Over the last week, 10 lucky companies have been getting the calls from HAXLR8R: they’ve been admitted to the inaugural session of the startup world’s newest venture incubator. Following the popular model pioneered by TechStars and Y Combinator, HAXLR8R will provide teams with a stipend of $6,000 per founder and about three months of mentorship, in return for a 6- to 10-percent equity stake. At the end of the session in June, companies will pitch their businesses to investors at a “demo day” in San Francisco.

There are just two big differences between HAXLR8R and all the other incubators. First, the program isn’t admitting software or Internet startups. It’s designed for companies building real stuff, rather than the usual mobile apps or consumer Web services. Second, it’s not actually located in San Francisco or any of the other typical U.S. startup hubs, like Boston, New York, or Boulder. In fact, it’s not even in the same hemisphere. HAXLR8R will gather its first class of startups at the Shiling Industrial Park in the Nanshan district of Shenzhen, a high-tech manufacturing city north of Hong Kong.

A recruiting poster for HAXLR8R

The theory behind the new program is that successful gadget builders—whether they’ve developed a toy, an appliance, or some kind of consumer device for health, fitness, or travel—will eventually have to figure out where to mass-produce their products. And chances are the answer will be China. Despite the new scrutiny being applied to U.S. consumer electronics companies over labor conditions in Chinese plants, China still has the world’s richest supply of low-cost manufacturing facilities, along with the engineers who know how to get them tooled up to make new things.

But to get something built in China, you have to know who to talk to, and the program at HAXLR8R is intended to smooth the way. Startups in the program will be “coming into an environment where they can work on their product and figure out how to manufacture it,” says Cyril Ebersweiler, one of the program’s co-founders. “They will get instant access to relationships which would take a year or more to develop on their own.”

HAXLR8R finished its selection process last week and began notifying the admitted companies. Ebersweiler says the program received “way more applicants than we expected,” from all over the world. The majority of the applications came from U.S. startups, but the organization also heard from companies in Europe, Asia, and India. The mix of applicants included “startup entrepreneurs, hackers, makers, and [people from the] open source movement; social entrepreneurs as well,” Ebersweiler says. “Most of the applicants have a working prototype.”

The 15-week HAXLR8R program starts on March 1. Teams will spend the first 13 weeks in Shenzhen, building their prototypes and gathering feedback from potential customers. Then they’ll decamp to San Francisco, where they’ll … Next Page »

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Long hours, breakneck deadlines, high stakes, and conflicting advice—it’s all part of the package when entrepreneurs submit a few months of their life to an incubator program in hopes of creating the next big thing. Not surprisingly, some groups crumble under the pressure, says TechStars Seattle director Andy Sack.

“The number one risk facing your company—whatever your business is—is internal combustion. That means team breakdown,” Sack said last night at a preview of the Mirosoft Kinect Accelerator program in Seattle.

Microsoft is partnering with TechStars for the three-month accelerator, which will be housed in Microsoft offices in the South Lake Union neighborhood—right next to Amazon headquarters.

Teams that qualify for the program will be developing businesses that use the Kinect on the Xbox 360 video game console and the Windows operating system. They’ll get access to a star-studded cast of mentors, including people inside Microsoft who are pushing some of the boundaries of the Kinect device, and a $20,000 investment from TechStars in exchange for 6 percent of the company.

Applications are due by tomorrow (Feb. 8), and hundreds have already poured in, with ideas ranging from advertising and entertainment to healthcare, education, and even manufacturing. The final 10 proto-companies to make the accelerator will begin their work in Seattle on April 2.

Sack and 2011 TechStars Seattle alum Russell Benaroya, co-founder and CEO of EveryMove, were on hand to give possible accelerator applicants an idea of what’s required to thrive in a TechStars-style program. They didn’t pull any punches, describing an intense experience that doesn’t always end well.

“There is nowhere to hide when you are surrounded by nine other teams that are, while collaborateive, also competitive,” Benaroya said.

One unnamed team in the last TechStars Seattle group “blew up” on the first day, Benaroya said. Another, LikeBright, broke apart shortly after the program’s Demo Day in November and has regrouped with one of the original founders taking on a new technical partner, Sack said.

Even groups without significant internal conflicts can run through huge changes to their idea or approach at a dizzying pace, and face what Sack called “mentor whiplash” from getting opposing advice from seasoned entrepreneurs and investors helping out with the program.

