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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Microsoft is celebrating the official opening of its newest research lab in Cambridge, MA, today with a day-long symposium at MIT on the intersection of computer science and the social sciences. That’s also where the lab itself —the company’s fifth research outpost outside its Redmond, WA, home base—will focus its efforts, at least initially, says Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

We covered the news back in February when Microsoft first announced the creation of Microsoft Research New England and the appointment of Jennifer Chayes—a former area manager for mathematics, theoretical computer science and cryptography at MSR Redmond—to direct it. Since then, Chayes and her husband Christian Borgs, the new lab’s deputy managing director, have been working to assemble a group of researchers who will bring a combination of economic, sociological, and psychological perspectives to bear on the ways people use computers and the Internet.

That’s bound to be a fruitful area for Microsoft, though in the long run, the lab’s direction will be determined by the people who join it, Rashid said in an interview this morning. “Whenever you start a research organization there tends to be a bit of a focus on the things that the people who started it want to do,” he says. “Ultimately, this lab will be no different from the other ones, in that we’ll hire great people and you’ll see the breadth of the organization develop. But certainly this whole area of interdisciplinary work, social computing, the social sciences area as it intersects with computer science, is a very interesting way to get the lab started.”

Already the lab includes an initial team of 33 full-time researchers, visiting researchers, post-docs, and interns, according to Microsoft. At its core, aside from Chayes and Borgs, are four other researchers with backgrounds in mathemematics and computer-science theory, including mathematician Henry Cohn, former head of the cryptography group at MSR Redmond; the husband-and-wife team of Adam Kalai, an expert on game theory and machine learning, and Yael Kalai, a cryptography expert, both briefly part of a theory group at Georgia Tech; and Butler Lampson, a pioneer of areas such as time-sharing, personal computing, WYSIWYG editing, and tablet computing. Also on board, at least temporarily, are visiting researchers Susan Athey, a rising star in microeconomics and econometrics at Harvard, and prominent MIT economists Glenn Ellison and Daren Acemoglu. (We published a full list of the lab’s founding staff back in July.)

More hiring announcements are expected today. The lab is also busy building connections with local computer science departments—it’s already running joint seminars with the Laboratory of Information and Decision Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. (Today’s symposium is at at MIT’s Stata Center, home to CSAIL.) Chayes and Borgs have been “doing a great job of making connections and building strong relationships with MIT, Harvard, and other universities in the Northeast,” says Rashid.

I asked Rashid how he expects Microsoft Research New England to contribute to the company. “I have no idea,” he answered. “If I knew, then we wouldn’t really need it. The difference between product development and research activity is that in product groups you may or may not do what you thought you would do, but at least you had a specific outcome in mind when you started, and you have a schedule and a plan. In basic research you don’t have those things—you have smart people and good intentions. The goal is to give them an opportunity to do what they want to do, and then step back.”

Microsoft is one of the last high-tech behemoths that can still afford to operate this way; with the exceptions of Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Xerox, most computing companies have long since folded their research operations into product development groups (witness last year’s saga at Mitsubishi’s Cambridge lab). And Microsoft rival Google famously has no formal research wing at all—its software engineers are encouraged, instead, to spend 20 percent of their time on fringe projects that don’t necessarily relate to the company’s existing business lines.

When I asked Rashid whether Microsoft had considered similar arrangements—perhaps giving product developers more time to do speculative work, or encouraging researchers to work alongside product developers more closely—he said that product developers inside Microsoft have no trouble innovating, even without a “20 percent time” tradition like Google’s. “I think a lot of people don’t quite realize how many of the exciting things that happen inside product groups come from individuals who have great ideas,” Rashid says. “That’s what Microsoft product groups are known for. We don’t call it something special; we just expect people to do intelligent work.”

And while there is plenty of collaboration between researchers and product developers inside Microsoft, Rashid says, there’s still enormous value to freeing the best people to do long-term basic research. “If you want to really contribute to the science of your field, that is a full-time job,” he says. “It’s not something you do in your spare time. The reality is that you want people to be able to take lots of risk, to go where their ideas take them independent of what might seem relevant at the time. And you want them to participate in the academic community, to be critiqued by their peers within that community. Historically, organizations that don’t subject themselves to peer review aren’t able to maintain an edge.”

