The vast majority of mobile applications in the marketplace aren’t coming from well-established businesses, but experimental developers. The apps can even accrue a good user following, but those developers don’t exactly have the skills or desire to build a business around their creations.

“It’s laughable how many times I’ve heard, ‘I didn’t get into this to answer support requests,’” says entrepreneur Jonathan Kay.

Kay is the chief operating officer and co-founder of Apptopia, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing a marketplace that condenses the droves of similar, one-off app projects and puts them in the hands of people looking to turn them into real moneymakers. It looks like the lovechild of eBay and a Web domain brokerage, with hints of a mobile strategy consultancy.

As you can imagine, buying and selling source code for mobile applications is just a bit more complex than auctioning off your used electronics. “I’m spending more time than I’ve ever wanted to with lawyers,” says Kay, who I caught up with this week.

The company is the brainchild of co-founder Eliran Sapir, who jumped on early iPhone trends to create the mobile app GPush, which created push notifications for Gmail on the iPhone. Despite the paid app’s popularity in the iTunes app store, Sapir couldn’t quite figure what business to sell it to for an exit, Kay says. But he kept thinking about the problem, and later toyed with the idea of creating a mobile app brokerage while entrepreneur in residence at Cambridge-based Greatpoint Ventures. Last fall, Sapir connected with the boisterous Kay—a former brand evangelist for local startup the Grasshopper Group—and left the venture firm to work on Apptopia full time.

Apptopia’s first step is to formulate a target price range for app developers to sell at, using market knowledge and algorithms. Developers then must give Apptopia access to their apps that enables the startup to gather accurate, objective data on performance, user base, and other information that will inform prospective buyers.

“Much like in eBay, we provide a professional middle ground where a buyer and a seller can actually negotiate,” Kay says.

Sellers can list their apps to be purchased for a fixed price within that suggested range or set up an auction with a minimum starting point.

Connecting buyer and seller is just part of the challenge, though, says Kay. Apptopia continues to oversee that payment and transition process, and has developed contracts with lawyers outlining the details of the agreement.

“If you put the app up, you legally are bound to send us the source code,” says Kay of the developer responsibilities. Sellers also have to agree not to … Next Page »

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Microsoft’s “Android isn’t free” campaign continues to roll along, with the Redmond software behemoth today announcing a patent licensing deal with handset maker LG to cover Google’s mobile operating systems.

With this deal, Microsoft says it’s got licenses covering more than 70 percent of all U.S.-sold smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The LG deal also covers the Chrome operating system, a web-based system for laptops.

Prices were not disclosed, as usual, but Wall Street analysts have pegged previous licensing deals at $5 per handset or perhaps more—which means that with Android’s massive market share, Microsoft is making more on Google’s mobile phones than its own, which have a sliver of the market.

It’s the 11th licensing deal covering Google OS products—previous licensees who have paid up to Microsoft include major manufacturers HTC, Samsung, and Acer. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez says in a statement.

As has become typical with these deals, Microsoft executives are on Twitter boasting about the deal. VP and general counsel Brad Smith announced the deal this morning on his feed, and quickly followed up with this gem, somewhat bizarrely inspired by the Occupy protests against concentration of wealth:

Microsoft claiming it’s the 99 percent by getting a patent licensing fee? Somewhere, a protester’s head just exploded.

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[Corrected on 12/30/11, 1:25 p.m. See below.] Roughly 18 months after Menlo Park, CA-based TechShop announced it was partnering with Ford on a new location in metro Detroit, the communal, membership-based DIY maker space is ready to welcome the public next week at an open house on Dec. 27. [Paragraph has been updated to reflect the correct amount of time that has passed since TechShop announced it would open a Detroit location. We regret the error.]

“Detroit needs a place like this,” TechShop’s CEO Mark Hatch says. “That’s abundantly clear by the number of hacker spaces popping up, almost more than any other city. Detroit has an innate desire to do it yourself, not to mention thousands of engineers. It’s the right place at the right time.”

I arrived for my tour of the approximately $1.8 million Allen Park facility—about a 15 minute drive from downtown Detroit along I-94 West—and was greeted by a man wearing a t-shirt that said, “Trust Me—I’m An Engineer.” It was an appropriately lighthearted garment for a place that aims to give everyone from pre-teen hobbyists to garage-workshop inventors to seasoned engineers a pleasant, affordable space in which to bring their homegrown inventions to life.

