San Diego’s high-tech sectors did not escape unscathed from the great recession of 2007-2009, but a new study says local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting the regional economy in recent years.

Using state employment data, the study released yesterday by the National University System Institute for Policy Research counted just over 6,000 high-tech employers in this region last year—or about 6 percent of all employers (with payrolls) in the San Diego region.

Yet these 6,000 companies directly employed 138,800 workers, or 11.2 percent of the total regional workforce in 2010. Using standard economic modeling, the institute estimated that San Diego’s technology industries indirectly created an additional 103,800 jobs last year, and induced another 120,400. The total—363,000 technology-dependant jobs—represents more than 29 percent, or close to a third of all jobs in the San Diego area.

Wages paid by technology companies have had an even-more disproportionate effect on the regional economy in recent years, according to the institute’s analysis. It shows the average annual wage of workers directly employed by technology companies in San Diego at $93,800 in 2010, more than double the $45,000 average annual wage paid by non-technology companies.

Accordingly, overall labor income generated directly by technology jobs reached $15.7 billion in 2010. The study found another $12.3 billion was generated by indirect and induced labor income, totaling $28 billion—or 45 percent of all labor income generated in the San Diego region last year.

San Diego’s technology sectors shed some jobs during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, contributing to a county unemployment rate that still stands at slightly more than 10 percent, according to August unemployment data. (The statewide unemployment rate in California was nearly 12 percent in August.) But technology employment held up much better than the overall  job market, according to the study. Employment in most tech sectors had returned to 2007 levels by 2010—except in computer and electronics manufacturing, which declined 8 percent, from 13,700 to 12,600 jobs throughout San Diego County.

In contrast to all other technology sectors, the number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical jobs actually increased by almost 21 percent in San Diego County during the recession—from 17,300 jobs in 2007 to 20,900 jobs in 2010.

The institute analyzed economic trends in nine high-tech sectors, based on a standard federal job classification system. The nine sectors are biomedical products, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, communications equipment, computer and electronics, defense and transportation, environmental technology, recreational goods, software, and technology consulting services.

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It’s impossible to overstate Jobs’s contributions.

First, monumental contributions to design. Design is at least as much about what to omit as it is about what to include, and Jobs was a master of both. As you saw in the New York Times last month, Jobs’s design patents ranged from the Mac Air, the iPhone, and the iPad to power adapters and the glass staircase in the NYC Apple Store.

Second, he made monumental contributions to business models. The iTunes store. The app store. The iPhone. These have revolutionized the music industry, the software industry, and the telecommunications industry.

Honestly, there has been no one like him.

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Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) is notoriously tight-lipped about the details of its day-to-day business, telling the press and analysts only what it wants them to know. Ever try to find out how many books they’re selling? How quickly certain types of merchandise is moving? Tough luck.

But when it comes to the Seattle e-commerce pioneer’s ambitions to enter the tablet computer market, there’s plenty of chit-chat.

Most of it has leaked out around the edges, although CEO and founder Jeff Bezos definitely added fuel to the fire when, in a rare interview, he told Consumer Reports to “stay tuned” for news about a tablet, and went on to talk about how any such device would be different from the Kindle e-reader.

There’s been more—lots more. To keep track of it all, I’ve used Storify to build this timeline of significant reports about Amazon’s plans for a new tablet device. If the tablet debuts sometime soon, as expected, it will give Amazon time to sell it hard this Christmas shopping season.

I’ll add more stories as they emerge, right up until we see the little guys roaming in the wild. And please let me know if I missed any big entries (there’s a curious lull between Sept. 2010 and this February, for instance.)

You can also find the timeline over at the main Storify site.

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San Diego’s innovation economy continues to move mostly sideways, with venture capital investments plunging and employment improving slightly among high technology and life sciences startups, according to a report today from Connect, the nonprofit group for technology and entrepreneurship. The mixed signals also showed San Diego’s merger and acquisition activity soared and federal grants to researchers strengthened during the last quarter of 2010.

