A consumer tech company has scored one of the bigger equity financing rounds in the Portland area this fall. Beaverton, OR-based Avnera, a fabless semiconductor company that makes chips for wireless audio applications, has raised about $8 million in equity financing out of a total offering of $10 million, according to a regulatory filing with the SEC. The investors in the current round were not specified, and e-mails seeking confirmation of the deal sent to Avnera and previous investors were not immediately returned.

Before the latest round, Avnera had raised about $42 million in funding. Its original investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Jafco Ventures. Other investors joined in later rounds, including Intel Capital, DAG Ventures, Altien Limited, Panasonic Ventures, Polycom, and BestBuy. Most recently, Avnera raised a $14.7 million Series C round in September 2007.

The current filing lists as company directors Rob Chandra and Umesh Padval of Bessemer, John Walecka of Redpoint, and John Miner, formerly of Intel Capital (now with Pivotal Investments).

Avnera was founded in 2004, and is led by CEO, chairman, and co-founder Manpreet Khaira. Its technology involves advanced circuit design techniques to put things like radio frequency electronics, power management systems, audio data converters, and programmable signal processors onto a single silicon chip. That can help make audio accessories cheaper and have better sound quality in computers, iPods, home entertainment systems, and mobile devices. Avnera’s customers include Logitech, Creative, Panasonic, Vizio, and Sanyo.

Back in June, Eric Rosenfeld of Capybara Ventures and the Oregon Angel Fund told Xconomy that Avnera was one of the leading lights in Portland’s semiconductor scene. “They’re doing very well,” he said at the time. “Hopefully they’ll be the one that revives people’s confidence locally.”

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This week, the Seattle area has lived up to its reputation as home to the future of technology, with three local (or formerly local) innovators making the national media rounds in Technology Review, the New York Times, and Time Magazine. And not in just one field or sector either—the three span academia (smart sensors), a major online video company, and a pervasive viral humor blog startup.

—Jason Kilar, CEO of online video website Hulu and a former Amazon executive, wrote a personal essay for the New York Times about his journey into the world of Internet startups, including his first meeting with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, back when Bezos could be much more casual in presentation than he could probably get away with now. Kilar left Amazon in 2006 after becoming senior vice president of worldwide application software, to work for Hulu.

—Ben Huh, the Seattle-based owner of wildly successful humor websites like Lolcats (I Can Has Cheezburger) and FAIL Blog, was profiled in a Time Magazine story about his company Pet Holdings’ success with user-generated content. Starting with angel investor money in 2007, Huh bought the original Lolcats website and has since expanded to more than 20 viral humor blogs.

—Shwetak Patel, assistant professor in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science and engineering at the University of Washington made Technology Review’s list of top young innovators for developing a way to tell how people are moving around a house based on how they use electricity, gas, and water. Patel started with simple devices to monitor house utility use, but has since developed devices for sensing when people enter or leave a room based on air pressure. Monitoring resource usage could ideally lead to conservation of those resources, and help with keeping watch on elderly people who live alone. Patel recently co-founded a startup company in Seattle to generate appliance-itemized utility bills for consumers.

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Advanced Inquiry Systems, Inc. (AISI) closed Series B financing with $11 million, according to a press release sent out today. The Hillsboro, OR-based company developed a data sensing system for semiconductor memory manufacturing, that allows memory devices to be tested for performance both earlier and for less cost than standard technology allows. Investors in the financing round included OVP Venture Partners, TL Ventures, Intel Capital, Applied Ventures, KT Ventures, and Northwest Ventures.

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[Updated and corrected, August 11---see below]
Anyone who has spent much time in universities knows that openness, teamwork, and collaboration are widely taught, but not always widely practiced. And when it comes to implementing entirely new models of education, well, let’s just say that institutional barriers, turf wars, bureaucracy, and tradition all too often derail significant change.

Better to start from scratch.

That, anyway, was the watchword of an experiment begun 12 years ago in Wellesley, MA, when the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering was created. Built on 70 acres purchased from Babson College next door, Olin was founded specifically to pioneer a new model of engineering education. It has no academic departments, and no tenure. The curriculum is designed to be retired after seven years. Students focus on real-world projects crafted around a commitment to design, functionality, and usability far more than an understanding of science. And, oh yeah, everyone who’s admitted in gets a full ride on tuition, or at least they did (more on that later). [The last sentence originally said Olin intended to offer students free tuition and room. Olin officials say that while free tuition was planned in perpetuity, the school only intended to offer room for the first class, which it did.]

