First of all, the name is Ginger.io, not Gingerd. The latter is how the company was incorporated; but the former is its real name.

And real is what Ginger.io is becoming. Since graduating with the most recent class of TechStars Boston startups, the MIT Media Lab spinoff (from professor Sandy Pentland’s research group) has been heads-down working on its product—software that helps healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies monitor the behavior of patients via their mobile phones.

The startup has been busy fundraising too—and it is naming its investors today. Ginger has closed $1.7 million in first-round financing led by Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Also participating were Kapor Capital (Mitch Kapor’s VC fund), Romulus Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Bill Warner, Walt Winshall, James Joaquin, and Ty Curry. All together, Ginger’s investors and advisors represent a pretty interesting mix of people with experience in big data, healthcare, and mobile software.

Here’s the idea. A mobile phone can provide crucial information about its owner’s activity level, location, and communication patterns—all in real time, more or less (assuming the person opts in). That information could be valuable to drug makers and hospitals looking to track the results of clinical trials, market medications to certain types of patients, or design new therapies for things like diabetes, obesity, or brain disorders. The data alternatives—behavioral self-reports, surveys, and the like—are famously unreliable by themselves. With this in mind, Ginger is not one of the dozens of startups developing consumer apps for tracking one’s own health and wellness (though that’s sort of where the company started). No, this is a business-to-business play.

But here’s the bigger idea. What’s really valuable is not so much the data as the insights and patterns that can be gleaned from that data. If Ginger’s software knows how you behave on a “normal” day, for example, it can figure out when your behavior changes—maybe you’re stuck in bed, or not calling your usual friends—and correlate that with indicators of problems such as doctor visits. If the software tracks a population of patients taking a drug, and some respond in an expected way but others don’t, the pattern might suggest a way to target the drug more effectively.

“If you’re a pharmaceutical company, to know a segment is behaving differently and doing better on that drug, that can help you market that medication,” says Anmol Madan, co-founder of Ginger.io and a Media Lab PhD.

What’s more, the company is harnessing its tools in computer science, machine learning, and data analytics for a much deeper purpose. “It’s about understanding people,” says Frank Moss, the former Media Lab director and software technologist who serves as an advisor to Ginger (he’s also an Xconomist). “I think it’s going to be revolutionary.”

Moss is talking about Ginger’s potential to “discover the principles behind … Next Page »

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As you may or may not know, it’s not just Xconomy’s staff editors who are powering our website with thoughtful reflections on the happenings in each of our city’s high-tech and innovation communities. We have more or less a dream team of innovators in each city who write for our Xconomist Forum, submitting posts on subjects plaguing their fields or assembling around a big news event (for example, the death of a tech icon like Steve Jobs). Once a year in each city, we get together to celebrate that group of inventors, entrepreneurs, (seed, angel, and venture) investors, academics, lawyers, and more.

This year’s Boston-area Xconomist reception, sponsored by Goodwin Procter and BDO (thank you!), was held at the hot new Kendall Square restaurant Catalyst, a great venue for our high-caliber guest list. Among the attendees? Mathematica inventor Stephen Wolfram, Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, Harvard geneticist George Church, retired Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Josh Boger, venture capitalist Rich Levandov, and iRobot founders Rod Brooks and Helen Greiner. I could tell you more, but that’d be ruining the fun of flipping through these snapshots.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	Young guns – Left to right: Rob Go from NextView Ventures; Phil Beauregard and Matt Grace from Objective Logistics.
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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Here in Boston, September 1st brings about quite a bit of change: students migrating back into town, moving trucks and furniture in the streets, and street cleaners around my office (all cutting down on parking options, sorry to say).

We’ve weathered Tropical Storm Irene and a roller-coaster stock market, felt the mild rumblings of an East Coast earthquake (OK, most of us here didn’t), and are waiting to see how the Red Sox-Yankees series plays out tonight. And football season. Did I mention football season?

It’s also a time of change and opportunity in the tech-business community, as we look forward to a high season of events and news. Here are some quick hits:

—Joi Ito has officially started as the new director of the MIT Media Lab (he succeeds Frank Moss). In a blog post, Ito writes, “The awesome space that the Lab lives in, and the somewhat tricky issues around IP and confidentiality, have kept a lot of the great things going on at the Lab out of the public view. I’d really like to have the Media Lab be more involved in the conversation that is the global Internet, and to invite everyone to participate in what we do.”

—CSN Stores is now officially Wayfair.com. No surprise there, as the Boston e-retailer (think Amazon for the home) has rebranded its 200-plus sites under a unified name. Wayfair, which has long been profitable, recently raised its first round of outside funding, and it was a doozy: $165 million from Battery Ventures, Great Hill Partners, HarbourVest Partners, and Spark Capital. It sounds like a lot of the money will go towards marketing and building the new brand.

—A number of Boston-area companies are hiring up a storm in a seriously competitive job market. HubSpot is among the usual suspects, coming off its recent acquisitions of Performable and Oneforty. The company is 285 employees going on 2,085. (We’ll be keeping an eye on how it manages its growth and integrations.) Other firms looking to hire include Gemvara, PeerTransfer, and a bunch of TechStars Boston companies—plus giants like Verizon and Pfizer (both are setting up R&D beachheads in the Boston area). I’m guessing Google and ITA Software aren’t exactly sitting still in Kendall Square either.

—While on the topic of Kendall Square tech icons, I should mention that Akamai has formed a partnership with fellow Cambridge startup Happy Cloud to speed up software downloads via Akamai’s content delivery network—in particular, downloads of high-quality PC games. Happy Cloud came out of beta with its on-demand game store in July.