A .pdf file for the full report can be downloaded here. My breakdown of the highlights and leading indicators for San Diego’s innovation economy follows:

—Eighty-four high tech and life sciences startups were formed in the region during the fourth quarter of 2010, a 13 percent increase from the same quarter of 2009, when 74 new companies were started. For the year, the report counted 277 new startup companies, which was a 13 percent decline from the 319 startups founded in 2009.

—Mergers and acquisitions jumped substantially across California in 2010 compared to the previous year. The value of reported San Diego M&A deals that closed during the fourth quarter was almost $1.7 billion. The nearly $4 billion in M&A deals reported here in 2010 was more than double the value of deals reported 2009. In Southern California, the M&A market in 2010 totaled more than $40 billion—almost seven times more than what was reported in 2009.

—Combined funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation for scientists in the San Diego area increased in 2010 to $42.5 million per 100,000 residents from $34.4 million per 100,000 in 2009. The report says that makes San Diego one of the state’s top innovation economies, based on federal grants received per capita. Total NIH financing for this region was almost $1.2 billion in 2010, a 28 percent gain from 2009, while NSF support amounted to almost $126 million, a slight increase from 2009.

—In the fourth quarter, San Diego got $278 million in NIH backing, and more than $31 million from the NSF.

— San Diego innovation companies received almost $32 million in Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program grants in 2010, according to new data from the Department of Defense.

—As we reported in January, venture capital investors put … Next Page »

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Designing a next generation computer chip can be a real pain in the…uh, hard drive.

Just ask Intel.

In January, the world’s largest maker of chips said it stopped shipments of chips that power its most advanced Sandy Bridge line of PC processors because of a design flaw, a recall Intel said would cost it about $1 billion.

“That’s kind of a bummer,” says Vimal Bhalodia, business development manager for Reveal Design Automation, a University of Michigan-bred startup.

One company’s bummer, however, is another company’s boon. Founded by recent U-M computer science graduate Zaher Andraus, Reveal has developed a way for chip designers to quickly check for bugs before manufacturers start shipping out defective devices.

Semiconductor chips essentially act as the brains of computers so any defect could cause a severe disruption in worldwide sales of PCs, video game consoles and mobile devices like smart phones and tablets.

Specifically, Andraus has created software that can greatly accelerate the process of “formal verification,” a mathematical way of proving that “chip always does what it’s supposed to do, guaranteeing there are no bugs,” Andraus says.

Reveal claims its technology is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than any other formal verification method, allowing chip designers catch bugs within minutes and hours versus days and weeks.

“Their technology has the potential to disrupt” the industry, says Terry Cross, a prominent local technology investor, who’s interested in backing Reveal. “They are the last step in the verification food chain and they can turn cycle time from multiple weeks to days.”

“Given the cost of [chip] designers, this can strip substantial cost from the equation,” he continued. “In a complex circuit design team, it is not unusual to have a team of up to a hundred or more engineers working together, so when you can take time out of the process through faster verification, the savings are huge.”

The startup is closely working with ARM Holdings in Cambridge, UK, the world’s top chip designer, which provides significant financial support to the U-M’s computer research program.

One of Reveal’s advisors is Randal Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and a top expert on formal verification. For his work, Bryant recently received … Next Page »

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While we are remembering Ken, I couldn’t help sending this picture of a poster that appeared in my office one Monday morning about 30 years ago that illustrated Ken’s sense of humor that most people never saw (see photo at bottom of this post).

This is something we shared, along with the concern about wanting to have beautiful computers and cabling. Unfortunately, I don’t have the text on the back of the poster that listed 20 reasons for the messy cables—e.g., “engineering said ‘marketing made me do it,’” and “we don’t ever want a customer to say that our cables are too short.”

Ken loved to work on the cabling and power supply problems for the DEC computers, a problem he and most every other company has never solved. He delivered a lot of the crisply burned out power supplies that customers sent him to my office.

Cabling has only gotten worse.

However, as a Ford board member, he claimed that he was able to get them to have a beautiful engine compartment and cabling (after he became a board member).