Olin graduated its first class just four years ago, so the experiment is still an experiment-but one with encouraging early results and exciting long-term possibilities. I went out to Wellesley recently to learn more about Olin first hand from director of business development Ron Guerriero, VP for development J. Thomas Krimmel, and rising junior and entrepreneur Evan Morikawa. Not everything has gone as planned, according to this crew. But the upstart college has already produced a crop of Fulbright scholars and is finding ready jobs for its graduates at Microsoft, Google, Akamai, and a host of other leading companies. It even has a plan for introducing its model to more traditional schools.

Here are some highlights:

—About 300 total students, all undergraduates
—Three degree programs: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and a broad Engineering degree
— 9-1 student-teacher ratio
— 91 percent of students graduate (40-60 percent appears to be the norm for U.S. colleges, according to the statistics I found)
—42 percent of this year’s graduating class, and 54 percent of the incoming class, are women (the highest in the country for an undergrad engineering program, according to Olin) [An earlier version of this point said that 47 percent of the incoming freshman class were women. Women will be about 47 percent of the entire student population this fall. ]
—17 percent of the study body are alumni of FIRST Robotics, Dean Kamen’s popular student robotics competition

The overriding concept behind Olin is that to compete successfully in today’s global economy, American engineering students need strong technical skills coupled to a better understanding of business and entrepreneurial thinking and broad cultural experiences offered by the arts and humanities. The engineering coursework is geared at providing loads of experience in creating real-world products—with product teams, timelines, and all the rest.

The college was founded by the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, named for the early-20th-century ammunition magnate, in 1997. After purchasing land from Babson College and creating Olin College, the foundation then dissolved itself.

The first employee—Rick Miller, the only president the school has had—was hired in 1999. Initial faculty came the next year, from places like MIT, Harvard, and Vanderbilt, and the core of the first class arrived in the fall of 2001, roughly 30 of them. They are known as “the partners,” …Next Page »

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Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM), a Boston-based provider of information storage and protection products, announced today a proposed $450 million notes offering. The notes to be sold in the public offering are due by 2021, and the proceeds will be used in combination with the company’s other funds toward the redemption of certain senior subordinated notes due in 2013 as well as other corporate uses.

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Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) announced today that starting next week, customers will be able to order versions of its Mini 10 netbook computer equipped with GPS hardware as well as hybrid GPS and Wi-Fi-based location-finding software from Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. It’s the first time Round Rock, TX-based Dell has licensed Skyhook’s software for its products, and the deal could provide a big boost for the venture-funded startup.

The Mini 10 is one of Dell’s main entries in the burgeoning category of netbooks, miniature portable computers that typically run Windows XP (rather than Vista) and have less processing power and memory than standard laptops, but cost under $500. Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s “chief blogger,” wrote in a post today that the options customers can choose for pre-installation on the Mini 10 will include the “Dell Wireless 700 location solution,” including a Broadcom GPS chip and Skyhook’s software, which can determine a device’s location based on satellite signals, the IDs of nearby Wi-Fi networks, or both.

That means the Mini 10 will be able to function much like a personal navigation device—perhaps helping netbooks to impinge on the market for standalone GPS devices sold by TomTom and other manufacturers. In fact, Menchaca said the “Wireless 700″ package will include navigation software called CoPilot that offers 2D and 3D map views as well as turn-by-turn directions to drivers.

The package also includes Skyhook’s Loki software, which integrates with browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer to help users retrieve Web-based information based on their location. (Dell has already set up a “Loki dashboard” for Mini 10 users at dell.loki.com.)

Ted Morgan, Skyhook’s CEO, says the Dell deal is a major one for his company—perhaps the biggest one since Apple announced in January 2008 that Skyhook’s Wi-Fi positioning system would serve as one of the location-finding technologies on the iPhone. “Dell is a pretty big name across a bunch of different categories—and is rumored to be entering some new ones,” says Morgan, perhaps referring to talk that Dell is developing an Android-based device that could be a smartphone, a media player, or an Internet device. “It’s a big win for us to have both Dell and Apple aggressively out there” promoting Skyhook’s technology, Morgan says.

