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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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I read the book and found it quite enjoyable.

And with all due respect to Eric Ries and all of the VCs out there chasing lean startups, I recognized one simple truth. I still like my startups Phat.

A phat startup aims to solve a very big, very difficult problem that will transform an industry. They typically take many millions, or even tens of millions and 1-3 years to get the first product out the door. They are big ambitious bets on deep technology and market transitions that are difficult to predict. They require invention and problem solving and risk, yes risk. They are a venture in the true sense of the word.

But my goal is not to dismiss the good ideas in the Lean Startup bible. There are many, but some simply don’t apply.

For example, in Phat startups, the challenge is not whether customers will want it (or whether you need to pivot or iterate or some other euphemism). The challenge is whether it can be built in the first place—will it work at all? Will it perform to spec? Will it scale? Will it be reliable? Can it be manufactured? Will it hit the price point?

Very frequently, the last question is whether customers will buy it. I know this sounds “unconventional” and decidedly old-school, but in many of these cases, if you CAN build it, they WILL come.

Why? Because phat startups often address problems that simply can’t be solved any other way, and customers are in dire need of solutions—from cancer treatments to robots for bomb disposal to switches capable of handing exponential growth in mobile data.

And that’s why, once the product is proven, phat startups have been many of our region’s, and our country’s fastest growing and biggest winners. All of these were $1B market cap companies:

*These are my estimates based on VentureSource.

And there’s a new generation of New England companies following in their footsteps:

Demandware (on-demand e-commerce), QD Vision (display color enhancement), 24M (grid storage), 1366 (direct solar wafer), Plexxi (10 GB networks), Affirmed (4G Mobile), Actifio (secondary storage), Qualtre (smartphone components), Xtalic (electronic components), Akiban (scale out databases).

But a key question comes to mind: Are phat startups riskier than lean startups? It depends how you measure risk.

One of the great virtues of lean startups is that they … Next Page »

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Xconomy and the folks at WGBH (Bob Seay, to be precise) are at it again: bringing you the latest and greatest in news from Boston’s innovation community. The Xconomy Report airs every Friday morning at 7:49am on 89.7 FM. To find out about the project that both The Who’s Roger Daltrey and actress Julie Andrews are funding, have a listen on WGBH’s website.

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Get a bunch of prominent Boston-area founders and CEOs in a room together, and ask them provocative questions. It’s a tried and true recipe for a good discussion, and that’s exactly what we got at the end of the day on Friday at MassTLC’s 2011 unConference at Hynes Convention Center in Boston. The topic was “the secrets of scaling,” and it was a fitting end to a fun and productive day.

This was the Mass Technology Leadership Council’s fourth annual innovation conference, and the event has really solidified in its “unconference” format, in which hundreds of tech entrepreneurs, investors, execs, and other business leaders meet and create organic sessions to discuss whatever is on people’s minds. Most people are there for the networking and private meetings, but that didn’t stop a few lively sessions from breaking out.

The secrets of scaling session—focused on how startups get big—was organized by journalist Scott Kirsner and was more conference-y than unconference-y, as it was planned ahead of time and had the feel of a big panel. Here are some takeaways from that (before I get to some broader highlights later).

Each of the companies on the panel could be considered a Boston success story: Constant Contact, Gemvara, iRobot, Kayak, LogMeIn, Wayfair (fka CSN Stores), Zipcar. (See photo above by Jeff Bussgang, who noted that you can distinguish the pre-IPO companies from the public companies by who’s wearing jeans.) The idea was to tap into this collective braintrust and draw out some key lessons.

Paul English of travel site Kayak said he routinely asks people, who’s the smartest person you ever met? And then he goes out and tries to hire them. He relayed the story of recruiting Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak’s chief scientist, a process that took several years but was well worth it. “It was transformational,” English said. He also talked about Kayak’s expensive acquisition of rival SideStep back in 2007. Kayak fired all of SideStep’s engineers and created a duplicate version of its site. Lesson: hire and fire ruthlessly.