And what a space it is. The long, slanted front desk was fabricated in the shop and is meant to inspire members by showing them how simply all the parts fit together. Walls are painted scarlet, teal, royal blue, and hot pink; natural light floods shop spaces that are a serious departure from typically dark and dank industrial facilities.

The atmosphere is bright and welcoming, and contains a tinkerer’s smorgasbord of machines, tools, and software: 3D printers, laser cutters, industrial-grade sewing and textile equipment, mills, lathes, saws, shopbots, an injection molder, a flow jet, a computer lab, a room for large projects that is big enough for a hovercraft, and even a “dirty room” for sandblasting. It even has an auditorium.

Anchoring the facility is a wireless-equipped open space with 4 x 8 work tables, each with access to power outlets, compressed air, and a vise. The various labs, organized by discipline, branch out from around this central hub. A common tool bin sits in the back of the room, and members can bring parts from home or purchase them in the small retail store that will eventually be located in the lobby area.

“We want people to have as few roadblocks as possible to getting into their creative … Next Page »

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A comprehensive snapshot of San Diego’s innovation economy shows that 76 technology startups were formed during the three months that ended June 30, a nearly 20 percent increase over the 64 startups established during the same quarter last year.

Counting the 70 new tech companies formed during the first quarter, a total of 146 startups sprouted here during the first half of 2011, according to the latest Connect Innovation Report, which covers innovation activity in the San Diego area during the second quarter of 2011. The full report is available here.

Connect’s innovation report also highlights rising tech employment, a three-fold increase in the total value of M&A deals involving tech companies, and a historic high for patent applications. The report was prepared by Connect, the nonprofit group supporting San Diego innovation and entrepreneurship.

Taken as a whole, the indicators suggest that economic activity was improving for thousands of local life sciences, technology, and defense companies during the first half of 2011. For example, the 146 new companies founded during the first six months of 2011 marked a nearly 48 percent jump over the 99 new companies formed during the first half of 2010.

But the encouraging vital signs measured in the report were taken before this summer, when U.S. markets were unsettled by a variety of political and economic setbacks, both foreign and domestic.

Those broader economic concerns could have been a factor in a nationwide survey of CEO confidence conducted during the third quarter by Vistage International. The survey, which Connect included in its full report, found that small-business CEOs anticipate a slowdown in the pace of economic growth amid record-high economic uncertainty. Generally speaking, that means small companies are more cautious about making investments and slower to hire new workers. The September survey of 1,710 small business CEOs resulted in … Next Page »

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Private research organizations employ almost 31,000 people in San Diego County, more than the number of similar employees in any other California county, according to a new quarterly innovation report from Connect, the local non-profit group for technology and entrepreneurship.

Researchers teased that statistic from U.S. Department of Labor data for the third quarter of 2010, the most recent quarter available, according to Steve Hoey, a project leader at Connect who called the new finding “a testament to the strong R&D base we have in our region.” The report ranked Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County second, with almost 19,000 working at private research institutions. Los Angeles was third with more than 17,000.

Such findings in the report underscore how San Diego has become a hotbed for early stage technology and life sciences companies, despite a decline in the amount of venture capital invested here.

Entrepreneurs started 70 companies in San Diego during the first three months of this year— double the 35 startups formed during the same quarter of 2010, according to Connect’s First Quarter 2011 Innovation Report. The report also shows an uptick in tech sector employment, continuing strength in federal research funding, a sharp increase in patents issued to local inventors, and increasing mergers & acquisition activity. Venture capital investments in San Diego startups, however, continue to decline.

Here’s a breakdown of the report’s major indices:

—The 70 new startups founded in San Diego accounted for nearly 12 percent of the 597 technology and life sciences companies created throughout California during the first quarter. San Diego’s tech startups created more than 130 new jobs, nearly 8 percent of the 1,700 new jobs created by new startups statewide. Twenty-seven of San Diego’s new companies are developing software, an increase that was offset in the life sciences where only 11 new companies were formed. Another 17 were communications startups, with the rest focused on recreational goods, defense, computer, and environmental sectors.

—Communications equipment manufacturing, as usual, represented the largest employment sector of the local innovation economy, with almost 28,000 jobs. San Diego’s life sciences sector and software each accounted for 27,400 jobs, and defense … Next Page »

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[Updated at 2:30 pm with details of ITC complaint] Now it’s really getting serious. Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based intellectual property and invention firm, is stepping up its fight against a pair of Asian memory manufacturers with a complaint to the International Trade Commission seeking to block the companies’ products from being imported to the U.S. A related federal lawsuit was filed in Seattle yesterday.