It’s the entrepreneurs’ job, Sack said, to take all the criticism and advice, but make their own decision about the best path for their startup. That instantly reminded me of this recent story about TechStars Seattle 2011 grad Romotive, which said a lot of mentors didn’t think their concept for a smartphone-driven toy robot would fly until a campaign on Kickstarter showed significant support for the idea.

But I don’t want to give the impression that their advice was all a huge buzzkill. It was candid advice for people considering taking the plunge into an intense experience that can hone their ideas into viable businesses. Seven of the 10 TechStars Seattle companies from last year have already raised financing, Sack said, with another apparently on its way. That includes Benaroya’s company EveryMove, an online platform where workers can earn rewards for healthy behavior—it’s raised $1.5 million so far, and is on track to make about $500,000 in revenue this year, he said.

“I guarantee you will put in more energy and effort—I don’t know if I’ll say more than you ever have in your life … but we are going to have fun while we work hard,” said Dave Malcolm, a former Microsoftie and TechStars mentor who is directing the Kinect Accelerator.

Here’s a short video of Microsoft’s JP Wollersheim showing off the Kinect hardware with Windows via the iClone 3D animation software from a company called Reallusion.

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In enterprise data centers, servers and storage go together like hot dogs and buns. One isn’t much good without the other. But if your specialty is baking buns, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how to improve the dogs. And that, in essence, is one of the limitations that Hopkinton, MA-based EMC has been trying to overcome lately.

The Hopkinton, MA-based company (NYSE: EMC) is one of the world’s leading vendors of storage arrays for enterprise data centers. Because it has always thought of itself as a storage company, it has never crossed the line into building components for servers. And that’s how, even though EMC was first to market with Flash-based memory technology for enterprises, a much smaller company, Utah-based Fusion-IO, was able to come out of nowhere in 2005 and take the lead in a burgeoning new market for solid-state Flash memory chips for servers. Today HP, IBM, and Dell all put Fusion-IO’s ioDrive cards in their servers; the company went public last year and is valued at around $2.1 billion.

But it’s a natural market for EMC, and it wants in, badly. At an event yesterday in San Francisco, EMC took the wraps off a competitor to ioDrive called VFCache. It’s basically a card full of Flash modules that fits into a “PCI Express” or PCIe slot in a computer server, where it provides an instant memory upgrade. That allows the CPU to get work done faster, without having to slow down to wait for data from the storage array.

EMC's Pat Gelsinger introducing VFCache, aka Project Lightning

How EMC came back from behind in the server-side Flash business is an interesting story of internal innovation. Pat Gelsinger, president and chief operating officer of EMC’s flagship Information Infrastructure Products division, told me yesterday that to help EMC catch up with Fusion-IO, he authorized an unusual skunk works project, with most of the engineering team isolated in EMC’s facility in Tel Aviv, Israel. “We hired the very best people and treated it like an internal startup,” Gelsinger said. “We set incredibly focused goals for the team. We told them not to go to corporate meetings,” but to concentrate solely on “Project Lightning,” the code name for the VFCache product line.

That was the only way to get the job done once EMC had determined that it had to build, not buy, its own alternative PCIe Flash product, Gelsinger says. “Organic innovation is very hard in a big, successful company,” he says. “There are a lot of antibodies saying, ‘No, you can’t do that, we can’t go that fast.’ There are a thousand reasons these things can slow down in a company. So having a very hands-on, top-down focus, combined with a very maniacal, senior, aggressive team, is really what’s required.”

Flash memory, a technology pioneered by Toshiba, is far more expensive than hard drive storage, but it also works much faster. Companies have begun to put extra Flash-based “tiers” of memory between servers and storage arrays in order to address the gap created by ongoing improvements in CPU speeds. Hard drives just can’t read or write data as fast as today’s multicore processors can suck it in and spit it out, which means CPUs are often sitting idle, waiting for data to arrive.

To speed things up, EMC has been adding Flash memory to its storage arrays since 2008—in fact, it has shipped more Flash memory to enterprise customers than all other vendors combined. But before Project Lightning, it hadn’t tried putting Flash into servers themselves, where the benefits are … Next Page »

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Applied Proteomics hasn’t exactly been operating in stealth mode since it was founded five years ago. Co-founders David Agus, a cancer specialist at USC, and Danny Hillis, the MIT-trained computer scientist, gave TedMed talks about the startup’s technology, which provides a 40-gigabyte snapshot of all the proteins circulating in a drop of blood. By pure coincidence, I watched John Stewart’s Feb. 2 interview with Agus last night on “The Daily Show.”