—In the “dead” category, consider U.S. solar panel startups. This week’s news about Solyndra, the Fremont, CA-based company that said it will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, is another nail in the coffin. Solyndra raised nearly $1 billion in private equity financing (and borrowed $500 million-plus from the U.S. Department of Energy), making it one of the largest failures in venture capital history. Solyndra was backed in part by Boston and Silicon Valley-based RockPort Capital and a number of other firms, including Madrone Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.

The news comes on the heels of Evergreen Solar’s bankruptcy—which Black Coral Capital’s Rob Day says isn’t the end of the story for the Marlboro, MA-based firm. And last week’s bankruptcy filing by Intel-backed SpectraWatt, in upstate New York. The broader consensus seems to be that U.S. solar investors didn’t look out far enough on the cost curve and didn’t have deep enough pockets to keep supporting companies trying to compete with cheaper solar overseas. There are still big opportunities to innovate in solar, of course, but the investor climate is looking pretty dour.

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I spent a good part of Friday at the MIT Media Laboratory, which was packed to the rafters with faculty, alums, and other guests celebrating the pioneering institution’s 25th anniversary.

Below are some quick impressions from the morning’s activities and an afternoon chat with Google CEO Eric Schmidt conducted by public radio host John Hockenberry. I missed the remaining afternoon festivities, but your intrepid reporter did drag himself back to the lab that night for food, drinks, music, and networking—hence the photos from the Dance Central and Rock Band action (games courtesy of their creator, Media Lab spinoff Harmonix).

New Energy

The energy of a big anniversary bash aside, I think it is safe to say the Media Lab is on a new upward trajectory. That’s largely a testament to the impassioned work of director Frank Moss, who after some five years will be leaving his post next February or March (or “whenever they find a replacement,” as he told me Friday).

The Lab as Space Port

At the end of the first panel, Moss asked everyone to predict where the lab would be in another 25 years. My favorite answer came from haptics expert Margaret Minsky (daughter of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky), who described a scene from her favorite movie, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” where space station bays open for an incoming craft and people are busy in the background on all sides of the space dock. She said she imagined the Media Lab welcoming researchers in space in 2035. “I really do want to come back when it’s in space,” she told me afterward.

New Horizons

A panel featuring the lab’s five newest faculty members was the day’s big draw for me, for the opportunity to see at a glance the new trails the lab is attempting to blaze. Here’s my summary, by research group name:

—Synthetic Neurobiology: Ed Boyden combines aspects of neuroscience with engineering and a lot more (the brain, after all, is a storage and communication and computing device).

—Camera Culture: Ramesh Raskar, perhaps the Doc Edgerton of the future, dreams of creating “femto” cameras that operate at a trillion frames per second and see around corners to help with everything from vehicular collision avoidance to new imaging tools that peer inside the “nooks and crannies” of the body.

—High-Low Tech: Leah Buechley seeks to fuse art, dance, physics, and technology to create new and intuitive tools for integrating form and function and thereby open up tech engineering to a whole new group of people who might normally be turned off to the field.

—Macro Connections: Cesar Hidalgo, a self-proclaimed “gypsy of science,” is looking at new ways to analyze and visualize extremely large sets of data, such as the patterns of production of national economies.

—Mediated Matter: Neri Oxman, an architect, designer, and artist, plans on turning architecture on its head by building things like walls and chairs out of materials that mimic properties found in shark skins and other natural materials.

Coolest Prediction

A lot of folks made futuristic predictions. My favorite came from Oxman. She looked ahead 10 years, 100 years, and 1000 years to make three forecasts:

2020: Materials become the new software, meaning (I think, but she didn’t respond to my email asking for clarification) materials will be programmable, reconfigurable.

2110: Bio-inspired fabrication comes of age, inspiring things like emergency structures spun cocoon-like from silk after natural disasters.

3010: Think CAD-CAM DNA. Genetics enters the world of building and product design. Oxman imagines chairs and clothes that grow and modify their behavior according to what people are doing.

Favorite Exchange

Hockenberry noted that Google had just reported $1 billion in mobile advertising revenue, and asked Schmidt if that marked “a tipping point” for the mobile space. Schmidt paused (stopping short of hemming and hawing), then said: “Anything that’s a billion dollars is good.”

At which point Hockenberry quipped: “Let me just write that down.”

Summary Quote

From Hugh Herr, explaining why the people in the lab are so special. “They do not accept the world as it is. They demand change by building alternatives.”

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Monday was Xconomy’s first ever event dedicated specifically to exploring how information technology can be used to improve the healthcare system. The event opened with a keynote address by Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab (our venue for the forum), who used a clip from Saturday Night Live satirizing the Middle Age-technique of bloodletting to demonstrate the sluggish pace at which doctors adopt new technologies. This introduced us to a theme that ran throughout the event: that patients will assume much of the power in thrusting the healthcare industry forward.

John Moore, a physician and MIT Media Lab researcher, offered a look at the technology and interfaces allowing patients to communicate more effectively with caregivers both near and far. Executives from San Francisco-based Keas, the Microsoft Healthcare Innovation Lab, EMC Healthcare Consulting, and Life Image, each took the stage for an “innovation profile.” They talked about how their technologies are putting control of healthcare more in patients’ hands and how the growing volume of data in the medical field will fuel enhanced physician care. Following our rave-drawing executive panel on the Internet’s role in transforming medicine, a slew of audience members lined up to ask questions of the speakers (and in some cases grill them), voicing concern on topics such as the degree of control patients should have in pushing the healthcare system for changes and employers’ management of healthcare costs.

The day concluded with spotlights of companies that are developing technology to make people healthier, including FitnessKeeper, the startup behind the RunKeeper mobile app, and Vitality, a maker of Internet-connected pillboxes designed to keep patients on track with taking their prescription meds. Many of the speakers addressed the myriad inefficiencies in the system, but also acknowledged that patients need to take greater responsibility in leading healthier lifestyles.

