Healthcare deals are going one way, tech deals another. That’s my read from the past week in the Northwest, where we’ve seen some of the biggest biotech deals around, even as a prominent Seattle tech venture firm (and software financings in general) head south.

—Bothell, WA-based Alder Biopharmaceuticals scored one of the biggest biotech partnerships of the year, as Luke reported today. The company has formed a collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) to develop Alder’s experimental rheumatoid arthritis drug, ALD518, and the deal could be worth more than $1 billion. In exchange for granting Bristol a worldwide exclusive license to develop ALD518 for all uses except cancer, Alder will get $85 million upfront, as much as $764 million in development and regulatory milestone payments, sales-related milestone payments that could exceed $200 million, and royalties on product sales.

—I took a look at the venture and debt financings for Washington companies last month (and the previous two months), and concluded that large investments in software startups aren’t coming back anytime soon. The data, courtesy of New York-based ChubbyBrain, shows most of the money is in healthcare and life sciences.

—Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire has secured an additional investment of $1.5 billion from Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Intel, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Google, a previous investor, is not participating in the round. The money will support Clearwire’s (NASDAQ: CLWR) deployment of its WiMax broadband network.

—Verathon, a Bothell, WA-based maker of ultrasound technology, has been acquired by Sarasota, FL-based Roper Industries (NYSE: ROP) as part of a pair of transactions worth a combined $356 million, as Luke reported. The price of Verathon’s sale by itself was not announced. The company develops a 3-D diagnostic imaging tool that helps doctors diagnose bladder disorders.

—One of Seattle’s most prominent tech VC firms will not be raising another fund or making new investments. Len Jordan of Frazier Technology Ventures confirmed the news as he announced he’s moving to Madrona Venture Group at the beginning of next year.

—Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences Oncology has lined up $35 million in follow-up financing to develop its drug-device treatment for cancer, as Luke reported. The investors weren’t disclosed, but the deal gives Light Sciences the right to access a $23.3 million line of credit, and $11.8 million more if investors choose to exercise warrants. The company raised $40 million from undisclosed VCs last year.

—Seattle startup Movaya Wireless has been acquired by Digby, a mobile commerce firm based in Austin, TX, for an undisclosed price. Movaya was founded in 2006 by Phil Yerkes and Stanley Wang, and focuses on making digital goods storefront applications for the iPhone, Android, and mobile Web platforms. The company’s development team in China will serve as the basis for Digby’s operations in Asia.

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The last official week of summer brought a slew of Northwest deals, to go along with today’s heat wave. Two of the year’s biggest financings happened in tech and life sciences, along with a big acquisition in healthcare, while a host of smaller deals went down in software, digital media, and advertising—and one company inched closer to an IPO.

—Seattle-based Integrative Diagnostics, Leroy Hood’s early cancer detection company, has raised $7.5 million out of a $30 million equity round, as Luke reported. The investors were not disclosed, but we’ll have more on this story soon.

—Seattle-based Free & Clear, which offers phone-based coaching for company employees battling tobacco addiction, obesity, and stress, was acquired by Inverness Medical Innovations (NYSE: IMA) of Waltham, MA, for $100 million in cash plus up to $30 million in follow-on payments, as Wade reported. Free & Clear was backed by Polaris Venture Partners, Three Arch Partners, and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. Inverness offers medical diagnostic tests and other disease management services for consumers.

—Portland, OR-based Ensequence raised $20 million, led by Clay Mathile, the CEO of CYMI Technologies (and former owner of Iams, the pet food company sold to Proctor & Gamble for $2.3 billion in 1999). It’s one of the Northwest’s largest tech financings of the year. Ensequence was founded in 2000 and is a leader in the interactive TV business, which lets viewers do things like call up additional information on the screen. There is some question as to whether the firm is moving its headquarters to New York, where its new CEO, Peter Low, is based.

—In the biggest life sciences venture financing of the year, Seattle-based Calypso Medical raised $50 million led by Skyline Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Ventures, with Bay City Capital and InterWest Partners also participating, as Luke reported. The funds will be used to expand Calypso’s worldwide rollout of its radiation pinpointing product, which helps radiation oncologists and technicians better treat prostate cancer. Luke also reported on the story behind the deal here.

—Seattle-based Getty Images, the creator and distributor of photos and other digital media, has made a $4 million strategic investment in Daylife, a New York media and content services company, according to the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital blog. The two companies have also formed …Next Page »

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The big news of the week was Microsoft’s sale of Razorfish to Publicis (see directly below), but there were a few other important deals in software, biotech, and energy.

