Serial entrepreneur Angel Gambino has every right to be arrogant—as people with resumes like hers often are—but she’s as down-to-earth and polite as they come.

Sure, a casual question about which local gym she prefers reveals that she’s currently training to be an Olympic soccer-team liaison, the Olympics’ most senior volunteer role and one which oversees every aspect of the team’s participation in the international games, but the answer is delivered in such a gradual, casual manner that it’s hardly bragging. (She’s awaiting confirmation from the Olympic Committee whether she’ll be overseeing the American, English, Italian, Australian, Brazilian, or Argentine men’s team.)

Trust me when I say Gambino’s life is way more interesting than mine and probably yours. She helped develop Gameplay.com, an early gaming site that eventually had 900 employees in nine countries; was instrumental in helping to popularize the social network Bebo, which was sold to AOL Time Warner in 2008 for $850 million; helped oversee the BBC’s expansion into mobile, broadband, and on-demand platforms; and helped launch social and video-on-demand platforms for Viacom channels such as MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central.

Gambino is still a co-owner of Sonico, the third largest social network in Latin America—Gambino describes it as “the Facebook of Latin America before Facebook became the Facebook of Latin America”—as well as Spoonfed Media, a popular website that directs Londoners to upcoming arts and entertainment events.

So what the heck is she doing in Detroit?

Gambino and her partner, Scott Griffin (more on his story later), purchased a massive building on Rosa Parks Blvd. for $270,000 in September, which they plan to turn into retail, restaurants, and space for local startups, the first step in a plan to further revitalize the Corktown area so it attracts not only the suburban visitors that are already coming in droves to eat at the neighboring Slow’s Bar-B-Q, but also to send the message to entrepreneurs around the globe that Detroit is the place to be.

“Detroit is a city of tremendous opportunity—I don’t know any other cities like it in the world,” Griffin says. Responding to the question of why two people as worldly as he and Gambino would choose Detroit as their base of operations, Griffin says, “I wonder why there aren’t more of us here already. I don’t understand why there aren’t a thousand of us here competing for these deals.”

Gambino was actually born in Detroit, though she spent her formative years in the suburbs outside of the city. Even in her youth, she says it was obvious to her that there were a lot of things lacking in Detroit.

“I knew Detroit was famous for sports and music, but not much else,” Gambino says. … Next Page »

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After a brutal few months battling Obama administration officials on two fronts, AT&T has given up its blockbuster $39 billion bid to acquire Bellevue, WA-based T-Mobile USA from Deutsche Telekom.

The end of an outright merger was clearly telegraphed a week ago, when the two companies and the Justice Department postponed a federal antitrust lawsuit. AT&T had earlier pulled its application from the Federal Communications Commission in the face of opposition from regulators and staff there.

What’s a little more unexpected is that AT&T is apparently ditching any sort of alternative deal that could have given the nation’s No. 2 wireless carrier access to T-Mobile’s assets, particularly wireless spectrum. That was held out as an option last week, when the two companies said they were “actively considering whether and how to revise our current transaction to achieve the necessary regulatory approvals.”

But today’s statement on the deal falling apart paints the breakup as pretty definitive, with AT&T saying that federal officials need to find some other ways to make sure the industry has the spectrum it needs to accommodate the growing hunger for broadband.

“First, in the near term, they should allow the free markets to work so that additional spectrum is available to meet the immediate needs of the U.S. wireless industry, including expeditiously approving our acquisition of unused Qualcomm spectrum currently pending before the FCC,” AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said in a statement. “Second, policymakers should enact legislation to meet our nation’s longer-term spectrum needs.”

It should be noted that while AT&T painted the acquisition as mainly about spectrum needs, opponents pointed out the side benefit to AT&T of sweeping a scrappy competitor off the floor. Federal officials, both at the FCC and the Justice Department, said the deal would have concentrated too much power in the industry and made things worse for consumers. Regulators also didn’t buy any of the supposed benefits that the companies put forth to soften the blow.

The big question now is what happens to T-Mobile, a business that Deutsche Telekom clearly doesn’t want—or didn’t want, anyway. AT&T says it’s taking a $4 billion charge to pay for a breakup fee, and will also “enter a mutually beneficial roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom.” Could that make the U.S. carrier an attractive option for Deutsche to continue owning?

