New England drug developers made headlines this week with funding news.

—My San Diego colleague Bruce took a look at Applied Proteomics, the five-year-old biotech startup co-founded by MIT-trained computer scientist Danny Hillis. The startup, which raised $22.5 million in funding in June, is developing technology that provides a 40-gigabyte snapshot of all the proteins circulating in a drop of blood.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge, MA-based startup developing treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its intent to raise $86 million in an initial public offering.

—Investing dollars in biotech and medical devices startups increased in 2011, but the volume of deals shrank, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association. Read more of my colleague Arlene’s recap.

—New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) continued its recent streak of deals with Boston biotechs, with a $15 million investment in Acetylon Pharmaceuticals, a startup funded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft. (That should be some consolation.)

—Waltham, MA-based Synchroneuron raised $6 million in funding from Morningside Technology Ventures—a milestone for founder Barry Fogel, who has been working for 15 years on a treatment for a movement disorder called tardive dyskinesia (TD).

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Time for an update on Boston’s marketing tech cluster. It’s one of the real strengths of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it looks like it’s getting stronger, with a couple of leaders making news this week. Here is a tale of two companies that have become competitors:

—Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), the Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm, has seen its stock price jump nearly 30 percent—from about $24 to just over $30—since Facebook filed for its IPO last week (coincidence?). Constant Contact has been positioning itself as a leader in digital marketing for small businesses across e-mail, social media, and Web platforms—especially social campaigns. The company also released some promising stats on its revenues and profits for 2011 and its most recent quarter.

—HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm, said it has hired J.D. Sherman, Akamai’s former chief financial officer (also a former IBM exec). The company says Sherman is being brought in partly to help it prepare for a future IPO. HubSpot has been hiring aggressively and working on new products, while it pares away others (like Oneforty.com, which it acquired last summer). It remains to be seen whether the company will actually make it to an IPO before getting snapped up by Salesforce.com or some other suitor.

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As you have read this week about the financial details of Facebook’s IPO filing, you have no doubt stopped to think about—or daydream about—what your own company might be worth.  While going public might be a distant or inappropriate goal for your own venture, Facebook’s IPO serves as a timely reminder that you should be calibrating your business and growth strategies to make your company attractive to investors or strategic partners.  After all, for most startup entrepreneurs, the eventual reward comes in the form of a merger or acquisition, rather than an IPO.

The good news is that the vast majority of technology CFOs (75 percent) expect M&A activity in the sector to rise in 2012, according to the fifth annual BDO Technology Outlook Survey, released this month by BDO USA, LLP, where I am a partner and national director of the Technology and Life Sciences Practice.  However, a word of warning: I’ve seen many deals derailed—with significant delays or value erosion—because of the management team’s undisciplined approach to presenting financial information.

Therefore, whether your own organization is in the market to acquire another business for strategic growth purposes, or you are working to position your company as an attractive acquisition target, there are two issues that are crucial to generating or maintaining shareholder value: Having an acute awareness of the motivating factors behind an M&A transaction, and providing an orderly financial snapshot that will answer the mostly likely questions from potential partners.

Motivating Factors Spurring M&A Transactions

In our survey, respondents predicted that the top three motivations behind M&A deals in 2012 will be revenue growth, enhanced market share, and the acquisition of new technology and intellectual property. In other words, a significant majority of CFOs believe that M&A transactions will mostly be offensive in nature. A company waging an offensive strategy isn’t necessarily engaged in hostile takeovers; rather, it means the focus is more on growth than cost-cutting. Therefore, companies are looking for acquisition targets that will fill in holes in product or technology portfolios, and are not necessarily angling to take a competitor’s product out of the market.

Financial Rigor

Understanding the motivations of other parties in a deal can put you in a more powerful position, either as an acquirer or a target. Equally important is meeting the due diligence requirements of an acquirer in an efficient and confident manner. By ensuring that reliable and accurate financial and operational information is available, companies can avoid roadblocks to the M&A process—roadblocks that can significantly erode shareholder value, if not derail the entire process.  For example, although the survey indicates a positive outlook for the industry this year, respondents foresee overall revenue increases of just 2.6 percent – significantly lower than the forecasted growth in last year’s survey (10.4 percent).  If you are experiencing a lower revenue forecast this year, be prepared to address how you intend to get your company back on track.

Beyond M&A Transactions

Even if M&As are not currently a part of your growth strategy, accessing capital remains a top of mind issue for technology companies. The good news is that—according to our survey—over three-quarters (76 percent) of respondents say they feel better about the ability to access capital in 2012. The hurdles to arranging debt financing remain high, but businesses with strong fundamentals and fiscal discipline are once again able to obtain credit. In fact, the majority of respondents who plan to raise additional capital this year intend to use debt financing. The key to making debt work for your company is to manage the process proactively, and avoid being forced into reactive mode.