—Microsoft’s online advertising subsidiary, Seattle-based Razorfish, was bought by French marketing firm Publicis for approximately $530 million, as Bob reported. The payment is expected to include cash and Publicis Groupe treasury shares. In addition, Microsoft and Publicis have entered into a five-year strategic alliance whereby Publicis clients can purchase display and search advertising from Microsoft on favorable terms. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) originally acquired Razorfish in its 2007 purchase of aQuantive.

—Bellevue, WA-based Confirma, a medical imaging software firm, has been acquired by Merge Healthcare, a Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider, for about $22 million, as Eric reported. Merge will incorporate Confirma’s MRI software into its IT offerings for doctors.

—Vancouver, BC-based Tekmira (TSX: TKM) formed a two-year partnership with Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals to develop new particles to deliver RNA-interference drugs to diseased cells deep in the body, as Ryan reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t given. Alnylam is funding the research effort and has exclusive rights to new discoveries, while Tekmira can use the discoveries for some of its own RNAi treatment programs.

—Seattle-based EnerG2 won $21.3 million in federal stimulus funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a new manufacturing plant in Albany, OR. The University of Washington energy-storage spinout is developing nano-scale materials to make better ultracapacitors for electric and hybrid vehicles and other applications.

—A few more terms of the Microsoft-Yahoo search deal, in which Yahoo will use Bing as its search engine and will control ad sales for five years, were spelled out in a filing with the SEC. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) will pay Yahoo $50 million a year for three years to cover transition and implementation costs. It will also hire 400 Yahoo employees, plus another 150 to assist with the transition. Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) can opt out of the deal if it isn’t approved within a year, or if Microsoft and Yahoo’s combined share of the search market dips below an undisclosed percentage.

—Seattle-based Oncothyreon (NASDAQ: ONTY), a developer of cancer drugs, raised $15 million by securing commitments from investors to buy new shares and warrants, as Luke reported. Last week, the company said a small group of lung cancer patients showed long-lasting responses after taking Stimuvax, the immune-boosting vaccine therapy Oncothyreon is co-developing with Germany-based Merck KGaA.

—Seattle-based WatchGuard Technologies, a network security company, acquired Toronto-based BorderWare Technologies, an e-mail and Web security firm, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not given. WatchGuard plans to use BorderWare’s technology to make its security software more comprehensive and competitive.

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Bellevue, WA-based medical imaging detection software company Confirma will be acquired by Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider Merge Healthcare for approximately $22 million, according to a press release sent out today. The acquisition will allow Merge to incorporate Confirma’s technology into its IT offerings to doctors. Confirma’s main product, CADstream, is used for prostate and breast MRIs, with other functions in development.

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Four professors from the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering recently presented their cutting-edge research to a private audience of tech executives and investors active in the game industry in downtown Seattle. The Interactive Media Technology Showcase was hosted on Wednesday by UW TechTransfer and enterpriseSeattle, and coincided with the Casual Connect gaming conference nearby. The moderator was gaming veteran Alex St. John, the founder of WildTangent and now entrepreneur-in-residence at UW TechTransfer.

As I understand it, the goal was to forge deeper ties between researchers and the gaming industry—presumably to explore the commercial applications of the professors’ work in areas like 3-D graphics, video processing, scene and motion generation, and human-computer interfaces. According to UW TechTransfer, the discussions led to at least one take-home message: that “control, simulation, and image manipulation technologies are at the point of radically changing the game development model.” Specifically, computers can now generate realistic-looking scenes, characters, and movements—potentially making it cheaper, faster, and easier to produce game-quality action and visuals, and “creating new possibilities for human control of game play.”

Just a brief recap of the talks here (you can also see videos here):

—Yoky Matsuoka, a neuro-robotics expert, gave an overview of her work on robotic hands and limbs, and control of virtual environments. She talked about how “neurobotic input devices” could let you grasp and manipulate virtual 3-D objects. Matsuoka’s work on measuring how challenging or stimulating it is to learn a repetitive action (like a hand motion) could potentially have impact on game design, in terms of being able to measure people’s enjoyment of a particular game or their ability to adopt new devices like the Nintendo Wii.

