Hey intern hopefuls, have you been on the hunt for a sweet media gig for the new semester? You’re in luck. Xconomy is looking for a rockstar intern to help out with a mix of editorial, social media, and event-related projects we’re initiating in the new year.

On top of gaining professional Web and news production experience in a lively startup setting, and free attendance at Xconomy events, the intern will also get the choice to work either from home or join us in our sunny Cambridge digs. Interested, or know someone who might be? Please send cover letters and resumes to Erin Kutz at ekutz@xconomy.com.

We’re looking for: 
—Familiarity with video editing software such as iMovie
—Strong working knowledge of social media platforms
—Some experience hand-coding HTML preferred
—Experience with and knowledge of WordPress or other content management systems

You can expect to:
—Help curate and update event calendars on Xconomy.com
—Assist with editing and producing graphics
—Edit photos and compile slideshows
—Edit event footage and one-on-one interviews
—Measure social media analytics

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It’s moving week for the companies launching Greentown Labs, the new cleantech incubator in the seaport area dubbed Boston’s “Innovation District” by Mayor Tom Menino.

The space at 337 Summer Street still looks more or less like a construction site, but the companies helping to get the incubator off the ground will be moving in this week, “ready or not,” says Jason Hanna, president and founder of Coincident and a founding entrepreneur of Greentown Labs.

Other media outlets reported that last fall, Promethean Power Systems co-founder Sam White launched a grassroots cleantech incubator near the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall. In December, the group of companies working there alongside Promethean—Coincident, OsComp Systems, Altaeros Energies, and AirVentions—found out that the owner of the building sold it to be redeveloped as a biotech facility. The group incorporated as a nonprofit in January as it searched for a new home.

Boston and Cambridge have their fair share of co-working spaces offering Wi-Fi and desks, but Greentown Labs is designed to have enough room for the physical equipment—and mess—required to build hardware that goes into these cleantech startups.

“It’s going to be dirty,” says Pedro Santos, CEO of OsComp Systems, a startup quietly working to develop a cheaper, more efficient method of producing natural gas after drilling, which is said to cut the cost of gas compression by 50 percent. “It will be safe and clean, but we want it to feel like a machine shop.”

The roughly 14,000 square-foot incubator consists of a large open space for startups to split up and build their products in, at a monthly rent of $25 per usable square foot, says Hanna. Companies can pay another $75 per month to access Greentown’s impending electronics lab and machine shop. Meanwhile, OsComp plans to run its prototype system in the basement. A dedicated desk in the main area costs $275 per month and includes Wi-Fi and access to the conference room; closed-door offices will run about $950 per month, depending on the size.

Dynamo MicroPower, a developer of a sub-microturbine for power generation, and SolSolution, a nonprofit working to get solar installations in schools, will be joining the five Greentown charter companies who moved from the Cambridge incubator space, says Jeremy Pitts, OsComp’s vice president of product development.

And as far as the charter member companies go: Promethean is working on solar-powered refrigeration systems; Coincident is developing a software- and hardware-based system for better integrating cleantech elements and optimizing energy use in the home; and Altaeros is making … Next Page »

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RelayRides, a San Francisco-headquartered person-to-person car-sharing startup with an office in Boston, has raised $5.1 million of an equity-based funding round that could total $5.9 million, according to an SEC document filed yesterday.  The company, which started in Cambridge and last year participated in the Boston incubator program MassChallenge, announced in December that it had nabbed an undisclosed amount of funding from Google Ventures and August Capital and was relocating its headquarters to San Francisco as it launched its car-sharing service there. Howard Hartenbaum of August Capital and Google Ventures’ Joe Kraus are listed as RelayRides directors on the SEC filing, which also notes that the funding comes from 19 investors.

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Boston has been vocal about its intent to transform its Seaport District into an “innovation district” for fueling job creation and attracting cutting-edge companies. Just last month, the city’s odds of making this vision a reality seem to improve, with the news that two Cambridge, MA-based companies—Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) and Heartland Robotics—would be relocating to the waterfront neighborhood. (The Vertex move is contingent on the company nabbing FDA approval for its hepatitis C drug telaprevir.) And last year, the $1 million state startup competition MassChallenge set up shop in the Fan Pier area of the district.

I’ve been hearing word around Cambridge that Boston’s moves in promoting itself as a home to innovation have created a bit of good old inter-city competition, so I informally polled folks working on each of side of the river to see if the Vertex and Heartland transplants mean that Beantown is gaining some serious ground.