There are other partners waiting in the wings, too. Last week, just as the lawsuit was being put on hold, Dish Network’s CEO told Bloomberg that his company would be interested in a tie-up with T-Mobile if the AT&T deal fell apart.

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Struggling wireless provider Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) has raised cash to beef up its network with new, faster technology.

Bellevue, WA-based Clearwire says it netted $715.5 million in stock sales Tuesday—$384.1 million in public share sales and another $331.4 million in a separate, private transaction with Sprint, its majority shareholder and customer.

It’s another big step in the rebuilding process that Clearwire CEO Erik Prusch has been quarterbacking since he took over the company in August from interim CEO John Stanton (previously, Prusch had served as CFO).

In a statement, Prusch said the infusion of cash “will enable us to continue delivering 4G mobile broadband service to meet the rapidly growing demand in the industry. We remain ideally and uniquely positioned to serve both wholesale and retail customers well into the future.”

Sprint’s participation in the stock sale is part of a $1.6 billion financing lifeline announced earlier this month, which allowed Clearwire to make a debt payment that it had considered skipping or paying late.

Clearwire was an early entrant in building fourth-generation, or 4G, networks in the U.S. But it based that network around a technology called WiMax, and the industry is now moving toward a faster technology known as Long-Term Evolution, or LTE. Clearwire has said previously that it could need around $600 million to build LTE capacity.

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Remember when Sprint (NYSE: S) said it would buy more stock if Clearwire made an offering sometime in the future? Well, the bill’s about to come due: Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) says it plans to sell $300 million in Class A common shares. The sale’s underwriters also will get a 30-day option to buy up to $45 million more in Class A shares.

Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire said the stock sale will help finance its planned construction of a fourth-generation (or 4G) network based on technology known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Clearwire’s existing network is based around a different kind of technology, known as WiMAX, which is being passed by as LTE becomes standard in the industry.

Clearwire has previously announced plans to build an LTE network along its WiMAX offering, but needed about $600 million to pay for the project. Majority shareholder Sprint cut a financing deal with Clearwire last week to provide up to $1.6 billion, allowing Clearwire to make a debt payment that it had considered skipping.

That lifeline from Sprint included a commitment for Sprint to purchase stock based on its existing 49.6 percent voting interest in Clearwire. Sprint will be buying Class B common shares, Clearwire said in Monday’s announcement. The previously announced deal with Sprint also included a pre-payment of up to $350 over two years for capacity on Clearwire’s LTE network, if Clearwire hits milestones for building the network by June 2013.

J.P. Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch, and Jefferies & Company will be the joint book-running managers, Clearwire said.

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Financially troubled wireless provider Clearwire and majority shareholder Sprint are keeping their seemingly reluctant partnership alive today, announcing a new injection of up to $1.6 billion from Sprint for current and future network capacity, along with possible equity sales.

The move allows Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire to make a $237 million debt payment due today—a bill that money-losing Clearwire had said it might skip or pay late. Clearwire had about $700 million in cash and about $4 billion in long-term debt at the end of the third quarter.

As you’d expect, shares of Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) bounced up on the Sprint (NYSE: S) financing deal. The company’s stock price has been tied very closely to the constant swings in Sprint’s attitude toward its partner—earlier this year, Sprint CEO Dan Hesse essentially said a Clearwire bankruptcy wouldn’t really be all that bad.

Clearwire’s present fourth-generation, or 4G, wireless network is based on a technology called WiMAX. Clearwire, founded by wireless pioneer Craig McCaw, made an early bet on WiMAX that hasn’t panned out—the industry has since coalesced around a faster technology known as Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, for future networks.

Clearwire is planning to transition to an LTE network in the future, but it needs about $600 million to pay for that switch. It looks like today’s Sprint deal would supply some, but not all of the money needed to finance that work, which means it’s still an open question who will pay for the rest. Indeed, most of the money from Sprint is for WiMAX services.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Sprint pays $926 Million for unlimited WiMAX service in 2012 and 2013. Sprint and Clearwire also said the WiMAX network will be live through 2015, even though Sprint apparently hasn’t committed to selling WiMAX-compatible devices beyond next year.

• Sprint also could pre-pay up to $350 million over two years for capacity on Clearwire’s LTE network, but that depends on Clearwire hitting milestones for building the network by June 2013. Again, Clearwire will apparently need more investors to pay for an LTE network.