“Danny and David had the foresight to build the tool before trying to use the tool,” says John Blume, a molecular biologist who joined API in 2008 as chief scientific officer. “Although the company wasn’t in stealth mode, the first several years were spent in taking the time to make it right, and then to use it and avoid some of the stumbling blocks.”

Now Applied Proteomics is raising the curtain on several steps that mark its progress beyond a seed-stage startup that was incubating at Applied Minds, an industrial think tank that Hillis founded in Glendale, CA, with a colleague from Disney Imagineering. After moving the headquarters to San Diego late last year, Applied Proteomics is today naming a new CEO—Peter Klemm, a veteran in molecular diagnostics and the former CEO of Lexington, MA-based Predictive Biosciences.

Danny Hillis

The company known as API says it also secured $22.5 million last June in Series B funding from Domain Associates (San Diego partner Jim Blair joined the board), Seattle’s Vulcan Capital, and returning angel investors. Klemm tells me the company raised $4 million from angel investors (who prefer to go unnamed) in what amounted to API’s Series A round in 2007.

David Agus

API’s goal, Klemm says, is nothing less than to “elevate molecular diagnostics to another level beyond the genome” by measuring the proteins made by genes—a long-sought technology that is expected to help doctors improve medical care for individual patients. Because proteins carry out most cellular functions, the company says a snapshot of all the proteins circulating in the body at a given moment represents “the most powerful source of information” in terms of understanding a patient’s health status.

Quantifying all the proteins in the body, Klemm says, can help doctors optimize the course of treatment for individual patients by making it easier to identify the specific drugs that would have the greatest effect on blocking specific proteins or signaling pathways, which can vary dramatically from person to person.

In a statement from the company, Hillis says, “For the first time, we can look at all the proteins in the body with remarkable specificity and sensitivity and use proteomic technology to create … Next Page »

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—Peter Clarke of EE Times reported that San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) has acquired Andover, MA-based Pixtronix, a startup founded in 2005 to develop Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) display technology. Qualcomm, which confirmed the deal with EE Times but provided no details or press release about the deal, reportedly spent between $175 million and $200 million for Pixtronix. The Massachusetts company founded by Nesbitt Hagood raised more than $53 million in venture funding, athough the Pixtronix technology has not yet been introduced to the market. Qualcomm has spent years working to refine its own MEMS-based display technology—known as Mirasol.

—More than 200 entrepreneurs turned out to hear TechStars founder and CEO David Cohen talk about the startup accelerator program he helped to launch in Boulder, CO, in 2007. Cohen told the rapt audience during a San Diego Tech Founders meetup that the Internet software community in Boulder “is just totally on fire” compared to five years ago. This was the night after Cohen met with local tech leaders to discuss the steps that helped boost the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Colorado college town. Xconomy San Diego arranged the dinner discussion, and I plan to have more about our conversation later this week.

—Meteorologist Stephen Bennett and investor John Plavan founded San Diego’s EarthRisk Technologies in mid-2010 with the idea of creating predictive analytics technology that could extend the range of weather long-term forecasts from two weeks to 30 or 40 days. They are now providing their Web-based technology to commodities and energy-trading firms on a subscription-basis. Bennett told me the core business at EarthRisk Technologies is focusing on extreme weather events—heat waves, frigid cold snaps, and storms because extreme events are the ones with the highest impact.

—Mark Heesen of the National Venture Capital Association gave a good-news, bad-news presentation to the San Diego Venture Group last week. Among the interesting bright spots: Corporate venture capital is growing and San Diego-based Qualcomm now ranks as the nation’s second-largest corporate venture outfit. The bad news? U.S. VC firms invested $28 billion in startups last year, but only … Next Page »

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Money pumped into San Diego’s regional economy by venture capital firms hit an eight-year low in 2011, with a total of $829 million invested in 104 startups throughout the year, according to the MoneyTree VC survey being released today. The 2011 deal count was the lowest seen in San Diego since 1997.

The 2011 numbers represent a 5 percent decline in dollars and a 17 percent decline in deals in comparison with the previous year, when VCs put a total of $871.7 million in 126 startups, according to the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and Thomson Reuters.