Whether your business is planning to undertake a strategic transaction or simply needs to access capital through financing, careful planning is critical. A blend of fiscal responsibility, corporate discipline and the willingness to take measured risk are the keys to powering growth.

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Plans for IPOs and venture funding dominated the New England deals news this week.

—A new seed fund, backed by venture firm New Enterprise Associates and hosted by Harvard, came out of the woodwork last week. The Experiment Fund will invest up to $250,000 in seed funding in selected startups, with a focus on technologies that come out of Cambridge, MA. The news broke just a few days ahead of Facebook—the one that got away—revealing its plans to go public.

—Radius Health, a Cambridge-based startup working on treatments for osteoporosis, filed paperwork indicating its plans to raise as much as $86 million in an initial public offering.

—A PricewaterhouseCoopers and National Venture Capital Association report shows a mixed picture for life sciences investing in 2011, my colleague Arlene reported. Biotech companies raised $4.7 billion, showing a 22 percent increase over 2010, but the deal volume for the sector dropped 9 percent to 446 transactions. Medical devices companies also showed an increase in funding dollars but a drop in number of deals.

—Cambridge-based Brightcove set the price range of its initial public offering at $10 to $12 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The video hosting startup plans to sell 5 million shares, and give underwriters the option to purchase another 750,000 shares. Brightcove first filed paperwork last August indicating it intended to raise $50 million in an IPO.

—Synchroneuron of Waltham, MA, nabbed $6 million in Series A funding from Morningside Technology Ventures. The startup is developing treatments for movement disorders such as tardive dyskinesia.

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This week’s deal news covered a breadth of sectors: biotech, medical devices, mobile applications, software, and robotics. Not to mention a major venture capital fund raise.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Avila Therapeutics was bought by New Jersey-based Celgene (NASDAQ: CELG) for $350 million, with as much as another $575 million available in milestones. Avila is a maker of “covalent” drugs that are designed to shut down the activity of disease-causing proteins for a prolonged period of time.

—Verastem, a young Cambridge, MA-based biotech working on drugs targeting cancer stem cells, completed its initial public offering, led by UBS and Leerink Swann. The IPO (5.5 million shares sold at $10 apiece) represented a strong showing among investors, as Verastem originally indicated it planned to sell 4.5 million shares priced between $9 and $11 each. The underwriters have a 30-day option to buy another 825,000 shares.

—Burlington, MA-based ConforMIS, a maker of knee implant systems, raised $89 million in a Series E funding from private equity investors and government investment funds abroad. The company said it will put the money toward sales, manufacturing, and expansion of its technology.

—Co3 Systems, a maker of data loss management software, received new funding from Fairhaven Capital. The Cambridge, MA-based startup said it will put the money (whose sum was undisclosed) toward sales, marketing, and engineering.

—Malborough, MA-based medical device startup Navilyst Medical will be acquired by Albany, NY-based AngioDynamics (NASDAQ: ANGO) in a transaction valued at $372 million, based on the company’s $14.20 per share closing stock price Monday. Navilyst, which focuses on … Next Page »

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Avila Therapeutics, after just five years in business and $51 million in venture capital, made big news today when it agreed to be acquired by Celgene for $350 million upfront plus another $575 million in milestone payments.

Naturally, there are a lot of people celebrating the success of the Bedford, MA-based company today around the web and on Twitter.

Over at Polaris Venture Partners’ blog, Amir Nashat wrote that “early, Series A life sciences investing pays off.”  He added that this portfolio company is the eighth in the last three years to generate returns, either through acquisition or an IPO. “One common thread that binds each of these companies was their compelling scientific foundation and transformative potential for treating disease. In our model, these areas are essential and go hand-in-hand with strong teams. In the case of Avila, we were fortunate to back a truly unique team of repeat entrepreneurs,” Nashat wrote.

Bruce Booth, a partner at Atlas Venture who also invested in the company, wrote on his blog about how Avila (AH-vill-uh) paid off big-time for its early venture investors. The company raised just $51 million in venture capital its five-year history. The company is generating a 5x return on investment on the upfront payment from Celgene, which has potential to balloon to a 15x return if Avila hits its future milestones.

Booth offers some interesting background on the Avila story, and some lessons in four bullet points. “Avila has exhibited many of the hallmarks of a great biotech story today”: Specifically, he said those hallmarks are:

 Commitment to discovering and advancing real innovation

 Healthy focus on ‘equity capital efficiency’

 Dedication to creating strategic optionality for the company’s future

 And, most importantly, a fantastic team

Over on Twitter, Michael Gilman of Cambridge, MA-based Stromedix (@Michael_Gilman) recalled sitting in his living room more than five years ago with Avila co-founder Jus Singh, talking about his idea for the company. “The sweet thing about Avila is that it’s a triumph of data over dogma. People HATED covalent drugs. Avila changed their minds,” Gilman said on Twitter.

