Institute of Technology (ITI) and entered into public-private partnerships. Other government departments are paying private sector vocational training companies a fixed amount for every person they train successfully.

Most major US universities are engaged in discussions on establishing some presence in India. MIT has been given a five-year contract to establish a Global Health Institute in Delhi. Rumors are that MIT may establish a joint venture business school in India soon. Bob Brown, President of Boston University, will be in India in a couple of days. Boston University just established a new position, Vice President for Global Operations, to lead BU’s efforts in establishing a global presence. India is a key part of this vision.

The current generation in India is called the “why” generation. After generations of being told what to do and how to think by parents, teachers, and other elders, young people are questioning all aspects of Indian life. In the urban middle class they are driving a consumer culture, similar to America’s: coffee shops, bars, cars, clothes. They are also demanding equality for women and gays and in fact getting laws changed to reflect these new social mores. And they are globally savvy, plugged into Facebook, sometimes working for multinationals and traveling abroad frequently.

But the bottom of the pyramid, particularly in rural areas, is completely disenfranchised from this global reality, and how India deals with them in the next two decades will determine whether it remains a pluralistic democracy. A possible alternative is a populist, labor led, violent revolution.

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Ensemble Discovery has found a second Big Pharma partner to support its R&D engine. The Cambridge, MA-based biotech is announcing today it has secured a partnership with Pfizer, the world’s largest pharmaceutical company, to develop a new class of drugs that combine some of the more desirable traits of conventional small molecule drugs and bigger protein therapies.

Terms of this deal aren’t being released, but Ensemble CEO Mike Taylor tells me they are “similar” to the template his company established back in April when it formed an alliance with Bristol-Myers Squibb. That deal called for Bristol to pay $5 million upfront, another $7.5 million for research expenses over the next two years, and milestone payments worth as much as $29.5 million based on the success of each individual molecule in development. Pfizer, like Bristol, has also agreed to pay the salaries of a “substantial” number of Ensemble’s 30 or so employees, Taylor says.

Both of those Big Pharma giants are paying for the right to develop a new class of therapies that Ensemble likes to call “Ensemblins.” These are synthetic mid-sized molecules that can be made into convenient oral pills, like classic small-molecule chemical drugs. But Ensemble hopes to gain an advantage by engineering its treatments to have precise targeting capability that’s commonly found in large-molecule protein drugs like antibodies, which are injected. The company was founded in 2004 based on research by David Liu at Harvard University, and it has received $32 million in venture capital from Flagship Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, Harris & Harris Group, CMEA Ventures, and Boston University.

But venture capital doesn’t last forever, so winning support from Bristol and Pfizer over the past year certainly solidifies the financial future of a little company like Ensemble, with a promising technology that still hasn’t yet entered clinical trials. The Pfizer deal means that Ensemble now has enough cash to operate “well into 2011,” Taylor says.

Mike Taylor

“Even though money can be hard to come by, we wanted to be strategic and selective in picking our deals,” Taylor says. “We really sought out companies that were committed to working with us to develop this therapeutic space.”

Naturally, that begged the question of why Ensemble thinks Pfizer would be committed. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) says it historically spends $7 billion a year on R&D, and maintains 250 partnerships across industry and academia. Plus, it did just complete a $68 billion acquisition of Wyeth in October, creating an even bigger pharmaceutical colossus.

Taylor says he’s not worried about Ensemble getting lost in the shuffle, partly because of personal relationships his company has with Pfizer. Taylor himself has longstanding ties inside the company, since he was a senior vice president of Pfizer’s global R&D division, responsible for the research portfolio, before he left to become Ensemble’s CEO in July 2007. Ensemble’s chief scientific officer, Nick Terrent, worked for Pfizer in the 1980s, and has his name on the patent for the hit Pfizer drug sildenafil (Viagra). Tony Wood, the global head of chemistry at Pfizer today, is a “champion” of the Ensemble approach within Pfizer, Taylor says.

“Despite the distractions they had to deal with, they maintained a diligent focus on getting this deal done,” Taylor says. “It reflects on the value they place on our platform.”

In a statement, Pfizer’s Wood added: “The Ensemble technology platform will give us access to an area of chemical space not currently well-represented in our file that holds the potential to be of utility in addressing novel target types.”

While Ensemble hopes to create a broad portfolio of new compounds for its partners, it is also spending some of its energy on developing a pipeline of its own internal products. The company has set its sights on an oral pill that blocks an inflammatory protein called TNF. Lots of companies have tried to do this, and none have succeeded, but the target itself has been a gold mine for Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, and Abbott Laboratories, who all hit TNF with injectable protein drugs that treat autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis. Ensemble hasn’t picked a lead drug candidate for blocking TNF, although it hopes to do that in 2010, Taylor says.

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