It’s also strategically important for Skyhook to have a foothold in the netbook market, Morgan says. “If you look at what Dell and Acer and Asus are doing, they’re inventing a whole new category that’s huge for students and mobile professionals,” he says. “We like the idea of working with new manufacturers and new devices that are ripe targets for location-based software.”

Dell’s Menchaca said the Wireless 700 option will eventually be available for Windows Vista and Windows 7 computers, and for other Dell systems beyond the Mini 10.

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Apple announced today at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco that its new operating system, Snow Leopard, will ship in September, just a month before Microsoft’s Windows 7. In the speech unveiling Snow Leopard, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Bertrand Serlet said Snow Leopard represents real improvement over the current Apple OS, and dismissed Windows 7 as another version of Windows Vista. Snow Leopard was developed in part to better handle modern computer hardware like 64-bit processors.

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San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders has referred to SPAWAR, the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, as one of the city’s best kept secrets, and I started to understand why during a presentation yesterday at San Diego’s Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center.

SPAWAR is a major Navy procurement agency, with a total budget of more than $2.4 billion in fiscal 2008. About 65 percent of that supports industry partnerships, which includes spending to acquire a host of hardware and software technologies needed for what the Navy calls C4ISR, Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance. Naturally, the Navy keeps most of this technology under wraps—literally. When maintenance crews work on U.S. warships at the Navy base here, they often wrap up parts of the superstructure before servicing the radar and other electronics.

So a presentation yesterday by Frank Gordon, who heads SPAWAR’s navigation and applied sciences department, represented an unusual opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy that surrounds the Navy labs on Point Loma. SPAWAR is an enormous organization, with more than 6,300 civilian, military, and contract workers just at its San Diego headquarters, and local spending of almost $991 million on procurement contracts and R&D programs, according to the latest data available at SPAWAR’s web site. Gordon says that at any given time, SPAWAR is overseeing more than 800 technology development programs in San Diego.

About 100 people attended the session, which was sponsored by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit group that promotes innovation and entrepreneurship. Connect was founded at UC San Diego in 1985 as a resource for academic researchers who wanted to start technology-based companies based on their laboratory breakthroughs. At SPAWAR’s government lab in San Diego, scientists also spin out new companies and technologies, said Jim Fallin, a spokesman for SPAWAR Systems Center.

Gordon, who is nicknamed “Dr. Chaos” because of his love of nonlinear dynamics, highlighted some of the advanced technologies that SPAWAR is developing for …Next Page »

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When Qualcomm co-founder and longtime chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs stepped down as chairman of the wireless giant last month, he said he was taking another shot at retiring. Jacobs, who turned 75 in October, told The San Diego Union-Tribune after Qualcomm’s annual shareholders meeting that his first attempt at retiring didn’t take, presumably because he remained active at Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) after his son Paul succeeded him as CEO four years ago.

As a retiree, though, Jacobs has still been keeping a fairly busy schedule. In February, he gave an extended lecture at MIT’s School of Engineering on “providing chips and technology for a world with 4 billion cellular customers,” in which he provided some intriguing up-to-date industry analysis, which has been embedded at the bottom of this report. And on Friday, Jacobs was a speaker at the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit, which was organized by Connect, the San Diego nonprofit that promotes technology innovation, as a showcase of local technology for venture investors.

“I was asked to forecast,” Jacobs told the San Diego audience, “but I must admit I’m a terrible forecaster. When I started Qualcomm in ‘85, I told my wife we might have as many as 100 employees if everything goes right.” Today Qualcomm has a global workforce of roughly 14,000 employees, including more than 9,000 in San Diego.
In discussing Qualcomm, Jacobs also steered clear of making any forecasts, although he made several interesting historical observations.

—At Qualcomm, he said, “We made a strategic decision early on that we really wanted to focus on innovation.” Because it was difficult in the beginning, however, for Qualcomm to gain market acceptance for its CDMA digital wireless technology, it became necessary for the company to make its own handsets and related cellular equipment. Once Qualcomm became established, Jacobs said, “We sold off the handset division to concentrate on the chips and software.”

