Last Thursday and Friday, leaders of entrepreneurial studies programs from seven Michigan universities met in Lansing for the Michigan Entrepreneurship Leaders Forum, where they discussed what’s working in their individual programs, how they might be able to collaborate in the future, and how all of their efforts might help boost the state’s economy.

“I’ve been in the business school since 1983, and I can’t remember hosting a joint event like this in 30 years,” says Shawnee K. Vickery, co-director of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Demmer Legacy Fellow at Michigan State University. “If it’s happened before, it’s happened rarely.”

Joining Vickery at the summit, which was held at the Henry Executive Development Center, were Tim Faley, managing director of the Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies at the University of Michigan (pictured above); Deb Zellner, executive director of the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship at Central Michigan University; Stephanie Newell of the College of Business at Eastern Michigan University; J. Kevin McCurren of the Seidman College of Business at Grand Valley State University; Margaret Williams, interim dean of Wayne State University’s School of Business; and Timothy B. Palmer, interim director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Western Michigan University. Officials from Michigan Technological University were invited and expected to attend, but were snowed in at the last minute.

“This kind of meeting is way unusual, though it’s more natural for entrepreneurial programs,” Faley says. “We already interface with the community, so it’s not a big stretch to say, ‘Let’s include other schools.’ It’s not like we’re competing directly—we can learn from them and they can learn from us. But most departments are more insular and don’t work this way.”

Both Vickery and Faley agreed that the meeting went well and spoke highly of all the participants. Topics of discussion included how they might come together on events and community-oriented proposals, or leverage each other’s strengths.

“It was really a shot in the arm to see how we can all share with each other to help our sister institutions be successful,” Vickery says. “It’s inspiring to see how much is going on across the state. It provided a great venue for us to share ideas, best practices, and what we’re doing to inculcate an entrepreneurial mindset whether we’re working on our own or trying to infuse a corporate workspace.”

Faley echoed those sentiments, and said he was surprised to learn, for instance, that Central Michigan has a 300-person undergraduate program in entrepreneurialism.

All participants agreed to meet again in May, where Faley expects something more concrete to come out of the summit as opposed to last week’s gathering, which was mostly spent sharing “baseline information.”

“Why did this work? Because of everybody’s desire to be collaborative,” Faley points out. “There was none of the usual posturing. Everybody honestly wants to improve what they’re doing at their school.”

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It’s a big month for Collabor, a Maynard, MA-based maker of software that powers online communities—for banks, nonprofits, manufacturers and a slew of industries in between. The company is working on closing its first ever outside funding round and has just cross the 1-million-user mark across the sites its technology powers.

The five-year-old startup is working on collaboration software—a space that’s occupied by players large (Microsoft) and small (startups like Wiggio). Its big target, unlike many others, says CEO and founder Sandeep Kaujalgi, is organizations that are looking to collaborate with players beyond the company walls, rather than internal organizational collaboration.

“Our focus is almost solely on a business reaching out to other businesses, customers, stakeholders, membership organizations,” Kaujalgi says.

Collabor’s software, called Work 2.0, plugs into an organization’s existing databases. But Collabor prides itself in creating completely customized designs and interfaces for each client, depending on their business needs and audience. Within an organization, different types of users will have completely different functions available to them, based on the user profiles set up in the system.

“All collaboration is built on who the user is,” Kaujalgi says. “Our product looks completely different from company to company.” Work 2.0 offers functions such as sharing reports, polls and quizzes, photos, calendars, and user forums, and automatically translates content written in one language into the language of the user who will be reading it.

One of Collabor’s clients is Connected Living, a provider of online sites for helping seniors in residential communities keep in touch with their families from afar. The Work 2.0 software powers an interface for seniors that involves large buttons and colorful graphics, for an audience not used to Web browsing.

Another customer of Collabor’s is … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute says today it’s joining the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), a global network that New York-based Pfizer established a year ago to foster collaborations between basic research and clinical applications.

The Pfizer network of drug discovery innovation centers includes academic medical centers in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and is expected eventually to extend overseas as well. When UC San Diego Health Sciences joined the network in August, it said its partnership agreement with Pfizer could be worth as much as $50 million from the pharmaceutical giant over the next five years.

The statement from Sanford-Burnham says nothing about funding, although an institute spokeswoman says its financial agreement with Pfizer is comparable to UCSD’s. The medical research institute says it will likely collaborate with UCSD when a research project reaches the clinical stage, and joint research projects would presumably draw from the same pool of funding at Pfizer.

The Sanford-Burnham also noted it is one of only two participating medical research centers in the CTI network that are not academic medical centers. (The other, Harvard Medical School, is not considered an academic medical center because it does not have its own research hospital with clinical trials and access to patient samples.)