Click on the photos in the gallery below for snapshots of some of the speakers and sessions I mentioned.

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There’s perhaps no better place in the Boston area to talk about the future use of information technology in healthcare than the modern building in Kendall Square that houses the MIT Media Lab. The abundant windows and glass interior walls allow natural light to spill onto researchers as they advance new technologies to transform healthcare. Visitors can see across the Charles River to renowned medical care facilities like Massachusetts General Hospital, and in every other direction they can see the largest cluster of biotech research institutions on the East Coast.

It was a great setting for “Healthcare In Transition,” Xconomy’s first forum solely focused on the convergence of information technology and healthcare. Frank Moss, director of the Media Lab, entertained the audience  with a clip from an old “Saturday Night Live” skit that satirizes the backward medical practices of the Middle Ages, when bloodletting was thought to be a panacea for all manner of ailments. Moss’s use of the clip underscored his point that patients, not doctors, need to be the agents of change in the broken healthcare system. Then John Moore, a physician and researcher at the Media Lab, gave us a look at several technologies—including artificial caregivers that talk to patients, a touch-screen interface to foster collaboration between patients and doctors, and a device for patients to use in their homes to communicate with caregivers—which are meant to put patients in better control of their healthcare.

Our presenters dazzled with their inventions to solve problems in healthcare. And there are plenty of problems: the $2.5 trillion dollars spent on healthcare in the U.S. last year accounted for nearly 20 percent of our country’s gross domestic product (GDP), and there is no sign that the gargantuan costs will level off. In the midst of this morass are people who are treating their bodies like dumpsters and taking no responsibility for the expensive results, doctors whose interests are to see lots of these sick people rather than spend more time to keep them healthy, and health insurance outfits that are profiting from the general disarray in this system. Still, the raft of bugaboos in healthcare has given rise to new companies and ideas bent on putting out these fires. And we tried to feature as many of them as we could on Monday.

“We’re headed for disaster,” Moss said. “We have to look at a … Next Page »

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The question of how we pay for healthcare has been under the microscope in recent months, but what can we do to radically improve the care itself? Examining how information technology can help with that challenge is the whole point of Xconomy’s Healthcare in Transition forum, which will be held on Monday afternoon at the MIT Media Lab. And we’ve just added two new speakers—and one very cool demo—to the lineup.

There are just a few seats remaining—you can register and see the entire program here. As you’ll see, we have an incredible roster of speakers, kicked off with a keynote talk by Media Lab director Frank Moss and—just added yesterday—a demo by John Moore, a physician who heads the lab’s New Media Medicine initiative (pictured above with Moss for a profile late last year above, as well as one offering a bird’s eye view of the New Media Medicine lab, below). One of the big points of that effort is to use information technologies—including new computer interfaces and social media—to find new ways of treating illness and, ideally, keeping people healthy in the first place.

We added another speaker yesterday as well—Ed Park, CTO of Athenahealth. Park, whose brother Todd is the chief technology officer of the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, will join an incredible panel moderated by Wired executive editor Thomas Goetz (who authored a book on personalized medicine called The Decision Tree). That panel includes Paul Bleicher, chief medical officer of Humedica and founder of Phase Forward; Daniel Palestrant, founder and CEO of Sermo; American Well CEO Roy Schoenberg; and Joe Kvedar, founder and director of the Center for Connected Health in Boston.

We have rounded out the day with health IT case studies from two public companies, Microsoft (and its Healthcare Innovation Lab) and EMC, and two startups, Newton, MA-based Life Image and Keas, a Bay Area company funded in part by Boston’s Atlas Venture. The program will close with short “bursts” from four pioneering companies out to transform medicine in unique ways—which should provide plenty of fodder for conversation during the networking reception to follow.

Again, we have very few seats left for a very exciting and information afternoon. Register here. We hope to see you there.

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When we came up with “Healthcare In Transition” as the title of our next Xconomy Forum on April 26 (register here), we were thinking of a way to crystallize in a few words the changes and progress being made in the digitization of healthcare for the benefit of humanity. (There were similar discussions here prior to the launch of our Health IT news channel.)

Before coming up with the right name, we had recruited several of the country’s top healthcare entrepreneurs and practitioners to share their stories at the forum, including Paul Bleicher, Daniel Palestrant, and Roy Schoenberg. And Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab, had already stepped up to host the forum at his renowned research center and speak to everyone in attendance about his efforts to develop technologies that empower patients.

Still, we soon encountered the difficulty in putting into a few words what all these pioneers in their respective fields are doing. One could say that Schoenberg’s American Well, of Boston, is revolutionizing the way we think about how patients visit with doctors. The same could be said about how Palestrant and his team at Cambridge, MA-based Sermo are impacting the way physicians interact with each other and share their insights from the front lines of medicine. There are more than a dozen other speakers like them, each looking at healthcare from different angles.

In large part due to the efforts of our speakers and their colleagues, it soon became clear at least to me that our conventional ideas or definitions of healthcare are in flux or transition. Our children may grow up picturing their doctor looking down on her iPhone to view medical information, the same way earlier generations might think about family physicians poring over paper records from overstuffed file folders. (And if American Well has its way, kids will think of their physicians as the people with whom they interact over the Internet when they get sick.) We also wanted to account for advances like we’re seeing at other of our speakers’ companies, such as Keas, SmartBeat, and Vitality, that are advancing technology-enabled products and services to promote wellness and keeping people healthier without having to be admitted to a hospital—or even visit their doctor. (Here’s a full list of our speakers on tap for the forum.)