Niraj Shah from Wayfair talked about his e-retail company’s bootstrapped growth, starting in 2002. Once his team figured out how to make money from niche online stores, it faced lots of competitors and had to decide whether to raise money or stay the course. It chose the latter (until this year, when it did raise a big round). “We just launched new categories as fast as we could, built out selection in each category as fast as we could,” Shah said. “We let the growth compound on itself.” The key was “not letting early successes keep us from letting that compound,” he says. Lesson: stick to your knitting.

Michael Simon from LogMeIn, the remote access and IT management firm, started with the idea of being a lifestyle business, not a public company (it now has 450 employees, about 200 in Massachusetts). The key moment in LogMeIn’s growth was when it “started giving away stuff,” he said. This was before “freemium” was a popular model. The company’s revenues started very small but grew exponentially. “If you have an exponential growth curve, the absolute number doesn’t matter,” Simon says. “You’ll get there.” Lesson: start small and get traction.

Matt Lauzon from Gemvara, the online custom jeweler, represented the younger generation of entrepreneurs on the panel. Although it’s still fairly early for Gemvara (which started as Paragon Lake in 2006), the company seems to be on an impressive growth trajectory. “We didn’t want to … Next Page »

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Today’s news: Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec, the largest maker of injectable treatments for multiple sclerosis, met its goals in a second clinical trial for an oral pill to treat the disease. The pill reduced flare-ups by 44 percent when taken twice per day, and by 51 percent if taken three times a day. Bedford, MA-based iRobot announced layoffs last week of 8 percent of its staff, or 55 employees across Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California, despite showing a strong third quarter profit. Boston startup accelerator MassChallenge awarded $1 million to be split across 17 startups, and Bay State companies collectively raised $250 million in venture capital last month. The total funding for the third quarter was $505 million, down by about half from the previous quarter when there was talk of a tech bubble.

In case you missed it this morning, have a listen. The Xconomy Report airs every Friday morning at 7:49am on 89.7 FM.

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[Updated 4:35 pm] Bedford, MA-based iRobot laid off about 55 people last week from its government and industrial robots division, Xconomy has learned. I heard from a source familiar with the company that some of the layoffs came to light because ex-employees posted on social media looking for new positions. An iRobot spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The staff cuts come as the pioneering robotics company (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced its third quarter financial results this afternoon. The press release mentions that the company “implemented a reduction in force” because of “expectations for a reduction in government-funded research in 2012.” There is an earnings conference call scheduled for 8:30 am Eastern Time tomorrow.

The last significant layoff at iRobot was back in 2008, but this one is bigger, according to my source. The latest staff reduction is also notable because it affects the biggest division in the company—the one that houses some of its most famous products, like the PackBot military robot.

I have heard that iRobot has roughly 550 employees, which would make the layoff about 10 percent of the firm’s total workforce. Those numbers are not confirmed, however.

In the past year, Xconomy has reported on iRobot’s progress and expansion in Michigan, among other things. It’s not yet clear in which cities the staff cuts have occurred.

[Updated with comments from iRobot] A company spokesperson just confirmed the layoffs, but with slightly different numbers: “We can confirm that iRobot Corporation has had a reduction in force. This difficult action was taken based on our current view of future defense spending and a shift in program structure. In 2012 we see a significant decrease in our externally funded research and development. This transition from development to production requires our Government and Industrial robot division to reduce the size of its workforce. The reduction accounted for approximately 8 percent of the total workforce.

“We will be addressing this on the call tomorrow.”

[Updated 5:40 pm] iRobot has confirmed that 55 full-time employees were let go from the company’s offices in Bedford, MA; Durham, NC; and San Luis Obispo, CA.

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

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

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

… Next Page »

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Any question about the impact MIT is having on the field of mobile software design can be answered with two words: Modo Labs.