Avila Therapeutics CEO Katrine Bosley

You can read the Xconomy story on the deal by my colleague Arlene Weintraub. The one thing I’ll add is that I saw Avila CEO Katrine Bosley along with VP of corporate development Nagesh Mahanthappa and CFO Andrew Hirsch a couple weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Bosley talked a bit about how the company’s lead drug candidate, a Btk inhibitor, was being readied for mid-stage clinical trials against cancer later this year, and that it was thought to have potential against autoimmune diseases.

It was a quick meeting, and there wasn’t any hint that a deal this big was ready to be announced. But Hirsch tried to persuade me that maybe the IPO market for biotech isn’t as barren as some people think, which I took as a subtle hint that Avila might be sniffing around at that option. “I think there is an appetite from the investment community for high-quality stories,” Hirsch said.

And Mahanthappa optimistically noted that some big companies have been doing creative deals to support innovative biotechs. In particular, he singled out Celgene for its partnerships with Cambridge, MA-based Agios Pharmaceuticals and Acceleron Pharma. When I asked him about predictions for the year ahead, he predicted that creative deals like that would continue.

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Johnson & Johnson’s West Coast research leader, Diego Miralles, has met with a lot of biotech entrepreneurs who are curious about what J&J is doing to foster more startups at its facility in San Diego. At some point, a skeptical question usually comes up.

“What’s the catch?” Miralles says he’s sometimes asked.

He insists there isn’t any catch.

“We are genuinely trying to help the industry,” Miralles said last week in a meeting at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. “We think helping the biotech industry helps us. We strongly believe that a rising tide lifts all ships.”

J&J (NYSE: JNJ), which is based in New Brunswick, NJ, has been moving quickly the past few months on a new initiative to help biotech startups get up and running, through its new 30,000 square foot Janssen Labs startup space on the Torrey Pines Mesa. As Bruce first reported here in October, the idea is to create a space at J&J’s facility where 18-20 fledgling companies can get modern lab space, supplies, professional facilities management, and equipment that is supposed to free up the entrepreneurs to focus more on their science.

The life sciences industry has been buzzing about the concept since then, and Monday night more than 500 people turned out to see the new Janssen Labs in San Diego during an open house at J&J’s renamed Janssen Research & Development facility.

J&J insists that it won’t take equity stakes in the startups, or attempt to direct them, but that it hopes the industry, and eventually its shareholders, will benefit by “fertilizing the soil” for more innovation. At Monday night’s soiree, J&J publicly named the initial four startups settling into the space, selected from the first 100 applications that have rolled in from around the world since October.

Big Pharma companies have gotten some heat from entrepreneurs and VCs over the past couple of years for taking advantage of them, essentially by harvesting the best ideas at bargain rates as the startups struggle to raise more venture capital to keep going. But as biotech startups are now less able to fill up Big Pharma’s product pipeline, those same Big Pharma companies are experimenting with new ways to stir up more early-stage R&D. Sanofi CEO Chris Viehbacher has outlined a strategy to shift resources toward startups and academic collaborators, Pfizer has set up a network of academic collaborations around the country, and Bayer has sought to become a landlord to promising startups in San Francisco’s Mission Bay.

Here’s how the J&J startup space is supposed to work. Companies apply for space that can be configured to house one to three people, or as many as 25, Miralles says. Prescience International, the group that runs the San Jose BioCenter, will provide professional management of the space, and to handle … Next Page »

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It’s time for our irregular, data-driven roundup of high-tech fundraising, M&A, and IPO news from around the San Francisco Bay Area.

$100 billion—The potential valuation of Facebook in an IPO tentatively planned for late May, according to a story yesterday from Kara Swisher at AllThingsD. Facebook hopes to raise $10 billion in the offering, according to Swisher’s sources.

$125 million—The amount San Francisco-based Splunk hopes to raise in an upcoming initial public offering, according to the startup’s S-1 filing last week. The main venture backers of the big-data analytics startup include August Capital, Sevin Rosen, JK&B Capital, and Ignition Partners.

$115 million—The amount Symantec is paying for LiveOffice, the Torrance, CA-based maker of cloud-based e-mail archiving systems. Mountain View, CA-based Symantec said yesterday that the acquisition “will extend Symantec’s intelligent information governance offering to the cloud, providing customers choice between on-premise, cloud or hybrid delivery of Symantec solutions.”

$75 million—The amount Mountain View, CA-based Audience hopes to reap in an upcoming initial public offering, according to S-1 papers filed last week. Audience makes noise-suppression chips for mobile phones that improve the quality of voice calls. Its biggest venture backers include Tallwood Venture Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Vulcan Venture Capital.