We’re expecting the talks and discussions among our presenters to provide our attendees with a clearer vision of the evolving healthcare landscape, far above and beyond what we’re seeing with the adoption of electronic health records. There are opportunities for all of us in this future, whether you’re an investor, entrepreneur, inventor, or a patient (we’re all patients, of course). We’re really happy to be able to help bring these efforts to the fore, and we’re hoping to see you on April 26th at the MIT Media Lab.

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New England’s drug developers and device makers are squeezing in a few more partnerships, acquisitions, financings, and strategic moves before the year’s end.

—Acceleron Pharma, the Cambridge, MA-based biotech that’s building its own drug-making infrastructure rather that outsourcing the work, raised $10.9 million in equity financing, according to an SEC filing. $8 million comes from Cambridge-based biotech Alkermes (NASDAQ:ALKS) as part of a licensing deal, and $2.9 million comes from previous backers.

—Lebanon, NH-based Adimab collected milestone payments from partners Merck and Roche and inked new partnerships with Pfizer and one other unnamed drug company. The pharma firms are all turning to Adimab for its drug discovery technology, which promises to dramatically speed the process of finding new antibody-based drugs against its partners’ chosen targets.

—Aveo Pharmaceuticals, a Cambridge-based developer of cancer drugs and genetically engineered mice used for predicting how well such drugs will work in humans, filed paperwork for an IPO that could be worth as much as $86.25 million. The company, a 2002 spinoff of Boston’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, has raised $165 million from investors and pharmaceutical partners.

—Cambridge-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) withdrew its hostile takeover bid for Facet Biotech (NASDAQ: FACT) after failing to convince a majority of shareholders in the Redwood City, CA-based firm to tender their shares.

–-Agios Pharmaceuticals CEO David Schenkein chatted with Luke about a grant the Cambridge-based company has secured from Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, an organization founded by AOL founder Steve Case’s family. Though small ($180,000), the grant should help Agios answer some scientific questions key to developing a new treatment for certain brain cancer patients.

—Javelin Pharmaceuticals (AMEX:JAV) of Cambridge agreed to an all-stock merger with Myriad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:MYRX) of Salt Lake City. The deal would give Javelin shareholders initial control of 41 percent of the stock in the combined company; the figure could climb to as high as 45 percent, depending on if and when Javelin’s lead anti-pain drug, an injected formulation of diclofenac (Dyloject), is approved by the FDA.

—Waltham, MA-based EyeGate Pharma raised $11 million of a planned $22.7 million round of equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. Eyegate is developing technology for delivering drugs directly into the eye.

—Bob visited the a new research group at the MIT Media Lab aimed at transforming healthcare by bringing patients front and center in controlling their own health. The New Media Medicine group, as it’s called, was launched in 2008 under the watch of lab director Frank Moss, who told Bob about the group’s ambitious goals.

—Luke checked in with upstart vaccine developer Genocea Biosciences. The Cambridge-based firm has decided to pursue as its lead product candidate a vaccine that treats a disease (genital herpes) rather than preventing it.

—Lexington, MA-based GI Dynamics garnered European marketing approval for a sleeve-like device that lines the gut to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity. The firm plans to begin selling the device, called the EndoBarrier, in Europe in the first half of next year.

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An avalanche of new technology promises to transform healthcare. You’ve heard a lot about it: Electronic medical records. New ways to mine genomic data to match patients with the right medicines. Everything from iPhone apps and robots to help you exercise or take your meds. Not to mention relatively “old” advances like digital imaging and telemedicine video hookups that connect those in remote places with doctors.

All this and a lot more fits under the broad umbrella of healthcare IT—and in Frank Moss’s view all of it (except maybe the robot part) falls far short of the mark of what technology should do for healthcare. You can find illustrations of many of his ideas—and he’s got a lot of them—in a corner of the MIT Media Lab, where Moss has set up a doctor’s table next to a living room arrangement as part of a research group called New Media Medicine.

The group’s goal is to help incite a revolution in healthcare by bringing patients front and center in controlling their own health. “We’re literally looking to break the 500-year-old asymmetry that exists between the high priests of medicine—the clinicians and the physicians—and ordinary people,” is the way Moss puts it.

That’s Frank Moss. Catchy phrases, bold vision, shaking up the establishment. Which is funny in a way, because he is the establishment. Moss isn’t just some upstart researcher in MIT’s vaunted factory of the future. Since 2006, he’s been the lab’s director. But after a few management-only years, he started his own research effort to look at new ways technology could transform healthcare.

This was an intersection he knew well. Before joining the Media Lab, Moss co-founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a cancer-drug company formed around the idea of using technology to find radical new ways of discovering drugs. And before that, he ran Tivoli Systems, a computer systems management software company that merged with IBM. So Moss (his own PhD is in aeronautics and astronautics) has spent a lot of time on aspects of technology and health and medicine, which is largely why he decided to study the convergence of these fields. To learn more, I recently visited Moss (who’s an Xconomist) in the Media Lab’s new home, which is right next to its original building, on the corner of Ames and Amherst streets in Cambridge, MA. It turns out I was one of the first outsiders to visit the spectacular facility.

New Media Medicine got going in 2008, after Moss got a call from George Demetri, a leading researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Demetri was working on LAM, a disease of the lungs, kidneys, and lymphatic system that primarily strikes women in their child-bearing years and for which there is no known cure. He was interested in using technology to create ways to speed up the hunt for drugs for LAM—in large part by involving the patients themselves in the effort. And he introduced Moss to Amy Farber, a Harvard Medical School physician and founder of the LAM Treatment Alliance who herself has been diagnosed with LAM.