Sanford-Burnham has expanded significantly in recent years. The National Institutes of Health awarded Sanford-Burnham a $97.9 million grant in 2008 to establish a high-throughput screening center. It was renamed as the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics in 2009 when San Diego philanthropist Conrad Prebys agreed to donate $10 million to the institute. Philanthropist T. Denny Sanford prompted a similar name change for the institute itself when he pledged $50 million and the research center became the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

The institute says working with Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation will provide scientists at Sanford-Burnham with access to additional resources, including select Pfizer compound libraries, proprietary screening methods, and antibody development technologies.

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Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, a provider of human antibody discovery technology, announced today that it has formed discovery collaborations with Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Danish firm Novo Nordisk. Each pharmaceutical company will use the Adimab technology to identify human antibodies against two targets. The specific targets and the dollar terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Adimab has signed previous collaboration deals with Genentech, Eli Lilly, Human Genome Sciences, Merck, Roche, Novartis, and Pfizer. Under the new agreements, both Novo Nordisk and Biogen have the option to commercialize antibodies discovered from the Adimab partnership. Adimab will receive upfront payments and preclinical milestones, and could be eligible for clinical development milestones and sales royalties.

“Our technology is simply faster, dramatically reduces the risk of development failures, and generates higher quality leads even against challenging targets; in fact many of our partners come to us with targets that have failed using traditional phage display approaches,” said Adimab CEO and co-founder Tillman Gerngross in the announcement of the deals.

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The Y Combinator startup incubator program in Mountain View, CA, is getting so big—63 companies presented at Demo Day this Tuesday, about half of them on the record—that we couldn’t squeeze summaries of even the on-the-record subset into a single article. Part 1 of our YC S11 debrief appeared yesterday and covered the first half of the alphabet, from Aisle50 through MongoHQ. Today we cover the second half, from Munch on Me through ZigFu.

Each listing includes a link to the company’s website, the names of its co-founders, the tag line provided by the company, and my summary. As a new element this time around, I’m also including my quick personal take on each startup.

Munch On Me

Jason Wang, Richard Din, Tony Li

“Get your Nom On.”

Munch on Me is a Groupon-inspired daily deals startup focused on specific restaurant dishes. The company argues that deals from Groupon and LivingSocial aren’t ideal for restaurants, since many deal buyers are bargain hunters who don’t contribute to repeat traffic. Munch on Me works with restaurants to pick a single dish and promote it for an entire week. The startup says that 75 percent of members who redeem an offer end up buying something else at full price, and that 100 percent of its early testing partners have stuck with the service. Munch on Me offers deals in six cities right now, and plans to expand to 30 over the next year.

My take: I was a little surprised by how many YC companies this year were simultaneously criticizing and imitating Groupon.

Opez

Chris Tam, Paul Chou

“Yelp for individual service professionals.”

Once you know that “individual service professionals” means bartenders, realtors, musicians, sales associates, and other people whose success depends on the quality of their interactions with customers, you understand what Opez means when it says it’s the equivalent of Yelp for these workers. At the Opez site, customers can leave reviews for specific professionals rather than their employers or venues, allowing them to build up a following that can boost their careers. Professionals might also be able to distribute promotions to their followers, “turning them into miniature Groupons,” in Opez’s words.

My take: Clever, but how often do you get the name of your bartender and remember to (or want to take the time to) write a review of him when you get home from the bar? Also, LinkedIn has a pretty big head start as a repository for professional references.

PageLever

Jeff Widman, David Turner

“Analytics to help marketers be more successful in social.”

Facebook provides owners of fan pages with an analytics dashboard called Insights that can show trends in things like how many people visited a page or contributed content. But by grabbing other data available through Facebook’s public application interfaces, PageLever says it can assemble much richer analyses that help companies attract and engage more fans—for example, by advising them on when to post a newsfeed item to reach as many fans as possible. Disney, Starbucks, MTV, Nike, Target, and YouTube are already using the tool, and the startup says it’s bringing in $25,000 per month in revenue.

My take: With so many startups offering social media analytics tools for marketers, it was only a matter of time until one came along focusing specifically on Facebook fan pages. For companies with the kind of brand recognition that can bring them hundreds of thousands of Facebook fans, I’m sure the extra data is worth the modest cost ($34 to $94 per month).

… Next Page »

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We spotted a few investments in New England startups working on a mix of technology in life sciences and collaboration. Take a look.

—Cambridge, MA-based Daktari Diagnostics, a maker of an HIV diagnostics system for use in developing countries, took in $1.17 million of a targeted $1.25 million debt round of funding, according to an SEC filing. The startup is backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as individual investors, Hub Angels, Launchpad Venture Group, Mass Medical Angels, Norwich Ventures, and Partners Innovation Fund. Daktari nabbed a $1.8 million equity investment last November.