• As the majority shareholder, Sprint says it will buy more equity in Clearwire if the smaller company raises between $400 and $700 million.

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The past week in tech headlines was dominated by our leading alpha geek: Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates. Gates stopped by the University of Washington to give a short talk about the future of computing, and how he sees cheap, powerful storage and processing revolutionizing everything from robots to disease eradication (the part about malaria went on for kind of a long time).

But the most interesting part of the evening was surely the Q&A portion, in which Gates sat on stage with the UW’s Ed Lazowska to field questions on just about anything from students in the crowd. Gates seemed to rather enjoy the give-and-take, even when a young woman asked him how she could get rich.

As you’ve probably read by now, Gates marveled at how strange it was to be a billionaire, and said that once you get past a several million-dollar fortune, it’s really just more responsibility about how to give it away. “Once you get much beyond that—you know, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger,” Gates said to laughs. The UW now has the whole lecture up online.

Elsewhere around town:

—PopCap Games mobile chief Giordano Contestabile reminisced about the inglorious past of mobile gaming, when all games on cell phones were basically hokey ways to get people to send premium-priced text messages. As Contestabile said on Twitter, “When mobile games were crap.” Now it’s quite a different story, of course, and Contestabile is one of the people in the driver’s seat pushing the boundaries of how games will evolve.

He’s also joining us Dec. 6 for Mobile Madness Northwest, our half-day forum presented with the Washington Technology Industry Association at F5 Networks in Seattle. Early Bird pricing only lasts until Nov. 15, so get your tickets now.

—Online real-estate brokerage Redfin added $14.8 million in venture funding, with designs on expanding the business into new markets around the U.S.. The round was led by new investor Globespan Capital Partners.

—Speaking of venture deals, we looked at September’s fundraising for Washington-based companies in technology, biotech, and clean energy and found a total of $32 million had been raised, according to data from our partners at research firm CB Insights. Medical companies led the pack, with $12 million for RF Surgical Systems and $10.6 million for Theraclone Sciences.

—More turmoil at Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), which saw board member Benjamin Wolff resign. Wolff is a close associate of Clearwire founder and former chairman Craig McCaw. The Kirkland-based wireless provider has been on a roller coaster ride lately—mostly down—as it and majority shareholder Sprint figure out how to navigate Clearwire’s expensive changeover to a new type of broadband technology.

—The state of Washington has been cutting millions from education budgets in the past several years as its treasury deals with low tax revenue. So there was one spot of good news for students shouldering larger tuition burdens: The rollout of open-source course materials for the most common community and technical college courses, called the Open Course Library. The project is jointly paid for by the state and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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One thing you can say about having Sprint as a majority investor: It’s not boring.

Shares of Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) bounced up today after the third-quarter earnings report from Sprint (NYSE: S), particularly CEO Dan Hesse’s comments about a possible deal for Clearwire’s as-yet-unbuilt long-term evolution network.

As quoted by Forbes’ Eric Savitz, Hesse said that Sprint has “signed a nonbinding cooperation agreement with Clearwire, to work together on the technical specifications of the Clearwire LTE network and to ensure a superb customer experience for Sprint customers on the Clearwire LTE network.” That kind of agreement is needed to pave the way for any broader deal to buy LTE service from Clearwire, Hesse added.

As Bloomberg reports, any Sprint deal to use Clearwire’s LTE network wouldn’t be in the picture until 2013. Clearwire still needs to actually build an LTE-based network—its fourth-generation infrastructure is currently based on a different kind of technology, called WiMax. It could cost Clearwire around $900 million to make the switch, but Sprint apparently isn’t ponying up cash for that effort yet.

This may all sound like pretty minor stuff, given all the tentative deals and possible partnerships and no commitments of money. But given Clearwire’s money-losing financial performance and the recent buffeting it’s taken on Wall Street, any appearance of a lifeline from its patrons at Sprint makes for big news.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that another round of Sprint statements sent Clearwire stock tanking. At that time, Sprint was rolling out its own Clearwire-free plans for an LTE 4G network, and Hesse pointedly said that he had nothing to announce beyond 2012 regarding Clearwire. Pressed by investors in that previous call, Hesse basically said that a bankruptcy by Clearwire wouldn’t be that bad.