The rivalry is real, says Tim Rowe, founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center in Kendall Square. “I think Boston probably feels that way more than Cambridge,” he says. “But there is a sense of competition, and, as I’ve said elsewhere, I think its good for both Boston and Cambridge. Competition pushes us all to be at our best.

Actually, the Cambridge City Council seems a bit bent out of shape by Vertex’s move, if you ask me. Massachusetts offered the drugmaker $50 million in public infrastructure financing to construct its new $800 million facility in the state, and $10 million in life sciences tax incentives from 2010 to 2014. In return, Vertex has pledged to create 500 new full-time jobs from 2011 to 2015 and to retain its existing 1,350 jobs. The offer letter from the state doesn’t peg the incentives to a certain Massachusetts city in which Vertex should construct its new facility, but notes Vertex’s plans to build in Boston. According to reports in the Boston Herald and the Boston Business Journal, Cambridge city councilors slammed Boston politicians for drawing Vertex across the Charles, and even voted 7 to 1 for a resolution to name the incentives for Vertex’s new office space, “especially egregious.”

Vertex—which just this week announced it its cystic fibrosis drug had passed a pivotal clinical trial—didn’t jump ship from Cambridge because of a particular penchant for the city of Boston, but because the space is there, many people tell me. And that space is a result of a decade of planning, says Boston Redevelopment Authority spokeswoman Susan Elsbree. “Physically it’s very different: buildings are already built, planned, and permitted,” she says of Boston’s Seaport District. “As the economy begins to take off again, there’s room for growth—significant room for growth. Cambridge has historically been for the smaller startups. They need room physically to grow.”

Companies starting out in Cambridge and leaving is nothing new, says Travis McCready, executive director of the Kendall Square Association. “People come from all over the world to participate in this uniquely Cambridge culture…we grow companies, commercialize innovation, and quite frequently see companies ‘graduate’ to other environments,” he says, noting that just under a quarter of the 25,000 active companies in the U.S. founded by MIT alumni have remained in Massachusetts.

Elsbree also has a bit of a friendlier outlook on the dynamic between the two cities. “We really don’t see it as two cities divided by a river, but rather what is the economic impact,” she says. “We’re looking at the state as a whole and … Next Page »

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Most readers will be aware that Vertex announced it is moving from 900,000 square feet of laboratories and offices in Cambridge to over a million square feet in Boston.

Some are asking if this spells serious trouble in Cambridge. This question surprises me. Cambridge is one of the world’s most important sources of next-generation technology and companies, and regularly exports them. A 2009 Kaufmann Foundation study showed that MIT spin-outs alone, if collected together, would rank as the 11th largest economy in the world. Vertex and its Telaprevir hepatitis C drug, which is on the verge of approval by the FDA, follow a time-honored tradition.

Once ideas are proven, those pursuing them should and do move into production mode. Sometimes that means taking larger, cheaper space elsewhere. When this happens, it makes room for another generation of new companies in Cambridge. While nobody wants to lose a taxpayer, Cambridge should feel proud of the contributions it makes to the rest of the world.

For nearly 400 years, Cambridge’s powerful blend of intellectual and entrepreneurial oomph has given the city an enviable self-renewing quality. Let’s look at the record. It starts with the book. Cambridge printed the first book in North America 370 years ago. About that time, it also became home to its first university, Harvard. The first computer (the Mark II) and the Internet (then called the Arpanet) came out of Cambridge. Thomas Watson placed the first two-way telephone call from his lab in Kendall Square, the wires stretching across the river to Alexander Graham Bell’s home on Beacon Hill. Some other Cambridge creations include the microwave oven, the sewing machine, instant photography, ship-to-ship radar, synthesis of penicillin and quinine, fractionation of blood, and deployment of vaccines. Many of Cambridge’s inventions today are so complex, the inventors win Nobel Prizes while most of us don’t even understand them.

(If you want the full background on these inventions and others, you are in luck. The Cambridge Historical Society is readying a comprehensive website on the history of invention in Cambridge. Send a note to innovation@cambridgehistory.org if you’d like to be notified when it’s up.)

Cambridge has launched some pretty interesting ideas in other departments as well. … Next Page »

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[Updated, see page 2] San Francisco-based Zynga, continuing the acquisition spree enabled by the massive success of its social games for Facebook, MySpace, and the Apple iPhone, has acquired Conduit Labs, the three-year-old music gaming company based in Cambridge, MA.