There are other things to recall as well. There’s the story of him wanting to redesign the famous, large, Yellow Ethernet cable just as we were to announce it!

I tend to remember all the humor and moments of irony that we shared while building computers at DEC.

Personally, I believe one of his longest living legacies will be the founding of The Computer (History) Museum(s) that started in Maynard, moved to Marlboro, then Boston for 15 years, and has lived in Silicon Valley for the last 15 years.

.

[Editor's note: The author spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital's products.]

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Chelmsford, MA-based IT firm Mercury Computer Systems said yesterday that it bought LNX, a provider of receiver systems for intelligence technology. Mercury (NASDAQ: MRCY) paid $31 million in cash for the Salem, NH-based company, and could pay up to an additional $5 million if LNX hits certain financial targets in 2011 and 2012, according to the announcement. The acquisition will strengthen the radio frequency and signal processing technology for Mercury’s products, the company said.

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Kevin Carroll, executive director of TechAmerica San Diego, sent over the list of winners from the 17th Annual High Tech Awards, which were announced Friday. The industry group (previously known as the AEA) bases its awards on such criteria as technological or business innovation, exceptional products or services, marketplace validation, perseverance, and community involvement. Winners in each category are: Anakam (Software); Anonymizer (Internet/Web Commerce); Z Microsystems (Computers); Entropic Communications (Communications); DefenseWeb Technologies (Defense/IT Services); Quantum Design (Semiconductors); RASIRC (Analytical Instrumentation); GenMark Diagnostics (Medical Technologies); Reaction Design (Clean Technology); D&K Engineering (Contract Services); Seacoast Science (Emerging Growth).

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The somewhat lurid circumstances surrounding Mark Hurd’s resignation Friday as chief executive of Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard have left plenty of room for gossip. Hurd stepped aside after a board investigation into a sexual harassment claim by a former marketing contractor; the board cleared Hurd of the harassment allegation, but found that he’d fudged expense reports to hide payments to the woman, who, it emerged over the weekend, is a former actress named Jodie Fisher.

For HP insiders, the episode must feel like a painful echo of previous executive departures, notably that of former board chair Patricia Dunn, who stepped down after a corporate espionage episode came to light in 2006. Now employees and shareholders must wait while interim CEO Cathie Lesjak, formerly the company’s chief financial officer, works to contain the damage and find a replacement.

But more significant than the scandal and the gossip, in the long run, will be the market’s assessment of Hurd’s record as a promoter of growth, innovation, and strategic change within HP. And the biggest lesson here—one that Hurd’s successor would be wise to learn—may be that vertical integration pays. The company’s biggest successes in recent years have come from taking manufacturing, software, and services—components of the computer industry that have been largely scattered since the 1980s—and tying them back together.

Certainly, Hurd leaves HP in a much sounder financial state than when the former NCR executive was chosen in early 2005 to rebuild the company after years of disappointing performance under former CEO Carly Fiorina. Net revenue grew from $86 billion in 2005 to $115 billion in 2009, increasing through the recession and helping the company to surpass even longtime rival IBM to become the world’s second-largest information technology company by revenue (trailing only Korea’s Samsung). While HP’s stock dipped nearly 10 percent on Friday following the announcement of Hurd’s departure, that same stock had more than doubled on Hurd’s watch, from a low of around $20 per share in April 2005 to the $43-$53 range this year.

In the market for consumer PCs, long the foundation of HP’s business, the company bounded forward under Hurd’s leadership, regaining the No. 1 spot in global market share from Dell in 2006. It’s held on to that ranking ever since, despite a major dip in PC purchasing in 2008-2009. In 2009 the company also became the leading supplier of PCs to the U.S. enterprise market, and it’s consistently in close competition with IBM to supply the most enterprise servers.

Between 2004 and 2009, HP spent $17 billion on research and development and $20 billion on acquisitions, capping off a buying spree with the purchase of infotech giants Electronic Data Systems (EDS), 3Com, and Palm. “The corporation is exceptionally well positioned strategically,” Hurd said in a statement announcing his resignation. “HP has an extremely talented executive team supported by a dedicated and customer focused work force. I expect that the company will continue to be successful in the future.”