Clearwire responded to that beating by pre-reporting some selected third-quarter financial numbers, showing record quarterly revenues and subscriber additions, along with a narrowing loss. Clearwire is scheduled to release its full third-quarter earnings report next Wednesday after the market closes.

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Sprint (NYSE: S) is unveiling a new plan to upgrade its national wireless network today, and Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire is not part of the picture. That’s sent shares of Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) into a nosedive, losing a third of their value in afternoon trading.

It had previously seemed that Sprint, as the majority shareholder, might have to play a key role in helping Clearwire remake its own network. Clearwire is a wholesale provider, but its early fourth-generation (or 4G) network is based on a kind of wireless technology called WiMax—and WiMax is quickly being displaced as long-term evolution, or LTE, becomes the industry standard.

Clearwire has said it needs close to $1 billion for its network upgrade—some $600 million to add LTE, with another $300 million or so to finish work on its existing WiMax infrastructure. But today, Sprint announced a $5 billion plan to upgrade its own network. And an investment in boosting Clearwire wasn’t part of the plan.

Even before today, Sprint had been sending increasing public signals that Clearwire is basically on its own. And the company hammered home the point even further today: As the Puget Sound Business Journal reports, Sprint said it wouldn’t offer Clearwire-compatible phones after next year, and CEO Dan Hesse said Sprint had “nothing beyond 2012 to announce” about network arrangements with Clearwire.

There’s also this Associated Press report on the analyst and investor meeting, which includes this key scene of Hesse basically pooh-poohing Clearwire’s situation:

“In a testy exchange with Sprint executives, a member of the audience at the investor meeting questioned why Sprint would risk forcing Clearwire to seek bankruptcy protection when it owns 54 percent of the company, and could lose its share of Clearwire’s spectrum in a bankruptcy case.

Sprint executives didn’t directly address that possibility, but Hesse noted that no bankruptcy case involving a wireless company has resulted in a disruption of service.”

Clearwire’s response was similar to the notes it’s sounded recently: Despite all the turmoil, it has lots of spectrum, and “Sprint remains dependent on Clearwire for 4G” today.

“As demand for mobile data increases, Clearwire remains the only viable 4G wholesaler with an operating 4G network, substantial spectrum resources, and a global technology road map to serve this growing market,” the company said in a statement.

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It’s been quite a month so far for Kirkland, WA’s Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), and that would be true even if the markets weren’t riding out an anxiety-fueled funnel cloud that has hammered plenty of technology stocks.

Then again, turbulence is nothing new to Clearwire overall—the company has been plowing ahead with a huge makeover in the past several months, including the late 2010 departure of founder and wireless pioneer Craig McCaw and a couple rounds of CEO musical chairs.

The latest: Clearwire’s majority owner, Sprint (NYSE: S), is looking into a possible buyout to raise the cash that Clearwire needs to build up its network with faster Long-Term Evolution or LTE wireless technology, as opposed the to older WiMax standard that Clearwire bet on initially, according to Bloomberg. Clearwire recently reported that it would need about $600 million for this task, with another $300 million or so for its remaining work on WiMax.

This comes just a few days after executive chairman John Stanton (who last week transitioned out of his interim CEO role) essentially doubled down on Clearwire stock. Both of these events gave a boost to Clearwire’s sagging stock price, which was pummeled most recently when an analyst cut his target price and said there was worry about Clearwire’s future as a going concern.

Why all this interest in reviving a company that has been the source of so many troubled headlines, and considered far behind in adopting the latest wireless technology? As Forbes contributor Joan Lappin of Gramercy Capital Management wrote today, “everybody covets that Clearwire spectrum.”

Lappin, who owns shares in Clearwire (and says she doubled down herself last week), writes that “In round numbers, Clearwire has more spectrum than the combined AT&T and T-Mobile will have if that deal is allowed to fly.” If the mega-merger goes through, she writes, “Verizon might write a small check and take Clearwire out of its misery. This is getting to be fun now. It hasn’t been for most of this year.”

Forbes’ Eric Savitz notes, however, that some industry analysts aren’t convinced the Sprint-cable company talks about Clearwire are very substantial at this point, and could be more of an attempt by Sprint to hedge its bets for LTE capacity. Which, again, means it’s all about the spectrum assets—a market that McCaw Cellular vets like Stanton have a lot of experience navigating.