The Cambridge, MA-based startup grew out of the MIT Mobile Framework, an open source project that began in 2007 with the goal of helping developers build mobile websites for universities. The plan was specifically to focus on things that people do every day, like look up directories and campus maps on mobile devices. The commercial version of the software platform is called Kurogo, and it debuted earlier this year, in April.

The idea behind Kurogo (the name comes from the stagehands in Japanese theater) is to help colleges and other organizations get their information up and running online and make it available on any kind of device, from iPhones to iPads to feature phones—and do it all quickly using pre-built templates.

“Someone could configure this without knowing how to program at all,” says Andrew Yu, Modo Labs’ CEO.

Last month, Yu and Marshall Vale, Modo’s chief technology officer, walked me through a demo whereby the Kurogo software lets a developer grab information from different kinds of data sources—staff directories, schedules, videos, Google Maps, Facebook, Yammer, and so on. Then he or she can put these elements together to form a working site, or even a mobile app for Android or iPhone, in a few hours or less, Yu says.

So far, about 150 universities around the world have deployed Kurogo or are tinkering with it, Yu says. And lately Modo Labs has been pushing into the business sector, helping large hospitals and financial institutions set up enterprise-level intranets and mobile apps, including features like a staff directory that links to an indoor map showing where each employee sits in the building.

While plenty of companies and development shops are working on enterprise mobile apps and platforms, most of them (e.g., Blackboard Mobile, Pyxis Mobile, Apperian, Raizlabs) use proprietary code and/or are complementary to what Modo Labs offers. Modo sees open source as a key advantage, in that companies can try out the platform directly and tailor it to their needs. What’s more, many existing apps and platforms concern only specific corporate departments, such as field sales or inventory tracking, says Yu. “We’re taking the stance of something to be used for every single employee,” he says.

Lest you worry about the corporate and mobile security involved in such an undertaking, these guys have some background in that arena. Vale previously was a product manager at MIT working on Kerberos network security technology. (He was also director of software engineering at iRobot, where he worked for almost six years.) Yu, for his part, is on his third software startup and also spent about five years working at MIT as manager and architect of the mobile platform project.

Yu’s near-term goal is to “make sure we have the right people, and create a really strong culture that will be driven by excellence, respecting the open source heritage of the company,” he says.

With that in mind, Modo Labs is really looking to take a leadership position in the open source community around the Kurogo platform. According to the company, some reasonable role models for Modo Labs would include JBoss in open source middleware (bought by Red Hat for $420 million in 2006), and Acquia, around social publishing software Drupal. The startup’s ultimate goal is to “deliver great products that have worldwide reach,” Vale says.

Modo Labs currently has about 20 employees, and the company says its revenue has been growing “very rapidly in the past few months,” to the tune of 50 percent year-over-year growth. The firm raised $2 million in its first financing round last year and is in the process of raising additional funds, Vale says.

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There’s no shortage of mobile apps for managing your workout plans or counting calories, but far fewer for managing and improving sleep, says Ben Rubin, co-founder and chief technology officer of Newton, MA-based Zeo. And he has reason to know. The company’s Personal Sleep Coach system has won the support of Regis Philbin (TV endorsement), iRobot founders (CEO Colin Angle is a board member and co-founder Helen Greiner has said publicly she is an investor), and Johnson & Johnson and Best Buy (strategic investors in last funding round). And now Zeo is expanding that function to a mobile app, with the goal of integrating its technology with a slew of smartphone-based wellness tools.

Like the company’s original system, which involved headband sensors and an alarm clock displaying sleep data, the new Sleep Manager Mobile detects brainwaves to determine when users are in deep sleep or REM sleep and uses the information to wake them up at the optimal time. And like the original, it also analyzes the data to give users a scored rating–or “ZQ”—of how good their sleep was on a given night. But, not surprisingly, the new mobile version of the Sleep Manager makes accessing the information much more seamless than the original system. The original alarm-clock-based product collects data on a memory card, which users have to connect to their computers to upload to an online dashboard. That dashboard then charts sleep patterns and offers up tips on how to improve sleep quality. The headband for the mobile version, by contrast, sends the data automatically to your cell phone (Zeo makes apps for iOS or Android) via a Bluetooth connection, says Rubin.