—Zoran Popovic, a specialist in computer simulations and animation, talked about artificial intelligence techniques for making next-gen Massively Multiplayer Online …Next Page »

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Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

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Much has been made of the fact that Microsoft is moving about half of its Live Labs applied research staff to other divisions, such as product groups and Microsoft Research. The news, announced within Microsoft a week ago, has been met with criticism from outside observers, who lament the reduction of one of the company’s most innovative groups (some would say its most innovative group). But there is another side to this story.

Live Labs was founded in January 2006 by Microsoft technical fellow Gary Flake, in a partnership between MSN and Microsoft Research. Its main goal was to accelerate innovation in Internet technologies like search, data mining, and distributed computing. Live Labs has been best known for developing visual interface technologies like Seadragon, a zooming application for all sorts of visual information, and Photosynth, which lets you create striking 3-D virtual environments from a series of photos.

According to the Live Labs blog, the current restructuring sends various team members to MSN, Windows Mobile, Microsoft Advertising, and Live Search. “Contrary to recent whispers and tweets, we are not shutting down, disbanding, dismantling, or anything of the sort,” the blog said. “In the coming weeks and months we’ll bring you updated developer tools, new ways to use Seadragon, and much more.”

Microsoft hasn’t said specifically what will happen to Photosynth and other favorite technologies from Live Labs. But the broader question on many people’s minds is whether the innovativeness of Live Labs will be crushed by plugging staff members into shorter-term product development instead of applied research.

Ed Lazowska, a University of Washington computer science professor and Microsoft watcher, has a very different take. “I think this re-org is great in terms of the company’s competitiveness and innovation potential,” he says in an e-mail. “The people from Live Labs who were doing research are now …Next Page »

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You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer.

Its assault began with little fanfare—the first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination. Yet here we stand in a world where Clark Kent couldn’t find a place to pull on his Supersuit if the fate of Metropolis depended on it.

The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?

For those looking over their shoulder, here are the three keys that will lead us to the next genre killer:

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.

2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming, but 50″ plasmas aren’t going—the 2″ experience just doesn’t compare. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email—at least not until someone solves the keyboard problem.

3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature. For example, the camera GET is two megapixels, autofocus, and flash. It’s no coincidence that this is about the quality level of a cheap disposable camera.

Following these rules, let’s break down the likely victims:

Point-and-shoot cameras—The writing’s on the wall.
There’ll always be a place for high end single-lens reflex models and the like. Enthusiasts will want the very best, regardless of cost or size. Most consumers, however, ask for two things from their camera: make it small and make it cheap. The GET for camera phones is being crossed as we speak, and then comes the end of the mass market digital camera. Who’s going to pay $250 for “just a camera” when their carrier just put one in their pocket for free? Danger level: critical.

Landline phones—The signal is still keeping busy.
The latest innovation often destroys its predecessor—CDs killed records, and DVD decimated VHS. The most obvious target for the phone, then, is the landline. But while the dial tone is clearly in decline, a tradition of reliability and security in case of emergency are keeping it alive. Burglar in the backyard? Hope you can get signal for 911. Extended power outage? Your touchtone telephone will be up and running, even as cell sites go offline and your phone battery dies. Installing an alarm for your house? Neither cellular nor VoIP are approved alternatives for trusty old copper. The GET for landline replacement is high reliability, and until carriers can guarantee it, the wires are safe. Danger level: moderate.

E-mail—Just a flesh wound.
SMS has revolutionized the way we communicate, but it’s still hard to beat …Next Page »

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Seattle mobile startup Ontela is announcing today that its photo-sending service for camera phones is now available through T-Mobile, via a partnership with the photo-sharing website Photobucket. The news comes on the heels of Ontela’s software going live on Verizon Wireless phones in November (also through Photobucket), as well as being pre-installed on four of the top five handset manufacturers—Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and LG—as of last month.

Together, these deals could represent a tipping point for Ontela, which in the past year has been signing up wireless carriers and social websites en masse in an effort to become a mainstream service for sending and uploading pictures from mobile devices. Its software automatically sends photos from your camera phone to your e-mail inbox, computer, or photo-sharing site. Ontela sells its software to wireless carriers, who in turn bundle and sell the service to subscribers as part of a monthly package. The company was formed in 2005 and is backed by some $15 million in venture funding from Steamboat Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Eastven Venture Partners.