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Clearwire has named Erik Prusch its new president and CEO, replacing interim chief John Stanton as the Kirkland, WA-based wireless broadband provider struggles with Wall Street doubts about its future. Prusch joined Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) in 2009 as chief financial officer, and as the press release notes, helped the company raise more than $6 billion in equity and debt financing.

Prusch will need to call on those skills again if Clearwire hopes to make it through the current rough seas. Following its recent quarterly report, Clearwire said it could need to raise almost $1 billion to pay for its network—up to $300 million to finish work on its WiMax network, and another $600 million to add the Long-Term Evolution, or LTE, technology that is becoming standard in the industry.

Although few stocks escaped unbloodied by the recent turmoil on Wall Street, Clearwire is in a particularly precarious position. Yesterday, as noted in this report by Forbes’ Eric Savitz, a Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst cut his rating on Clearwire, citing “increased going concern risk,” and targeted the stock price at 50 cents, about a third of where it was trading.

There are also doubts about the company’s debt, and jitters over the fact that majority investor Sprint recently inked a long-term deal with a competitor, LightSquared.

Prusch was elevated to chief operating officer in March, when former CEO Bill Morrow and two other top officers left. That was just a few months after Clearwire founder and wireless industry legend Craig McCaw left the company as chairman. Stanton, another of Washington state’s wireless industry pioneers, took over the interim CEO duties in March. He’ll stay involved as executive chairman, the company said.

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Andover, MA-based SiGe Semiconductor, which first revealed its plans to go public last July, is instead set to be acquired by another Bay State semiconductor technology company, Skyworks (NASDAQ: SWKS). Woburn, MA-based Skyworks, whose analog and mixed signal semiconductors have applications in the military, medical, broadband, mobile, industrial, automotive, and energy management spaces, will pay as much as $275 million for SiGe, with $210 million in cash upfront, and potentially $65 million more if certain milestones are met.

Last year, SiGe proposed to raise $143.8 million in an initial public offering. “Skyworks clearly represents the best strategic and cultural fit for SiGe Semiconductor,” said Sohail Khan, president and chief executive officer of SiGe Semiconductor, in an announcement of the deal. As of last year, SiGe had raised about $130.7 million through the sale of preferred stock. According to a filing amended in March, SiGe, which makes fabless semiconductors for wireless multimedia applications, had revenues last year of $103.3 million, and net profits of $4.1 million. The acquisition by Skyworks has been approved by both company’s boards, and is expected to close in June, subject to customary closing conditions.

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As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

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There are two sides to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based “invention capital” company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The revenue-generating side of the business is a stockpile of more than 30,000 patents, which Intellectual Ventures licenses and sells to other firms, including tech companies large and small looking to defend themselves in lawsuits. IV also isn’t shy about suing to defend its patent portfolio.

On the other hand—and in a different set of buildings, actually—is the invention lab. Tucked into nondescript space in outer Bellevue, the lab is stocked with a huge amount of equipment, from sophisticated laser arrays to really big band saws, sometimes purchased at fire-sale prices. This is the epicenter of the “make side” of Intellectual Ventures, which also includes a network of affiliated individual inventors who work on their own. That side of the business files about 500 patents per year on inventions that are cooked up in-house, not acquired from somewhere else.

You’ve probably heard of some of the biggest creations to emerge from the lab, including the TerraPower next-generation nuclear reactor, the “photonic fence” of lasers designed to keep malarial mosquitos at bay and “Modernist Cuisine,” a nearly 50-pound food-geek compendium that that is redefining the term “cookbook.”

But the lab staff also is working on plenty of projects you might not have heard of, including some interesting stuff in the arena of global health. Some of this work, no surprise, is being financed by Myhrvold’s old boss, Bill Gates.

On a recent visit to the workshop, I got a look at some of the interesting but under-the-radar things that the Intellectual Ventures crew is working on. Here’s a quick look, with details from Geoff Deane, the company’s VP of engineering and head of the lab:

—Malaria diagnosis. One of the problems in treating malaria in the developing world is finding an effective way to diagnose people.Today, blood tests might have to be strapped to the back of a motorcycle and driven 100 miles to the nearest health facility, making the economics of diagnosis not much better than the actual production of malaria drugs. So frequently, the path is just to medicate almost everyone, Deane says—and routine overuse of medication can eventually lead to drug-resistant strains.