Zynga announced the acquisition in a press release. Conduit, headquartered in the Barron Building at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Central Square, will now be known as “Zynga Boston” and its team will be “immediately integrated into Zynga’s workforce,” according to the announcement. Zynga isn’t saying how much it paid for the startup.

Conduit Labs was formed in 2007 by Nabeel Hyatt, formerly chief operating officer at MIT spinoff Ambient Devices. Backed by $8.5 million in venture financing from Charles River Ventures in Waltham, MA, and Prism VentureWorks of Westwood, MA, the startup first gained notoriety for Loudcrowd, a casual gaming community launched to the public in March 2009. In Loudcrowd, players created customized avatars and competed for points in animated dance games requiring a combination of listening skills and eye-hand coordination.

Loudcrowd demonstrated Conduit’s programming chops, and even attracted the attention of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who played a few rounds during a visit to Conduit’s original Cambridge Innovation Center home. But the game predated the huge boom in social games facilitated by Facebook’s growth, and failed to gain a large user base. Conduit shut down Loudcrowd on July 29 of this year to focus on its two Facebook game titles, Music Pets and Super Dance (the latter of which drew heavily on art styles and game play developed for Loudcrowd).

Now those two titles will become part of Zynga’s existing Facebook lineup, which includes the breakout hits FarmVille and Mafia Wars as well as a number of lesser-known titles, such as Cafe World, Fashion Wars, FishVille, FrontierVille, PetVille, Pirates, Special Forces, Treasure Isle, Vampire Wars, and YoVille.

In a March 2009 interview with Xconomy, Conduit’s Hyatt said that Loudcrowd, which was designed in part as a vehicle for music promotion and sales, represented “10 percent or less” of the potential for the company’s social games. “It became very obvious very early on that the potential for this product was that it was a multi-billion-dollar company, if we executed it right,” Hyatt said. He compared Loudcrowd to MTV, which, he said, “had a worse path to market and a worse monetization model than we have. This thing is ours to screw up.”

But as it became clear that Facebook, with its built-in viral user acquisition mechanism, would be a better platform for social games than the open Web, Conduit pivoted. Its Facebook games have done fairly well—Super Dance has 483,000 monthly active users, and Music Pets has 362,000. But the startup never approached the levels of success achieved by … Next Page »

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If there were a heat map showing how high-tech entrepreneurs are distributed around Boston, there would be a new red spot at 614 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge’s Central Square.

From the outside, the four-story office building is distinguished mainly by its white-tiled facade and its large plate-glass windows. Deep inside is the office of Carl Barron, the building’s 93-year-old owner and landlord, long adored by neighbors as the unofficial “Mayor of Central Square.”

And now the building is also home to a gaggle of venture-backed Web and mobile startups, including Conduit Labs on the fourth floor and Oneforty on the second. Conduit is best known as the creator of the online music game Loudcrowd, and Oneforty has built a groundbreaking “Twitter app store” guiding Twitter fans to tools that make the microblogging service more useful.

Dozens of familiar faces from the Boston startup and investing scene were on hand for a joint Conduit/Oneforty housewarming party last Friday night, which was also the occasion for the unveiling of the Awesome Foundation’s March 2010 grant (it went to a London biology undergraduate, Charles Fracchia, who’s creating bio-engineered inks). At the party, I learned from Conduit CEO Nabeel Hyatt and Oneforty CEO Laura Fitton that both companies will be sharing their spaces with smaller startups.

Already subletting space from Conduit, according to Hyatt, are Shareaholic, maker of a social sharing plugin for Web browsers, and AccelGolf, which is developing GPS-driven golf apps for smartphones.

Jay Meattle, founder and CEO of Shareaholic, says his company moved into the Conduit space in mid-February. “We have a private room that can easily fit in 3-4 people, which is perfect for our size,” Meattle says. “It’s like an office within an office, with all the amenities of a big space like a kitchen, conference rooms, et cetera.”

William Sulinski, CEO and co-founder of Portland, ME-based AccelGolf, says the Cambridge outpost will become the startup’s sales hub.

Fitton says she’s not sure yet who will move into Oneforty’s space, but that they’ll likely be other entrepreneurs funded by Oneforty’s investors, who include Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners, San Francisco-based Javelin Venture Partners, and a bevy of angel investors such as Dave McClure, Roger Ehrenberg, Lee Hower, and Andy Sack.