—PharmaSecure of Lebanon, NH, pinned down $2.5 million of an equity-based funding round that could hit $6 million, an SEC filing shows. Its previous investors include Tech Coast Angels, Gray Ghost Ventures, and Life Science Angels. PharmaSecure, founded in 2007, offers mobile authentication technology to prevent the sale of counterfeit drugs in emerging markets. It is a field also targeted by Boston-based Sproxil.

—Waltham, MA-based InnoCentive raised $844,717 of a potential $7.5 million equity financing, an SEC document revealed. The company, which was incubated by Eli Lilly starting in 2001 and is now an independent company, offers platforms for enabling companies and organizations to collaborate with employees, customers, and partners on problem-solving throughout processes such as R&D. It has collaborations with Popular Science Magazine, Cleveland Clinic, and the city of Boston, to name a few. InnoCentive raised $7.3 million from Spencer Trask Ventures in August 2009.

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It’s probably reassuring for online shoppers and the like to know that the generic-sounding address they e-mail—-usually dubbed something like help, service, or contact @xyz.com—is actually manned by people and not robots. And TechStars Boston 2011 graduate Help Scout is looking to make life easier for the humans that are responding to those queries.

“We know that every business on the planet has some sort of catch-all inbox that typically goes to group of people,” says founder Nick Francis. “Anytime that account gets more than 10 emails a day, it becomes a bit unmanageable. Help Scout helps you manage the chaos.”

Without Help Scout, Francis says, employees are left to find alternate ways to inform each other on how a request or e-mail is being handled—like BCCing or sending separate e-mails to colleagues, and passing notes in person or shouting across a desk.

Help Scout’s platform sifts through the e-mails that come to those catch-all inboxes, and enables different users to collaborate on responses. There are features for assigning a customer e-mail to an employee, passing along notes before sending the e-mail, and creating a draft e-mail for review. (See screen shots below.) Help Scout’s big focus is on customer service applications, so incoming e-mails pushed through the system are assigned a ticket number to track how they are dealt with throughout the process.

The technology launched about seven weeks into this year’s TechStars program, and Help Scout scored some business with its TechStars mentor Jason Henrichs, COO of Boston Web-based banking startup PerkStreet Financial. “It’s really dangerous to think the target customer is always you, but halfway through a mentee session we realized we’re totally a customer,” says Heinrichs.

He says his firm was using the manual shouting and passing notes method of collaborating on customer e-mails. Help Scout technology helps them more efficiently scale as they grow customers for their Web-based, cash-back debit card account product.

“We add a collaborative layer on top of email,” Francis says. His startup is working on closing a $400,000 round from a group of 15 angels—including David Cancel, Dharmesh Shah, Joe Caruso, Chris Sheehan and Brian Balfour. It expects to

… Next Page »

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New Haven, CT-based Rib-X Pharmaceuticals announced today that it could receive about $772 million from Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) under a new research collaboration and option for Sanofi to license novel classes of antibiotics from Rib-X’s RX-04 program for the treatment of resistant Gram-negative and resistant Gram-positive infections. Sanofi paid $10 million upfront and could pay up to $9 million in near-term research milestones, as well as other clinical and commercialization milestones and royalties. Rib-X could also receive $86 million in development and regulatory milestones and $100 million in commercial milestones for each product identified in the collaboration—Sanofi is targeting four for now, but there is no upper limit, the companies said.

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Boston entrepreneur Dana Lampert says he tests every new feature for his collaboration software, Wiggio, in a fourth-grade classroom.

“If they can’t do it, we don’t put it out,” he says. “We’re kind of the anti-SharePoint [Microsoft], the anti-Wave [Google]. We don’t want to just add bells and whistles. We really focus on user experience.”

Boston-based Wiggio offers group scheduling, polling, file uploading, and mass messaging (voice or SMS). Groups can use it to assign items on to-do lists, set up audio or video conferences, and edit documents. My colleague Wade profiled Wiggio in 2008, back when the startup was working out of the basement of its angel investor Bob Doyle’s home, and when it was largely targeting the college audience as users of its collaboration software. As Wiggio has evolved with new features and collaboration functions, it’s also attracted an audience far beyond academia, in the non-profit, small business, and political sectors.

Wiggio now has more than 700,000 users, and has been growing by 1,000 per day, says Lampert, the company’s CEO. Most of that has been organic, with college students taking the software to their internships, and employees using it to collaborate on volunteer activities they do in their spare time, Lampert says. Groups such as college fraternities and sororities and soccer teams were initially big users.