Rubin says this seamless interaction enables the system to better serve as a platform for sleep management, by interacting with other sleep improvement tools more automatically. He hopes that it can ultimately be employed by other devices and applications to improve wellness from all different angles. For example, he envisions that (in later developments of the technology) users who … Next Page »

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CyPhy Works, the Boston-area robotics startup led by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, has raised an additional $1.2 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The investors in the round weren’t disclosed, but John Simon and Anita Jones are listed on the form as directors of the company, which was originally called The Droid Works. General Catalyst is an existing investor in CyPhy, which is still in stealth mode but is reportedly working on flying robots (UAVs), among other things. The startup previously raised $1.75 million early last year and won a $2.4 million government research grant in late 2009 to study UAVs.

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Silicon Valley has the PayPal mafia. Seattle has the Qpass mafia. Boston, for its part, has many interesting and influential tech company/family trees—DEC, PTC, and iRobot come to mind—but one of the more underrated ones is the m-Qube mafia.

For those who don’t know, m-Qube is the Boston-area mobile marketing and applications company that started in 2001 and was bought by VeriSign for $250 million in 2006. That deal was the first of a series of big mobile software acquisitions around town in the past five years—including Third Screen Media, Enpocket, Quattro Wireless, and most recently, Where (bought by eBay/PayPal last week).

The executives from m-Qube have gone on to lead companies like Quattro, Turbine, Unbound Commerce, and a few new projects around town and around the country. So let’s do a “where are they now” for the m-Qube mafia—or at least the ones we could track down. (This is a work in progress, so please send additions and we’ll update it.)

After compiling this list, I saw that BostInnovation published a similar piece last fall. The table below includes a few updates and additions to that list.

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The world needs robots, hopefully more than Mars needs moms.

The first part of that was Rodney Brooks’s message in his talk at the annual meeting of the National Venture Capital Association in Boston yesterday. Brooks, of course, has a strong interest in seeing the mass adoption of robots. He’s the co-founder of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) and Heartland Robotics, the Boston startup that aims to revolutionize U.S. manufacturing. Brooks retired last summer from an illustrious 29-year academic career, mostly at MIT, to focus on Heartland, which raised a $20 million Series B round last fall.

Here are a few takeaways from the Brooks talk, which was delivered to a room of venture capitalists:

Brooks started by making the economic case for mainstream robots. The populations of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. are getting older, he showed—the ratio of elderly to young people is increasing. That means “older people are competing for the physical services of younger people, so the price goes up too,” he said. “Physical stuff that needs to be done for people will get much more expensive.” And robots are a way to help do that stuff more efficiently, he said—think robotic wheelchairs or simple machines to lift and carry groceries and heavy items.

Brooks then traced the geographic path of low-cost manufacturing since World War II. He showed that the U.S. has outsourced cheap industrial labor to a series of countries—first Japan; then Korea, Taiwan, and China; and then Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Next up: Burma, Bangladesh, and perhaps African nations. “I don’t think this is sustainable in the long term,” Brooks said. “Everyone comes up in this flat world.”

He didn’t give an overt commercial for Heartland Robotics—the company is still pretty guarded about its technology—-but the idea (as I understand it) is that inexpensive helper robots in factories and workplaces could increase U.S. competitiveness, and eventually lead to what Brooks calls the “third wave of the industrial revolution.”

I gleaned a few more hints about what Heartland’s robots might be able to do. Judging from Brooks’s research over the years in computer vision, object recognition, dexterous manipulation, and interactive robots, I’m guessing they’ll be aware of people and objects around them and what exactly they’re looking at. They’ll be able to pick up and manipulate simple items, all while being safe for people to be in close quarters with. Most of all, they’ll be cheap and easy to use—a new breed of … Next Page »

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Make no mistake—this is Boston’s big bet on the future of robotics.