There’s “a two-fold benefit” from having other companies supported by Oneforty’s investors in the same space, says Fitton. “It keeps the energy up, and it also means our investors and advisors are coming by the office all the time, so we can grab them for extra questions.”

The new cluster of startups in the Barron Building is another example of the informal incubator phenomenon that Erin spotlighted back in February. In these work/hangout spaces, sheer proximity tends to … Next Page »

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HubSpot, a fast-growing marketing technology startup born at the Cambridge Innovation Center, will leave its space at One Broadway this summer for new offices at 25 First Street, about 10 city blocks north, Xconomy has learned. While the move will take the startup out of the center of Kendall Square, vice president of marketing Mike Volpe says he hopes HubSpot and its weekly webcast parties will create a new center of gravity for tech entrepreneurs in the Lechmere Square neighborhood of Cambridge, flanking the Cambridgeside Galleria mall.

Call it Kendall Square North. “There are already a few tech companies” at 25 First Street, the building HubSpot will occupy in August, Volpe points out. Zipcar is one; enterprise storage company Permabit is another. “It’s not quite as central to the true heart of Kendall, but finding space for a couple of hundred people is quite an undertaking,” Volpe says.

HubSpot considered moving to a larger space inside One Broadway, and also looked at space in the Tech Square development, Volpe says. “What made the most sense in terms of the layout of the space and the pricing was the First Street space. I think we can make it work—we have people coming every week for HubSpot TV so hopefully we can create a little bit of an attraction ourselves.”

HubSpot’s growth has been rapid. The company started off in 2006 with a single bay on the 14th floor of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the business incubator space that occupies much of the MIT-owned One Broadway building. In January 2009 it moved to the fifth floor, into space that it sublet from RFID startup ThingMagic. But with a current staff of 120, the company is already spilling back out into a few miscellaneous desks at the CIC. To keep growing, the company needed to look elsewhere, Volpe says.

“We expect that by the time we actually move, we’ll have about 150 people, and we’re going to keep growing from there,” Volpe says. “The new space should carry us through for a while—it’s 37,000 square feet, with the potential to take over some more.”

HubSpot has already begun to build out the new space in anticipation of the move, he says. “It’s a very open environment, and we’re going to have a bunch of studio space to do the media production that we do in terms of videos, as well as … Next Page »

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Atlas Venture, an early stage venture investing firm with offices in Waltham, MA, and London, announced today that it will consolidate its operations, downsize its UK office, and bring almost all of its active investment professionals together under one roof in the Boston area.

That roof likely won’t be Atlas’s current office 890 Winter Street in Waltham, says Jeff Fagnan, a partner at the firm. So it’s conceivable that Atlas will join the minor migration of venture firms from the distant suburbs to Cambridge and Boston proper—areas often seen as the emerging center of gravity for the region’s software, Internet, and life sciences startups. Greylock Partners moved its regional office to Harvard Square last year and Bessemer Venture Partners is reported to be considering a similar move.

But Fagnan says the firm hasn’t chosen a spot yet. “We’re evaluating a few different locations right now,” Fagnan said by phone from the Waltham office. “Some are out this way and some are back that way.”

Wherever the firm goes, he adds, it would be mistake to read too much into the choice. “I definitely look at office space as tactical rather than strategic; I find it interesting that the whole venture firm office space thing is considered so newsworthy right now,” Fagnan says. “If any firm in New England has stuck to its knitting, it’s us. We are doing all seed and Series A investments and we’re committed to early stage investing. That’s not going to change, whether we’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Cambridge, England.”

The decision to consolidate personnel in the Boston area is also tactical rather than strategic, Fagnan says. “We operate best when we’re around one table and we can collaborate and challenge one another and look each other in the eye,” he says. “We are going to continue to execute on European deal flow, but we feel like we can continue to do that out of an office in Boston. It’s a lot easier these days to do the best deals today regardless of geography. We’ve proven that with the West Coast, and London is actually an easier flight from Boston. We don’t see it changing our strategy.”

Atlas partner Fred Destin will relocate from the London office to Boston, the firm said in today’s announcement. Graham O’Keefe and Regina Hoddits, partners in the London office, have “transitioned to venture partner roles,” the firm said. Christopher Spray will remain as the firm’s ranking partner in London.

As it comes together in a new location and continues to invest money from its $283 million eight fund, which closed about a year ago, it’s also likely that the Atlas team will grow, Fagnan says. “We’re hiring a new general partner on the technology side, and the life sciences team is also likely to add somebody. So you’re going to see an aggressive team with a fresh pool of capital.”