From that seed, Moss’s group has since expanded to span four core areas:

—Biomedical research: The direct result of the partnership with Demetri and the LAM Treatment Alliance, the idea is to help patients with rare diseases participate in the process of finding cures and treatments—what Moss and PhD student Ian Eslick, who heads the work, call “collective discovery.” As you might expect, patients often seem to know things about their own disease that doctors don’t. They try out non-prescribed treatments, experiment with diet and exercise programs, and find ways to share information amongst themselves.

Moss’s group wants to enlist and assist that energy through new computer interfaces, social media tools, and other technologies. Moss stresses that the goal is not to develop better ways for people to commiserate or exchange tips, but to help in accumulating valuable data that can inform treatments and drug discovery. Of traditional drug discovery, with trials, placebos, and such, he says, “In some senses it treats patients like lab rats. What we’re really trying to do is explore through radically new technology how we can unleash the power of patients with rare diseases, or any disease, to really transform the drug discovery process, speed it up, by taking down the barriers between patients and clinicians and drug and biotech companies.” In the scenario he envisions, “Patients use data to create hypotheses and reach conclusions. In other words, they become scientists.”

—Primary care and chronic care transformation: The goal here, says Moss, is to … Next Page »

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The battle is over and the final economic recovery and stimulus bill preserves $15 billion for basic science and over $50 billion for upgrading America’s technology infrastructure. These expenditures will put people to work immediately, provide a foundation for steady economic growth, and set the stage for discoveries that address longstanding human problems.

As a technologist also concerned about the state of society I should be happy. Most of my colleagues in high tech, biotech, and academia are ecstatic. But for me something important is missing.

If we are not only to survive but also thrive in the years ahead, basic science and infrastructure upgrades alone are not enough. We must also invest in radical innovations that deliver venture-capital type returns for both the economy and society. By this I mean returns on investment of up to a thousand to one in less than seven years—in dollars and human good.

To illuminate the kind of possibilities I have in mind, consider a huge segment of society: the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed.

For all the wonders of the digital age, these people remain at the tail end of the technology adoption cycle. Amazing advances at the intersection of the biological, information and social sciences could change this. Soon all technologies—from nanochips to mobile devices to robots—will learn from people, understand them and augment their physical and cognitive abilities.

At the MIT Media Lab, as at many other academic and industrial research organizations, we are exploring how this human/technology collaboration will enable the less fortunate overcome their challenges in ways previously thought impossible. In the course of this research we have discovered that many of our innovations intended for the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed of society have the potential to benefit virtually everyone, simultaneously creating huge economic growth opportunities and vast human good.

This phenomenon is rooted in history. Some of the most pervasive technologies in the world emerged from inquiries into human deficits. The first typewriter proven to work was built by Pelligrino Turri to enable his blind friend to write. The invention of the telephone originated with Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to assimilate his deaf mother into the world of sound.

Here are three examples of research at the Media Lab today which illustrate this:

* There are approximately 10 million amputees in the world today. Professor Hugh Herr and his team aspire to enable each of them to return to complete mobility by inventing smart robotic limbs that mimic human motion. What if we could leverage their innovations to equip every elderly person with an inexpensive and simple exoskeleton that prevents falls? Herr believes this is possible. Falls among people over 65 are projected to account for direct costs of $55 billion a year by 2020 and untold suffering of victims and their families. Eliminating them would provide enormous economic and societal benefit.

* One of every 150 individuals in the US today is diagnosed with autism. Professor Rosalind Picard and her team are inventing novel ways for people with autism to communicate emotion and cognition with others using simple wearable sensors. What if we could adapt these sensors to help businesses truly understand and empathize with customers? Picard is working with many companies to do just that. This is the Holy Grail of commerce and could catalyze huge economic growth and create millions of jobs.

* Patients with rare diseases number 25 million in the US today, but these diseases receive little attention from the biomedical establishment. PhD candidate Ian Eslick is inventing new ways to empower patients to self-organize into communities that discover therapies based on their “everyday experiments” of living with their rare diseases. What if we could extend this model to accelerate discovery for mainstream diseases such as cancer? Eslick’s collaborators in the biomedical world are optimistic. The benefits would be enormous – bringing new medicines to market takes ten years and costs $1 billion today.

In this spirit, I propose we now devote just $1 billion out of the basic science and infrastructure budgets to technologies like those above that offer both innovative approaches to the challenges of the less fortunate and also the potential to translate rapidly to commercial opportunities of scale. Awards ranging from $50,000 to $1 million would go to anyone with the desire to address pressing human needs and the determination to turn concepts into reality.

I realize a proposal like this, coming from the director of the MIT Media Lab, could appear like a bid for a share of the stimulus cash. But the Media Lab derives the vast majority of our funding from private industry (less than 10 percent from government), and our researchers would have to compete on an even footing with everyone.

My point is this. The kind of passion and ingenuity that drove Alexander Graham Bell to find a way to communicate with his deaf mother resides in the hearts and minds of millions of people today—from ordinary citizens to entrepreneurs to academic and industrial researchers—waiting to be unleashed.

Invoking the words of President Obama, this is not a Democrat solution nor a Republican solution, but an American solution.

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I might just have figured out the worst corner in Kendall Square and the best company to have there…It’s a beautiful day here, so I was taking a leisurely after-lunch stroll when I spotted MIT Media Lab director and Xconomist Frank Moss sauntering equally leisurely on the other side of Binney Street at the corner of Third Street. I waited for him as he crossed over to where I was at the southwest corner of the intersection and we started chatting.

My back was to the street, when suddenly Moss grabbed my shoulders and said, “Watch out,” pulling me farther away from traffic. I turned around to see the body of a big truck that was having trouble making the turn onto Third roll into the curb near where I had been standing. Whew! (Thoughts of Xconomy’s “key man” insurance policy danced in my head.)