In fact, one of the main ways Microsoft evaluates its researchers—and maintains accountability despite the open-ended nature of its brief—is to monitor their contributions to academic publications, Rashid says. “What is their impact on the field? That’s really measured through peer-reviewed publication, not so much numbers but quality—where are you publishing.”

But Rashid uses other criteria as well. “What is your impact on the researchers around you? Some researchers may not publish as much but are people who have this ability to synergize activity—causing things to happen that wouldn’t otherwise. You want to reward that too. And a third thing to look at, obviously, is technology transfer, whether it’s into Microsoft or into the world more broadly.”

It will be at least two years, Rashid says, before Microsoft can begin to tell how its research investment in New England is paying off. “This is just really early days, but the trajectory looks good,” he says. “I think people are excited.”

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Glyn Edwards, CEO of British biotech firm Antisoma, has found just the tonic for both the particularly gloomy weather in London this year and the business risk his company once faced with only one experimental drug close to market approval: Cambridge, MA, drug developer Xanthus Pharmaceuticals.

Xanthus, which Antisoma (LON:ASM) acquired in May for $52.2 million in Antisoma stock, provides Antisoma with two more prime commercial drug candidates. Now Edwards—who notes that one perk of the deal is the sunnier weather he enjoys during regular trips to this side of the Atlantic—plans to begin building a commercial team in Cambridge with a first hire later this year, in anticipation of hoped-for approvals of his firm’s anti-cancer treatments over the next several years. He also talked to me about how Antisoma first walked away from merger talks with Xanthus in 2007, but returned to the negotiating table after privately held Xanthus later reached two key milestones.

“Obviously, drug-development is a risky business; you can’t predict with absolute certainty what the results of these trials will be,” Edwards says, “but we have a high probability that at least one of these drugs is going to get through its Phase III.”

When M&A talks began between Antisoma and Xanthus last year, Antisoma’s only late-stage commercial drug prospect was its lead product candidate, called ASA404, which is in Phase III clinical trials to treat non-small cell lung cancer. (Swiss drug giant Novartis (NYSE:NVS) has licensed exclusive rights to ASA404, but Antisoma retains the option to become Novartis’ U.S. commercialization partner for the drug.) Now, with Xanthus’ pipeline in the Antisoma fold, the British biotech has added AS1413 (formerly Xanafide), which is in Phase III trials to treat secondary acute myeloid leukemia (AML), and oral fludarabine, which is pending FDA review and which could be approved by early 2009 as a secondary treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia. (For you science-minded folks, Antisoma gives details on the mechanisms of action of each drug here.)

Xanthus also gave Antisoma a ready-made drug development organization in the U.S., with internal expertise to manage the late-stage clinical trials and earlier-stage work on drugs in its pipeline. Antisoma has retained most Xanthus employees. For example, Mike Boss, who was chief business officer of Xanthus prior to the acquisition, has become general manager of the firm’s autoimmune program. Yet Richard Dean, former CEO of Xanthus, left the company shortly after the buyout. Antisoma has also folded an operation it launched in Princeton, NJ, last year into the 30-person Cambridge office, Edwards says. Though most of the firm’s workers, about 90 employees, are now housed in its London office, the CEO says he foresees the Cambridge outpost employing an equal number of people within the next several years. (Novartis projects potential approval of AS1413 in the U.S. by 2011, he says, and Antisoma would like to build a sales force here by then to handle its part of the joint-commercial effort for that drug.)

Though I hadn’t heard or read this before, Xanthus had been running a dual effort last year to consider whether to seek an initial public offering or find a buyer of the firm. Antisoma, searching at the time for a deal to bring it more late-stage product candidates, entered initial buyout talks with Xanthus yet walked away because the FDA had not yet accepted the New Drug Application for oral fludarabine or cleared secondary AML as an indication for the Phase III trial of ASA1413. But the regulatory agency later accepted both the NDA and the secondary AML indication. “So we got back in touch with (Xanthus) once we saw that both these events had happened,” Edwards says, “and we said, ‘You were right and we were wrong. How about getting married?’”