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Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center at One Memorial Drive here in Cambridge, MA—NERD, as it is so affectionately called inside and outside the company—has quickly become one of the central gathering spots for the Boston tech community.

In late March, the company opened a big conference area on its second floor, and almost from day one has been making it available for free to a variety of outside groups—from Tech Tuesdays to the Environmental Defense Fund, which just last week held an unconference about green business practices at NERD.

Well, as part of that welcoming spirit, I guess you would call it, the company has quietly posted its logo for the facility. The logo shows the Boston skyline (roughly as seen from NERD) in shaded blue, and the stylized Longfellow Bridge connecting it with Cambridge in orange. “We kind of flipped the switch this morning,” says Sara Spalding, senior director of NERD. “We really felt that we wanted to have a design that reflected our presence her in the greater Boston area, and Cambridge in particular.”

Out to get to the bottom of the story in true hard-hitting journalistic fashion, I asked her if there was a deep symbolism behind the logo, such as a metaphorical bridge linking Microsoft with the larger Boston innovation scene.

Nope. “There’s no clever reverse image or play it backwards on your stereo,” she says. “There’s no deeper meaning.”

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Cambridge, MA drug giant Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB) and Hawthorne, NY-based Acorda Therapeutics (NASDAQ:ACOR) announced today that Biogen Idec has acquired the rights to develop and commercialize Acorda’s multiple sclerosis drug, Fampridine-SR, in markets outside the U.S. Acorda will receive an upfront payment of $110 million and additional payments of up to $400 million, and retains commercialization rights to Fampridine-SR in U.S. markets. The deal increases the Cambridge company’s MS drug footprint, which already includes Biogen drugs Avonex and Tysabri. The latter drug has come under scrutiny recently for its link to a severe brain infection called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, or PML.

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Our Seattle compatriots have all arrived in Boston for XSITE. We wish we could say they brought the rain with them, but in fact, Boston has been far wetter than Seattle all month. The week’s life sciences news, however, isn’t quite the downpour you’ve all been dealing with outside.

—Wide-roaming correspondent Ryan McBride took in some sea air while attending the Convergence conference in Newport, RI. Policy wonks abounded, as the health care industry is nervously awaiting changes to federal patent standards, generic biotech drug regulation, and healthcare coverage. Ryan gathered insights on GlaxoSmithKline (NYSE: GSK)’s purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Sirtis last spring from Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) CEO Henri Termeer’s account of a conversation he had with Sirtis CEO Christoph Westphal. For all this and more, check out his report.

—Ryan also profiled PubGet, a Cambridge-based scholarly search engine aiming to provide faster, more useful results than the likes of GoogleScholar and PubMed. Instead of clicking through multiple links to get to the paper, a PubGet search will take you directly to a full-text PDF (assuming your institution has access). PubGet’s just announced that 50 research institutions have adopted its service.

—Marlborough, MA-based Exact Sciences is going back home to where the buffalo roam. The colorectal cancer test maker is relocating to Wisconsin after securing a $1 million loan from the Badger State.

—ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN), which produces technology to aid the effectiveness of antibody drugs, raised $33 million, after expenses, through a stock offering. The Waltham company sold 5 million shares at $7 apiece.

—Cambridge’s Living Proof, which aims to apply advanced materials science to beauty products, raised $9 million in an equity financing round. The funds came from Polaris Venture Partners, the sole venture backer of the company. Living Proof recently debuted its first product, the hair treatment NoFrizz.

—I-Therapeutix, a Waltham-based maker of tiny hydrogel-based eye bandages, landed $15 million in venture capital during a Series C Financing round. Between this latest news and the recent clearance of its flagship product, the I-Zip bandage, in European markets, I-Therapeutix is sitting pretty. The company hopes to enter the American market early next year, and is currently batting its lashes at the FDA.

—Norwich Ventures sounds like a great boss to work for. The Waltham venture firm loves to invest in medical device companies at an early stage, and unlike other, larger players, doesn’t pressure companies in its portfolio to sell or exit within five years. Hear more about their strategy in Ryan’s piece here.

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Knome, a personal genomics startups located in Cambridge, MA, announced today the launch of its newest product, a partial genome sequencing package called KnomeSELECT. The service will cost $24,500 for individuals, but is discounted to $19,500 per person for couples and family groups. The firm’s more comprehensive whole-genome sequencing service, KnomeCOMPLETE, costs $99,000. Rather than decoding a person’s entire genetic blueprint, KnomeSELECT looks only at the exome, the protein-coding regions of the DNA.