—”All phones are getting smart,” Jacobs said. He held up a copy of the New York Times business section with a story headlined, “Laptops? They Are So Yesterday. Try a Netbook” and described the progression of smaller and more powerful computers from desktops to laptops and netbooks. At the same time, he noted that mobile phones are progressively getting bigger and more powerful, “So they’re going to meet in the middle, where we’re getting colliding galaxies here or something.”

—Amazon’s Kindle “will be the only way you read a book in the future,” Jacobs said. “It’s got a Qualcomm chip in it, and all the data going to Amazon goes through our data center.”

In his February lecture at MIT, Jacobs repeated one of the mantras that kept him excited during the early days at Qualcomm. “I always said we’ve got at least 10 years of excitement ahead of us, and every year of that 10 years moves out a year,”Jacobs said.

His MIT lecture is embedded below, or you can watch on MIT’s website by clicking here.

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Randy Drawas, chief marketing officer at Moscow, Russia-based antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, shared some disturbing statistics with me earlier this week. In 2007, he said, Kaspersky’s researchers detected as much malicious software activity on the Internet as they had in the previous 11 years combined. In 2008, malware volume doubled yet again. And in 2009, the company estimates, more than 30 million unique malware programs will be found in circulation on the Internet, many of them targeting consumers.

In an effort to help Internet users learn about these threats and protect themselves, Kaspersky this month launched a security news site called Threatpost. Based out of Kaspersky’s US headquarters in Woburn, MA, and edited by journalists, the site is designed to provide objective news, analysis, and education about issues like worms and viruses, software vulnerabilities and patches, and spam and botnets.

Kaspersky will be the site’s sole sponsor and advertiser. While Drawas says the Threatpost’s editors won’t overtly hawk Kaspersky products as solutions to readers’ malware headaches, the site “provides us with unique marketing opportunities just the same.”

To lead Threatpost’s editorial operation, Kaspersky has hired two veteran technology journalists: Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher. Naraine is a former editor-at-large for security at enterprise technology weekly eWeek who also blogs about security for ZDNet; Fisher is the former executive editor of the Security Media Group at Needham, MA-based TechTarget and former news editor at eWeek.

Naraine and Fisher launched the site on March 9 to coincide with the SOURCE Boston security conference. The plan, according to Naraine, is to write roughly four original news stories every weekday and to link to six or seven security-related news stories published elsewhere on the Web. In that sense, the site is a conscious imitation of the Huffington Post and other outlets that consist in large part of information culled from other sites. “It’s mostly an aggregation model,” says Naraine. “We really believe in this send-them-away mode—because if we do it right, tomorrow they will come back and see what else we have.”

Personal blogs by both Naraine and Fisher, weekly podcasts, slide shows, guest editorials, and a “watchlist” of security-themed video clips are also part of the Threatpost recipe.

When I spoke with Naraine earlier this week, I was naturally curious about how he plans to maintain the site’s editorial independence, in light of the fact that his employer is in the security business. “Dennis and I are under no illusions about this tightrope we’re walking, being employees of Kaspersky and writing about security,” Naraine said. “Maintaining independence is absolutely critical if this thing is to work. Our big thing was having a full understanding with the company that they have to be hands-off. But what we also understand is that this is a Kaspersky project. They are investing heavily. So obviously, you are not going to see product news from Symantec or McAfee featured strongly—but neither are you going to see overt pimping of Kaspersky products.”

I was also curious about what balance Naraine wants to strike between “educational” content explaining security threats to readers and community discussion and other more collegial or peer-to-peer forms of communication. “Security is a different animal” from other forms of technology journalism, he responded. Most readers “are not looking for a deep journalistic piece about a business model. They come in looking to be educated—’How do I find this patch, how do I disinfect my machine, what is a botnet, what should I be doing to keep my machine immune from falling into these types of attacks?’ Every time a reader comes to a story they must find some sort of information that helps them protect themselves.”

Drawas says Kaspersky will measure the success of Threatpost not simply by its traffic levels or whether it leads to increased sales of Kaspersky’s software, but by by the strength of the community it builds: “How many people join, how many people subscribe to our newsletter or our alerts….This is also an opportunity for [Kaspersky's business partners] to promote what they are doing and provide them with an outlet if they feel that they have something meaningful to share.”