“We never billed Wiggio to be just for the education space,” he says. “It’s taken on a life of its own.” In the process, it also has captured the attention of users away from other software products that do individual tasks like to-do lists (Basecamp), file-sharing (Dropbox), video conferencing, Web conferencing (GoToMeeting), and document collaboration (Google Docs).

Wiggio launched its 2.0 version last month, after about seven months of development. It’s designed to provide a more seamless experience for people who need to collaborate around a one-time, ad-hoc event (like a media announcement or camping trip among friends), and to include those who don’t want to go to the Wiggio interface or create an account in order to collaborate. Wiggio communication in a group goes to a user’s e-mail account, from which they can reply to the threads, post calendar items, and upload files directly.

“We’re trying to make it so that people who want to live within Wiggio will see … Next Page »

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Consider these five trends, and then ask yourself what kind of Internet business you would create to exploit them.

1. Persistent economic uncertainty, leaving employers unwilling to hire lots of new permanent employees—but needing to get work done nonetheless.

2. The emergence of outsourcing as a mainstream, accepted, even expected corporate practice.

3. A growing number of people with home broadband connections for doing computer-mediated work and easy access to remote collaboration tools like Skype, Box.net, Basecamp, and Github.

4. More workers choosing (not necessarily being forced) to work from home as career contractors.

5. The interconnection of banking and financial systems around the world, making it more practical to transfer payments internationally.

Well, obviously, if you were thinking like an Internet entrepreneur, you’d want to go out create some kind of online service that helps businesses find, manage, and pay remote contractors, whether domestic or foreign, and then take a cut of the action.

But as it turns out, you’d quite possibly be too late: a company called oDesk created just such a service in 2005, and it’s now built up such an impressive lead over rivals such as Guru and Elance that it may be unstoppable. The six-year-old Redwood City, CA, startup has been growing its business at 100 percent per year for the last three years, and is now the world’s largest online employment platform, with more than 1 million contractors and employers signed up in more than 150 countries.

ODesk’s services, which include a hiring marketplace, tools for monitoring contractors’ hourly work, and a backend for handling payments across national borders, have been “a hit from the beginning,” says Gary Swart, the company’s CEO. But the venture-funded startup has also been the beneficiary of some huge and unexpected shifts, especially the global economic meltdown of 2008-2009. “The winds got stronger, fueled by the economy, the Internet, and globalization,” Swart says.

Barring the collapse of the Internet, a drastic drop in unemployment, or a sudden end to globalization, oDesk seems positioned to keep growing for years to come—and perhaps to eventually earn a nice return for investors Sigma Partners, Globespan Capital Partners, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures, who have put $29 million into the company. With 38 full time employees of its own, the startup may or may not be breaking even yet, but … Next Page »

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Salesforce.com’s acquisitions binge continues. The San Francisco-based maker of cloud-based customer relationship management tools has added WebEx-like conferencing and collaboration capabilities to its arsenal through the purchase of Lowell, MA-based startup Dimdim.

Announced late Thursday, the acquisition cost Salesforce.com $31 million, net of Dimdim’s cash. Dimdim had raised venture funding from Nexus Venture Partners, Index Ventures, and Draper Richards; co-founders DD Ganguly and Prakash Khot were also investors.

Founded in 2007, Dimdim developed a freemium, open source, fully Web-based conferencing system with features such as Webcam and audio connections for multiple participants, document sharing, whiteboarding, screen sharing, and chat windows. As Ganguly explained in a 2009 interview with Xconomy, the company’s early mission was to show that a cloud-based multimedia conferencing system could be simple and easy to use. Conferencing systems from WebEx (now part of Cisco) and GoToMeeting (a Citrix product) require users to download client programs before joining meetings.

Salesforce.com says it bought Dimdim in order to add real-time communications capabilities to Chatter, an enterprise social networking platform that’s openly modeled after Facebook. In fact, Salesforce.com chairman and CEO Marc Benioff went out of his way in the acquisition announcement to say that the Dimdim acquisition would make Chatter more Facebook-like.

“The acquisition of Dimdim will help salesforce.com deliver to the enterprise the same integrated collaboration and communication experience that made Facebook the world’s most popular Internet site,” Benioff said in the announcement. According to the company, 60,000 Salesforce.com customers have already deployed Chatter, and the expectation is that the addition of real-time conferencing and document-sharing features will further boost adoption.

Dimdim is Salesforce’s third acquisition in less than a month. The company bought Heroku, a San Francisco-based Ruby application platform provider, for $212 million in early December, and announced just before Christmas that it had purchased e-mail reminder service Etacts. Both Heroku and Etacts were alumni of the Y Combinator venture incubator program.