To the extent that Hurd’s prediction comes true, some observers believe, it may be thanks to his own aggressive effort to extend HP’s product lines, making the company into a one-stop shop in many of the markets where it plays.

In the realm of corporate data centers, for example, the acquisition of Opsware in 2007 and of 3Com this year brought the company networking software and switches to layer atop its server and storage technology. In corporate computer services, the acquisition of EDS in 2008 brought HP an enterprise IT outsourcing division to help big companies run the same hardware and software that it was selling to them. And while competitors like IBM have exited the PC market, HP has … Next Page »

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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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The high-tech industry lost 245,600 jobs, or about 4 percent of the nationwide technology workforce, as the recession hit bottom last year, according a report being released today. But there are still jobs to be had in high-tech fields. Unemployment in several high-tech sectors remained below 5 percent at a time when overall unemployment soared above 9 percent nationwide, according to the 13th annual Cyberstates 2010 report issued by the TechAmerica Foundation.

All tech sectors lost jobs, but “even during the depths of the recession, most high-tech workers were still employed,” says Kevin Carroll, TechAmerica’s regional director for Southern California. The report, which relies on the most recent data available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, covers tech employment nationwide in 2009—and provides state-by-state information on employment, wages, and other data in 2008.

Considering all that has happened to the economy over the past year, Carroll acknowledges that the 2008 data for California and other states is too outdated to provide many insights. But he says a few points are worth extracting from the 2009 data:

—The four main components of the high-tech industry—manufacturing, communications services, software services, and engineering and tech services—all lost jobs in 2009.

—Software services experienced the smallest decline nationwide, losing 20,700 jobs in 2009. That’s about one percent of the 1.7 million software jobs that existed in the previous year.

—Communication services lost … Next Page »

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With the Apple iPad set to hit stores at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, you can probably guess what my digital media column, World Wide Wade, is going to be about this Friday.

But this time I want to leaven the punditry with some populism—so I’ve put together a quick, 9-question survey at SurveyMonkey. Please head over there and take a few minutes to share your opinions about Apple’s “magical” and “revolutionary” new tablet device.

Depending on which commentator you listen to, the iPad is either going to unleash a huge new wave of entertaining and educational digital content and overturn all of our old notions about personal computing, or destroy the tradition of open software development that has made computers and the Web so powerful.

The reality will probably be somewhere in between—but this week it’s your opinions as tech-savvy consumers of startup and innovation news that we’re interested in. I’ll report back on the survey’s results in my column this Friday.

Here are the questions — please head over to SurveyMonkey to register your answers. And please leave comments in the boxes provided; I’ll excerpt the most interesting answers.

1. Are you planning to buy an iPad?

2. If you are planning to buy an iPad, which version do you prefer?

3. Which features of the iPad appeal to you most?

4. Which missing iPad features would you most like to see added in a future version?

5. Where do you see yourself using an iPad?

6. Will the iPad be a better e-book reading device than the Amazon Kindle and other electronic-ink-based reading devices?

7. Some observers condemn Apple for the restrictions and secrecy it imposes on third-party app developers. Do you generally agree with this critique?

8. Following up on Question 7, has your opinion about Apple’s culture of control influenced your decision about buying an iPad?

9. The big picture: What impact will the iPad have on consumer expecations about personal computing? Choose the answer that comes closest to your view, or write one in.

Go to the survey.

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After a steady crescendo over the last several years, the talk in the mediasphere about a new tablet computer from Apple has reached deafening proportions. With an actual product announcement now expected on January 27 (at least, according to the Wall Street Journal, which cites “sources in a position to know”), Apple may finally be on the verge of providing some official data to quell the many and oft-conflicting rumors.

I’m as curious as all of my tech-journalist colleagues about what Apple will reveal. And my inner gadget freak is impatient, too. Speaking purely with my consumer hat on, I’ve long been budgeting mentally for an “iSlate” purchase sometime in 2010. There’s only one company where I’d commit sight unseen, years in advance, to dropping a grand on the next new thing, and it’s Apple.