$20 million—A Series C funding round for AppDynamics, the San Francisco-based maker of software that monitors the performance of enterprise applications. New investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) led the round, with existing backers Greylock Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating.

$13 million—New funding for PivotLink, the San Francisco-based maker of retail analytics software. Trident Capital, Emergence Capital, and Starvest Partners led the round. PivotLink also announced the acquisition of Salt Lake City, UT-based Acteea, a maker of e-commerce analytics software.

$11 million—New funding for Fremont, CA-based disaster recovery startup QuorumLabs. Airtek Capital Group led the round, which also included QuorumLabs’ existing investors.

$6.7 million—A Series B financing round announced last week for Senova Systems, a Sunnyvale, CA-based maker of solid-state pH sensors for the food, water, medical, and agricultural industries. Phoenix Venture Partners and Harris & Harris Group led the round.

$5 million—New funding for Affine, the San Francisco-based startup offering targeting software for online video ads. Crosslink Capital and Highland Capital Partners led the round. Former Quattro Wireless CEO Andy Miller, the chief of Apple’s iAds program, has joined Affine’s board.

$2.5 million—Seed funding for PandoDaily, a new San Francisco-based technology blog founded by ex-TechCrunch writer Sarah Lacy. Institutional backers, according to Lacy’s introductory blog post, include Accel Partners, CrunchFund (founded by ex-TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington), Greylock Discovery Fund, Menlo Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Ooga Labs, and SV Angels. Individual investors include Marc Andreessen, Andrew Anker, Matt Cohler, Chris Dixon, Tony Hsieh, Jeff Jordan, Saul Klein, Josh Kopelman, and Zach Nelson.

$990,000—New equity-based financing for San Francisco-based AllTrails, according to a regulatory filing. An alumnus of the AngelPad startup accelerator in San Francisco, AllTrails offers maps and reviews of hiking, biking, and camping trails.

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Some business software news this morning. LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), the Woburn, MA-based remote access and customer support tech company, said it has acquired Kansas-based Bold Software for $16.5 million, including retention-based bonuses over time.

Bold makes software for live-chat systems and click-to-call customer service. The move is intended to strengthen and expand LogMeIn’s offerings in customer care and engagement. The company says it will continue selling Bold’s main product line as a stand-alone offering as well as integrate it with LogMeIn’s remote support software.

LogMeIn started in 2003 and is led by CEO Michael Simon, who spoke last fall about LogMeIn’s rise from being a “lifestyle business” to becoming a mid-size public company (a freemium business model was key). The company went public in 2009.

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Biotech pilgrims are gathering today for the biggest industry frenzy of the year, the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. This confab in San Francisco’s Union Square is the singular place each year where essentially all industry mover/shakers—and many wannabes—gather for a marathon week of investment scouting, dealmaking, publicity seeking, job-hunting, and schmoozing.

I’ve been going to this conference for at least seven or eight years (but who’s counting?) and look forward to meeting lots of interesting people and digging up all kinds of news every year. It’s the best time to meet industry players face-to-face, and hear about the latest trends at work, in an action-packed few days. Most everybody here is brimming with optimism—or least putting on their best game face—about how they’re going to make new drugs, devices, or diagnostics that will leap tall buildings with a single bound in the coming 12 months.

Some of these dreams will be fulfilled, but the odds aren’t good. Hope and hype are a couple essential ingredients in this business, and every year both are on display at this conference. Sometimes the wishful thinking can congeal into conventional wisdom. So with that, I thought I’d try to anticipate a few popular myths you can expect to hear circulated, in order to debunk them. Here goes:

1. “The biotech IPO market will pick up.” Every year this line gets repeated, and every year it’s nothing more than wishful thinking. All you need to know about IPOs is that Groupon raised more money in its initial offering last year than the entire class of 2011 biotech industry IPOs. Facebook is on the docket this year, and it will dominate the news. Many biotechs that went public last year were weak, and didn’t perform well for investors, which only serves to dampen enthusiasm. And most importantly, it’s always good to remember who will be spreading the positive word about the IPO market, and consider the sources. It’s the investment bankers, lawyers, and consultants who stand to put a lot of money in their pockets from fees every time one of these transactions occurs. Just because they want it to happen, doesn’t mean it will.

2. “Amgen will make a mondo acquisition.” The biotech industry’s biggest company was sitting on a massive stockpile of $17.6 billion in cash and investments at the end of September. Common sense says that Amgen has got to do something with the cash other than collect interest. Shareholders might like getting dividends or seeing share buybacks to lift the stock price, but this won’t excite anybody for long. The company is getting a new CEO, Robert Bradway, who might be interested in putting his own stamp on the company once he takes over in May from Kevin Sharer, who had a lackluster record in the acquisition department. And Amgen might be feeling the need to compete in the acquisition arms race, especially since Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) scooped up Pharmasset for $11 billion.