As Antisoma details in its announcement of the May 2008 acquisition, Xanthus shareholders—including such Boston-area venture capital firms as Oxford Bioscience Partners, HealthCare Ventures, and Still River Funds—exchanged their Xanthus shares for Antisoma stock. Michael Lytton, a general partner at Oxford who represented the VC firm in the deal, says that Xanthus investors decided after testing the IPO and M&A waters that they could get the best returns on their investments by converting theirs shares into stock in a consolidator in the field of oncology, which turned out to be Antisoma. Lytton says his firm maintains a 4-5 percent stake in Antisoma, and plans to sell its stock once its price (which was 43 cents on September 4) triples in value.

“We see ourselves being shareholders for a couple of years,” Lytton says, “through the point where Antisoma becomes a commercial organization.”

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It wouldn’t be a visit to Google if it didn’t include a game of some sort.

In the elevator on the way up to Google’s new Kendall Square digs, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was “talking smack” about his table-tennis prowess, according to Google’s Cambridge site director Stephen Vinter. So before allowing the governor to leave the housewarming party Google threw for itself yesterday, Vinter challenged him to a ping-pong match in the company’s colorful cafeteria/lounge.

Nobody kept score. And let’s just say that neither player is about to make the Olympic team.

“So, this is just a typical day at the office,” Vinter remarked, as TV cameramen recorded the match and newspaper photographers flashed away.

“It is for me—with the press watching every move,” Patrick quipped back.

The half-spontaneous, half-staged moment of geek athleticism was in keeping with the studiously casual atmosphere that Google prefers to project to the world—and that is captured much more precisely by the company’s newly renovated space at Five Cambridge Center than it was by Google’s cramped old offices at the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway. The third-floor cafeteria, which was also the setting for the Google Games pitting MIT students against Harvard students five weeks ago, feels for all the world like a basement rec room on ‘roids, except for the wraparound windows (admitting some welcome springtime sun yesterday) and the impressive Fenway Park mural, with its caricatures of local-born celebrities like Leonard Nimoy in the stands.

The open house included the requisite serious panel discussion, with Vinter, the governor, and a few Google sales and engineering execs fielding softball questions about Google’s importance for the local economy. But the real point of the day was to give journalists and local luminaries a look at the space where Google programmers and salespeople will continue to manage the New England theater of the company’s war for global dominance in search, social media, and online advertising.

And the Boston Globe’s Rob Weisman got it exactly right in his story yesterday evening when he observed that the space is “done up in the company’s extravagant, self-consciously quirky Silicon Valley style.” Between the ping-pong tables, the massage chairs, the yoga balls, the Rock Band equipment, and the abundant microkitchens—all cloned from the Googleplex in Mountain View—it’s a mystery how anyone at Google gets any work done. But one clue came from a staffer accompanying journalists on the office tour, who said Googlers who clamp themselves into the massage chairs usually bring their laptops along for the ride.

Along with the architecture, Google showed off four consumer-facing projects involving Cambridge-based programmers, including YouTube, the Friend Connect platform for adding social networking features such as message boards and picture-sharing to existing websites, the Book Search project that’s making the full text of many new and public-domain books searchable online, and the Android open-source phone operating system.

Rich Miner, who’s been leading the Android effort since Google bought his mobile-software startup in 2005, was on hand to demonstrate the latest version of the system, which currently runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux computers inside an “emulator” that shows how it will look and behave on an actual phone. The interface plainly builds on many of the user-interface innovations pioneered by Apple for the iPhone, but with some interesting improvements, including pop-up menus that allow quick access to basic functions without returning to the phone’s main screen, and the ability to jump from link to link inside a Web page with a thumb-click, enabling one-handed interaction.

Of course, the biggest thing distinguishing Android from the iPhone’s operating system is that it’s open-source, meaning that anyone can adapt it for their own phone hardware, and that anyone can write and distribute applications for it without having to go through a central authority. Miner said that the project is on schedule so far, and that the first phone running Android will ship in the second half of 2008.

Before leaving the event, I put it to Vinter that the environments Google has assembled at its Cambridge office—one of 10 Google satellite sites in North America—is so comfortable for young software engineers that many who might otherwise start their own entrepreneurial ventures are instead enticed into joining the search giant, perhaps stunting innovation in the region.