To get the story behind the T-Mobile deal, I visited Ontela CEO Dan Shapiro at his company’s digs in the historic Smith Tower in Pioneer Square. We strolled up to the famed “Chinese Room” on the 35th floor, which is filled with intricately carved decorations and wood furniture, a gift from the Empress of China to tycoon L.C. Smith. The outdoor deck gave us a great view of downtown Seattle, Elliott Bay, and the surrounding mountains (that day was a bit drizzly, though). Back in the office, Shapiro gave me a demo in which he installed the photo-uploading software on a random phone in about a minute, took a picture, and e-mailed it to me. Most other mobile applications are “freaking impossible to install,” he pointed out.

The T-Mobile deal brings the total number of carriers offering Ontela’s software to 30, Shapiro said. All the top handset manufacturers except for Apple now offer the service, and this is the first time it’s available on smartphones and BlackBerries. No Android G1 yet, though—and apparently the iPhone is not a very good fit for Ontela. Nevertheless, Shapiro said, “We’re really excited. About half of U.S. subscribers can get our service now.” He added that T-Mobile’s subscriber demographics are a really good match with Ontela. “T-Mobile users take a lot of pictures,” he said. “With the launch of their new applications store, they’re poised to do amazing things with this product.”

Shapiro also told me about how the latest deal came about. “It took two and a half years of having thoughtful conversations with carriers about what’s important to them,” he said. “‘Here’s what we think you’re doing, and here’s how we think we can help move the needle on your business.’” Whether it’s reducing costs or providing a service that customers really want, Shapiro said, a deep understanding of the carriers’ needs is crucial. “Listening as well as telling—that’s important. ‘Here’s how we can help you build your business.’ That takes a long time.”

Lastly, I asked Shapiro whether the close proximity of T-Mobile’s headquarters (Bellevue, WA) played any role in the deal-making. He replied that the key meetings actually took place outside the Seattle area—typically at big wireless conferences in places like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Barcelona.

It reminded him of how he originally met venture capitalist Tom Huseby, the mobile guru who is chairman of Ontela’s board. It was February 2006, and they were all in Barcelona for a 3GSM World Congress meeting. Just milling around, Shapiro happened to spot Huseby’s nametag on his shirt and introduced himself. The two hit it off, and Shapiro ended up giving Huseby a photo-uploading demo. Having their first meeting in Barcelona was kind of funny, seeing as Huseby’s office was just a couple blocks away from Ontela. But it fits with the notion that in the mobile world, it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you have a connection.

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RedShift Systems, a Burlington, MA-based maker of advanced thermal imaging cameras used in manufacturing and other industries, says it has closed a $6 million second round of financing led by St. Louis-based technology company Emerson (NYSE:EMR), a new investor in the firm. The company says that previous backers also contributed to the financing.

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Beverly, MA-based SiOnyx, the developer of “black silicon” solar and imaging devices that we profiled when it came out of stealth mode back in October, said last week that it has opened a West Coast engineering center in Beaverton, OR. Leading the Oregon office will be Homayoon Haddad, SiOnyx’s new vice president of device engineering, who joins the company from Korea-based MagnaChip Semiconductor.

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The University of Washington’s TechTransfer department has launched a new program over the last four months that brings local entrepreneurs into the university to help academic researchers in the early stages of starting a company. This program, which is part of UW’s startup-support service, LaunchPad, matches volunteer entrepreneurs with faculty and other researchers interested in learning what it takes to build a successful company. (Xconomy previously wrote about LaunchPad here.)

Unlike more traditional entrepreneurs-in-residence programs (which UW also has), where entrepreneurs come in later in the game to help shape a particular company and often take on the role of CEO in that company, these new advisors will help with a range of projects well before they’re at the startup point.

Janis Machala, the director of LaunchPad since November, is spearheading the new program, which is being formalized this month. The experts she’s bringing in are tentatively being called LaunchPad “entrepreneur advisors.”

“Vetting research early with industry, with people who have had to go through the funding process, with people who have had to pitch their deals to strategic investors, will help give the researchers a sense of the reality of what it takes to make something translated into the commercial world,” Machala said in an interview. “This is really about trying to narrow that gap between the lab and the commercial.”

To find these expert advisors, Machala looks to her extensive network of local contacts. She just came to UW from an extensive background in the startup world, most recently from Paladin Partners, a Kirkland-based consulting firm for startups she founded in 1995. Machala keeps her ear to the ground for news of senior executives going through some kind of transition—retirement, company mergers, and so forth—someone who would have some spare time to volunteer with the researchers.

“People are really excited about this program and the idea that they can help in a meaningful way,” Machala said. And it helps that she is only asking for their time and not a check, she added. “So many of these people are being pitched to be an angel or to be on a board. They don’t have to have a formal relationship here.”