Intellectual Ventures also targets a bunch of companies that make, market, and sell products with the Asian companies’ memory devices—including such household names as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Best Buy and Wal-Mart. Those companies aren’t IV’s main adversaries; the firm is mainly going after Korea-based Hynix Semiconductor and Japan-based Elpida Memory. On its website this afternoon, Intellectual Ventures said that “ITC requirements” led it to include ”several companies whose products contain infringing Elpida and Hynix memory devices.”

The lawsuit represents the second time overall that IV has gone to court to enforce its considerable patent holdings, but the ITC is a new level of seriousness. Hynix and Elpida (along with their American branches) also were targets in that first round of civil suits, filed in Delaware at the end of last year. In its blog post, IV says the ITC complaint is the next step in its legal moves against Hynix and Elpida. Intellectual Ventures lawyer Melissa Finocchio is quoted saying that the two manufacturers were “clearly” infringing on IV’s patents, but refused to make a licensing deal.

“We can file a patent infringement suit seeking money damages, which we did in December, and we can file a complaint with the ITC requesting an order barring importation of the infringing products into the U.S.,” Finnoccio said. “In the case of Elpida and Hynix, we see both courses of action as necessary to protect the value of our invention rights.”

Hynix and Elpida both make DRAM, a kind of memory used in computers and servers. Hynix also makes NAND Flash memory, which is used in things like iPods. Just as it did in its previous suit against the two companies, IV lays out a history of trying unsuccessfully to cut licensing agreements with the two firms over a set of patents.

Intellectual Ventures, co-founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, takes a two-pronged approach to building what it calls an “invention capital” company. The serious money is made by buying up and licensing patents—an approach that IV’s leaders have said is their attempt to establish a large, competitive market for patents as financial commodities. Intellectual Ventures says it has … Next Page »

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Buying, Selling, Agreeing. San Diego’s life sciences companies conducted a lot of different transactions over the past week. We have a rundown for you.

—San Diego’s ResMed, which specializes in medical devices used to treat sleep apnea and related breathing disorders, said it acquired BiancaMed, a private Irish maker of sensor technology used to monitor sleep and breathing. Financial terms were not disclosed, but a ResMed spokeswoman told the U-T the deal represented a significant premium over the $15.8 million that all of BiancaMed’s investors—include ResMed—previously put into the company.

—-The executive chairman of San Diego’s aTyr Pharma, John Mendlein provided an overview of an idea he conceived that would enable nonprofit disease foundations to help fund aTyr’s R&D, along with big government agencies and privately held pharmaceutical and biotech companies.

—ActivX business development executive Robert Hillman alerted me yesterday to just-published findings, which the San Diego-based unit of Japan’s Kyorin Pharmaceutical said validate its KiNatiV technology. Hillman says the technology uses probes that interact and bind with kinases within cells of any tissue from any species, enabling ActivX to use sophisticated mass spectroscopy to identify key attributes of kinases that can’t be obtained any other way. In a statement, the company says, “Given the utility of kinase inhibitors as research tools and promising agents for molecular-targeted therapy, the opportunity to characterize their interactions with native endogenous kinases undoubtedly represents a significant step forward.”

—San Diego’s Cadence Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: CADX) got a new headache, after the FDA disclosed that an unidentified competitor wants to bring a generic version of Cadence’s pain reliever to market in the United States. The FDA allowed Cadence to start selling its injectable formulation of acetaminophen to hospitals just nine months ago.

—Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE), the Carlsbad CA-based giant in biomedical diagnostics, settled an intellectual property dispute with Fluidigm (NASDAQ: FLDM), the South San Francisco maker of microfluidic instruments used to identify rare and valuable cells.

—San Diego’s CareFusion (NYSE: CFN) agreed to pay $150 million to acquire Rowa, a German maker of robotics used in pharmacies for the automated high-speed storage and retrieval of pre-packaged pharmaceutical products. CareFusion said the buyout offers an opportunity for the company to expand its Pyxis line of products in markets outside the United States.

—OncoSec Medical, a three-year-old San Diego company developing a proprietary electroporation technology that’s intended to make cancer drugs more effective, raised $3 million through a private stock placement. The company trades on the over-the-counter bulletin board as ONCSD.