The decline in San Diego’s venture activity ran counter to the nationwide trend in 2011, in which $28.5 billion was invested in 3,673 deals—and ranks as the third-highest total in the past decade. The U.S. numbers represent a 22 percent increase over the $23.6 billion in 2010 VC funding and a 4 percent rise over the previous year’s deal count, according to the MoneyTree analysis.

The overall U.S. trend depicted in the MoneyTree Report generally agrees with the rise in venture activity nationwide that CB Insights charted last week in its 2011 findings. CB Insights, the New York financial analysis firm, said the $30.6 billion VCs invested in 3,051 deals throughout 2011 was a 10-year high in terms of both dollars and deals. (The two sets of numbers don’t line up exactly because the firms use different methods to collect their venture data, and count dollars and deals in different ways.)

In the fourth quarter of 2011, the MoneyTree Report shows that venture capitalists invested $269 million in 23 deals in the San Diego area, with life sciences startups in diagnostics, drugs, and devices accounting for roughly two-thirds of the transactions. It represented a … Next Page »

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For the first time ever, the International Consumer Electronics Show created a zone called Eureka Park specifically to showcase startups from across the country. Fledgling companies have come to CES before and can still be found elsewhere at the conference, but Eureka Park is a new way to highlight them at the 2012 show. At an event where companies such as LG and Samsung occupy huge territory, startups such as Kogeto in New York and Flingo in San Francisco have space at The Venetian to stand out, albeit away from the digital carnival at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Kogeto CEO and founder Jeff Glasse made his way to CES bringing his company’s panoramic camera lens attachment called Dot iCONIC. “Of all the events we’ve attended with technology companies, this is the first place where I’m not the only hardware guy in the room,” Glasse says. “That’s kind of nice.”

The Dot iCONIC attaches to smartphones’ camera lenses and lets users capture panoramic 360-degree video. The lenses went on sale last October for the Apple iPhone 4 and 4S. Glasse also brought to CES demo versions of lenses for Android phones, which he expects to release within the first half of this year.

Glasse says grouping startups together at CES is an interesting move by the conference hosts to keep the event relevant as the dynamics of innovation change. “I felt like, as a [CES] outsider, that place’s days are numbered,” he says. “I think they’re adapting to a world where there are things like TechCrunch Disrupt.”

Compared with the show floor at the convention center, Eureka Park looked a bit barebones with its small booths and tables, but Spartan aesthetics tend to go hand-in-hand with startups. Some startups at CES could still be found outside of Eureka Park. Shodogg from Valhalla, NY, for example, set up a more elaborate display in another part of The Venetian to debut its technology for sharing video across Web-connected devices. Shodogg has raised $1.7 million from angel investors, and its backers include actor Seth Green, known for such roles as Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies and co-creator of the “Robot Chicken” television show on Cartoon Network (he’s the voice of Chris Griffin on “Family Guy” too). Green dropped by the company’s display to meet with Shodogg CEO Herb Mitschele (see photo above).

While some big electronics players such as Samsung have proprietary platforms to share video among their own devices, Shodogg is agnostic. Shodogg users can share content regardless of the brand of television, computer, or smartphone. “It’s a validation of our model,” says Rajiv Lulla, Shodogg’s chief innovation officer, regarding the moves by major electronics makers.

Back in Eureka Park, MIT spinout Lantos Technology, a startup in Cambridge, MA which raised $4.1 million last August, set up … Next Page »

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San Diego’s MicroPower Technologies, founded in 2008 to develop ultra-low power wireless video surveillance products, said it has landed the first installment of a $6.5 million round of funding from Motorola Solutions Venture Capital and an undisclosed private fund.

The Series C funding represents MicroPower’s first institutional investment. Motorola Solutions Venture Capital is the investment arm of Schaumburg, IL-based Motorola Solutions, the company that retained Motorola’s mainstay radio, bar-code scanner, and RFID business in last year’s separation from Motorola’s mobile business.

MicroPower was initially funded by Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels, and was one of the first startups in San Diego to take advantage of the free EvoNexus incubator program established by CommNexus, a local nonprofit industry group.

The company says it plans to use the funding to step-up marketing of its wireless surveillance camera and related technology. The company’s flagship product, the Rugged-i wireless video camera, eliminates data and power cables and substantially cuts installation costs, such as the expense of pulling cable.