Cambridge, MA-based Heartland Robotics is announcing today it has raised $20 million in Series B financing led by new investor Highland Capital Partners. New investor Sigma Partners also participated, as did existing investors Charles River Ventures and Bezos Expeditions. All in all, it’s a vote of confidence by the Boston-area venture community in one of its homegrown companies—even as the region faces increasing competition in robotics from Google and other Silicon Valley companies.

More specifically, the new money and support will help Heartland Robotics “finalize product development” and bring its “innovative line of robots to market,” said Heartland CEO Scott Eckert, in a statement.

The company is still being cagey about giving any details on its technology or specific applications. The basic idea, it says, is to make U.S. manufacturing more productive and efficient by “introducing a new generation of robots” into “places that have not been automated before.” In a statement, Heartland founder and chief technology officer Rodney Brooks said the firm’s robots will be “intuitive to use, intelligent and highly flexible. They’ll be easy to buy, train, and deploy and will be unbelievably inexpensive.”

That last bit is key—the robots have to be really cheap for the economics to work out, and for Heartland to reach its goal of keeping American manufacturing jobs from migrating to low-cost regions. That would seem to preclude robots that have human-like dexterity, which was the focus of research Brooks conducted in recent years at MIT involving robotic arms and hands that can manipulate tools and everyday objects using tactile sensors and computer vision. But the robots could have some dexterity—enough to load and unload equipment parts, say, or perform assembly-line tasks. And they probably could be mobile, like iRobot’s Roomba, and could help move items around the workplace, like Kiva Systems’ warehouse helper robots, for example.

Heartland Robotics previously raised a $7 million Series A round from Charles River Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, the Seattle-based investment firm of Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Heartland was founded in 2008 by Brooks, the co-founder of iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) and former director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Brooks retired from MIT last summer to spend more time on his new company.

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IRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) has quietly added to its forces in Michigan. The Bedford, MA-based provider of robotics for the home, government, and industrial markets now has two full-time employees based in the Wolverine state, where it first established a one-person office in 2009 to focus on its military customers.

Joe Dyer, iRobot’s chief of operations, sounded upbeat last week about his company’s presence in Michigan and the climate for future business growth.

In October, the company revealed that it landed a $14 million order to provide intelligence software upgrades and spare parts to previously deployed unmanned ground vehicles called PackBots for the U.S. Army. (The military has used the robots in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq for bomb disposal and other dangerous missions.) The order came through the Army’s Robotic Systems Joint Progress Office (RSJPO) in Warren, MI, Dyer said. Though this was the 20th order made under what is an ongoing $286 million contract, he gave the firm’s fledgling team based in Troy, MI, some credit for it.

“Our folks in Michigan have worked closely with that office [the RSJPO] in facilitating that business,” Dyer said.

And despite its small size, iRobot’s two-man force in Michigan is part of a crucial segment of its overall business, Dyer said. The company—though perhaps best known for its Roomba home vacuuming robots—brought in $39.6 million, or 42 percent of its third-quarter revenue, from its government-industrial group that makes robotic systems for military and security customers. The firm’s presence in Michigan keeps it in close proximity to the RSJPO, which is located at the U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM) in Warren, and a growing crop of nearby tech firms that are developing sensors and other systems that iRobot could integrate into its robots, Dyer said.

IRobot started with just one Michigan-based employee, Bruce Legge, a former U.S. Navy submarine officer and former employee of General Dynamics Land Systems who joined the company in 2009 to open the Troy office. IRobot has since added an engineer to its Michigan operation.

“Detroit has without a doubt some serious … Next Page »

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None of this would have happened 10 years ago. Where to begin?

Last month, I walked into a room of about a dozen robotics experts and technology startup investors. It was one of the sessions at the MassTLC Innovation “unConference” in Boston. The discussion centered around how to build a successful robotics company. But it was some of the newer context around this question that turned the session into a watershed moment I won’t soon forget.