The Intellectual Ventures team set out to build a quick, portable, durable screening system. There is a reliable marker in something called hemozoin, a blood byproduct that the malaria parasite excretes. So, the IV team set out to detect it, and wound up with a method that involved a complex-looking … Next Page »

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Competition in the crowded daily-deals market got a little more pugnacious recently with an acquisition by group discount site BuyWithMe. The Boston- and New York-based company purchased LocalTwist, boosting BuyWithMe in San Diego and putting the company in a new market—Seattle.

The latter city, of course, is the home base of competitor Tippr, the Martin Tobias-led company that is currently suing BuyWithMe in federal and state court over two different issues. As my colleague Greg Huang notes, it’s all part of the “life-and-death struggle for third place” in daily deals.

Other stories that made the rounds at Xconomy in the past week or so:

—Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) had another confrontation with state government over the company’s extreme aversion to being deputized as a sales-tax collector. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law that state’s version of an “Amazon law,” trying to make the sales in Illinois subject to sales tax by targeting Amazon’s marketing tie-ins with affiliate websites.

With a steady drumbeat of regulation attempts happening in the states, I took a look at why these efforts are really a side issue in making a big national policy change. Long story short: More aggressive state regulations aren’t likely to make Amazon heel, but they could serve as another prod for Congress to finally act on a broader solution.

—Kirkland, WA-based wireless provider Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) saw more top names hit the bricks, just a few months after founder and local wireless legend Craig McCaw left his post as chairman of the board. Chief Executive Bill Morrow, Chief Information Officer Kevin Hart, and Chief Commercial Officer Mike Sievert are out in the latest shake-up. As The Wall Street Journal’s Russell Garland noted, Sievert’s last public words on Clearwire’s behalf were very likely at our big Mobile Madness event, where he sounded optimistic: “We lack for nothing except cash.”

New board Chairman John Stanton, another titan of the Seattle-area wireless landscape, was immediately tapped as interim CEO while the board searches for a long-term replacement. Asked whether he’d take over as CEO permanently, Stanton gave The Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley an unequivocal no. Clearwire also said that it believes a resolution is near in a dispute over wholesale pricing with majority owner Sprint (NYSE: S).

—The center of gravity in the tech world shifted temporarily to some college town in Texas for the interactive portion of South by Southwest. Plenty of well-known names from the Seattle tech scene were … Next Page »

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I just got a new BlackBerry smartphone last weekend, which makes me a mobile expert—for circa 2005-2006 maybe. Luckily for you (and me), there’s a big event coming up called Mobile Madness, which will tell you all you need to know about the industry in 2011 and beyond.

Xconomy’s third annual mobile conference, Mobile Madness 2011, is happening on the afternoon of March 9 at Microsoft N.E.R.D. in Cambridge, MA. This year’s theme is “getting down to business.” We want to delve into what the real, important business questions are for mobile startups and big companies; which kinds of money-making strategies are working (and which aren’t); and how consumer behaviors and expectations are evolving in the age of ubiquitous smartphones and tablets. All that and more, across the sectors of mobile payments, mobile interfaces, location-based services, enterprise apps, and 4G wireless infrastructure.

To that end, we are convening some of the top names in mobile and wireless computing from the Boston area, as well as our other hubs, for a series of interactive panels and chats. We’re excited to announce a few additions to the speaker lineup today. The group includes:

—Michael Sievert, chief commercial officer at Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR), the wireless broadband provider (and developer of WiMax).

—Mark Lowenstein, managing director of Mobile Ecosystem, a Brookline, MA-based wireless/mobile consulting and advisory services firm. (You can read his top five wireless trends to watch in 2011 here.)

—Andrew Paradise, founder and CEO of AisleBuyer, a Boston-based mobile checkout company.

—Drew Volpe, co-founder and CTO of Locately, a Boston-based location analytics startup.

—Meredith Flynn-Ripley, CEO of MediaFriends, the Boston-area mobile communications firm that makes HeyWire, a free text-messaging service.