MicroPower has targeted commercial and government customers, including border protection, retail, education, and public utility markets. The company also says its wireless networking technology could be incorporated into wearable video cameras by law enforcement, paramedics, first responders, and military personnel.

Last year, MicroPower was named as a high tech award winner in the communications products and services category by the San Diego chapter of Tech America and as 2011 new product of the year by Security Products magazine.

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[Editor's Note: We asked selected Xconomists a series of questions designed to zero in on the big issues of the year, including "What issues would you be willing to throw a punch over?"]

There are two.

The first is the state of the patent system, particularly as it affects computing hardware and software (broadly construed). Just about everything about the system is broken. In my view it is working strongly against real innovation. Major companies amass enormous portfolios of questionable patents that they can use to bludgeon one another (until they sign cross-licensing agreements, at which point only the little guys are left to be bludgeoned). Organizations that are not in the innovation business acquire portfolios that they assert for profit alone. I have absolutely nothing against the licensing of substantive innovations by those in the innovation business, whether by major companies or little guys . But much of what goes on today does not fall into this category, and something needs to change. I am not sufficiently expert to make appropriate detailed proposals, but I am sufficiently expert to smell a rat.

The second is our “blame the teachers and the teachers unions” approach to improving K-12 education. Yes, K-12 education is a mess, more of a mess in the U.S. than in most industrialized nations, and more of a mess in Washington than in almost all other technology states. (For some facts to support the latter assertion, see this.)

But blaming teachers and unions is a cheap way to avoid confronting the many real problems that plague our K-12 education system and are leading us rapidly down the road to an ever-more-stratified society of haves and have-nots, threatening the raw material upon which the innovation economy depends. Here, too, I don’t have an easy or quick solution—there isn’t one. But we are not going to make progress by sitting around playing the blame game.

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‘Tis the season to reflect on the past year and take a look at some of Xconomy Boston’s top stories.

As usual, these aren’t necessarily the highest-traffic stories (though in some cases they are). They are stories that exemplify what we are trying to deliver to our readers every day—narratives about the people, companies, and ideas that are shaping the future of technology, life sciences, and cleantech in our region, and across the country.

It was very hard to pick just 20 stories, like I usually do. I guess that’s a good thing. So I fudged it and actually picked slightly more—a dozen tech stories, and a dozen life sciences and cleantech stories.

In any case, our editor’s picks for 2011 span the fields of software, mobile, Internet, security, health IT, biotech, life sciences, energy, and hardware/materials.

They range in topic from people stories (Adriana Jenkins, Steve Jobs) to company strategies (Acme Packet, Vertex) to trends and analysis (big data, biotech risks); from universities (Harvard accelerator) to startups (MedicalRecords, Harvest Power) to big companies (IBM, Pfizer, Biogen Idec); from Q&As (Rob Day, Jim Baum) to company profiles (EnVivo, MC10) to news features (testing the nation’s first car collision-avoidance system); and from big community projects (Entrepreneur Walk of Fame) to cheeky area clusters (top 10 “boring” tech companies).

Here they are in their full glory, our top 20-ish stories of the year, sorted by sector:

Top 12 Tech Stories

Adriana Jenkins, Boston Biotech PR Maven, Dies from Breast Cancer at 41

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Carlsbad, CA-based Razer bills itself as a maker of “professional gaming” hardware, which always struck me as an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp.”

Nevertheless, Razer just demonstrated how serious it is, raising $50 million in a Series A round venture round led by the IDG-Accel China Capital Fund, a global investment fund established by IDG and Accel Partners.

Razer was founded in 1998 by Min-Liang Tan and Robert Krakoff, and says its capital previously came from angel investors and the company’s own global operations. Over the past 13 years or so, Razer says its operations have grown to hundreds of employees in nine cities, including San Francisco, Hamburg, Seoul, Shanghai and Singapore.

“We took a long time raising our first VC round as games like Battlefield 3 kept us pretty busy recently,” CEO Tan says in a statement from the company. “More importantly, we took our time selecting an institutional investor as we wanted to find a partner that understood our commitment to gaming and our no-compromise attitude to designing products. Plus these guys didn’t freak out when we disappeared for a week in the middle of the deal when Skyrim launched.”