Two main takeaways: First, robotics companies around Boston have come a very long way since 2000, when I was a postdoc in a robotics group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. That sort of academic research is still going strong, but the bigger story of the past decade has been the business success of robotic vacuum cleaners, bomb-disposal units, and surveillance drones, and how that has helped pave the way for a new generation of companies.

My second takeaway is that the business community thinks there is a new threat to Boston’s competitive position in robotics—and its name is Google. I’m not usually one to fan the flames of Boston vs. Silicon Valley arguments, but in this case the discussion hits close to home, so I wanted to see if there’s much truth to it.

The Boston area, of course, is home to numerous robotics companies—iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), Boston Dynamics, Harvest Automation, Heartland Robotics, Kiva Systems, iWalk, and CyPhy Works, just to name a few. Many of those companies were represented in the unConference session, along with investors from CommonAngels, Founder Collective, and General Catalyst. Historically the region has had lots of expertise, both in universities and industry, in key technologies underlying robotics such as sensors, actuators, control algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data storage.

Yet 10 years ago, most early-stage investors (angels and VCs) wouldn’t think of touching a robotics startup. The development costs and business risks were too high, and the technology infrastructure—onboard processing power, wireless communication, programmable chips, sensors, algorithms—wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Now things have changed, certainly in investors’ minds, … Next Page »

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Overwhelming. Inspiring. Thought-provoking. These are all words that apply to the spectacle that was yesterday’s Mass Technology Leadership Council’s Innovation 2010 “unConference,” held at the World Trade Center Boston and organized by entrepreneur and investor Bill Warner, Matrix Partners’ Antonio Rodriguez, and MassTLC’s Tom Hopcroft. And one more word, ridiculous—that’s what it feels like to try to sum it all up in one post.

So I won’t do that. Instead, I’ll just give a few of the ideas and thoughts that my colleague Erin Kutz and I came away with from the discussions of the day. The basic format (or unformat): hundreds of entrepreneurs, tech executives, investors, and other business leaders broke out into about 100 organically created sessions on everything from customer development, startup resources, and how to generate social media buzz to alternative financing schemes, venture capitalist-entrepreneur dynamics, and education issues for engineers headed into industry and women in tech. I’d hazard a guess that a lot of strong connections were made during the course of the day, and we’ll be seeing the fruits of all that in the years to come.

Just a few of the people I saw as I flitted from room to room during the morning sessions: Shawn Broderick from play140 and TechStars, Mike Chin from Baydin, Ed Crawley and Ken Zolot from MIT, Wade Appelman from Harvest Automation, Carl Calabria from iRobot, Paul English from Kayak.com, Eric Paley from Founder Collective, Susan Hunt Stevens from Practically Green, Chris Sheehan and James Geshwiler from CommonAngels, John Landry from Lead Dog Ventures, Sim Simeonov from FastIgnite, Ziad Sultan from Marginize, Vineet Sinha from Architexa, Bettina Hein from Pixability, Gus Weber from Microsoft, and, of course, Bill Warner himself.

Here’s our top 10 list of observations:

1. MassTLC’s innovation conference, in its third year, has become a premier business event for tech entrepreneurs in New England. It has gained a critical mass of elite attendees, such that people now feel they have to be there. It has also found a way to blend the concerns of entrepreneurs, startups, and venture capitalists with those of big companies and other organizations to a degree that I’m not sure I’ve seen before. Kudos to the organizers and participants.

2. The World Trade Center Boston is a pretty good venue for this sprawling event. Although the day was fairly chaotic, that’s by design. The layout of the rooms and floors made it easy enough to find what you were looking for quickly. One logistical suggestion that might help things get started more smoothly—some advance prep and communication of what a few of the key topics will be (maybe this happened at the pre-party and I just missed it).

3. You’ve heard about co-working spaces; how about co-living? Cambridge Innovation Center founder and CEO Tim Rowe prompted a discussion on dorm-style entrepreneur co-living spaces, where a bunch of startups share common kitchen and bathroom space. The idea is to … Next Page »

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