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Companies, merchants, and residents in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge banded together last week to form the Kendall Square Association, a non-profit group whose mission, according to its new president Tim Rowe, is to “improve, protect, and promote” the technology-saturated neighborhood. After several months of informal discussions, representatives from dozens of area organizations, including Xconomy, met at Genzyme Center on February 24 to formally incorporate the association and elect board members and officers.

With funding from member organizations, the association expects to take on both short-term issues such as repairing sidewalks and setting up a free Wi-Fi network and longer-term challenges such as optimizing transportation patterns, improving the mix of retail outlets, eateries, and entertainment venues in the area, and developing a 20-year plan for the neighborhood’s growth.

While there have been previous efforts to organize local businesses to promote the Kendall Square area—notably the Kendall Square Manufacturing Association, which was formed in the 1920s and later morphed into the current-day Cambridge Chamber of Commerce—Rowe says there has been no active group representing the area’s interests since a group called Kendall Square Business Association, founded in the 1970s, petered out more than a decade ago. Given the area’s rapid transformation over the past few years, including the addition of multiple office and laboratory buildings and the impending construction of a huge biotech park on the neighborhood’s northern edge, it was time for stakeholders to start talking about how to guide the area’s future, Rowe said in an interview last week.

“We are in a world now where there is a lot of interest in civic engagement,” Rowe says. “The time seemed to be right; there was a need that was growing, a rising tide that crested the dike.”

Rowe is well known around Kendall Square as the founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center, which rents space to more than 170 small and medium-sized technology companies at One Broadway. He’s also a partner at New Atlantic Ventures, an infotech-focused venture fund based in Cambridge and Reston, VA.

He says part of the impetus behind forming the group came from watching other organizations successfully promote their own neighborhoods in Cambridge—especially the Harvard Square Business Association, which has helped bring more attractive development and more cultural events (not to mention free Wi-Fi coverage) to the area around the Harvard campus.

But the idea isn’t to put Kendall Square in competition with Harvard Square or other local neighborhoods, Rowe says. If anything, it’s to underscore Kendall Square’s attractions compared to locations on the West Coast.

“The real competition is Palo Alto,” says Rowe. “I talk to a lot of startups trying to decide between two destinations, and it’s not Kendall Square or Harvard Square, it’s Kendall Square or Palo Alto. But the fact that both Google and Microsoft set up major offices in Kendall Square in the last few years is a big win for this area. It’s jobs we’ve brought in, and we want to have more of that.”

In fact, Kendall Square—which the association defines as the area within a 10-minute walking radius of the Kendall Square subway station—has benefited from massive investment and lightning-fast growth, compared to most other areas of Massachusetts. But that growth has been mostly … Next Page »

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An ambitious plan by Pasadena, CA-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities to create a 16-acre biotech park in East Cambridge, MA, moved one step closer to being realized last night. By an 8-1 vote, the Cambridge City Council approved a rezoning request from Alexandria that will allow it to build taller, denser buildings than those previously permitted along the Binney Street corridor, just north of Kendall Square.

Luke detailed Alexandria’s ten-year plan for the area back in June. Overall, the $1 billion project spans a six-block area along both sides of Binney Street between First Street and Sixth Street (a stone’s throw from Xconomy headquarters on Rogers Street). It would add five new buildings with 1.5 million square feet of “green” lab and office space for life-science tenants, as well as 220,000 square feet of housing, 30,000 square feet of ground-level retail space, underground parking, 2.3 acres of open parkland, and up to 52,000 square feet of community space (in the form of the “Foundry” building off Third Street, which Alexandria is donating to the city; the city itself will decide how the space is divided up between community and municipal uses).

To make the project viable, Alexandria (NYSE: ARE) needed a change in zoning ordinances to allow it to build mixed-use buildings as high as nine stories tall. Some area residents have opposed the change, saying the buildings will be too high, and raising concerns about construction noise and the risk of exposure to potential pathogens in the new labs. At last night’s city council meeting, almost a dozen East Cambridge residents spoke up against the proposal, some holding signs reading “Too Big, Too Close, Too Toxic,” according to a report today in the Harvard Crimson.