But what’s really been catching my interest, as we wait for news from the horse’s mouth, is the apparent strength of the market pull for Apple’s hypothetical tablet. Everybody, it seems, desperately wants the iSlate rumors to be true: bloggers, journalists, publishers, mobile application developers, generic geeks, and even average consumers. Indeed, the expectations have built up to such a pitch that if the January 27 event doesn’t materialize, or if it’s not about a tablet device, Apple’s PR team will have global-scale disappointment to deal with.

The details don’t seem to matter. Whether the device is called the iSlate or the iPad or the MacBook Touch; whether its screen measures 7 inches diagonally or 9 or 11; whether it costs $600 or $1,000; whether it’s primarily designed as an e-reader or a gaming pad or keyboardless netbook—most observers seem to agree that the Apple tablet will be über-cool, that the company will sell millions of units, and that 2010 will be the year of the tablet.

Whether or not you buy into that consensus (and I do, more or less, though there are also a few dissenters), you have to admit that all this enthusiasm is a little strange, given that the market has shown so little interest in tablet computers up to now.

Tablets are a very old idea—in fact, the first computer that can rightly be called a PC, Alan Kay’s 1968 Dynabook, was a tablet device. (The Dynabook concept evolved into the Xerox Alto, which inspired the Apple Lisa and the Apple Macintosh, which eventually spawned the Apple iPhone, which paved the way for the alleged iSlate—so in a way, personal computing is now coming full circle.) But it’s a product category that has never quite matched up with an identifiable consumer need.

Apple’s Newton was essentially a small tablet, and Steve Jobs himself killed the product in 1997 after disappointing sales and embarrassments over the device’s suboptimal handwriting recognition capabilities. Full PCs with touchscreens and pen interfaces have been on the market since 2001, when Microsoft introduced a tablet version of Windows, but they’ve never sold more than a few hundred thousand units a year, and have never caught on outside a few specialized habitats, such as hospitals, shipping and logistics operations, surveying and mapping, and the military.

So, what accounts for the dissonance here? Why are the same consumers who have been so apathetic about the tablet form-factor in the past suddenly so excited about a possible Apple version? I think there are several things going on.

First, as Pen Computing Magazine founder Conrad Blickenstorfer has pointed out, most of the tablets built to date have suffered from the same set of fatal drawbacks. On the input side, if you’re going to dispense with a physical keyboard, then you’d better have either perfect handwriting recognition, an efficient virtual keyboard, or … Next Page »

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Last May, the Seattle startup Nanocel won the University of Washington’s yearly business plan competition. Now the company—founded by UW mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Dustin Miller and recent UW MBA grad Daniel Rossi—is gearing up for a big year in 2010. Their planned first products, affordable fluid-based cooling systems for computer chips, will fill a large void in the market, Rossi and Miller say.

Nanocel’s technology uses a combination of microfluidics and novel plastic materials to cool devices more cheaply than other liquid-based systems and more efficiently than cooling fans. The products use thousands to millions of very thin (between one and 100 micrometers wide) vessels to circulate tiny amounts of liquid in close contact with the computer chips, or other device components prone to overheating. Nanocel is eco-friendly, Miller says, in that it could save vast amounts of energy over current air-based cooling methods.

Two of the biggest problems in the computer industry are keeping large server farms from overheating and extending battery life in laptops and other portable electronics. “We are currently using over three percent of the nation’s energy on cooling the Internet,” Miller says. Industry calculations say that fluid-based cooling could cut that energy use in half. “That’s a staggering number.”

On an individual scale, a cooling technology that uses less energy will lead to longer battery life, reducing energy usage and keeping more batteries out of landfills. “This can have a real impact, not only at the country level but also at the consumer level,” Miller says.