Not a minute after we had resumed chatting (and yes, maybe I was dumb for turning my back to the street again), Moss reached for me again. This time it was a truck with a crane (or was it a backhoe?) having trouble with the same turn—and the pointy part was aimed right at my head. Did I mention there’s a lot of construction going on in Kendall Square these days?

Now, today wasn’t the first time the Media Lab’s head honcho has bailed me out. Earlier this spring, I was on my way to moderate a panel at the Deshpande Center Ideastream conference when my taxi got into an accident with another cab on Beacon Street in Boston. As the two cabbies were arguing over who was at fault and I was fretting about being late for the conference, I was able to reach Moss on his cell (he was on my panel) and he swooped by in his cab and whisked me to the conference.

Thanks Frank, again.

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Last week saw new filings for both an IPO and an SPO. Could the climate for exits be getting a little better? (Seems like it would be hard for it to get much worse.) Here’s the news on those filings, and the rest of the recent deals.

—Codon Devices, a Cambridge, MA-based startup focusing on applications of synthetic biology, settled a patent suit it filed last March against Bothell, WA-based Blue Heron Biotechnology.

—MIT Media Lab and Bank of America inked a five-year deal worth $15 to $25 million to create a research center at the Lab to study the future of the banking industry. Media Lab director Frank Moss and MIT professor Deb Roy told Wade the deal was perhaps the biggest corporate sponsorship win in the lab’s history.

—Woburn, MA’s BioTrove, an MIT spinoff that makes tools for life sciences research, filed for an IPO worth up to $75 million. BioTrove’s investors include Catalyst Health and Technology Partners, CB Health Ventures, Zero Stage Capital, Echelon Ventures, and Fletcher Spaght.

—Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced it would shell out about $84 million for the UK-based consulting firm Conchango, which specializes in custom implementations of Microsoft enterprise software.

—Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) of Woburn, MA, filed for a secondary offering worth up to $101 million; all the proceeds will go to selling stockholders of the text-imaging firm.

—Cambridge, MA-based speech-recognition startup Vlingo raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Yahoo.

—Radius Health, also of Cambridge, raised $28.3 million in second Series C closing from MPM Capital, The Wellcome Trust, HealthCare Ventures, Oxford Bioscience Partners, BB Biotech Ventures, and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership. The new financing, which brings the total raised in the round to $67.5 million, was a planned reward for Radius finishing enrollment in a Phase 2 trial of its lead drug candidate, a treatment for osteoporosis.

—Merrimack, NH’s GT Solar signed $91 million contract with The Silicon Mine, a Dutch photovoltaic manufacturer, to supply equipment for the Netherlands’ first solar-grade silicon plants.

—East Providence, RI-based medical device maker IlluminOss Medical closed a Series B financing from New Leaf Ventures and Foundation Medical Partners worth $11.02 million, according to a report in PE Hub.

—An auction of the assets of the defunct Cambridge, MA, e-commerce startup N2N, scheduled for April 11, was postponed until May 2. Before ceasing operations around Christmas last year, N2N had raised $30 million from General Catalyst Partners and Limited Brands (from which it spun off).

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The Center for Future Banking announced yesterday by the MIT Media Lab and Bank of America is the trailblazing computer lab’s biggest corporate funding win in years—perhaps its biggest ever. But it also represents a new type of industry-academic collaboration for the Media Lab, one in which the company footing the bill will have more say over the questions researchers are studying than previous Media Lab sponsors have been afforded.

That’s the word from Media Lab director Frank Moss and MIT professor Deb Roy, the center’s founding director and principal investigator. I spoke with Moss and Roy yesterday, shortly after MIT released the news that Bank of America will commit at least $15 million, and possibly up to $25 million, over the next five years for research on the future of the banking industry—particularly the ways technology is changing consumers’ experiences of banking and their behavior around saving, spending, risk, and planning. Projects funded through the new center will involve areas as disparate as architect William Mitchell’s studies of the changing ways people interact inside network- and sensor-saturated public buildings and cognitive psychologist (and best-selling author) Dan Ariely’s work on why we often spend money unwisely and other forms of “predictably irrational” behavior. But in a break with past practices with sponsors, Bank of America will help choose the specific questions the researchers consider, and will send visiting fellows to participate directly in the research, according to Moss.

The center’s overall mission is to help the banking industry (and Bank of America in particular) look beyond innovations such as online banking and prepare for the field’s long-term future. “If you look at the big picture of banking for the past decade or 15 years, they have been in the process of re-architecting from the back office on out, with a new focus on consumer banking and consumer services,” Moss says. “They’ve done a great job at Bank of America and other banks of providing self-service access to back-office things that were previously only in the realm of people inside the bank. But the whole world that their customers are in is changing—and what those customers are doing is dramatically changing, as they change their social habits and engage in social networks, and communicate in different ways—and they are asking the question, ‘What is the next step beyond giving customers access to information?’ How can banks be a new factor in the lives of customers?”

These are exactly the kinds of question the Media Lab is used to asking about other industries, such as the news business, robotics, education, and entertainment. But beginning with the Bank of America partnership, it may be investigating these questions with a slightly more practical bent.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, under the leadership of co-founder Nicholas Negroponte (now director of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation), the Media Lab attracted a flood of industry research dollars—all in spite of a tradition of “open IP” that bars sponsors from having exclusive access to the work produced. But after Negroponte gave up executive leadership of the organization in 2000—and especially after the dot-com bust brought the days of abundant funding to an end—it appeared to many outsiders that the Media Lab was without a single strong leader who could sway contributors to loosen their purse-strings unconditionally.