—San Diego-based Apricus Biosciences (NASDAQ: APRI) sold BioQuant, its contract research organization (CRO) subsidiary, to BioTox Sciences for $5 million in up-front and future earn-out payments and a potential to get as much as $20 million over the next 10 years. Apricus Bio said it retained all NexMed-related research conducted by Bio-Quant as well as BioQuant’s profitable diagnostic kit business. Apricus, which was previously a New Jersey life sciences company known as NexMed, moved to San Diego after it acquired BioQuant about eight months ago.

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Amazon.com’s attempt to cash in on the online-coupon craze, AmazonLocal, is spreading to a bigger market: The online retailer’s hometown of Seattle. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) kicked off its deals offering earlier this month, starting out in Boise, ID. Today, Amazon is announcing its first discounts in the Seattle area, including a half-off coupon for food and drinks at the Garage, a fancy-pants bowling and pool joint just down the block from Xconomy’s First Hill office.

It’s not just confined to Seattle proper—I coincidentally got another offer for a spa discount in the Tacoma area in my personal email this morning, and I found a restaurant coupon for the Bellevue area too. The AmazonLocal Seattle Twitter feed identifies a fourth offer up in Snohomish County.

The offers are being provided by No. 2 daily deals service LivingSocial, but Amazon says it’ll eventually start plugging its own discounts into the service. This market obviously makes sense for Amazon’s bedrock shopping brand, but as a feature it hardly stands apart from the herd of online discount-mongers chasing Groupon’s wild ride (well, not the relentless criticism part).

I wonder how long it’ll take to see whether Amazon has decided to apply its retail expertise and massive data-crunching power to this market, or if this just fades away as a me-too campaign of the moment. I also wonder whether AmazonLocal will have any interplay with Seattle’s Tippr, which recently gobbled up crosstown discount service DealPop from WhitePages. Tippr’s Martin Tobias has likened the startup’s patent portfolio to “pocket aces” in the deals market.

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iTegris, a stealth-mode Bellevue, WA-area startup headed by former Ignition Partners entrepreneur-in-residence Kurt Kolb, has raised about $4.6 million in equity financing according to a new SEC filing. iTegris’ web page is the standard placeholder, but the metadata search description says the company’s “focus in on helping companies to effectively manage their software and IP assets.” Along with CEO Kolb, iTegris’ co-founder and CTO is former Microsoft general manager Tom Phillips. Other iTegris board members, according to the SEC filing, are VCs Cameron Myhrvold of Ignition and Nick Sturiale of Jafco Ventures.

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Quick, which Boston- and San Francisco-area venture firm has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the burgeoning—and controversial—market of intellectual property and patent protection over the past five years?

If you said Charles River Ventures, you are correct. In fact, CRV is the only big venture investor behind Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm known for its unique (and often criticized) approach to the business of invention. Charles River says that, together with its limited partners, it has poured some $300 million into the company since 2006.

That’s an astounding figure, and it shows that Charles River is betting on intellectual property in a huge way—perhaps more so than anything else in its portfolio. Besides Intellectual Ventures, the VC firm is also invested in RPX, a San Francisco-based defensive patent aggregation firm, which filed for an IPO in January and plans to go public today—more on that coming in a separate story. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures are also investors in RPX, which was co-founded by two former employees of Intellectual Ventures.) Yet most venture firms still treat the field of intellectual property as a bit of a scourge—or, at best, a fringe area—even though it has great ramifications for VCs and their startups. So why did CRV decide to take the plunge?

The story goes back to 2001, the year after Intellectual Ventures was formed, when Nathan Myhrvold, the company’s polymath, founder, and CEO (and Microsoft’s former chief technology officer), came to Boston and met with Izhar Armony, a partner at Charles River Ventures. After some intensive Myhrvold-speak—for example, “invention is the essence of innovation”—he drilled down to his main point. Venture firms, Myhrvold argued, spend almost all their money on things that are essentially commodities—engineers, business people, infrastructure for startups—but what’s actually unique, and arguably most valuable, is invention.

Many would disagree—people and execution are pretty essential to businesses, after all—but the seed was planted. “Nathan helped open my eyes to the notion that IP [intellectual property] is a very important market—it’s actually a very big market in tech,” Armony says. He adds that there’s a $50 billion-plus market in IP rights and licensing, versus a $6 billion litigation market based on legal fees.