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The evolution of computer security is not merely some dark mirror, passively reflecting advances in technology. While technology provides new opportunities for threats, these become true dangers only when there is a motivation to exploit them and a means to do so.

Stefan Savage, writing in The New York Times, Dec. 5, 2011.

By his own admission, Stefan Savage’s interests are all over the map.

Savage is a professor of computer science at the University of California, San Diego, who works on computer and network security issues with researchers at the University of Washington, where he got his PhD, as well as UC Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and elsewhere.

Last year, a team led by Savage and UW’s Tadayoshi Kohno showed that a hacker with physical access to an automotive electronic control unit could alter software to stop the engine, disable the brakes, and carry out other nefarious tasks. In follow-up research published earlier this year, Savage and company said they had succeeded in performing similar tasks remotely—using the cellular phone in a car to insert malicious software that enabled them to override various vehicle controls. (Their findings can be found at the website of the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, a UW-UCSD collaboration.)

Savage also has helped lead wide-ranging studies of Internet spam, outlining the global “ecosystem” that supports compromised accounts, spam mailers, credit cards, e-mail lists, and other tools of the trade. This work led to a comprehensive study of just how much revenue spam advertising can generate, even when most of the spam is blocked. In a recently published paper, the scientists from Berkeley and San Diego counted more than 100,000 orders a month in just one spam network. The group also offered a “rough but well-founded” estimate that revenue generated from spam-advertised pharmaceutical drugs amounts to tens of millions of dollars a year.

He recently fielded some questions from Xconomy:

Xconomy: You’ve been involved in so many different aspects of cyber-security. What do you see as the single biggest danger in … Next Page »

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Connect, the non-profit group that supports innovation and entrepreneurship, named San Diego’s eight most-innovative products of 2011—and bestowed its highest honor on Gen-Probe (NASDAQ: GPRO) for its nucleic acid test for screening donated blood.

Connect gave Gen-Probe its William W. Otterson Award for its Procleix test, which won FDA approval in 2002, saying Procleix has significantly increased the safety of the world supply of donated blood by dramatically reducing the risk of contracting HIV, Hepatitis C, Hepatitis B, and West Nile virus from a blood transfusion. Previous recipients of the award include Intuit for TurboTax, Qualcomm for CDMA technology, and General Atomics for the Predator unmanned spy plane.

But the afternoon belonged to Bill Walton, the legendary basketball player and Grateful Dead fan, who served as Connect’s master of ceremonies at the luncheon ceremony Friday. With his extensive experience as a sports broadcaster and counter-culture icon, the NBA Hall of Famer delivered a moving tribute to the spirit of entrepreneurship and the determination needed to overcome adversity.

Almost three years after undergoing a new type of spinal surgery that San Diego-based NuVasive (NASDAQ: NUVA) helped to pioneer, Walton proclaimed himself “the luckiest man alive.” The injury-prone basketball great has said that his back pain was so intense before the surgery that he considered suicide. Now living without pain for the first time in years, Walton is a walking testimonial for NuVasive, and a life-affirming example of what a breakthrough in medical technology can accomplish.

In a commentary that was vintage Walton, “the Big Red Deadhead” intertwined the lyrics of several Grateful Dead tunes in a paen to entrepreneurship and San Diego’s Challenged Athlete Foundation. He urged entrepreneurs to defy those who say, “that will never work,” likening their experience to handicapped athletes who struggle to compete. And he reminded the audience that in “Stella Blue,” the late Jerry Garcia sang, “It all rolls into one and nothing comes for free.”

Connect says it received more than 140 nominations—a record number— from local companies for its 24th annual “Most Innovative New Product Awards.” In one category, software, there were a record 37 applications, more than any other category in the history of the event.

To be eligible, the product must have been developed in the San Diego area, introduced between March 2010 and September 2011, and generated sales revenue. More than 850 people attended the awards luncheon, which offers awards in biomedical diagnostics and research tools, medical products, software, communications and IT, cleantech, aerospace and security technologies, hardware and general technology, and action and sport technologies.

The 2011 winners of … Next Page »

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Bedford, MA-based Zink Imaging said this week it has closed $35 million in Series B financing led by Genii Capital. The company, whose name stands for “zero ink,” is developing technology for inkless digital printers that can be attached to or integrated with cameras, consoles, and other devices.