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Cambridge, MA-based Forma Therapeutics has struck a collaboration deal with the U.S. unit of Tokyo-based drug powerhouse Eisai that is focused on discovering drugs against normally intractable disease targets, according to the companies. Eisai is paying Forma $20 million in upfront and committed fees over a three-year period, according to the companies. The deal gives Eisai non-exclusive access to Forma’s proprietary compound library and cell-based screening platforms to aid in Eisai’s discovery of new drugs for its own pipeline. Forma is eligible for potential milestone payments and royalties on products that Eisai might decide to develop as a result of the collaboration.

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Collaboration software for office workers isn’t new, and neither are technologies for doing refined, targeted Web searches. But Ann Arbor, MI-based InfoReady is combining those elements in a social networking-like interface to create a workflow tool that the company’s president and CEO Bhushan Kulkarni thinks will really shake things up.

“I feel that we are hitting on something that’s going to allow us to change the way that business is done in the collaboration space,” he says.

The startup spun out of Kulkarni’s Ann Arbor-based IT consulting firm GDI Infotech in March, and released its first product in June, attracting about a dozen paying customers, Kulkarni says. He thinks the market potential for his company’s product is massive, but wanted to start with a more targeted customer base and get good at that, he says. So InfoReady has selected the problem of finding government grants and other awards and putting together proposals as the first application for its software.

Between federal agencies, state agencies, and foundations, there’s about $1 trillion in grant money available every year; the problem is knowing where and what to apply for, Kulkarni says. Traditionally, those interested in grant money have had to go to individual agency and foundation websites, and by the time they gather the information on grants that are available, “there’s not enough time left to respond with a quality proposal,” Kulkarni says. So InfoReady is targeting its software to streamline the grant search and proposal process for groups such as big research universities, community colleges, public school districts, economic development agencies, and local government entities.

“It’s probably because of the environment in Michigan,” says Kulkarni of the inspiration for grants as a first market for the InfoReady software. “What became clear to us is that everybody is hungry for new sources of revenue.”

InfoReady’s software platform crawls the Web for information relevant to a particular customer, and delivers notifications on available grants to their inboxes, based on their customized search criteria. It’s designed so that users can take action on that particular grant right away, by putting together a proposal. “If we’re trying to find something, chances are we want to find that information because we want to do something with it,” he says. “With most software tools out there, once you find info, there’s no easy way to collaborate.”

Rather than requiring customers to go into separate programs and documents and copy and paste relevant content, the software platform enables different users to post items on an interface similar to the wall in Facebook. The software also pulls relevant content exchanged via e-mail regarding … Next Page »

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It was a busy New England area life sciences news week, with headlines of drug collaborations, failed applications with the FDA, clinical trial results, plus some lengthier profile stories.

—Providence, RI-based Shape Up The Nation is using social networking to invite people’s friends to encourage them to eat better and make healthier choices, Ryan wrote. The four-year-old startup raised $5 million earlier this year from Excel Venture Management and Cue Ball Group, landed CVS Caremark (NYSE: CVS) as its first big customer, and is adding other Fortune 500 companies to the list.

—The diabetes drug developed in a collaboration by San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN), Waltham, MA-based Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS), and drug giant Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY) failed to garner FDA approval, the companies announced on Tuesday. The regulatory agency is requiring a new study looking at whether the drug—the once-weekly injectable version of exenatide (Bydureon)—is connected to irregular heartbeat in trial patients. The application for FDA approval of the drug was delayed earlier this year, due to manufacturing questions and the agency’s request for a risk mitigation strategy of the drug. By Wednesday morning Amylin’s and Alkermes’ share prices had fallen 50 percent and 29 percent, respectively. Lilly, with a more diversified drug pipeline, saw its shares drop by about 5 percent.

—Cubist Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CBST), a Lexington, MA-based maker of acute care drugs, announced it had priced a $400 million offering of convertible notes, which have an annual interest rate of 2.5 percent and mature on November 1, 2017. The deal underwriters have the option to purchase $50 million in additional notes. Cubist will put the proceeds toward repurchasing about $191 million in notes that carry a 2.25 annual interest rate and are due June 15, 2013, as well as its investing in its pipeline products, corporate expenses, and acquisitions.

—Cambridge-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) reported data from a late-stage clinical trial comparing its drug clofarabine (Clolar) in combination with chemotherpy to treatment with chemotherapy and a placebo. Those treated with the drug did not live longer than those only given the placebo, but the clofarabine group saw its remission rate double, to 47 percent, Genzyme said. The firm will … Next Page »

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AVEO Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO), a Cambridge, MA-based cancer drug developer, announced today that it has regained its worldwide rights to its antibody drug candidate AV-299 from Merck’s Schering subsidiary. Merck said it ended its collaboration with AVEO because the drug candidate was no longer a priority in its portfolio, according to today’s announcement. AVEO, which initiated a Phase II clinical trial in June of the tumor-fighting drug alongside other treatments in patients with non-small cell lung cancer, said the company’s expected 2010 year-end cash balance will not be affected by Merck’s decision.