So in 2003 he led CRV’s investment in Intellectual Ventures’ “invention science fund,” which aimed to create new inventions across a wide range of fields, in part by bringing together renowned scientists and inventors and brainstorming ideas in a structured way. Such “invention sessions” have led to major projects and spinouts such as TerraPower, the Bellevue, WA-based nuclear-reactor firm (in which CRV also became an investor). In total, CRV committed $39 million to the invention science fund, co-investing with the likes of Bill Gates and Microsoft.

But the really big business opportunity came along in 2006, when CRV and its limited partners decided to commit an additional $300 million—I’ll say it again, $300 million—to Intellectual Ventures’ … Next Page »

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You can learn a lot from Wikipedia, despite all its faults—and Jeff Catlin’s company has done just that.

Boston-based Lexalytics said today that its latest text-analysis software incorporates insights from combing through Wikipedia’s entire user-generated online encyclopedia for relationships between words, phrases, and their meanings. The company says its new software, which powers products used by big brands and other organizations to quantify the meaning and sentiment behind conversations on the Web, will be available this summer.

Before diving into the technology, here are some business metrics. Lexalytics is “quite profitable this year,” according to Catlin, the firm’s CEO. It saw 65 percent revenue growth last year, and is continuing to grow in 2011 in a number of new markets, he says (more on that in a minute). The company currently has 18 employees in the U.S. and U.K. Catlin himself splits time between offices in Boston and Amherst, MA.

About a year ago, my colleague Wade profiled Lexalytics and its humble beginnings in 2003, when Catlin was running an engineering group at LightSpeed Software, a Woburn, MA-based content management startup. LightSpeed was consolidating and closing its East Coast operation, but Catlin convinced the firm’s investors to let him run his division as a separate company (which became Lexalytics).

Lexalytics has gone on to provide “sentiment analysis” technology for companies that help brands and organizations monitor and manage their reputations online, such as Cymfony, ScoutLabs, and social-media firms like Bit.ly. Lexalytics recently landed Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor as a customer and partner; TripAdvisor (which is being spun out of Expedia as a separate public company) uses Lexalytics’ software to understand user sentiment—what people like and don’t like—in their online reviews of hotels, restaurants, cruises, and other attractions.

But the opportunity for Lexalytics goes far beyond understanding sentiment in blogs, tweets, and other social media. As I see it, the technology is really about getting a computer to understand the meaning of sentences and the deeper relationships between words and phrases in documents. So it’s about classifying “wonderful day” as positive and “horrible disaster” as negative, sure, but it’s also about identifying names and acronyms; detecting sarcasm or hype amidst praise or insults; and being able to classify things like “cabin” as a type of room on a ship, “chicken tikka masala” as Indian food, “golf club” as having to do with outdoor recreation, and “Red Sox” as a (currently bad) baseball team.

The technologies behind such “semantic” analysis of text—natural language processing, machine learning, and statistical modeling techniques—have been around for more than a decade. But they have continued to improve in recent years, enhanced in part by the availability of big, user-generated databases, like Wikipedia. And, crucially, the market for these … Next Page »

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A juicy excerpt from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen‘s new autobiography caused plenty of chatter around Seattle and the broader tech world this past week, and considering that he’s starting a book tour, I guess that’s the point. The stunning vignette, in the excerpt published in Vanity Fair, was a scene in which Allen writes that he caught co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer conspiring to dilute Allen’s stake in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment.

That blow-up, in Allen’s retelling, basically sealed his departure from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Gates called Allen a friend in a reply statement, but did say he may remember events differently. In any case, I kind of thought the attention to that very noteworthy episode actually obscured the more nuanced, diverse portrait that Allen sketched of the two entrepreneurs’ relationship. Basically, it emerges as a complicated partnership—over the years traced in that writing, Allen is by turns amazed by, suspicious of, and angry at Gates. In any case, the whole book should be good reading.

—Amazon.com continued its march into new cloud-based businesses by rolling out a music player and storage service tied to Android devices. There was a lot of focus devoted to the spat that Amazon apparently kicked up by not securing licenses from the record labels. But the even more interesting angle may be that Amazon is leapfrogging ahead of other big-name competitors—especially Apple—by taking personal music collections up to the cloud for storage and playback in a variety of places. Basically, it looks like Amazon is trying to position its freemium service as iTunes for Android—which is a pretty nice market to pursue.