Jeff Canin, a local serial entrepreneur and consultant specializing in clean technology, just started as one of the entrepreneurial advisors last week. One of his first orders of business will be helping some UW researchers start a company around new solar cell technologies. Starting a successful cleantech company is not so different from any other successful startup, Canin said. “You have to have a differentiating solution to a large problem,” he said. “Often one finds a researcher or a technologist may have a grand idea, but it doesn’t serve a specific market.”

Among other advisors recently signed on at UW are Chris Porter, formerly of Cellpro and Pfizer; Joe Eichinger, co-founder and president of Redmond-based CoAptus Medical; Michael Hovanes, a serial entrepreneur in medical devices and imaging; and John Hansen, the former CEO of Bellevue-based Vallent (acquired by IBM in 2006). We’ll be keeping an eye out to see what impact this distinguished group has on the UW startup community.

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Peabody, MA-based medical imaging and airport security company Analogic (NASDAQ: ALOG) said today that it will reduce its global workforce by 140 positions, or about 9 percent, in response to declining demand for capital equipment among healthcare organizations. The company said the cuts would save $9.6 million annually. We will update the Boston Tech Layoff Tracker accordingly.

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Beaverton, OR-based Planar Systems (NASDAQ: PLNR), a maker of monitors and displays, announced it has sold its remaining interest in its CoolSign Digital Signage business to CS Software Holdings. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. In November, Planar sold part of CoolSign to Bally Technologies, for gambling applications.

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It’s been a pretty slow couple of weeks for deals in the Northwest, what with the holidays. But there were still some big ones in software and biotech—starting with an Xconomy exclusive below.

—Xconomy broke the news this morning that Seattle-based Qwell Pharmaceuticals has raised a $7 million Series A round led by Arch Venture Partners and the Wellcome Trust. Qwell, which is developing new types of drugs to fight cancer and inflammation, could end up raising as much as $35 million in its first round, said Arch managing director Steve Gillis, in an exclusive interview with Luke.

—Hillsboro, OR-based FEI (NASDAQ: FEIC), a maker of high-resolution imaging tools, acquired the assets of Brisbane, Australia-based Intellection Holdings for about $2.8 million. The deal seems to strengthen FEI’s position in the global mining and mineralogy markets.

—Bob reported on Hopkinton, MA-based EMC’s acquisition of part of Seattle software startup SourceLabs. The deal, which was first reported by TechFlash, involves undisclosed assets and employees, but does not include the Swik.net open-source project run by SourceLabs, according to EMC (NYSE: EMC). The data-storage giant may be focused on SourceLabs’ data management tools, which would bolster its efforts in cloud computing.

—Not technically a deal, but some useful advice on how to follow through on deals. Moni Miyashita of IBM in Armonk, NY, gave pointers on how to successfully integrate a company after a merger. The keys, according to Miyashita, are strong leadership and performance management focus from the top.

—Lastly, Luke rounded up the latest rumors that Microsoft might be getting ready to lay off 10 to 15 percent of its staff—as many as 15,000 people. As of today, the rumors remain unsubstantiated. CNBC, citing a Microsoft source, reported the Redmond company will embark on a cost-cutting initiative this year, but that a big layoff is unlikely. Nevertheless, the rumors persist, according to reports in PC World and Network World. If anything happens, look for it before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings report on January 22.

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Hillsboro, OR-based FEI (NASDAQ: FEIC), a maker of nanotech imaging tools, announced today it has acquired the assets of Intellection Holdings, a Brisbane, Australia-based firm that makes automated mineralogy equipment. The deal was worth $2.8 million, and seems to strengthen FEI’s position in global mining applications.

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With only two eyes apiece, spanning a mere 180-degree field of view, humans have an innately limited understanding of what it means to see. Some insects have compound eyes with hundreds or thousands of facets that can form a nearly 360-degree picture of the world around them. The shells of many scallop species are rimmed by 100 or more brilliant blue eyes; a scallop can’t actually see much (since it doesn’t even have a brain), but its eyes can detect motion from any direction, warning it when to clam up.

Inspired in part by the scallop, engineers at Tenebraex—a small Boston company that makes optical equipment for the military—are unveiling a new type of surveillance camera today that combines images from five separate image sensors, each equivalent to the camera in a typical cell phone. Each camera has a roughly 40-degree field of view, and when stitched together, the five video feeds span a full 180 degrees, giving security personnel a comprehensive real-time view of a scene without the distortion created by traditional fisheye lenses, and without the delays created by remote-control pan-and-tilt cameras. Tenebraex’s engineers call the device the Digital Window, and it’s the debut product for Scallop Imaging, a new Tenebraex subsidiary that hopes to sell its technology to camera makers and system integrators in the security industry.