It may sound logical, but this all feels like wishful thinking to me on the part of bankers with vested interests. Amgen will think long and hard before it attempts to do any monster acquisition, especially after seeing the organizational indigestion mega-mergers have caused in Big Pharmaland (see Pfizer/Wyeth, Merck/Schering-Plough, and Roche/Genentech). My hunch is that Amgen may buy a company in the $1 billion ballpark, but it will not pull the trigger on a really audacious mega-merger in 2012.

3. “The FDA is going to be more supportive of innovation.” I’m not sure how many people are really going to go out on a limb and take the FDA at its word that it wants to be more supportive of medical innovation. But a small group of high-powered VCs and industry advocates have pushed for this for a long time, and commissioner Margaret Hamburg has been making more noises about how the agency’s mission is to ensure the safety and efficacy of new drugs, while also helping stimulate biomedical innovation. Just like anything in politics, though, talk is cheap and the record is … Next Page »

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Merry Christmas, Boston. You asked for it, and you got it. A big, publicly traded consumer tech company to put us on the map alongside the Silicon Valley bad boys and uppity New Yorkers. I present to you: TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP).

Sure, we already have Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB), iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), and privately held but well-established companies like Wayfair, Kayak, and Harmonix. But TripAdvisor is different. Although the online travel firm is not new—it’s been cranking here in Boston for more than a decade—it has become one of the biggest consumer-focused Internet companies on the East Coast, with more than 1,100 employees; 50 million-plus unique visitors a month checking out hotel, restaurant, and travel reviews; and, oh yeah, a market cap north of $3 billion. Yet it hasn’t received as much media coverage or tech-community-adulation as you might expect over the years. (An exception to the former would be this in-depth story by my colleague Wade Roush; the latter would be this commentary from investor Chris Dixon.)

I spoke with TripAdvisor CEO Stephen Kaufer on Wednesday, the day his company officially became independent from Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) and started trading on the Nasdaq under its own stock symbol. Here are my takeaways from our chat:

1. TripAdvisor wants the spotlight now. “We have generally been very, very surprised at how little attention the press have paid to TripAdvisor,” Kaufer said. He pointed to his company’s size, number of employees, traffic, revenues, and profits, calling it “the $3 billion company in our own backyard.” On the local training and ecosystem front, he says college interns are turning down offers from Facebook and Google and working at TripAdvisor instead.

2. TripAdvisor is global. Seventy-five percent of the traffic to the company’s branded websites comes from outside the U.S. Think about that for a minute. “We’re almost unchallenged in most countries in the … Next Page »

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What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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Acquisitions and IPO announcements dominated the deals news in New England this week.

—Boston-based Third Rock Ventures put $34 million in Series A funding into Ember Therapeutics, a startup that’s developing drugs to fight obesity in a new way. Ember, also of Boston, is harnessing new understanding of the bodily tissue known as brown fat, which can help mammals burn off the more commonly known white fat tissue.

—Cerulean Pharma inked a $15 million Series D investment from new investor CVF, an affiliate of Henry Crown and Company, as well as existing backers Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock, Lilly Ventures, Lux Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Cambridge, MA-based Cerulean’s lead drug is a so-called nanoparticle, a tiny chemical package designed to work its way into cancer cells and kill them.

—IBM made its 20th acquisition in the Bay State since 2003, with the purchase of Burlington, MA-based Emptoris, a maker of supply and contract management software. Emptoris has 725 employees across the globe and will become part of IBM’s software group. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

—Coronado Biosciences  (NASDAQ: CNDO) started trading on the Nasdaq on Monday at an opening price of $6.50 per share. The formerly New York-based biotech, which moved to Burlington, MA in August, took an unconventional path to going public, by registering its private shares as common stock, rather than undergoing an IPO.

—Coskata, a cellulosic ethanol developer backed by Boston-area venture firms Advanced Technology Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures, filed documents with the SEC indicating its intent to raise $100 million in an initial public offering. The Warrenville, IL-based startup has raised $80 million in venture funding since founding in 2008, and is also backed by GE, Khosla Ventures, and Blackstone Group.

—Woburn, MA-based Excelimmune took in $12 million in financing from an undisclosed private investor to help fund the development of its molecules focused on fighting infectious diseases, like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

—And in the week’s more shocking news, two speech software makers that had been battling in court over allegations like patent infringement and commercial bribery announced they would become one force. Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) is acquiring Cambridge-based startup Vlingo for an undisclosed sum. The deal enables the two to team up as players like Apple and Google and are focusing more on voice-enabled applications for mobile phones.

—A deal that had been talked about for more than half of this year finally went live. Newton, MA-based online travel company TripAdvisor officially began trading on the Nasdaq on its own (NASDAQ: TRIP), after being spun out by Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE).