—I sat down with Don Merino from Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s unique patent-licensing and invention firm in Bellevue, WA, to get an inside take on how the company went about setting up a first-of-its-kind modern, large-scale middleman market for intellectual property. Merino was a pivotal player in this tale, having personally purchased about half of the first 1,200 patents that Intellectual Ventures secured—the portfolio is said to number above 30,000 at this point. This topic gets more energy every week, it seems, particularly in mobile—just this week, Google announced it was going big in a bid for Nortel patents in a bankruptcy auction.

—We also checked in with the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games, which rolled out its new Moai development platform and cloud-hosting service for professional game developers. Moai’s main selling point is that it tries to bust down language barriers in game building by letting developers use Lua, a familiar game coding language, and translating that work into the different formats needed to make mobile games … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures, ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold’s new-wave patent middleman business, has cut a new licensing deal with Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM), makers of the BlackBerry smartphone.

As Intellectual Ventures’ senior VP of licensing Don Merino described in today’s in-depth Xconomy interview, licensing deals like this are an increasingly common way that IV is using to make money from its portfolio of more than 30,000 patents. Merino says IV’s holdings can actually function as a bit of a hedge for a company, especially in a category like mobile, where manufacturers own a vertical array of intellectual property but might like to add more, particularly when it comes to legal battles.

Financial terms of the RIM deal weren’t disclosed in today’s announcement. This marks the second big Seattle-area business connection for RIM in recent months: In mid-February, the Canadian company acquired Seattle’s Gist, which combines business contacts with online social profiles to give people a better picture of folks they’re working with.

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The Cheezburger Network‘s bid to dominate meme-dom took another leap forward this week with the acquisition of Know Your Meme, a site that attempts to trace the histories of passed-around bits of Internet pop culture that are the fodder for Cheezburger’s humor sites. But the purchase of Know Your Meme, said to be in the seven figures, is significant for more than adding context to a moment of funny: The acquisition also plants the Cheezburger flag in New York.

Founder and CEO Ben Huh told us the Seattle-based company definitely plans to add more staff to the “Cheezburger East” offices in Manhattan. This was the first big buy we’ve seen Huh make since Cheezburger landed $30 million in investment backing earlier this year, and it appears the guy behind the weird cat photos means business. Other big news from the past week or so in Seattle-area technology business:

—RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK) CEO Bob Kimball resigned abruptly on Monday, with no specific reason identified. Kimball was a veteran of the Seattle online media company, which hung around through the dot-com bust and has spent the past year or so trying to slim down and remake itself. Most of the heavy lifting on that score fell to Kimball, who took over the chief executive’s chair from Real founder and chairman Rob Glaser early last year. Kimball said just a few weeks ago that Real had reached the end of its restructuring phase and was preparing to move forward—that restructuring included shedding a good number of jobs and spinning off the Rhapsody music joint venture. At this point, it looks like either Kimball, the company, or both decided that it was a good time to make a switch. Glaser has said he’s not coming back as CEO.

—I dove into the Seattle-area market for tech jobs, and folks who watch that scene closely are ringing alarm bells about the ability of this region to sustain the growth needed to keep companies staffed. It’s particularly worth paying attention to since the college system doesn’t have the capacity to supply people as fast as companies like Microsoft and Amazon need them, which naturally leads to some poaching of the big boys’ talent. This is not necessarily a new dynamic, but it is becoming more amplified as more Silicon Valley companies move northward to satisfy their own hiring needs beyond the Bay Area. Stuck in the middle are smaller companies, particularly those that have made it past the early startup phase and are pushing toward a second round of growth and evolution.

—I had fun sitting down with Seattle startup lawyer Eric Koester for a debrief on the seemingly overnight debut of Zaarly, a kind of reverse-auction service that allows people to tap into mobile networks to supply goods, services, or close to anything else legal that they’d like to pay for (there is a ban on … Next Page »

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Boston-based Skyhook, a wireless technology firm, said today that Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has licensed its location-finding software and will make the technology available on Intel chip-based devices. Skyhook also announced that Citysearch, the online local guide, has integrated Skyhook’s technology into its mobile and deals apps for Android devices. Financial details of the two agreements were not given. Skyhook’s software determines the location of a mobile device by combining data from Wi-Fi access points, GPS, and cell towers. The company is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Google over location-based intellectual property and business practices.