“Using multiple, lost-cost imaging sensors allows you to do things you couldn’t do otherwise,” says Peter Jones, president of Tenebraex. “They’re small enough and cheap enough that you can put them anyplace where you want situational awareness, without having to install a big eyeball with a motor turning it back and forth.” That could be a big advantage in locations where purse-snatchers and other wrongdoers have learned to look for remote-controlled cameras and strike when they’re pointed away. “There’s no motion to catch your eye, because the sensors are looking everywhere at once,” says Jones.

The Digital Window device is so small it will fit into a hole in the wall the same size as a light switch or power socket. It’s powered by the same Ethernet cable that connects it to a building’s surveillance system.

The Digital Window is only the latest in a eclectic series of vision-related technologies from Tenebraex. The company’s first product was a honeycomb-like screen that fits over the lenses of military-grade binoculars and rifle sights to keep out glare and prevent reflections that might give away a user’s position. (Reflections off optical devices are a more serious problem in wartime than you might think: a glint from Moshe Dayan’s binoculars during the 1941 Allied invasion of Syria showed a Vichy French soldier where to shoot, costing the future Israeli general and politician his left eye.) Using a similar type of screen, Tenebraex licenses filters to Philips Lighting that make vehicle headlights look black, red, or blue when they’re turned off. The company also makes a full-color night vision system, as well as a system called EyePilot that helps color-blind people distinguish different colors on a computer display.

Jones says the impetus for Digital Window originally sprang from a request from the Department of Defense, which wanted to add a large bulletproof window to the door of the M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The window would give soldiers about to exit the vehicle a better look at what awaited them. But it would also create a huge reflection, so some kind of camouflaging system was needed.

In the end, the project was dropped. “But what they really wanted to do in the Bradley was to make that door, in effect, transparent,” says Jones. “It doesn’t really matter how you get there—you just want an undistorted view. That was the genesis of the idea; it got us thinking about using multiple, low-cost sensors on the outside of the vehicle and having a display inside.”

Digital Window is the first instantiation of that idea—it’s just built for stationary installation as part of a security system, rather than the outside of a moving vehicle. (Not coincidentally, however, Scallop is investigating automotive applications of the technology, including distortion-free backup cameras for the rear ends of trucks, vans, and SUVs.)

In a way, Digital Window is the video equivalent of the low-budget panoramic and gigapixel imaging techniques that are becoming popular among amateur digital photographers (a subject I covered in a column last summer). The key to making a decent panorama or gigapixel image is to …Next Page »

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Redmond, WA-based Microvision, a mobile imaging and display company, announced it has been awarded a $750,000 contract to begin developing a high-definition, see-through eyewear display. The name of the customer was not disclosed. The wearable display is designed to be full-color and transparent to the surroundings.

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When NASA announced last week it was postponing the launch of its next mission to Mars by 26 months, Michael Ravine says his heart sank—and then he breathed a sigh of relief.As the advanced projects manager at San Diego’s Malin Space Science Systems, Ravine says his team has been working frantically to deliver two cameras for the mission by the end of January. They are the last two of four cameras that NASA hired the company to build for the Mars Science Laboratory, an SUV-size rover designed for backcountry four-wheeling across the Martian landscape.

NASA’s decision to delay the launch that was set for next October until 2011 was disappointing, Ravine says. But the extra time could give one of San Diego’s most unusual business ventures a chance to restore advanced optical capabilities that NASA was forced to delete from the two cameras to meet its test schedule.

Malin’s 2004 proposal called for building identical stereoscopic cameras that would be mounted on masts aboard the big Mars rover. Ravine says that for several reasons their plans included a wide-field zoom lens in each mast camera. One was the fact that Ravine had recruited “Titanic” filmmaker James …Next Page »

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Ambric, a Beaverton, OR-based semiconductor company, has announced it is shutting down and looking for a corporate buyer. The firm has suspended all operations not having to do with its sale or existing customer agreements. Ambric has developed software-programmable parallel processor chips that are used in video coding, wireless base stations, and medical and military imaging. It has been funded by the likes of OVP Venture Partners and Northwest Technology Ventures.

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