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It’s probably the quietest Boston-area public offering of the year. But why? Maybe because it’s a spinoff from an already public company, and the deal was announced back in April. Or maybe because New England doesn’t go wild for its consumer-focused tech companies the way some other regions do. Or maybe everyone is just sick of online user reviews (and planning holiday travel).

For whatever reason, tomorrow’s first trading of Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor’s stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol “TRIP”—and the company’s official spinoff from Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE)—doesn’t seem to be getting talked about or celebrated that much in local tech circles. And that’s probably just fine with TripAdvisor, which has always been understated when it comes to PR. (Its stock has already been trading under “TRIPV” for the past couple weeks.)

The company, which has more than 1,000 employees (doubled in the past two years), is a major international force in online travel and has been raking in the cash for the better part of a decade. TripAdvisor made $486 million in revenue in 2010 and is on pace for more this year. From what I can tell, the firm has never been particularly chummy with Boston media, marketing, or trade organizations. It does recruit heavily in the area though.

TripAdvisor started in 2000 as a search engine to help people find reviews of travel destinations. The company quickly became a destination in itself for user-generated reviews, and it figured out the lead-generation model before most people had even heard of lead-gen. The company makes money from advertising and referral fees when consumers book flights and hotels through its partner sites. One tidbit: Founding CEO Stephen Kaufer told my colleague Wade last year that TripAdvisor was “a couple months shy of going out of business” in late 2001 before it figured out its revenue model.

In 2004, TripAdvisor was bought by Internet giant IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) and became part of Expedia, which itself was spun out from IAC the following year. TripAdvisor the company has grown to encompass nearly 20 travel sites (including TripAdvisor.com, SeatGuru.com, and BookingBuddy.com) and is expanding aggressively in Europe, China, and other locales.

It sounds like going public should raise TripAdvisor’s international profile, but being independent of Expedia won’t change things much. The companies basically operated separately over the past seven years. One broader trend to watch: whether user-generated content for travel, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses remains a lucrative property to own, or whether it ends up getting lost in the noise of bigger and badder marketing devices of the coming decade.

Locally, there’s an interesting juxtaposition of TripAdvisor with other prominent travel tech firms. Just as TripAdvisor is going independent, Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software is being integrated into Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) as the search giant ramps up its own travel-site capabilities. And Kayak, the Connecticut-based travel meta-search company with a strong Boston presence, filed for an IPO late last year but has been waiting out the market and evolving its own offerings in this super-competitive sector.

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Here’s another data point for New England cleantech investors. Coskata, a Warrenville, IL-based developer of cellulosic ethanol, has filed paperwork for an initial public offering. The proposed maximum offering is $100 million, but as usual, that doesn’t mean much at this point.

Coskata is backed by a couple of Boston-area venture firms—Advanced Technology Ventures and Greatpoint Ventures. ATV (owning 17.7 percent) and Greatpoint (15.6 percent) are the third and fourth largest stakeholders in the company, behind Khosla Ventures and Blackstone Group. General Motors is also an investor in the company. Coskata has raised more than $80 million in VC funding since 2008 but isn’t making money yet.

It’s a difficult climate for biofuels companies. Nevertheless, Coskata isn’t the only one testing the IPO market. Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma filed to go public in September. Mascoma, which is building a cellulosic ethanol refinery in Michigan, is backed by another pair of Boston-area VC firms, Flagship Ventures and General Catalyst, as well as Khosla Ventures.

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Ah, the good old days of April. Spring was in the air, and bankers were running the numbers on IPOs for Northwest technology companies. It was fun while it lasted.

Here’s the flashback: Real-estate website Zillow filed its paperwork on April 18, and RFID maker Impinj followed suit three days later. I even interviewed Seattle-area investors and entrepreneurs about whether these were the first ripples of a new boom for local tech companies.

So much for all of that.

Zillow (NASDAQ: Z) did successfully go public, opening trading on July 20. But Impinj has moved slower, not updating its SEC filings since mid-July. And some other Washington state companies that say they have the fundamentals to go public are staying away until the markets improve.

Exhibit A is Inrix, the Kirkland-based provider of traffic data that started as a spinout from Microsoft. Back in late July, Inrix reported a new $37 million financing round, and CEO Bryan Mistele told me that the company was ready to go public “sooner rather than later,” and was doing better than Zillow when it filed.

That was just five days after Zillow started trading, and two weeks before S&P’s downgrade of the federal government sent the stock markets into a tailspin. These days, Inrix is taking a wait-and-see approach, spokesman Jim Bak says.

“Was it in he cards this year? Yes. Are we choosing to play the hand? No,” Bak says.

He points out that Inrix is having another good year—it’s a profitable, cash-flow-positive company that doesn’t need an IPO to sustain its business. So that makes the decision to wait and see even easier.

“We’ll probably have another year under our belt of 100 percent year-over-year cumulative annual revenue growth,” Bak says. “Everything is in place. The numbers are there, the growth curve is there … but the climate really isn’t ready.”