“I think that kind of misses the bigger point, which is that too many smart people are leaving this area,” Vinter responded. “We can’t do enough to create more opportunities for them. The more we can do to build a mixed ecosystem of small, medium, and large-sized companies, the more it will be self-sustaining and self-expanding, which leads to more competition, which leads to more opportunities.” For more from Vinter on Google’s approach to hiring, see Globe writer Scott Kirsner’s video from the open house.

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Fans of browsing uber-geeky tomes on computer graphics, operating-system design, programming, and all other deeply technical matters have something of a wake to attend tomorrow afternoon. Kendall Square’s Quantum Books, which will be shuttering its brick-and-mortar store this weekend, is hosting a 5:30 p.m. goodbye party for longtime customers, according to the Cambridge Chronicle.

Quantum owner June Kapitan—who with her husband opened the store more than 20 years ago a few blocks away from its current 4 Cambridge Center location—told the Chronicle that rising rent and electricity costs and a shrinking customer base were to blame for the store’s closing. (Another faction evidently blames tech publisher Tim O’Reilly.) Quantum’s online store and warehouse in Wilmington, MA, will remain in business.

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On November 11, 2005, tech blogger Om Malik challenged his fellow bloggers to “Stay GYM Free” for a week. “Whether we hate them, or we love them, we do love to talk about them…Them being Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aka GYM,” he wrote. “What would happen if the blogosphere decided that we would not talk about the Big Three for a whole week?”

Om fell off his own anti-GYM wagon the very next day. But in his defense, we at Xconomy probably would too—especially these days. In fact, we can’t help pointing out that with Yahoo’s acquisition of Maven, announced yesterday, Kendall Square has scored a GYM hat trick. Before 2007, none of the Big Three had independent operations in Kendall Square. Now they all do, almost in a straight line down the Main St.-Broadway corridor:

• Google occupies offices on the 7th and 13th floors of the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, and is renovating nearly 60,000 square feet of space at Five Cambridge Center, with a move expected early this year.
• Yahoo, with the Maven acquisition, will have at least 60 employees at Maven’s Four Cambridge Center location.
• Microsoft is renovating space at One Memorial Drive for a new concept development center, a new outpost of the Microsoft Research division, and employees brought on as a result of Microsoft’s 2006 acquisition of Softricity.

Because we’re map freaks, we’ve put together this little pictorial guide to the GYM presence in Kendall Square, with help from Google Earth. Once Google moves, the three companies will even be in proper G-Y-M order from west to east. (For more fun with maps, check out out our Greater Boston Innovation Map.)

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A rumor circulated by TechCrunch on January 31 that Yahoo intended to acquire Cambridge-based Maven Networks, whose Web video and advertising platform is used by dozens of large media organizations, seemed to go by the wayside after Microsoft launched its unsolicited bid for Yahoo the next day. But it turns out that the deal was real, with the official announcement on hold until after Yahoo dealt with the Microsoft offer (which it did yesterday, decisively, rejecting Microsoft’s $44.6 billion bid as “substantially” underpriced). Yahoo said today that it will acquire Maven for about $160 million in cash.

The Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner is reporting, based on conversations with Woody Benson of Maven backer Prism VentureWorks and Maven CEO Hilmi Ozguc, that Yahoo and Maven signed a letter of intent about the acquisition around Thanksgiving, but that the final papers weren’t initialed until February 10.

The acquisition will reduce the number of local Internet and mobile video companies by one (other big names in the cluster include Akamai, Blackwave, Boston.TV, Brightcove, Buzzwire, Choicestream, EveryZing, Extend Media, Hobnox, PeerApp, Veveo, Visible Measures, and WheelsTV). But Maven’s force of at least 60 employees at Four Cambridge Center will give Yahoo its first foothold in the Kendall Square technology corridor, joining rivals Google (which will soon move its Cambridge operation from two cramped floors at One Broadway into a larger digs at Five Cambridge Center) and Microsoft (which is renovating space to create a new concept development center and a wing of its research division at One Memorial Drive).

Maven, founded in 2002, offers software that allows content owners to create instant Internet video channels that play inside a customized player; upload and manage the videos that appear within those channels; insert interactive advertisements and other types of ads; and analyze audience behavior. The platform is already used by high-profile media organizations like Fox News, CBS Sports, Univision, and Canada’s CBC Television. (For an example of Maven’s technology in action, check out how the Food Network mixes ads and promos into Internet clips from shows like Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals).