Zink’s technology was conceived at Polaroid Research Labs. It uses special “paper” consisting of dye crystals encased in polymer film. The technique essentially puts color-producing materials in the paper itself, which get activated by thermal print heads, like those used in fax machines. The result is a small color printout of a photo or document, say. The company has partnerships with Polaroid, Dell, and other firms to manufacture devices for consumers.

Zink also announced it has hired former board members and Polaroid veterans Mary Jeffries and Ira Parker as co-CEOs. They succeed former CEO Wendy Caswell (also a former Polaroid exec), who led the company for almost six years since it started in 2005.

My colleague Wade wrote an in-depth profile of Zink back in early 2008. At the time, the startup was about to debut its mobile photo printer at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

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As the third annual mHealth Summit convenes today near Washington, D.C., San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it has formed a new subsidiary, Qualcomm Life, from its wireless health business unit. The wireless technology giant says it also has established a $100 million wireless health investment fund that will be managed by Qualcomm Ventures.

Qualcomm Life is headed by Rick Valencia, a former CEO at San Diego-based ProfitLine who joined Qualcomm a little over a year ago. Valencia previously helped to launch ProfitLine’s multi-billion dollar telecommunications management services business. Qualcomm’s wireless health guru, Don Jones, continues in a similar role at Qualcomm Life as vice president of global strategy and market development.

As part of today’s announcement, Qualcomm also unveiled the 2net Platform and Hub, and a video explaining the technology is available here.

The 2net Hub is a product that plugs into a standard electric outlet—it resembles a simple wireless router—and serves as a gateway to the 2net Platform, which operates as a technology-agnostic, cloud-based service. The platform serves as a kind of universal translator and intermediary that addresses one of the intractable challenges amid the convergence of different wireless health devices, technologies, standards, and systems. Data from the 2net Hub, a user’s mobile phone, or other gateways, is sent to the 2net Platform, where it is encrypted and made available in the cloud to patients, physicians, and other appropriate users. Qualcomm says the system meets medical privacy requirements and works with multiple carriers.

Qualcomm says its 2net Platform and Hub, which are on display at the three-day conference in National Harbor, MD, and will transfer, store, convert, and display a variety of medical device data. More than 40 customers and collaborators are either considering or already integrating with its 2net ecosystem, including Pittsburgh, PA-based BodyMedia, New York’s Hello Health, and San Diego-based ResMed.

In today’s statement, Valencia says, “Qualcomm Life was founded, in part, to assist medical device manufacturers who approached Qualcomm for help when their own wireless connectivity attempts became untenable due to technology selection errors, unscalable deployment models and prohibitively high operational support costs.”

Qualcomm’s 2net Hub device resembles a simple wireless router. Qualcomm says it “seamlessly connects to integrated partner medical devices via shortwave radio, uploading biometric data over the cellular network to the 2net Platform’s data center.”

The company describes its platform and hub as the core for a technology “ecosystem.” Qualcomm also says the devices are individually listed with the FDA as Medical Device Data Systems (MDDS).

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Pixtronix, an Andover, MA-based maker of low-power displays, has been acquired by San Diego tech giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), according to Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. Terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the report cites a price range of $175-200 million, based on sources close to the deal. A source of mine confirmed the deal but couldn’t provide any details on the record.

Pixtronix started in 2005 and has raised a little more than $50 million in venture funding from Atlas Venture, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other investors. The company reportedly has 45 employees, and they’ll stay in Andover. Pixtronix is led by CEO Anthony Zona.

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Last week was the storm before the calm, as a warm front of high-tech news moved through the San Diego region before the Thanksgiving holiday. We’ve got the details here.

—San Diego-based DriveCam said it raised $85 million through a private placement that will be used mostly for its acquisition of RAIR Technologies. As I explained a couple of years ago, DriveCam puts its video data technology on the dashboards of fleet vehicles. Brookfield, WI-based RAIR provides technology that helps U.S. Department of Transportation-regulated fleet operators manage driver qualification requirements, vehicle inspection requirements, hours-of-service logs, and scoring for compliance, safety, and accountability. A New York private equity firm, Welsh Carson Anderson & Stowe, provided the $85 million in investment capital.

—The San Diego Venture Group awarded top honors—and $10,000 in startup capital—to San Diego-based SwoopThat at its annual PitchFest event. More than 70 early stage startups applied for the PitchFest competition, which ended last week in final presentations by SwoopThat, Gamer Grub, and Deal Current Network. SwoopThat helps college students at 2,347 schools nationwide save both time and money by purchasing their textbooks through Web-based technology that matches buyers with sellers of used textbooks. SwoopThat also operates a search engine that provides price comparisons for over 15 million products.