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This is pretty big news for a local mobile startup. Boston-based Where, a mobile applications and advertising firm, announced today it has been granted a patent covering a wide swath of location-based services—in particular those related to delivering certain kinds of advertising, alerts, and coupons to mobile devices.

Where now has strong intellectual property protection around a burgeoning area in mobile. U.S. Patent No. 7,848,765 relates to a number of technologies around “geofencing”—this basically means establishing a virtual perimeter around a real-world area and alerting users of location-based services when a person or object of interest crosses that perimeter. When combined with location-aware mobile devices such as GPS-enabled smartphones, the technology can let people keep track of where their friends and loved ones are, for example, or allow companies and retail stores to know when consumers enter certain neighborhoods (so they can sell them stuff).

In a statement, senior analyst Greg Sterling of Opus Research called the news a “very significant patent and win for Where.” He added that geofencing and location-based ads are “among the most strategic opportunities in what will become a huge mobile market.”

Indeed, a whole slew of startups and big companies are trying to cash in on this emerging market. Companies from Foursquare and SCVNGR to Whereoscope (a Y Combinator startup), Google, and Facebook are looking to implement location-based local advertising in a smart way. One thing seems clear: for now at least, the intellectual property highway for these kinds of services goes through Where. The company hasn’t said yet whether it intends to defend the patent against potential infringers in court—an increasingly common tactic these days (see, for example, our recent coverage of infringement suits filed by Seattle-area firms Interval Licensing and Intellectual Ventures).

Where (formerly called uLocate) was very early in the location-based services game. It filed an application for the patent in question back in 2005. Since then, the company has built mobile apps—local retail listings and recommendations—across all the major smartphones and mobile devices. It also runs a location-based ad network, which it says reaches more than 50 million consumers around the U.S.

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Every month we compile all of the deals at Washington tech and biotech companies into one story where we watch up and coming trends in local financing. Unlike our regular investment coverage and weekly deals roundups, these monthly features give us a chance to look at both the large investments that usually make news, alongside smaller “under the radar” deals we may not have yet reported on. The information is based on data provided by our partner, New York-based private company intelligence platform CB Insights, and our own prior coverage.

This data gives us an in-depth look at which sectors are leading in financing month to month, which continually ink the most (or fewest deals), which are gathering equity versus debt funding, and what trends can be seen over time. Over the last two months, healthcare has been the clear leader. But after July’s lull in funding in every other sector, August’s numbers indicate a significant rise in financing in both the software and Internet industries as well, a promising notion given that the two sectors have brought in modest amounts of financing over the last few months.

Of the 13 deals Washington companies saw in August, only two were in healthcare, though they were sizable, accounting for $21.8 million of the $59 million total investment across all sectors. August, no surprise, was a slower month than usual for healthcare financing, given that the sector raised $62.5 million in July and $41.1 million in June, according to previous reports based on CB Insights data. The Internet sector, at $16.9 million, and software, with $16.5 million, came close to raising as much as healthcare in August. The business products and services sector took a distant fourth place, with $2 million in financing in August, while mobile and telecommunications companies came in fifth with $1.4 million. The only other two sectors to earn financing in August—video games, and risk and security—brought in less than $1 million each.

A number of the larger deals in August made our headlines, including medical device maker NeuroVista’s $21.5 million financing, split between a $16.5 million equity financing led by GBS Venture Partners, and a $5 million convertible debt agreement with Houston, TX-based Cyberonics (NASDAQ: CYBX). Local software company Apptio was the sole software company to bring in a deal last month, but it was a big one—a $16.5 million Series C to increase sales and marketing efforts, expand to new markets, and launch new products.

Though the Internet sector didn’t bring in the most funding in August, it did have the most deals—five total—including $6 million to private sales e-commerce site Zulily, and $3.3 million to youth sports automation company Korrio.

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

August also saw a handful of starts raising cash through deals based on debt, options, and/or warrants, rather than equity, totaling $5.9 million, and three deals in all. The largest portion of this went to local IP service provider Telekenex, which raised $5.5 million in debt financing from Toronto, Canada-based specialty firm Wellington Financial. The short list of transactions that constitute debt financing are listed below.