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It’s an unofficial tradition in my family to spend the last few days of the year—often New Year’s Eve itself, I’m embarrassed to admit—deciding what charities we’d like to support before the tax-deduction clock resets for another year. So for any of you who are thinking along the same lines this week, and who are fortunate enough to be able to do a little giving at the end of what’s been such a tough year for so many, I thought I would mention a few causes near to Xconomy’s heart. These are all local organizations that are helping give kids and other folks access to the scientific and technological skills and tools they need to participate in the innovation community. The list is by no means exhaustive, and your additions to it are welcome; just post a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

Computer Clubhouse
Established via a collaboration between the MIT Media Laboratory and Boston’s Computer Museum (which is now part of the Museum of Science), the Computer Clubhouse is a free, safe after-school environment where kids can get access to not only computers but a host of other cool technology and adult mentorship. With support from Intel, the original model has been replicated at 100 locations around the world.

East End House
The East End House’s broad range of services includes free computer classes and an after-school program that, with help from local biotech firms, aims to bolster kids’ understanding of science and their interest in pursuing it as a career.

FIRST Robotics
This is the local outpost of Dean Kamen’s program aimed at encouraging middle and high school students to pursue science and engineering. The program is centered on a giant international robotics competition; the next Boston regional contest will be March 6th and 7th.

Freedom House
The Freedom House provides free access to its computer labs, as well as computer-skills training for seniors.

Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House
In addition to numerous other services, the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House offers free computer classes and free daily access to its computer lab.

One Laptop Per Child
Founded by Nicholas Negroponte and other veterans of the MIT Media Lab, OLPC wants to ensure that every school-aged child in the developing world has a networked laptop. There are several ways to contribute, including OLPC’s current Give One, Get One (G1G1) program, through which consumers can buy two laptops for $399. One of the computers will be shipped to a school of OLPC’s choice, the other to any recipient that the buyer chooses.

Science Club for Girls –
The name of this organization pretty much nails it—Science Club for Girls provides free after-school programs designed “to increase the self-confidence and science literacy of K-12th grade girls belonging to groups that are underrepresented in the sciences.” (Xconomy is putting its money where its mouth is on this one, by the way: Science Club for Girls is one of the organizations to which we’ll be donating part of the ticket proceeds from our upcoming Battle of the Tech Bands.)

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Study Finds Scientific Fraud

The National Institutes of Health may have to start policing their grants better, after a study found that as many as 1000 incidents of scientific misconduct may go unreported each year. The study, by the NIH’s Office of Research Integrity, surveyed 2,212 scientists who receive NIH grants and found that researchers witnessed an average of three cases of fraud per 100 people each year, Bloomberg reports.

Alternative Energy Could Power Next Tech Boom

With oil prices soaring and concern about global warming spreading, alternative energy could well be a booming market in the next few years. But will the winner be biodiesel, wind power, solar energy, or even new nuclear power? A special report in the Economist looks at a variety of technologies being developed around the world.

Innovation Cuts Data-Center Power Use

Finding new sources of energy is important, but so is cutting back energy use at power-hungry facilities like computer data centers. CNET News brings us the story of a startup, Power Assure, which has developed so-called Holistic Power Management. The company says it can reduce data center power by up to 80 percent.

Lending Website Seeks SEC Approval

The Securities and Exchange Commission will examine whether peer-to-peer lending embedded on a site like Facebook is a good idea, TechCrunch reports. Lending Club, originally launched as a Facebook application, has filed registration forms with the government. The company suspended operations in April after the SEC told it it required regulatory approval to act as the middleman in lending deals.

Grant Aims for Greater Ambulance Efficiency

Can public safety officials get emergency help where it’s needed in a more timely manner? That’s the question researchers at Cornell are examining. Science Daily tells us the researchers have a National Science Foundation grant to perfect a computer program that will tell city managers where to place ambulances across a city for maximum availability at all times.

Global Warming Will Cause More Wildfires

A warming Pacific Ocean will bring warmer, drier air to the northwest corner of the United States, sparking more wildfires by the end of the century, New Scientist says. The magazine cites a study by the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, which predicts that the acreage burned in that area will more than double between 2002 and 2080.