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Transparency is viewed by many as the solution to many of the world’s problems, and perhaps a solution to failed collaborations. Indeed, a common explanation for disputes is that they result from an imbalance of information between the two sides. If we could have more transparency, some say, then we would all have the same facts and a lot of these disagreements would melt away.

But having information and being able to use that information effectively are two separate issues. The first is about access, which is certainly being expanded greatly with search engines and the Internet. The second issue, however, is about education, context, and perspective, none of which transparency addresses. Being able to interpret facts and perform critical analysis is a learned skill that a great many (too many) people don’t have. In the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson’s renegade soldier on the witness stand responds to Tom Cruise, the military prosecutor, who asked the witness to “tell the truth.” Nicholson’s answer: “You can’t handle the truth.” He was referring, of course, to the fact that no person without battle experience can understand what really happens on the front lines. That lack of experience or lack of education in battle, or in life, can be exploited. And a large industry exists to take advantage of the “opportunities” which that lack makes possible. Advertising, marketing, public relations, journalism, all exist to “help” those without the interest and/or ability to understand the subtleties of political issues, product comparisons, and many other things in life. This is a large force in our society. It can change elections, move products, and get generals fired.

As a result, transparency is a very sharp, double-edged sword. Although it sounds simple and “honest” to “do the right thing,” it requires enormous delicacy and skill to describe events or actions in a way that can be understood objectively by all. Emotional baggage colors our understanding of all news and information. And, of course, “news people” are trained to put a spin on things. They can interpret in imaginative ways and generally create a news item out of something that fits the ideology of what they are trying to promote. Whether that is distortion or objective reporting may depend upon the politics of the reader, as well as the writer. “Transparency” today may better refer to the fact that it is much more difficult to keep anything secret. Ubiquitous camera phones document events that governments and businesses would have rather kept private. Every rumor is tweeted. This activity can lead to “collaborations” of a different sort, where misinformation is used to polarize and sensationalize. How ironic that sometimes what started out as an effort at openness and transparency can be turned around by an opponent or the media into just the opposite.

A crisis can create interesting dynamics for public and private collaborations. When BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, then collapsed and began gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the disaster quickly escalated into one of the worst environmental accidents in history. As the company worked feverishly to plug the gusher and clean up the oil spreading around the Gulf, a “Deepwater Horizon Response” Facebook page was established, garnering tens of thousands of members within weeks. While becoming a member of such a group usually means you are a “fan” or “friend,” the Deepwater Horizon Response page featured comments from more people who were incensed by the spill than “supporters” of BP. While creating the Facebook page may have seemed like a risky strategy, BP may have gained points for creating a public forum, and for allowing both “pro” and “con” participants. And the comments let BP know how people were responding to the myriad of news from many sources. Transparency might not be all it’s cracked up to be, but in this new age of camera phones and social media, secrecy may be much riskier.

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Compared to the handful of “under the radar” deals we had to report on in our May roundup, the month of June was buzzing with deals, both small and large, for Seattle-area tech and biotech companies. Normally we publish our “under the radar” roundup for regional deals worth less than $1 million in a monthly post. However, for the first time this month we are combining our normal “under the radar” list with deals worth more than $1 million, creating one comprehensive report of all local equity deals. This information is based on data provided by New York-based private company intelligence platform CB Insights, and our own past coverage.

Despite the fact that deals of all sizes are represented on the June list, the majority were for less than $1 million. And contrary to what you might assume, given that Seattle is a hub for many areas of information technology, healthcare and energy/utilities companies dominated the roundup. Of the $104.3 million in venture dollars raked in through 20 equity deals in June, Washington companies in the healthcare sector pulled in $41.1 million, while those in energy and utilities brought in $35.8 million.

The third leading sector was computer hardware and services, which raised $15 million in investments last month. Internet startups came in fourth at $4.9 million, and industrial startups followed up with $3.95 million, while financing for business products and services, software, and video startups all trailed behind.

We reported on the majority of June venture investments as the news broke, including the $40 million nabbed by Seattle-based Calistoga Pharmaceuticals, amounting to the biggest Washington venture deal of 2010 thus far. Not far behind was three-year-old Intellectual Ventures spinout, Bellevue,WA-based TerraPower, which brought in $35 million in Series B funding for further development of its traveling wave nuclear reactor. Other notable deals include the $11 million Seattle software developer Opscode earned in Series B led by Battery Ventures, and the $4 million raised by cloud storage and data protection Seattle startup Symform.