These speakers join a distinguished cast of presenting companies that includes Qualcomm, Ruckus Wireless, Skyhook, SCVNGR, Swype, Vlingo, Where, Apperian, Fig Card, Ground Truth, Enterprise Mobile, and Ondeego. We’ll also have some prominent investors on hand who have skin in the mobile game, such as Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital Partners, Jamie Goldstein of North Bridge Venture Partners, John Landry from Lead Dog Ventures, and Rich Miner from Google Ventures. And we’ve got a couple of other surprises in store, just to spice things up…

My colleague Wade and I will be posting the detailed agenda pretty soon, so stay tuned. In the meantime, you can register for the event here. We’re looking forward to seeing you on March 9.

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The countdown hasn’t started just yet, but in five months, Carlsbad, CA-based ViaSat (NASDAQ: VSAT) will be launching its first satellite, ViaSat-1, aboard a Proton rocket from the Baikonour Cosmodrome, the Russian space launch facility in Kazakhstan.

“We’re done with the really tough testing, where you put the satellite in a thermal vacuum chamber and cycle through extreme temperatures,” says Tom Moore, a ViaSat senior vice president and CEO of WildBlue Communications who heads the company’s ViaSat-1 satellite initiative. “Now we’re just going through the last stages of testing and processing before shipping to the launch facility.”

Tom Moore

Getting the satellite into a geo-stationary orbit centered 22,300 miles above the United States will be the crucial final maneuver in a plan that began in 2007, when ViaSat decided to build a satellite for Internet service—”the highest capacity satellite ever built by an order of magnitude.” But a successful ViaSat 1 launch would also represent a personal triumph for Moore. He has travelled full circle in returning to WildBlue Communications, the satellite-based Internet service provider in Denver, CO, that he co-founded in 1998—and which ViaSat acquired at this time last year in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $568 million.

As ViaSat CEO Mark Dankberg explained to me at the beginning of the year, ViaSat realized that acquiring WildBlue solved a … Next Page »

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Fremont, CA-based Quantenna Communications, which makes chipsets for broadband home networking over Wi-Fi, said today that it has collected $21 million in Series E financing, bringing its total venture pot to about $78 million. New investor DAG Ventures led the round, with, with existing investors Sequoia Capital, Sigma Partners, Southern Cross Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participating. The company says hardware like its multichannel MIMO 802.11n chipsets will be needed to carry multiple high-definition video streams within homes.

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Timing is everything—especially in the tech world. If you follow trends in technology, science, or business for long enough, you realize there are very few new ideas. Instead, the combination of the right idea with the right timing and execution is usually the key to success in any field.

Look at all the snazzy tech products that have sprung up around us in recent years—iPhones and iPads, Kindle e-book readers, mobile and gaming apps, GPS and mapping technologies. And some services are so ubiquitous that we don’t even notice them anymore, like Internet banking or online shopping.

It made me think back a decade to 1999-2000, the height of the tech bubble, and consider which of these ideas were already around back then, but either didn’t quite pan out or failed. (Of course, you could go back much further than that, but 10 years feels like an eternity in tech these days.) If you paged through Red Herring, Fast Company, or Technology Review in the late ‘90s, I suspect you’d find many ideas that look a lot like the current tech landscape.

So I informally surveyed a few techies and venture capitalists on both coasts, and have compiled a list of 10 old ideas from the dot-com era that have finally arrived. In some cases, the old product was not positioned correctly, or the technology of the day didn’t support it well. But in most cases, the main issue was the timing of the market—the offering just wasn’t compelling enough at its price point or it cost too much to produce back then. Now times have changed.

This list is by no means comprehensive. If you’ve got a company or idea that I missed—or if you have a different take on the reasons for the turnaround—please leave a comment below.

Without further ado, here are 10 oldies that are new again:

1. Group-buying sites (Mercata vs. Groupon)

This is the quintessential old idea whose time has come. Mercata, the Paul Allen-backed dot-com that withdrew its IPO in early 2001 and closed down, struggled to gain traction in part because it competed for consumer-product deals with e-retailers and big portals like Yahoo and AOL. In the past couple of years, Groupon solved this problem by focusing on one deal per day, but across very different kinds of stores. A down economy, mainstream use of the Web, and lack of competitors didn’t hurt. Now there are more than 100 group-buying sites around the world—mostly blatant knockoffs of Groupon, which is … Next Page »

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For the second month in a row we’re compiling all recent Seattle-area tech and biotech deals—”under the radar” and otherwise—into one comprehensive overview of all financings for the month. As always, the information is based on data provided by our partner, New York-based private company intelligence platform CB Insights, and our own prior coverage. And just as in June, the July data shows a clear trend: the majority of the local venture and angel-backed investments are going to the healthcare sector, which includes biotech.