Plant Oil Could Fuel Jet Planes

The poisonous seeds of a fast-growing weed called jatophra could make the friendly skies a little greener, the Los Angeles Times reports. Researchers from the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center are working with companies like Boeing to develop the oil from the seeds into a plant-based jet fuel. The fuel could produce about half the carbon emissions of fossil fuel, researchers say.

Is An Oil-Free Country Possible?

Could oil be entirely removed from a country’s economy? Shai Agassi, founder of Project Better Place, thinks so, and told a conference gathered to discuss how Washington could promote plug-in vehicles about his plan. The Environmental News Network posts a video of his talk.

Daily TIPs (technology, innovation, policy) is produced in collaboration with

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Phoenix Technologies of Milpitas, CA, said today that it will acquire TouchStone Software, the North Andover, MA-based maker of tools for diagnosing and updating Windows personal computers.  Touchstone stockholders will get $1.48 for each share, making the total value of the deal roughly $18 million. TouchStone’s core product is a yearly service that gives customers access to the company’s database of software drivers for PC peripherals. Phoenix develops PC firmware such as the “BIOS” that loads the operating systems software into your computer when you start it.

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New England’s high-tech economy netted 7,600 jobs in 2006, as all six states in the region gained over the previous year. But the growth nowadays comes mainly from software and engineering services, as tech manufacturing jobs become harder to find. These were some of the major trends contained in Cyberstates 2008, a report released today by the American Electronics Association.

New England’s shift away from manufacturing is in line with the trend for the country as whole. Nationwide last year, seven out of nine tech manufacturing sectors lost jobs, according to the report (national figures were for 2007, but regional figures covered 2006). Defense electronics and electromedical equipment were the only manufacturing sectors that saw expansion.

Massachusetts had the largest high-tech sector in New England and the second highest concentration of high-tech employment in the nation. The state has a strong manufacturing base in measuring and control instruments, consumer electronics, and computers and peripherals. But even that wasn’t enough to stem the tide in the switch from manufacturing to services.

The computer and peripherals industry lost 1,600 manufacturing jobs in 2006, but these losses were more than offset by 3,100 new jobs in computer systems design and related services. Overall, the Bay State picked up 5,100 jobs, a 2.1 percent gain over 2005, by far and away the most in New England.

Here’s the state-by-state breakdown for New England:

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Microsoft has joined the MIT Kerberos Consortium as a founding sponsor, nudging the organization closer to its goal of establishing Kerberos as a universal authentication platform for computer networks, MIT officials announced today. A representative of the software maker will join counterparts from Sun, Google, and Apple on the consortium’s executive board. Although Kerberos was originally developed for MIT’s Project Athena back in the 1980s, the consortium itself was founded last September.

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38 Studios, the Maynard, MA-based game development studio founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, has decided not to reinvent the world. The virtual world, that is—the one it’s creating as part of the massively multiplayer online-gaming experience it plans to debut in late 2010. The company said yesterday it will license a suite of world-development tools and game servers from BigWorld Technology, which has offices in Canberra and Sydney, Australia. BigWorld supplies the technology behind online role-playing games such as Stargate Worlds.

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An assembly line dedicated to the One Laptop Per Child Foundation’s XO Laptop went into operation yesterday at Quanta Computer’s new Changshu factory north of Shanghai yesterday, a few days ahead of the timeline One Laptop CTO Mary Lou Jepsen projected the last time Xconomy spoke with her. CNET and Top Tech News have good writeups.

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If you aren’t on a schedule, you can’t be late.

That was the gist of a conversation I had last night with Mary Lou Jepsen, chief technology officer at the One Laptop Per Child organization here in Cambridge. Jepsen says that a Reuters report yesterday asserting that production delays will cause the organization to miss promised delivery dates for its famous (to some infamous) XO-1 Laptop was misleading.

Jepsen says it’s true, as the story suggested, that final assembly of the first batch of mass-produced laptop—to begin soon at a recently expanded Quanta Computer factory in Changshu, northwest of Shanghai—was originally envisioned to begin in October, and will now start sometime in November. But neither the One Laptop organization nor Quanta ever claimed that production would be begin on a set day—so it’s a stretch to call the situation a “production delay.” Says Jepsen, “I think we had hoped to start mass production in October, but we were never focused on starting on a certain date. We’ve always just wanted to make the product as good as we can…I am certainly not aware of any promises that we are going to miss.”