Vancouver, WA-based nLight Photonics, which makes semiconductor lasers, also has been talking up its IPO potential this year. In a series of news reports tied to its $17.5 million financing round in late August, company officials and investors said nLight was poised for an IPO—although they generally declined to put a timeline on taking that step.

But it definitely doesn’t sound like the step will come anytime soon. “When volatility is how we’ve seen, it’s not a good time to go public,” CEO Scott Keeney says.

In the meantime, nLight is profitable and growing 30-40 percent a year, Keeney says.

“It’s hard to speculate on how the current market changes the exact timing of how we’re thinking about the big step,” Keeney says. “I can say we are a fast-growing, strong venture-funded company, and that’s clearly in our plans.”

Impinj couldn’t comment on the timing and particulars of its IPO filing because it’s in the middle of the registration process, but said a public debut is still in its future.

“While the recent volatility in the capital markets has impacted many IPOs, we have no current intention of withdrawing our registration statement,” spokesman Jim Donaldson says. “The timing of Impinj’s IPO by will depend on many factors, including conditions in the capital markets, conditions in the markets for our products, and our financial performance.”

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Catching up on an eventful week in Boston- and San Francisco-area venture capital personnel moves…

—Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures are leaving the board of Twitter at the end of this month. Sabet and Wilson were early investors in the social-media giant, and there has been plenty of speculation as to the reasons for the move. The consensus seems to be that Twitter needs a public company-ready board, and that the VCs want to focus on early-stage startups. Plus there was talk that Twitter’s board needed a trim. (Of course, there might be more to it than that.)

—Mike Hirshland has left Polaris Venture Partners after 12 years to form his own seed-stage investment firm, the details of which (including its location) are still under wraps. Hirshland was a general partner at Polaris and helped lead the creation of the firm’s early-stage startup incubator Dogpatch Labs, which started in San Francisco, where Hirshland was a frequent presence. His investments have included Black Arrow, Q1 Labs, Formspring, and Stickybits, and his board appointments include Automattic, KISSmetrics, LolApps, and Quantcast.

—Ryan Moore from GrandBanks Capital is joining Atlas Venture as a partner, effective in November. Moore has spent the past dozen years at GrandBanks, making his name with investments in companies such as Enpocket (acquired by Nokia), GlassHouse Technologies (filed for IPO), and Vivox. Meanwhile, Atlas partner Axel Bichara will step back to a venture partner role with the firm. No word yet on how (or whether) GrandBanks will fill its new opening.

—Keith Dionne, the former CEO of Surface Logix and Alantos Pharmaceuticals, has joined Third Rock Ventures as an entepreneur-in-residence. Third Rock, a life sciences VC firm that raised its second fund last year, says Dionne (also a veteran of Millennium Pharmaceuticals) will provide expertise in areas such as rare genetic diseases and novel biologics. Some of Third Rock’s recent investments include Blueprint Medicines, Lotus Tissue Repair, and Zafgen.

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This week’s deals news in New England was dominated by cleantech and life sciences firms.

—Quincy, MA-based Bluefin Robotics, a maker of  autonomous underwater vehicles, acquired the assets of Hawkes Remotes for an undisclosed sum. Hawkes Remotes is a spinoff of Hawkes Ocean Technologies, a Bay Area developer of deep-ocean explorer vehicles.

—Providence, MA-based NABsys, a developer of gene-sequencing technology, raised $10 million in a Series C financing led by its return investor Stata Venture Partners. That brings NABsys’ total funding pot to $21 million. The startup said it will put the money toward developing and commercializing its solid-state electronic systems for single-molecule DNA sequencing and analysis.

—Mascoma, a Lebanon, NH-based biofuels developer, filed for a potential $100 million initial public offering, which is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank, and Credit Suisse. As of fall 2009, the company had raised $100 million in private equity and about another $100 million in government grants and loans.

—Massachusetts startups collected $156.5 million in equity-based funding in August, continuing to dip from the dollars raised in earlier months of the summer, according to data from CB Insights Funding Flash.

—My hunch is that this month’s Bay State funding numbers will turn out better; Westborough, MA-based cleantech startup Boston-Power announced Tuesday that it had raised $125 million in funding, led by Beijing firm GSR Ventures. Return Boston-Power backers Oak Investment Partners and Foundation Asset Management also provided funding, along with the Chinese government. As a result, the developer of lithium-ion battery technology will shift its operations and manufacturing to China. Boston-Power has now raised more than $316 million.

—Cambridge, MA-based Tokai Pharmaceuticals took in a $23 million third tranche of its Series D round from existing investors Novartis Venture Fund, Apple Tree Partners, and angel investors. The money will go to Tokai’s prostate cancer drug galeterone (TOK-001), as it moves into the second of three clinical trial phases needed for FDA approval.