But other residents representing local construction workers’ unions urged the council to accommodate Alexandria, saying the project would bring much-needed jobs. And the Cambridge Planning Board, in a recommendation to the City Council last month, concluded that “there are many very positive aspects to the current scheme.”

“Alexandria is very pleased that the City Council approved the revised zoning in the Binney Street district,” Tom Andrews, Alexandria’s senior vice president and regional market director, told Xconomy. “Over the next several months we intend to prepare and submit a development plan for review and approval by various City and State agencies. We look forward to working closely throughout this process with the East Cambridge community, the Planning Board, and other City and State officials.”

Alexandria, which brands itself as the “Landlord of Choice to the Life Science Industry,” already manages nearly 2 million square feet of lab and office space in Cambridge, including Technology Square area near Kendall Square and the Science Hotel on Memorial Drive.

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It seems like a good day for some music, so we thought we’d give you a little preview of the tunes you’ll hear at our rapidly approaching second annual Battle of the Tech Bands. (Tickets are going fast—get yours now.) So behold MP3s from four of the six bands that are readying themselves to rock on January 22. The other two bands are fantastic as well, but they do covers and our attorneys made us a wee bit nervous about re-posting those. You can still play tracks from the ever-suave Seymore Willie (which represents AMAG Pharmaceuticals, LSI, and ARCON) on its own website, and you can see EneRock, the power rockers from EnerNOC, belt it out in this video from some other, assuredly less fun, band battle.

So with  that, I give you…

…the pleasing twang of The Dirty Truckers, doing American Well and Sophos proud with “Boston Wrangler”…

…the cool electronic stylings of Harmonix’s The Main Drag in “A Jagged Gorgeous Winter”…

…the edgy pulsations of “Angel Hair” by  Anomopoly of Nano-C and Tekscan…

…and the indescribably delightful “Tatooine” by our indescribably delightful special guest, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, featuring Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass.

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January can be a cold, dark, cruel month around Boston. But Xconomy plans to liven it up—at least for one very loud evening—with our second annual Battle of the Tech Bands, planned for January 22 at the Middle East Restaurant and Nightclub here in Cambridge, MA. If you’re a musician and at least one member of your band works for a local tech company, send in your MP3s before the December 12 deadline to compete for a slot in the Battle. If you’re a music lover (or you just like to watch geeks bang on drums), mark your calendar and buy a ticket in advance.

If last year’s Battle was any indication, the event will be a blast. We’ll have sets from five finalist bands selected by our celebrity judges (Boston Celtics Managing Partner and CEO Wyc Grousbeck, investor-musician Giles McNamee, and Harmonix Music Systems founder and CEO Alex Rigopulos), as well as a special musical guest band, Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, which features Xconomy’s own Greg Huang on bass guitar.

Finalists will be competing for seriously cool prizes, including band promotional services from Framingham, MA-based Nimbit and seven hours of studio time (plus engineering and production help) from Boston-based Bristol Recording Studios. There will be two Grand Prize winners: The crowd will choose the Audience Favorite using a text-messaging-based voting system provided by Cambridge’s Aerva. And our elite panel of judges will award a second grand prize for Most Innovative band (hint: there was a River Dance at last year’s battle).

But everyone wins, really. This year, Xconomy will donate half of the ticket proceeds from the Battle to two worthy local non-profit groups: The Science Club for Girls, which offers free after-school science literacy programs to K-12 girls, and the Community Music Center of Boston, a music school that serves more than 5,000 students per week in Boston’s South End.

If you’re a band member and you’d like to enter, go here for more details on how to submit your band for consideration.

If you’re only interested in attending, tickets are on sale now for $20 (they’ll be $25 at the door, so plan ahead) and will get you not only several hours of top-notch entertainment, snacks, and a free drink or two, but a chance to win fabulous door prizes.

Stay tuned to Xconomy for a list of the finalist bands later this month, plus added information about the door prizes and the lineup of events for the evening.

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Biogen Idec (NASDAQ:BIIB) confirmed yesterday that the biotech company plans to move its corporate headquarters from Cambridge, MA, to a site in Weston, MA, in 2010, the Boston Business Journal reports. A company spokeswoman told the BBJ that the firm has recently inked a lease on 350,000 square feet of office space in the Boston suburb, where up to 600 Biogen employees will move from the current headquarters at 14 Cambridge Center.

Rebecca back in October wrote about speculation about the big biotech’s plans to relocate its headquarters, after the story broke in the Boston Globe. The Globe reports this morning that Biogen says its headquarters will be at an undeveloped site at the junction of Routes 20 and 128 in Weston.