Miller, who is working on his doctorate in a plastics lab in UW’s mechanical engineering department, says Nanocel is not the first to think of replacing fans with liquid, but other fluid technologies out there use expensive materials such as metal or silicon, making them unfeasible for most consumer products. After seeing a lecture on microfluidic cooling technologies, Miller realized they looked similar to things he was building in the plastics lab. Nanocel’s technology is the first to combine plastics with microfluidics to create a heat sink, Miller says.

Once the technology was invented, Miller joined forces with Rossi, the business expert, and the two did extensive market research to find out who might be interested in Nanocel’s product. It turns out everyone is interested, the founders say. Their potential partners and customers mainly include computer chip manufacturers and designers, Miller says, but they are also talking with companies that make gaming consoles, servers, and hardware.

“There are tons of shelf-ready products that can’t go to market because they’re too hot,” Rossi says. That’s because fans aren’t powerful enough to cool them down, and liquid technologies are too pricey.

As for Nanocel, “the process was originally developed for areas in food packaging or disposable packaging,” Miller says. “So, for the cost of a coffee cup, you can have a heat sink that used to be made out of copper,” Rossi adds.

From the beginning, Nanocel has worked very closely with the UW TechTransfer office, the two say. They’re currently working out a deal to license the technology from the office, as it was developed at UW. The two have used many of the programs the TechTransfer office offers, Rossi says. “We’ve really gotten a lot of help from them,” he says. “I’m grateful, and we’re going to use it for all it’s worth.”

Jim Roberts, UW TechTransfer’s business development officer, was involved in helping Nanocel get off the ground by bringing in student interns to help work with the team, reviewing their practice presentations and business plan, and helping the two make connections in the Seattle business scene. “We’re excited about this technology. We think it has many applications,” Roberts says. “They’ve got all the right ingredients to be a successful company.”

Since the UW business plan competition, the Nanocel founders have incorporated the company, continued their market research, and are gearing up for their first angel funding round in early 2010. They’ve been working on putting together an advisory board and have been talking to many potential clients and partners, Rossi says. None of these are done deals yet, but Miller and Rossi say they’ve gotten enthusiastic responses from everyone they’ve talked to about their product.

“Everyone needs a technology like this,” Miller says.

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Forty years ago, in 1969, Neil Armstrong left footprints on the surface of the moon. It was an extraordinary accomplishment.

Also in 1969, with much less fanfare and at much less expense, Len Kleinrock’s programmer Charley Kline sent the first message over ARPANET. (The message was “lo” – the first two letters of “login.” Then the system crashed.)

With forty years of hindsight, which of these events has had the greater impact? Unless you’re really big into Tang and Velcro, the answer is clear. From four computers in 1969, the Internet has grown to more than half a billion computers and more than a billion regular users, and is impacting every aspect of our lives.

“Exponentials R Us.” That’s the magic of computer science. It’s what differentiates us from all other fields. (To the extent that other fields are experiencing exponentials, it’s because of computer science – for example, the sensor technology and computational power that are driving biotech.) “Exponentials R Us” is the past, the present, and the future of computer science. If you think you can have greater impact doing something else, you’ve got your head wedged.

With that as context – as the single most important message – here are a few things that have been particularly cool in the past decade:

1. Search. Ten years ago, you would painstakingly organize things – label them and file them – so that you could find them. How 1990s! Today, you can search more than 500 Terabytes of the web (not to mention your own desktop) in 100 milliseconds.

2. Scalability. In the 1990s, Jeff Bezos’s smiling face appeared in advertisements for DEC multiprocessor servers, because the scalability of Amazon.com was limited by the size of the largest computer that DEC could build. Today, that’s laughable—we use hundreds of thousands of piece-of-junk computers running innovative software to create arbitrarily reliable, available, and scalable web services.

3. Digital media. Text. Music. Images. Video. All of it is digital. Downloaded and streamed. Seamlessly edited. With you at all times. Interactive. “It’s just bits.” It’s totally different.

4. Mobility. A decade ago, your mobile phone was a brick, and all you could do with it was make calls (if you were lucky!). Today, high-bandwidth connectivity to all of the world’s digital data is ubiquitous. Ain’t no escaping it, for better or for worse. … Next Page »

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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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