—A model fuels consortium formed six years ago by San Diego-based Reaction Design has developed software that can accurately simulate the formation of soot particulates during internal combustion. The modeling software was developed in anticipation of new engine exhaust regulations aimed to dramatically reduce the size and number of soot particles in gasoline and diesel-powered engines. As I had previously explained, Reaction Design develops software that models gaseous chemical reactions.

—A new San Diego startup, Swarmology, said it has raised $1.2 million as part of its emerging Web-based business, which mines social media as part of an integrated marketing approach for healthcare clients. Pharmaceutical and health IT executive Malcolm Bohm founded Swarmology to analyze online conversations about specific health concerns.

—Austin, TX-based car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler North America, announced the debut of its all-electric car-sharing program in San Diego—the first in North America. The company began deploying 300 zero-emission smart “fortwo” electric-drive vehicles here Friday, and said they are now in service.

—First, IBM’s Watson beat the best players on TV’s Jeopardy! game show. At last week’s SuperData Summit, IBM executive Christine Kretz said the company is now working on … Next Page »

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A 48-percent uptick in new company formations, a funding deal, and two acquisitions made for an encouraging week in San Diego’s innovation economy. This is our roundup of tech sector news.

—The California Public Utilities Commission approved five power purchase agreements that Soitec, the photovoltaic chip maker based Bernin, France, negotiated with San Diego Gas and Electric. The five deals represent a total capacity of 155 megawatts of new solar power for San Diego, according to Soitec. As we explained in April, Soitec says its innovation, which combines concentrating Fresnel lenses and high-performance PV chips, operates twice as efficiently as conventional solar cells. Soitec plans to manufacture its solar modules in the San Diego area, creating about 450 new jobs. Building the solar facility will cost an estimated $500 million.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired HaloIPT, a UK-based startup developing wireless charging technology for electric vehicles. Financial terms were not disclosed. The technology uses inductive power transfer to charge an electric vehicle (EV). The car parks over an electromagnet, which generates an electric field that transfers energy to the EV power system. A couple days after announcing the deal, Qualcomm said it’s planning to carry out a field trial in London that calls for establishing the wireless EV charging systems for 50 vehicles.

—Cubic (NYSE: CUB), the San Diego defense contractor, conducted a series of local exercises to demonstrate new “combat ID” technology, which is intended to reduce friendly fire casualties among U.S. troops in combat. The technology integrates laser targeting with radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) and a GPS-based system in a rifle-mounted targeting scope, according to Cubic. The RFID tag, mounted on each soldier’s helmet, transits a coded radio signal that enables users to distinguish between friend and foe combatants.

—The San Diego-based Active Network (NYSE: ACTV) paid $21.5 million to acquire RTP (also known as Resort Technology Partners), a specialized IT company in Colorado that provides online reservation and registration services for Vail and other ski resorts. The Active Network already provides Web-based registration services for … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it’s rolling out the first wireless electric vehicle charging trials next year in London—just two days after the mobile giant said it acquired HaloIPT, a London startup developing the wireless charging technology.

In a statement today, Qualcomm says it is collaborating with the UK government, as well as the Mayor of London’s office and Transport for London to deliver the trial.

As many as 50 specially modified electric vehicles (EVs) will take part in the trial, including electric taxis, according to a news report from London.

In the United States, San Francisco-based Ecotality has been installing 15,000 charging in 16 cities throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Tennessee, Texas, and the District of Columbia. But these are plug-in charging stations.

The Qualcomm trial in London, however, uses technology that charges an EV without plugging in any power cords. Inductive power transfer is a wireless technology that transmits energy from an electromagnet in a plate on the ground to a receiver in the EV. The British program calls for installing wireless inductive power transfer plates throughout London’s Tech City.

The process is a breeze for motorists. The driver simply parks the EV over the plate, and the system automatically aligns itself to transfer power across the gap, from the ground to the EV. In the statement from Qualcomm, Prime Minister David Cameron says, “Creative, high-tech advances such as this are extremely important as we work to rebalance our economy, and the decision to trial this at Tech City shows confidence in the UK as an ideal place for innovation and investment.”

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