Though Biogen’s corporate offices will move, company spokeswoman Jennifer Neiman told the BBJ, the biotech plans to continue operations in 400,000 square feet of lab space and 200,000 square feet of manufacturing space in Cambridge. Biogen will join Waltham, MA-based Immunogen (NASDAQ:IMGN) and other biotechs to recently relocate headquarters from Cambridge to the western suburbs, where office rents and parking costs are generally less expensive than Cambridge rates.

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Cambridge, MA, startup Tipjoy, a Y Combinator-launched company whose technology allows Web surfers to leave small payments at the blogs of their favorite content creators, announced on its own blog this week that it has closed a $1 million Series A funding round. The round was led by New York-based seed stage investor Betaworks and also included the Accelerator Group, David Shen Ventures, and private investors Chris Sacca, Taavet Hinrikus, and Ron Bouganim.

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After publishing my story yesterday about the opening of Microsoft’s newest research lab in Cambridge, MA—where social scientists and computer scientists will work side by side to understand technology-mediated phenomena such as social networking—I attended a Microsoft-sponsored launch symposium at MIT and had the opportunity to meet with the lab’s director, Jennifer Chayes. Though Bob has spent a bit of time with Chayes and her husband and deputy director, Christian Borgs, this was my first time meeting her, and I have to say that Microsoft could hardly have picked a more dynamic and outgoing person to lead its first formal research facility in the Hub.

Chayes labels herself as “loud, crazy, and intense,” and jokes that she’s probably a headache for her boss Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research. If so, I’m sure it’s one of those worthwhile headaches: Chayes is clearly one of those exhilarating, exhausting types who just can’t stop making connections between ideas and people.

She’s no stranger to the Boston area, having done her postdoctoral work in mathematics and physics at Harvard in the 1980s. But she’s been away for a while, serving as a professor in the math departments at UCLA and the University of Washington and, for the last 11 years, as part of Microsoft Research, where she gained recognition for her work on game theory, the modeling of random graphs (of which the Internet and the Web are examples), and “phase transitions,” or sudden changes in the properties of a graph as it grows.

Chayes says it’s good to be back—and that Cambridge is the perfect place for a Microsoft lab. “Being located right next to MIT makes a huge difference,” she says. “We have faculty and students coming over all the time. We have major relationships going with Harvard, BU, and MIT—and I’m going out to speak at Northeastern and Tufts. Things are taking off so fast, it’s unbelievable.”

The Microsoft lab’s newest hire, announced yesterday, is also a Boston returnee: the deliberately uncapitalized danah boyd, a Berkeley-trained ethnographer who is famous in the blogosphere for her ethnographic studies of teen behavior on social networks like MySpace and Facebook. Currently a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, boyd will start at the lab full-time in January.

“I just love the way she looks at the world,” Chayes says of boyd. “I’ve already started talking with her about how we can modify some of the standard models of online networking to account for the kinds of behaviors she observes”—for example, the fact a social networker’s universe of online friends tends to shrink as he or she ages. “If we had more accurate models, we would be able to much more effectively come up with things like recommendation systems that give you recommendations based on the strength of your ties and the number of ties you have to others,” says Chayes.

Over lunch, I asked Chayes about a range of issues, from the genesis of the interdisciplinary focus she and Borgs have outlined for the lab to how she plans to measure the success of the new group over time.

Xconomy: You’re just celebrating the official opening of Microsoft Research New England with this symposium today, but you’ve actually been in business since mid-summer, right?

Jennifer Chayes: We’ve been in operation for about two and a half months now, so we’ve already got a lot of research projects going, but we waited until now because we wanted the universities to be in session and we wanted to draw in people who didn’t already know that we were here or what we were doing. And the vast majority of the people here today are from the university community. It’s very interesting for me, because some of them I haven’t seen in 23 years, since I was a postdoc.

X: Considering that your own background is in game theory and cryptography, I’m wondering where the idea for the Cambridge lab’s interdisciplinary focus came from, where you’re bringing together people from economics, the social sciences, and traditional computer-science theory.

JC: Well, if you look at my resume, I’ve changed fields every few years. My undergraduate degree was in biology, my graduate work was in physics, I was a professor of mathematics, and then I ran a theoretical computer science group. And over the last three or four years, I have become very interested in networks. I see them everywhere. It has just become clear to me that mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have done about all that we are going to be able to do without … Next Page »

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