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Cambridge, MA-based Joule Unlimited, a biofuels technology company, announced today it has been granted a U.S. patent for an engineered bacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide. The company says it is the first to patent a direct, single-step, continuous process (based on photosynthesis) for producing hydrocarbon fuels without using raw material feedstocks like sugar or corn, or other intermediate steps. Joule says this process could be made cheap enough, and could be employed at large enough scale, to help replace fossil fuels. The news was first reported by the New York Times; a CNET report also has some useful context. Other companies in the biofuels technology sector include Amyris Biotechnologies, Aurora Algae, Bio Architecture Lab, LS9, Sapphire Energy, Synthetic Genomics, and Targeted Growth. Joule says it will begin pilot production of diesel fuel by the end of this year.

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There were, surprisingly, quite a few Seattle-area technology deals this week, breaking the typically slow summer deals trend we’ve seen recently. In the last week we’ve seen a local supercomputing company nab a pretty hefty Department of Defense grant, a cleantech startup partner with the Environmental Protection Agency, and an info commerce company settle a nasty dispute with the Washington State Attorney General’s office. Take a look at the highlights:

—Seattle-based supercomputing company Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY), was part of a team that was awarded a $25 million U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant to further develop supercomputer technology. The four-year research project is being led by Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), a graphics processing unit (GPU) developer, and includes Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six U.S. universities. The objective is to develop a new class of supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than those in existence today.

—Local IP service provider Telekenex raised $5.5 million in debt financing from Wellington Financial, a specialty firm out of Canada. Though headquartered in Seattle, Telekenex was founded in San Francisco in 1994, and is backed by a number of Bay Area firms, including Walden Venture Capital, Altos Ventures, and Industry Ventures. The funding will provide the company with the necessary capital to “continue its growth and penetration of the managed voice and data service market,” according to Wellington.

—Bend, OR-based search engine marketing company G5 closed a $15 million round led by Boston-based Volition Capital. The funding will be used to further the company’s software development platform. As part of the deal, Volition managing partner Roger Hurwitz and principal Sean Cantwell are joining the G5 board of directors.

—Bellevue, WA-based Intelius, an online background check and information commerce company, agreed to pay $1.3 million in a legal settlement with the Washington State Attorney General’s office, according to a report by TechFlash. The dispute was part of an ongoing effort on the part of the Attorney General to prevent “post-transaction marketing” tactics. Intelius has been called out in a number of class action lawsuits recently, including one case in October accused the company of violating the state’s Consumer Protection Act.

—DepotPoint, a Bellevue, WA-based Web company that develops a tracking platform for the real estate foreclosure market, raised $2 million in equity out of a $4.5 million offering. In 2008, as the mortgage meltdown accelerated, the company launched a free site that provided access to street addresses for some 1.2 million properties undergoing foreclosure across the U.S. In the same year, it raised a $7 million Series C found led by OVP Ventures Partners and Trident Capital.

—Woodinville, WA-based Calico Energy Services  told  Xconomy of an recent partnership with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Energy Star program. Although the energy management company hasn’t officially announced the deal yet, Calico chief marketing officer Thomas Doggett said the partnership, which has no financial terms, validates the company and acknowledges its ability to help utilities companies and energy providers “meet Energy Star certification goals.”

—San Francisco-and Seattle-based Jambool, the virtual currency and virtual goods management developer, was acquired by Google for an undisclosed amount. The four-year-old company behind the Social Gold platform, has raised $6 million in venture financing to date from Palo Alto, CA-based Bay Partners and Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group.

—A brand new online travel venture here in Seattle—AirlineTickets and Airport Parking—received $90,000 in startup financing out of a $200,000 round. A number of local angel investors contributed to the round, including Andy Liu and David Niu of BuddyTV, Geoff Entress, Bob Senoff, and Fred Hsu, the co-founder of oversee.net. The sites, led by former Internet marketer and first-time entrepreneur Sujan Patel, will take a new spin on the online travel searching and booking market—making the process of traveling easier and more enjoyable, Patel says.

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Seattle-based IP service provider Telekenex has raised $5.5 million in debt financing from Canadian specialty firm Wellington Financial. In a statement released Monday, Wellington said the funding will provide Telekenex with the capital necessary to “continue its growth and penetration of the managed voice and data service market.” Telekenex is backed by a number of venture firms, including San Francisco-based Walden Venture Capital, Menlo Park, CA-based Altos Ventures, and San Francisco-based Industry Ventures. Though headquartered in Seattle, Telekenex was founded in San Francisco in 1994, where it maintains a strong presence.

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