However, a number of interesting deals slipped under our radar. Here are a few that I found interesting: Bellevue, WA-based online collaboration and file sharing software developer OneHub raised $750,000 in equity. The three-year-old company, which provides cloud-based software-as-a-service for thousands of companies, raised $1.3 million in Series A financing led by local venture capital firm Ignition Partners back in October. Liberty Lake, WA-based Demand Energy Networks, which is developing technology to help energy providers manage their electricity supply, brought in $650,000. The company, founded in 2008, has developed a tool called the Demand Shifter, which allows a variety of businesses and consumers to store electricity at distributed end points during times of low demand, and control and dispatch it as it’s needed.

Seattle-based medical device developer Uptake Medical raised $600,000 in equity in June. The interventional pulmonology company then followed that up with another $17.5 million in a Series B round led by Maverick Capital this month. The only video game startup on the list, Redmond, WA-based Novel, raised $550,000 in equity. The 20-person startup plans to change the gaming industry and corporate culture as we know them by applying massively multiplayer online (MMO) gaming techniques to create new kinds of games and business simulations for companies. Seattle-based Liquid Light brought in $200,000 in equity financing. The early-state energy startup is expanding on the research of Princeton University professor Andrew Bocarsly to develop highly efficient technology for converting carbon dioxide to fuels and industrial chemicals without using biological feedstocks. this month. The only video game startup on the list, Redmond, WA-based

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

June also saw a few startups raising cash through deals based on debt, options, and/or warrants, rather than equity. Those three transactions, worth a combined $1.64 million, are listed below.

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Today, many documents are not only born digital, they’re also born social. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft, and Google provide online tools where documents of many different types can be collaboratively generated and edited. The problem is that online editing is still a fragmented affair: If you want to mark up an Adobe PDF document with a group of officemates, for example, you have to use Adobe’s Acrobat. If you want to mark up a Microsoft Word document, you have to use Microsoft’s Web-based viewer. Et cetera.

Crocodoc, a small San Francisco- and Boston-based company that emerged this spring from the Y Combinator startup school in Mountain View, CA, is working on solving that problem. The first version of Crocodoc’s online service, introduced in February, allowed users to collaborate on a few types of documents such as PowerPoint files and PDFs. Today, the four-man startup debuted a new version of its free service that can handle more types of documents, including PDFs, Word documents, JPEG and PNG images, PowerPoints, and Photoshop files. Crocodoc “2.0″ also features an overhauled user interface with an improved set of reviewing and commenting tools. The virtual sticky notes that formerly plastered collaboratively edited documents, for example, have been replaced by a comment stream in the margin where revisions can be shared in real time.

The overall goal, says founder Ryan Damico, is to help users circumvent the proprietary walls between document types and collaborative editing experiences. “Adobe is only good for Adobe documents, and Microsoft is only good for Microsoft,” Damico says. “We want to be the universal tool that people use for any kind of markup and review and collaboration for documents of any type, and eventually on any platform or any device.”

Crocodoc, whose team consists entirely of recent MIT graduates, was originally formed in Boston in 2008 around a previous product called WebNotes. As part of the company’s evolution, it also announced today that it has closed its first major round of post-Y-Combinator angel investor funding. Damico isn’t saying how much money is involved, but he’s definitely crowing about the investors, who include prominent Silicon Valley names like Paul Buchheit (lead developer of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, acquired last year by Facebook), Steve Chen (co-founder and former chief technology officer at YouTube), Dave McClure (former director of marketing at PayPal, now with Founders Fund), Joshua Schachter (creator of Delicious, acquired by Yahoo in 2005), and XG Ventures (a group of four ex-Googlers including Pietro Dova, David Lee, Greg Lee, and Andrea Zurek).

These are all folks Crocodoc met through Y Combinator, Damico says. “We’re really psyched,” he says. “This group has been a huge help to us already.”

Crocodoc’s small team—two of whom are setting up shop in San Francisco, and two of whom are still based in Boston—had lots of experience with the idea of annotating online documents. WebNotes was all about letting users attach personal notes to live Web pages. But true collaborative editing is … Next Page »

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Individuals in today’s world, Nathan Myhrvold once observed, are sort of like single B-cells in the immune system who go about their business oblivious to what’s happening in an entire human organism with 1 trillion cells. Biology, Leroy Hood often likes to say, is becoming an information science built on units of A, C, G, & T in the place of digital 1’s and 0’s.

Many in the current era of specialization stay within their professional comfort zones, and never cross-pollinate their ideas with people from disciplines as divergent as computer science and molecular biology. But that’s not true of Myhrvold, the Microsoft Research founder who later started Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, or Hood, the high-speed gene sequencing pioneer who now leads the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. These two big thinkers—who are featured speakers at an Xconomy event Monday at the University of Washington—are close friends who long ago saw the benefit of sharing what they are learning about IT and biology.