Of the 17 deals Washington companies saw over the month of June, seven of them were in the healthcare sector, amounting to $62.5 million of the $81.7 million invested overall.  Compare this to the $104.3 million raked in locally in June, of which biotech companies nabbed $41.1 million, and it’s easy to see that the healthcare sector is leading in terms of regional financings. But whereas the energy and utilities and computer hardware and services sectors trailed close behind healthcare in June, no other sector was even close to bringing in the same amount of funding in July. The electronics sector trailed far behind with $5.8 million in financing, and the business products and services sector was close to follow with deals totaling $5.4 million.

The Internet sector came in fourth with $4 million in financing. (The Northwest Open Access Network did nab $54.5 million in federal stimulus money to expand high-speed broadband service across Washington state, but as this is grant money and not investment financing, it is not included on the list). Software took fifth place, with $2 million, and the mobile and telecommunications sector took a distant sixth place with $1.3 million in funding.

Perhaps the most shocking result has to do with the energy and utilities sector, which only brought in $0.69 million in July—the only sector to drop below the million-dollar mark—compared to the $35.8 million they raked in back in June. The computer hardware and services, risk and security, industrial, automotive and transportation, and gaming sectors brought in no funding at all in July.

We reported on a number of the larger deals that came through in July, including the $32 million Seattle-based Immune Design raised in Series B funding for the development of a new generation of vaccines. This deal, the second-largest venture deal in Washington state this year so far (behind the $40 million nabbed by Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals in June) is just another indication of the healthcare sector’s leading role in Washington state investments. Further evidence: Uptake Medical’s $17.5 million investment for the sale of its emphysema treatment device, and Integrated Diagnostics $10 million deal, the second of its three-part, $30 million Series A.

On the tech side, contact-organizing software developer Gist raised an additional $4 million from Vulcan Capital and the Foundry Group. There were also a few interesting deals you may not have heard of, including a $690,000 round of equity that Seattle-based General Biodiesel, one of the first cleantech companies to set up shop at the McKinstry Innovation Center, brought in.

Here’s the full list of July’s equity-based deals, both under the radar and on it:

July also saw a few startups raising cash through deals based on debt, options, and/or warrants, rather than equity, including mobile software company Dashwire, which brought in over $515,000 in July from an undisclosed investor. (CEO Ford Davidson says the mobile app space is a “market that’s on fire.”) Those seven transactions, worth a combined $14.5 million, are listed below.

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Another week has passed, and with it, more Seattle-area technology deals. This week we’ve seen a hefty amount of federal dollars get poured into developing the state’s broadband infrastructure, a handful of local financings, and a deal that fell apart between a global wire service and a local online humor company. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based database company SpaceCurve raised $1.1 million in equity led by Reed Elsevier Ventures. Seattle-based Divergent Ventures also participated in the round. The year-old company develops scalable databases capable of storing and analyzing large spatial and graph datasets.

—Oggifinogi, a creative technology and rich media advertising firm based out of Bellevue, WA, and New York, raised $2 million in Series A financing, led by Grecroft Partners. The company, founded in 2008, plans to use the funds to grow its Real Time Rich Media (RTRM) services.

—The Northwest Open Access Network (NoaNet) received $54.5 million in Recovery Act funds to expand high-speed broadband Internet across Washington State. The federal grant is the second the Tacoma, WA-based organization has received for a $185 million project to bring Internet access to 170 communities that lack adequate service. The work will affect 2,000 schools, libraries, universities, hospitals, and emergency response agencies in rural areas of Washington.

—Portland, OR-based Tyfone, a developer of mobile contactless payment software, raised $5 million in equity from an undisclosed investor. The company, founded in 2004, partnered with Atlanta, GA-based e-commerce and payment processing company First Data in March, to offer SideTap micro secure digital (MicroSD) memory cards with Tyfone technology.

—This isn’t so much of a deal as a non-deal: A potential partnership between the Associated Press and Seattle-based humor network I Can Has Cheezburger fell through this week. The wire service backed out of the deal, citing concerns over its “journalistic integrity.” Cheezburger landed a similar deal with Seattle-based Getty Images earlier this month, and is currently in talks with Corbis, another stock photo agency.

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