When Moss was appointed director in February 2006, he said it was time to apply a business leader’s sensibility to solving the lab’s financial problems, and to better accommodate the needs of the lab’s sponsors. “What has changed over the past seven or eight years is that simply coming here and rubbing shoulders with very smart, creative people is often not enough for our sponsors,” Moss told MIT’s Technology Review magazine shortly after his appointment. “They need us to help them make a connection between … Next Page »

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the great honor of attending Xconomy Forum: The Future of Innovation in New England. As I met some fantastic angel investors and shook hands with iRobot CEO Helen Greiner, I felt the strange euphoric giddiness once only reserved for Christmas mornings. What was I, a lowly and unproven student, doing in the company of giants?

As the forum progressed, my purpose became clear (to me, anyway). The question at hand was what can we do to build more billion-dollar technology companies in Massachusetts? I heard talk of providing free housing, eliminating capital gains taxes, and scratching out non-compete clauses. All of this made sense, and formed an exciting new viewpoint for me. However, where was the talk about connecting with students, sourcing ideas out of academic institutions, and retaining talent? These ideas were raised—mainly by MIT Media Lab head Frank Moss—but never fleshed out. Well, ladies and gentleman (by which I really mean investors), you can’t escape the truth (or a driven undergrad on a late-night sugar high). I present to you my one-man discourse on the following question: “How do I make connections with students, and why should I even care?”

First off, let me give you a peek into the student psyche. Mind you, this reflects the understanding and assumptions of just one MIT senior in Material Science and Engineering. With that disclaimer/personal pitch taken care of, here are some interesting facts:

1. A significant portion of my MIT friends (of which Facebook meaninglessly counts 459) have expressed interest in starting their own businesses. Very few have acted on that interest.
2. Today’s mainstream, aspiring student aims for a job in:
   • Glamorous, lucrative, ambition-drenched Wall Street
   • Prestigious, door-opening, generalist-friendly consulting
   • Young, hip, cool Google/Apple
3. You have networks. So do we.
   • All the entrepreneurs in each class know who each other are.
   • We go to dinners together. We brainstorm with each other. We share our dreams of bootstrapping a billion-dollar startup with one another.
   • We host mini conferences together. You probably haven’t heard of them. Maybe you never will.

So, you may ask, “what does this all mean to me?” Well, note that you are not involved in any of the above hopes, dreams, or activities—all of which can profoundly affect whether and how today’s students become tomorrow’s innovators and entrepreneurs. I take great pride in knowing that my fellow MIT students are going to be the world’s best scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, most of these students are not likely to help you in your efforts to make money, change the world, or whatever else it is that drives you. Why is that? Because the vast majority of students fall into one of the following four categories:

1. They don’t know you exist
2. They don’t trust you (read: vulture capitalists)
3. They are intimidated by you
4. They haven’t had the opportunity to meet you

Now, I am not suggesting that you, as a venture capitalist or angel investor, should chill at MIT looking to meet students. We both know that you don’t have the time for that. Instead, I am suggesting that you connect with major network nodes within the MIT student-entrepreneur community. Get to know the student who knows all the entrepreneurs and has the talent and drive to make something of himself/herself, and you get the value of their network as well. And as technology continues to evolve, disciplines continue to merge, and systems become more complex, the value of that student network will continually increase.

So how do you find these superstars? You don’t! Truth is, they find you. All you need to do is eliminate category four above and create the opportunity from them to find you. Now this is where I propose a groundbreaking and immense concept that will change this ecosystem…internships! Silly? I think not. Anticlimactic? Probably, but just listen a little longer. Establishment of a very selective internship program at your firm or angel group will:

1. Boost your reputation at MIT
2. Encourage entrepreneurship at MIT
3. Establish student connections that will provide great returns
4. Increase the quality and number of ideas making it through your filters

Are these investments in the MIT community worth it? Frank Moss has challenged VCs to spend 0.1% of their funds on students. Will it kill you to do that, or maybe even to increase that to 0.2%? Internships really do make a difference. I did an internship at incTANK Ventures my sophomore summer, and I can honestly say that you wouldn’t be reading this right now if it wasn’t for the mentorship of firm partners Karl Ruping and Chad Jackson. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing, I’ll let you decide.

Ultimately, I just want to point out that coaxing growth in this region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem requires a multi-pronged approach, so while you’re thinking about housing and contracts, taxes and billion-dollar companies, I’d like to send out a friendly reminder not to overlook the students. Of course, I’m just an undergrad—and what do we know? My guess is it would benefit you, us, and the innovation ecosystem if you found out.

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The surge of major researchers leaving Cambridge’s Mitsubushi Electric Research Laboratory, which we first reported in July, was only the beginning of what’s looking like a steady flow.

Today, we have three more departures to report:

• Ramesh Raskar, an expert in computational photography who will join the Media Lab in the spring of 2008 as an associate professor of media arts and sciences.

• Kathy Ryall, former leader of MERL’s Diamond Touch project, which created a widely emulated multi-user, touch-activated tabletop display. Ryall has joined BAE Systems in Burlington, MA.

• Jonathan Westhues, whose work at MERL focused on building-wide sensor networks, is leaving for a position at Microsoft. At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, Westhues presented work on a system called Buzz that allowed users to visualize the locations of crowds on the conference floor. Westhues is also famous for exposing security flaws in Verichip’s implantable RFID chips.

The latest trio of MERL departures join two previous waves that followed the firing of former research director Joe Marks in October 2006. The first exodus included Paul Dietz, James Frankel, Wojciech Matusik, Baback Moghaddam, Hanspeter Pfister, Chuck Rich, Candy Sidner, and Benjamin Vigoda, all of whom we reported on in late July and early August. Then, in late August we reported that Matusik and two more MERL researchers, Paris Smaragdis and Shai Avidan, had joined the Newton, MA, office of Adobe Systems.