And while Jepsen says she’s happy that audiences are so interested in the details of the One Laptop project, she points out that the One Laptop organization doesn’t work like a traditional manufacturing company, with detailed business plans or Gantt charts showing the dependencies between each part of the project. “It’s much looser and more collaborative, kind of in the spirit of the open-source movement—and yet I’ve never worked at a company where things have come together more smoothly,” she says. “Everyone thought this was impossible three years ago.”

Jepsen’s explanation may sound like spin, and the grandiose claims occasionally made about the “$100 laptop” by the project’s founder, former MIT Media Lab director Nicholas Negroponte, have certainly amounted to an open invitation to the project’s skeptics. But given the unprecedented scale of what the non-profit organization is attempting—distributing laptops to tens or hundreds of millions of the world’s children—small shifts in the organization’s timeline seem insignificant, especially when placed beside the years-long delays seen in some commercial products like Windows Vista.

Some of the criticism leveled at the the One Laptop project since its January 2005 launch has been more serious. Skeptical observers have said that the device will be underpowered, that it will always cost more than Negroponte predicted (indeed, the current projected cost per laptop is around $200), and that the project duplicates efforts already underway in countries such as India to create cheap, mobile computing devices. Some governments have resisted the very idea of spending precious education funds on gadgets, while others have failed to follow through on commitments to purchase the machines.

A “buy one, give one” plan that will allow individuals to purchase an XO-1 laptop for themselves while donating another for distribution in a developing country, planned to begin November 12, has been perceived as a sign that national governments aren’t signing up to buy enough of the devices to allow the organization to reach efficiencies of scale in manufacturing. And the Boston Globe reports today that in a search for more paying customers, the organization is now appealing to wealthy individuals and corporations to help pick up the tab.

But none of those bumps seem to faze Jepsen. She says she’s had her “head down” for months focusing on the XO-1’s technical details and is preparing to leave for China on Saturday to oversee the beginning of the laptops’ final assembly from the thousands of components, such as motherboards, screens, and antennas (the device’s distinctive “ears”), that have already been manufactured. “We are still making changes to the ears, and I’m still waiting to hear how one little spring came out,” Jepsen says. “There are hundreds of little things you have to do. But none of that is really delaying it.”

“What is mass production, anyway?” asks Jepsen. “Is it when you put together the motherboards, or is it when the operators on the line screw together the plastic parts on a conveyor belt? You can say that that’s when it really becomes a laptop—but we designed it so that five-year-old kids in Nigeria can screw it together. In a way, the work is already largely done.” Jepsen points out that Quanta, the world’s largest laptop manufacturer, recently doubled the size of its Changshu manufacturing plant so that it could begin production of the XO-1, which will be the first product off the new lines.

Jepsen says she was surprised by the complaining tone that spread across the blogosphere yesterday in response to the Reuters story about the supposed delays. “On some level I’d just like to say to everyone, ‘Chill,’” she says. “But on the other hand, it’s clear that people are really interested in the process, and in learning about how a laptop is manufactured.”

The amount of information available about the XO-1’s design, production, and testing is already unprecedented; some 4,500 bugs are publicly viewable through the organization’s bug tracker, for example. But Jepsen says she’s inspired by all the attention on the production schedule to think about more ways to open the project to the public. “Maybe we should explain even more about what happens,” Jepsen says. “You never hear about when the new iPod starts its mass production at various factories; you only hear about when it’s going to show up in stores. But I guess I should send out a ‘Hello World’ the day we start mass production.”

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With early orders, principally from governments in developing nations, for its lime-green, crank-powered, and low-cost XO laptop computer running short of what’s needed to trigger mass production, the One Laptop Per Child project is today kicking off two initiatives that will allow paying consumers to purchase machines for the benefit of children in its target countries.

Originally envisioned as the $100 laptop, the XO now costs about $188. But starting today, consumers can purchase a machine for $200, and donate it to a child in a developing nation. To do so, go to XOgiving.org and click the “Donate” button.

The same website has details of the second announcement—called “Give 1, Get 1.” Under this program, which runs for two weeks beginning on November 12, consumers in Canada and the U.S. will be able to buy two XOs for $399—one to keep and one that will be donated to a deserving child.