Plenty of companies are vying for a slice of what’s expected to be a $4 billion online video advertising pie by 2011, and Yahoo sees Maven as its knife. Hilary Schneider, Yahoo’s executive vice president of global partner solutions, writes today on Yahoo’s corporate blog that adding Maven to Yahoo’s arsenal will mean “more inventory, more choice, [and] more audience reach” for Yahoo’s advertisers and “consistently free access to high-quality video content and ads that are less disruptive [and] more relevant” for consumers.

On Maven’s blog, Ozguc called the acquisition a “huge win” for Maven, saying it validates the company’s vision for monetizing online video content. “This deal makes great sense for Yahoo to further grow its multi-billion-dollar advertising business, as its advertisers and publishing partners are looking for more advanced and highly scalable video solutions,” Ozguc writes. “The Maven platform will now be serving an audience size that is unparalleled, [with] 500 million visitors every month around the world.”

Actually, Yahoo hasn’t yet explained whether or how it intends to fold Maven’s platform into its existing Yahoo TV portal (its answer to Google’s YouTube and Microsoft’s MSN TV), other than to say that it intends to “invest in the growth of Maven’s overall video business” and “expand on the Maven offering with video monetization services allowing publishers to take advantage of Yahoo’s industry leading display [advertising] sales force.”

In most respects, Maven’s platform is similar to Cambridge rival Brightcove’s. In fact, Brightcove founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire was a board member and adviser at Maven until August 2004, and until last year, Maven owned a partial equity stake in, and licensed technology to, Brightcove, according to a Kirsner piece from last October comparing the two companies.

Maven and Brightcove compete for many of the same customers, and Ozguc has claimed in print that Maven has prevailed in most of these head-to-head contests. But to get to roughly the same point in its growth as Maven, Brightcove has taken in almost three times as much venture funding ($82 million, compared to something short of $30 million for Maven, mostly from Prism, General Catalyst, and Accel Partners). It’s hard to see whether Brightcove might now find an exit strategy as clean-cut, or as profitable for investors, as Maven’s sale to Yahoo.

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Microsoft announced yesterday that by July Cambridge, MA, will be home to the fifth R&D outpost outside the company’s Redmond, WA, headquarters, joining existing Microsoft Research facilities in Silicon Valley, Beijing, China, Cambridge, England, and Bangalore, India. The new lab, to be located at One Memorial Drive adjacent to the MIT campus and led by mathematical physicist and 10-year Microsoft veteran Jennifer Chayes, will focus in part on blending computational and social-sciences approaches to understanding the needs and behaviors of people within online social networks.

Late yesterday I reached Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s senior vice president of research and the man who has been overseeing the growth of Microsoft Research worldwide since 1994, to ask about how the company decided to place a lab in Cambridge and what value he hopes it can create for the software giant.

Xconomy: Why put a research lab in Cambridge now, as opposed to, say, five years ago?

Rick Rashid: For us, what makes this a good time is simply that Microsoft as a company has been growing its presence in the Boston area. Before, if you’d tried to put a research lab there, there would have been wonderful universities to talk to, but it wouldn’t necessarily have been anchored in other parts of the company. Now with the really substantial, growing presence the company has there, it really makes sense. And we’ve been getting an incredibly enthusiastic response from within Microsoft—from people in the Boston area. Now that Microsoft Research is going to have a lab there, it gives them access to more really smart people and really great ideas. I think everybody is excited about what that could produce.

X: Why here? What makes Cambridge an attractive place for Microsoft to have a research center?

RR: One of the key things is that obviously, there is this incredible intellectual environment in the Boston-Cambridge area, and really in the Northeast in general. When we site our labs you have to think about, what are the opportunities to recruit and bring great people into the lab, and what are the opportunities to collaborate and work together with others? Being right next to MIT, near Harvard, not that far from Brown, not that far from New York, that will open up a lot of new collaboration opportunities and access to faculty and students. And clearly we will be able to hire some great people there. The way I think about research labs, first and foremost research programs are about people—the quality of the people you’re getting. It’s not like a product group. You are not hiring them to do something specific. What you’re doing is hiring for opportunities, hiring for the future. The people you bring in are really the critical resource that makes it go, or not.