Of the latest departures, Raskar is perhaps the highest-profile—and he was one of the MERL researchers most hotly pursued by outside institutions.

Raskar first became widely known for his work between 1998 and 2003 on systems that meld the images from multiple video projectors into a single seamless image, even on a curved surface such as a dome. More recently, his experiments using specialized aperture masks and digitally timed exposures to selectively block the light that hits a digital camera’s CCD sensor have shown that, in essence, less is more: the less light a camera receives, the more easily the information from the CCD can be reprocessed to achieve effects such as motion deblurring and focus deblurring. Raskar is described by former MERL colleague Baback Moghaddam as “brilliant” and “by many people’s estimation, the rising star in computer graphics.”

At the Media Lab, where he already has an online faculty profile, Raskar is expected to lead the new “Camera Culture” research group, which will work on new types of cameras with “unusual optical elements, programmable illumination, digital wavelength control, and femtosecond analysis of light transport.” The group will look at tools to “decompose pixels into perceptually meaningful components,” according to the site.

Media Lab director Frank Moss says he is “extremely excited” about Raskar’s hiring, for several reasons. “First, his research interests are truly transformational at the human level—capturing and sharing the visual experience beyond traditional photography and video. Ramesh envisions game-changing approaches such as an imperceptible wearable ‘second skin’ and novel cameras for capturing human motion in multiple dimensions. Also, Ramesh is a hands-on type of researcher that will try anything by building it—this is a super addition to our ‘build to learn and learn to build’ culture and will be a big hit with both students and sponsors.”

Moss compares Raskar to Ed Boyden, another recent Media Lab faculty addition who focuses on non-invasive brain-machine interfaces. Boyden and Raskar are both “right at the intersection of the biological, physical and information sciences, the hot spot for future innovation that will improve the human condition and drive commercial innovation in the next decade,” says Moss.

Raskar himself declined to comment for this story. But Joe Marks, the former director of MERL’s research wing, tells Xconomy that Raskar “was among the top talent in the old MERL Research group.” Several industrial labs and universities were competing to hire Raskar away from MERL, Marks says. “I’m sure the MIT Media Lab folks are thrilled to get him, and I’m glad he has landed at a place where he can continue to pursue his research agenda with great colleagues and students.”

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I don’t know if the cold medicine was getting to me or what, but venture capitalist Michael Greeley was sounding awfully like a socialist for a minute there last night at the Xconomy Forum.

Greeley—a general partner at IDG Ventures, president of the New England Venture Capital Association, and an Xconomist—was moderating a spirited discussion on the future of innovation in New England. He had lit a fire under the tushes assembled in the MIT Media Lab’s Bartos Theatre by offering prizes for the most provocative question and for the most lively question. (The latter is a bit of an inside joke; I’ll explain in a bit.)

Taking the prize for most provocative—a Roomba generously donated by iRobot 
co-founder and chairman Helen Greiner, who was one of the panelists joining Greeley on stage—was a question from Cambridge Innovation Center cofounder Tim Rowe directed at each of the speakers. Noting that Tito Jackson, Industry Director of Information Technology at the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, was in the audience, Rowe asked, roughly: If you were the governor of Massachusetts, what you would do to spark innovation and address the fact that there aren’t more billion-dollar companies being formed in Massachusetts? (The billion-dollar-company issue was a central focus of last night’s discussion.)

Here’s where Greeley went momentarily pink on us, suggesting that the state should offer free housing for all graduates of Harvard, MIT, and the like. “It’s a tragedy that we educate these people and they leave,” he added. Of course, Greeley also said that as governor he’d take the capital gains tax to 0 percent, which was much more in line with what I’d expect from a VC, if a bit of an expansion of gubernatorial power.

Media Lab Director Frank Moss, another of last night’s panelists (and another Xconomist), went in the opposite direction on this question, though to similarly provocative effect. “I don’t think that the opportunities we have in front of us are going to be much influenced by government policy,” Moss said. What Moss advocated instead was, among other things, for the venture community to forge a new relationship with academia, getting involved with budding inventors and entrepreneurs by supporting them in some fashion while they are still students. With government and industry funding for basic research falling, Moss said, … Next Page »

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Innovation springs from diversity. And bringing together people and ideas from diverse backgrounds, fields, and experience to help explore and drive innovation is core to Xconomy’s mission. We’re trying to do that online, through both our editorial coverage and our Xconomist Forum, which we hope add a fresh, more personal, and insightful dimension to the innovation landscape here in New England. But we also seek to do that person-to-person through our event series, which began last week with our gala launch party.

Now, though, we’re moving into higher gear, announcing our first Xconomy Forum: The Future of Innovation in New England. The forum will be held on December 5, at the MIT Media Lab. Our premise is that New England is home to the world’s greatest concentration of elite universities, large corporations and startups, venture-capital and business leadership, great research hospitals, and science and technology expertise spanning everything from life sciences to energy to robotics and IT. But how well do we collaborate and share ideas? How well do we identify and tackle the challenges that are critical to the region’s future and the planet’s? In short, is our region living up to its full potential—and how can we reach the next level of success?

We’ve put together a fantastic group of leaders from the local innovation community to discuss this critical subject. They are a trio of entrepreneurs who each have created public companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars that are making the world a safer, more efficient, and healthier place: Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman, iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT); Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) and several IT companies; and Christoph Westphal, CEO and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SIRT), who’s also co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) and Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MNTA).

Moderating this great group will be IDG Ventures general partner Michael Greeley, president of the New England Venture Capital Association, who has made it part of his NEVCA mission to help spur local entrepreneurs and company leaders to take on bigger challenges and create new, billion-dollar businesses.

It’s bound to be a fun and informative discussion, and we hope you can join us. Registration is free, but limited, so sign up fast. Click here to register.

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