The Boston Globe has a lot of details about the project and its evolution. It cites Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the $100 laptop initiative, as acknowledging that the project has not reached the 3 million initial orders that he had previously projected would be needed to kick off mass production.

“There’s a much bigger gulf between a handshake with a head of state and a real check coming out of the treasury,” Negroponte told the Globe. “You could argue I could have been more realistic in the beginning, but if I had, I would never have done this.”

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For two years, chipmaking biggies AMD and Intel have been locked in the Battle of the Multi-core Chips. First Intel pitted its Xeon and Core 2 chips against AMD’s dual-processor Athlon 64, and now both companies are doubling the stakes, with Intel releasing the Quad-Core Xeon and AMD about to bring out a four-processor chip code named Barcelona.

But there’s a Silicon Valley startup with operations in Westborough, MA, that’s leapfrogging both giants. It’s Tilera, which came out of stealth mode today to announce that it’s supplying a 64-processor chip called TILE64 to a dozen customers in the networking and digital multimedia processing sectors. The chip, based on technology developed by former MIT computer scientist Anant Agarwal, features an innovative mesh of switches that allows the 64 separate microprocessors on the chip to communicate with each other and with the outside world without the traffic jams of data that trouble multi-core integrated circuits with more classic designs.

“With the conventional architecture, if you try to double the number of cores, you run into some big problems—you have to significantly re-architect the main communications routes,” Tilera director of marketing Bob Doud told Xconomy in a call from the Hot Chips 19 symposium at Stanford University, where the company is making its public debut. “But with our mesh, as you add cores communications just takes care of itself. It’s like a city that grows at the edges.”

Multi-core chips are being used in a number of applications to handle several tasks simultaneously or to speed up the processing of large amounts of data. Intel and AMD’s consumer-level multi-core chips, for example, can handle multiple data-intensive jobs such as virus scanning and graphics rendering with less lag than single-processor chips. One problem with the multi-processor chips designed to date, however, is that the processors send data back and forth to one another and to external hardware via a central avenue or “bus,” an architecture originally developed for single-core chips. The bus becomes more and more saturated with data as additional processors are added, undermining the chips’ speed advantage.

Tilera says the processors on its TILE64 chip communicate via a two-dimensional grid of switches that the company calls “iMesh.” Like the grid layout in a city, the iMesh grid can soak up more traffic than a central avenue and provide a quicker path between any two processors. That, in turn, lowers power consumption. Tilera claims that the TILE64 runs commands 10 times faster than Intel’s dual-core Xeon, with 30 times the performance per watt of electricity consumed.

The combination of a core and a switch, in Tilera’s nomenclature, is a “tile” (hence the company’s name). Founder and chief technology officer Agarwal developed the tile architecture between 1997 and 2002 as part of the Raw Architecture Workstation (RAW) Project, an MIT effort funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the MIT AI Lab’s Project Oxygen. In 2004 Agarwal started Tilera, where it took several years to fine-tune the connecting mesh before a tile-based chip was ready for commercialization.

The TILE64 chips come with their own built-in management system called a “hypervisor” that’s capable of blocking off groups of tiles into islands, helping the chip to run multiple operating systems or applications or multiple instances of the same application. Customers can use the chip this way to get more performance out of existing applications. Or they can use Tilera’s own software development tool—the so-called “Multicore Development Environment,” which is based on an open-source development toolkit called Eclipse—to build new programs that divide a single data stream into multiple streams, processing them faster than conventional systems.

The company says this approach will be particularly useful for applications such as encrypting and decrypting high-definition TV signals or filtering Internet data for malicious viruses and worms. Doud says early Tilera customers include Top Layer Networks, a Westborough, MA, company that makes Internet intrusion detection equipment for corporate networks; Go Back TV, a Menlo Park, CA, company that provides a DVR-like ability to retrieve recorded video over cable networks; and Codian, a UK company that offers high-definition video conferencing services.

Tilera has venture funding from Bessemer Venture Partners, Columbia Capital, Walden International, and the VentureTech Alliance arm of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which is also the company fabricating Tilera’s chips. It will likely face competition from Beaverton, OR-based Ambric and Sunnyvale, CA-based Stream Processors, which are also shipping multi-core chips with unconventional communications networks.

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