X: The vision that Jennifer Chayes and her husband and deputy managing director, Christian Borgs, have outlined, of a lab where theoretical math will overlap with sociology and psychology and economics, would make it pretty unique among the system of Microsoft Research labs, wouldn’t it?

RR: The personality of each of our locations is really determined by its people. Jennifer and Christian, they have a vision, and there are things they’ll be doing, and that’s certainly going to have an impact.

But also, over time, we’ll have opportunities to hire great people who may be in very different areas. If they find some incredible person that that may be somewhat off the direction they may have been thinking about, I would still encourage them to hire that person, because that’s the way you win. You draft for the quality of the player, not for the position, or because you have some great plan for the team.

That said, having a lab in Boston will bring us access to some incredible people in a number of the areas that Jennifer is talking about.

X: What makes Chayes the kind of person you’d want to appoint to start a Microsoft Research outpost?

RR: Have you met Jennifer, face to face? If you had, you probably wouldn’t ask that question. She’s brilliant, first off. That’s a critical criterion. But also, she’s one of these people that has …Next Page »

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There isn’t any shortage around here of potential collaborators and job seekers eager to work with Jennifer Tour Chayes, managing director of Microsoft’s newest research outpost, Microsoft Research New England. Chayes tells Xconomy that by 11:00 am Eastern time today, less than five hours after news of the lab’s creation hit the New York Times and the Boston Globe, she had already received more than 100 e-mails from the East Coast—about 80 percent of them from researchers at MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Brown, and Yale “telling us how excited they are and that they want to interact with us,” in her words.

Microsoft already has a major presence in Cambridge and greater Boston: in addition to the Boston-area employees of recently acquired companies such as Groove Networks, Softricity, and Fast Search & Transfer, the company is hiring staff for a new product-oriented “concept development center” adjacent to the MIT campus under the leadership of former Eons CTO Reed Sturtevant. But when Microsoft Research (MSR) comes to town, the academic world pays attention.

Chayes, 51, is the first woman appointed to lead a Microsoft Research lab and is a pioneer in areas of mathematics and theoretical computer science—such as network and graph theory, recommendation systems, and search filtering—that have increasing relevance in a world of Web-based communication and commerce. Chayes and her husband and close collaborator Christian Borgs, who will be the lab’s deputy managing director, have already begun to outline a vision for an interdisciplinary research center that will link experts in economics, psychology, and sociology with computer scientists who can translate their insights about human behavior into algorithms that will improve the growing range of products that Microsoft delivers over the Web.

“I think that putting the basic mathematics together with basic research in sociology, psychology, and economics will allow us to come up with the insights that we need to deliver a much better experience to our customers online,” says Chayes, who was formerly the research area manager for mathematics, theoretical computer science and cryptography for MSR Redmond and has been named as the Cambridge lab’s managing director.

The new group, to open in July in newly renovated space at One Memorial Drive, will be only a few stair-steps away from the product development groups that can translate its research findings into real software features—and from the new concept-development group headed by Sturtevant. “We’re really excited about that,” says Chayes. “We do long-term research and we come up with basic insights, but if there is some of that that can actually be turned into products, there is nobody better in the world to do it than Reed.”

Sturtevant, for his part, says the decision to open a Cambridge branch of Microsoft Research is “a real step forward for our emerging ‘vertical campus’ in Kendall Square…Having basic research, concept development and incubation, and full product development together at one site will bring great creative energy.”

To ensure communication between the groups, Chayes says the construction plans at One Memorial Drive include a space large enough for MSR staff and Sturtevant’s group to gather every afternoon for tea. “I’m a big believer in breaking bread,” says Chayes. “Probably a quarter of the projects in our theory group have started over our daily teas. People who wouldn’t ordinarily talk to each other start talking to each other, and before you know it they are writing on the walls and modeling.”

Chayes says she and Borgs haven’t yet identified the exact projects the new lab will pursue—that’ll have to wait until they can brainstorm with new staff members face-to-face. But it’s fair to predict that some of the work will reflect …Next Page »

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EveryScape’s online collection of 360-degree street views, which we reviewed in October, grew today by one city: Xconomy’s own Cambridge, MA. It’s the seventh city that the Waltham, MA, startup has added to its photographic database, after Boston, New York, Miami, Aspen, CO, Lexington, MA, and Beijing, China.

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