There are many connections between the two. Myhrvold, along with Bill Gates, is a member of Hood’s “President’s Council,” an informal kitchen cabinet of advisors to the Institute for Systems Biology. Myhrvold has given keynote talks at the ISB’s annual scientific symposium in which he has drawn analogies between the way the human immune system functions and the way societal networks operate (as mentioned above). Myhrvold is known for his omnivorous interests, and if you watch this video, you can see biology is one of them. This talk is specifically focused on how the human immune system spots infections, fights them off, and develops protective memory against future attacks. It’s not too hard to see how those concepts might be useful against computer viruses and worms, for starters.

Myhrvold, in an e-mail, said he first met Hood after Gates recruited him in the early 1990s from Caltech to start the molecular biotechnology department at the University of Washington. They’ve been working together informally almost ever since.

“Lee has been fantastic for Seattle, first at UW and then by creating the ISB,” Myhrvold wrote. “His mission is to peel back the lid of the black box of biology and peer inside to understand how biological systems work. Biological systems are obviously complicated but there is a strong analogy to the algorithms and electronic circuits used in modern technology. Lee’s approach has motivated some interesting discoveries. I’ve both invented with Lee, and I’ve learned a tremendous amount from him over the years.”

Lee Hood & Nathan Myhrvold

Hood told me he has participated in many of Myhrvold’s “invention sessions” over the years which bring together experts from a wide array of disciplines. Hood said he has also sought Myhrvold’s advice on how to raise awareness of the Institute for Systems Biology’s work in the academic and business worlds. And an IT focus is obvious to anybody who walks into the Institute’s offices: the place hums with high-powered gene sequencing instruments and computers that sift through vast amounts of DNA that make up the genome inside each living cell.

While they have some things in common, the analogies that Myhrvold is talking about are hard to follow at times, much less condense into a single story. But I figured I’d try to sum it up anyway after watching Myhrvold’s freewheeling 39-minute keynote to a bunch of biologists at the April 2008 Institute for Systems Biology symposium. He admitted at the beginning that the analogies are “bold and crazy,” and that he was taking a risk by talking about immunology concepts in front of a lot of people who know more than he does about immunology.

The human immune system, Myhrvold said, has evolved to do a few things very well. It provides surveillance of invading pathogens like viruses and bacteria; analyzes and synthesizes the information; acts on it in the form of an immune response; and stores the information in its memory so that we can quickly produce antibodies to fight off strains of, say, the common cold, that we have seen before.

That process is sort of like how individual biologists have acted independently throughout history. When an emerging pathogen stands out, like smallpox, HIV, or SARS, large numbers of scientists working independently conduct surveillance … Next Page »

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Millennium is playing the role of global development and marketing partner to Seattle Genetics, something that would have been tricky for Cambridge, MA-based Millennium to nail before it became the cancer R&D arm of Japanese drug giant Takeda Pharmaceutical Company in May 2008.

Last month, Millennium closed a major collaboration deal with Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ:SGEN), buying exclusive rights to sell the Bothell, WA-based biotech firm’s experimental drug for Hodgkin’s and other lymphomas in all markets outside the U.S. and Canada. (Luke covered this deal in Seattle last month.) The deal shows how Millennium, with the financial backing and global reach of its parent Takeda, has risen in the ranks of potential collaborators in the biopharmaceutical game.

Takeda is looking to Millennium to lead the expansion of its oncology business, which already features Millennium’s big-selling multiple myeloma drug bortezomib (Velcade). In addition to the Seattle Genetics deal, Millennium executives played a key role last spring in doing due diligence for and negotiating Takeda’s buyout of Irvine, CA-based IDM Pharma, says Dan Curran, vice president of corporate development at Millennium. This week, Takeda is beginning European sales of mifamurtide (Mepact), a bone cancer therapy developed by IDM, he noted.

In Seattle Genetics, Millennium has found a partner with which it has a long history and deep understanding of its technology. Millennium initially began a research collaboration with the Washington biotech in 2003 to evaluate its “empowered” antibody drugs, according to Curran. That relationship was elevated last March, when Millennium paid Seattle Genetics $4 million up front to license the empowered antibody technology for cancer drug development. As the name suggests, the drugs are souped-up antibodies. The firm’s technology links antibodies, which are ideal for homing in on proteins on the surface of cancer cells, to toxins that are intended to destroy cancer cells.

Millennium knows what it is like to be in Seattle Genetics’s shoes, trying to bring its first drug to market and relying on a larger corporate partner in order to tap foreign markets. In fact, Millennium partnered with a unit of the healthcare products giant … Next Page »

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