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Big news today in New England cleantech—a sector that could certainly use some positive developments. Lebanon, NH-based Mascoma, a biofuels firm that plans to break ground on a cellulosic ethanol plant in Michigan later this year, has filed for an initial public offering. In its SEC filing, Mascoma says it intends to sell up to $100 million worth of shares in its IPO, which is being underwritten by Morgan Stanley, UBS Investment Bank, and Credit Suisse. (The $100M figure doesn’t mean much at this point, though.)

A number of big venture firms are investors in Mascoma. Among them are Khosla Ventures (which owns 17.5 percent of the company), Flagship Ventures (8.7 percent), General Catalyst (8.3 percent), and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (7.2 percent). But the largest owner is SunOpta (NASDAQ: STKL), a Canadian food and mineral company that has gained a 20.6 percent stake in Mascoma, mostly through a $51 million merger a year ago. As of the fall of 2009, the company said it had raised about $100 million in private equity and another $100 million in government grants and loans.

Mascoma started in 2005 out of Dartmouth College and is led by CEO Bill Brady. The company has developed a process for producing ethanol from non-food plants such as wood chips and grass. So far it’s not profitable. Mascoma made $15.5 million in revenues in 2010, but had a net loss of $25.9 million. For the first six months of 2011, the firm made $6.7 million in revenue and had a net loss of $14.5 million.

Xconomy first profiled Mascoma in 2009, when the startup gave us access to its lab facilities in New Hampshire. We also wrote about the company’s plan for its Michigan operations last year, with a major update early this year.

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It’s a busy day for venture-funding and IPO announcements. To wit:

—San Mateo, CA-based InMobi, which runs the largest independent mobile ad network, said today that it has arranged a whopping $200 million investment from Softbank, in two tranches of $100 million each arriving this month and in April 2012. “With a global leader like Softbank behind us, we are now well positioned to fully capitalize on the opportunity before us through substantially increased product innovation, deeper market penetration, and acquisitions across the mobile ad value chain,” InMobi founder and CEO Naveen Tewari said in a statement.

—Chegg, the Santa Clara, CA-based online college textbook rental company, said that it has agreed to acquire Zinch, a San Francisco startup whose online platform matches students applying to colleges and graduate schools with admissions offices and scholarship opportunities. “”With our acquisition of Zinch, we’re extending our mission to high school students through the $7 billion college recruiting market, while continuing to break down the barriers of a college education, from the high cost of tuition and textbooks to helping students make money, pick their courses and get the academic help they need,” Chegg president and CEO Dan Rosensweig said in a statement. Zinch raised venture financing from New World Ventures as well as individual investors Mike Levinthal, Stan Chudnovsky, Aydin Senkut, and Chris Michel. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

—GCT Semiconductor of San Jose has filed S-1 registration papers in preparation for an initial public offering. The company, a fabless designer of 4G wireless chips, hopes to raise $100 million in the offering. The filing shows that GCT’s largest shareholders are board chairman Paul H.J. Kim (31.15 percent), Parakletos Ventures (31.14 percent), and FirstMark Capital (13.60 percent).

—Alphabet Energy, a San Francisco startup developing thermoelectric materials that capture waste heat, said it has closed a $12 million round of Series A financing. TPG Biotech led the round, which was joined by existing investors Claremont Creek Ventures and the CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund. The company says it will use the funds to speed up product development, deploy pilot projects, and relocate to an as-yet-undisclosed location in the Bay Area. Mark Gudiksen of TPG Biotech has joined Alphabet’s board of directors.

—RRKidz, a San Francisco- and Los Angeles-based startup developing tablet-based books for children, said yesterday that has completed an initial round of fundraising with support from Raymonds Capital and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Led by actor-director Levar Burton of Reading Rainbow and Star Trek fame, the company is creating a subscription e-book service for iPads and Android devices. In a report today, VentureWire put the amount of the initial investment at $3 million.

—Rumble Entertainment, a new cross-platform gaming company based in Redwood City, CA, came out of stealth mode to announce that it has collected an unspecified amount of seed funding from Playdom founder Rick Thompson. Rumble’s founding team includes former EA executives Greg Richardson, Mark Spenner, and David O’Connor, as well as former Zynga designer John Yoo. Rumble says it will build free-to-play games in house, and also offer a publishing platform to third-party developers.

—San Francisco-based SaveUp, which is building an online rewards program to encourage personal saving, announced that it has collected $2 million in seed funding from Blue Run Ventures and True Ventures. The startup, whose system is still in private beta testing, was founded by Priya Haji and Sammy Shreibati. “Instead of rewards that accumulate over long periods of time, SaveUp is pioneering a unique model where every positive financial action offers the chance to win valuable or life-changing prizes,” the startup said in a statement.

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