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

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

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

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

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This week in New England we’ve seen financings and data updates from drug developers, as well as an acquisition in the life sciences tools space.

—An SEC filing revealed that New Haven, CT-based BioRelix has brought in $3.6 million in new funding, as part of a round that could hit $5.3 million. The company is developing antibiotics against RNA drug targets known as RiboSwitches.

—Waltham, MA-based Syndax Pharmaceuticals has reported that its lead drug had performed well in a Phase 2 breast cancer trial. Syndax had previously reported positive data of the drug, entinostat, in a lung cancer trial two months ago, and reported the breast cancer data at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Breast Cancer Symposium this week.

—Cambridge, MA-based Aura Biosciences raised $4.5 million in financing, bringing the company’s total funding pot to $10 million in two years of operating. The startup, which develops tiny protein cells for delivering cancer drugs directly into tumors, has not named the specific investors in the round, but noted they are individuals who are pharmaceutical industry CEOs or entrepreneurs. The nano-particles look like viruses but are engineered to prevent the triggering of dangerous immune reactions.

—Caliper Life Sciences (NASDAQ: CALP) of Hopkinton, MA, will be bought by Waltham-based PerkinElmer for $600 million in cash, at $10.50 per share. Caliper makes imaging and detection technology.

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Some news from the world of life sciences equipment makers today. EMD Millipore, the Billerica, MA-based subsidiary of German pharmaceutical and chemical giant Merck KGaA, has agreed to acquire Seattle-based Amnis for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Millipore was bought by Merck KGaA for $7 billion-plus in cash in March 2010 and combined with EMD Chemicals, a New Jersey-based Merck subsidiary. Last week, EMD Millipore named Robert Yates, a diagnostics veteran from Roche, its new president. He succeeds Bernd Reckmann, the Merck exec who replaced Martin Madaus (another Roche vet) as head of Millipore after the acquisition last year.

Meanwhile, Amnis has taken an interesting path to this point. The Seattle firm, which spun out of the University of Washington in 1998, makes an imaging device that provides detailed images of large numbers of cells—potentially enabling researchers to detect trace amounts of cancer in a blood sample, or determine whether a drug will hit a particular protein target. The company’s customers include academic researchers and big drugmakers. According to today’s release, Amnis has 40 employees and generated sales of $14 million in 2010. The company’s investors include CVF, MedVenture Associates, OrbiMed Capital, and WRF Capital.

“The combination of Amnis with EMD Millipore will greatly accelerate development of novel applications in imaging flow cytometry, enhance our customer support, and accelerate product development,” said Amnis co-founder and CEO David Basiji, in a statement. No word yet on whether the company’s Seattle office will remain intact or if employees will be moving.

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[Updated 8/29/11 6:40 pm. See below.] Cambridge, MA-based Lantos Technologies, an imaging technology startup, has brought in $4.1 million in a round of equity funding from 17 investors, according to an SEC filing. The funding was led by return Lantos investor Excel Venture Management and included previous backers Catalyst Health Ventures and Mass Medical Angels. The MIT spinout raised $1.6 million in Series A funding last fall, to put toward development of its device for 3D imaging and digital mapping of the human ear canal.

Lantos also announced that it has hired Jeffrey Leathe as its new CEO, and that its founding CEO Shahid Azim will become senior vice president of new market development, focusing on consumer applications of the Lantos technology. Leathe was previously CEO and chairman of Biocius Life Sciences, an instrument and contract research organization focused on drug discovery research and clinical diagnostic testing. [Story updated to include investors and CEO announcement.]

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Here in the Boston area we like hard technologies. We like companies with weird names. We like companies that have vision. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Tenebraex, SiOnyx, and MC10.

They are the micro-cluster of imaging tech companies. They are working on a mix of far-out stuff and closer-in products, with a multiple-focus approach that befits their chosen field. If they were superheroes, Tenebraex would have eyes in the back of its head (panoramic view); SiOnyx would see in the dark; and MC10 would morph into different shapes depending on what it was looking at. Taken together, they just might reinvent the cameras we use every day.

One example: Imagine an ultra-thin camera phone that can take high-resolution, wide-angle photos and video in a dimly-lit bar or restaurant, or outside at night. That’s what combining the companies’ capabilities could do—though, as far as I know, they are not working together.

Several months ago I first talked with Peter Jones, the CEO of Scallop Imaging, which is the fastest-growing division of Boston-based optical tech firm Tenebraex. Why am I telling you this now? One, I’ve been busy. Two, Scallop is about to debut its third camera product in September. Last week, Jones said the upcoming “as-yet-unnamed camera will be the industry’s first multi-megapixel panoramic camera for very low light environments.”

Scallop’s new camera follows in the footsteps of its earlier products: digital and analog versions of a device (see photo below) that stitches together images from five separate camera sensors into a 180-degree, distortion-free, high-res panoramic view, for security and surveillance applications. The advantage over traditional fisheye lenses and pan-and-tilt cameras? Image quality, cost, and convenience, Jones said.

Some recent customers include hotels, museums, retail stores, and the U.S. military. One of the more intriguing applications of the technology lies in robotics. Last winter, a U.S. Army research lab organized a contest at Fort Bragg, NC. A number of teams sent mobile robots into a remote area to beam back images—presumably to check out the surroundings without having to send troops in. The robot that used Scallop’s camera finished in the top two (in terms of meeting its objectives), and it was the only one that didn’t get stuck in the woods, Jones said. He attributed the performance in part to its wide field of view.

My colleague Wade first profiled Scallop Imaging back in 2008. Since then, the division has grown to about 50 people. Tenebraex, its parent company, is no flash in the pan either. The company started in 1992 and is profitable, having invested in Scallop “multiple millions” of dollars in research and development, Jones said. “The majority of our future growth will come from Scallop.”

The company’s upcoming low-light camera overlaps a bit with another local firm. … Next Page »

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Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, said something interesting in last weekend’s New York Times magazine interview. It wasn’t his “there’s no tech bubble” spiel, or even his prediction that we’ll all be riding around in self-driving cars in 10 to 20 years, thanks to Google.

No, it was that he singled out “wearable computing”—portable devices like a pendant around your neck that record “everything around you all the time”—as a Next Big Thing. (Like Twitter, Facebook, or the iPhone, this could either be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the downfall of humanity—or both.)

Now one Boston-area startup is taking the mechanics of the idea a step further. MC10, based in Cambridge, MA, is developing flexible (“conformal”) electronics that can bend, stretch, and wrap around to conform to surfaces in the natural world, like the human body. That’s a far cry from the guts of today’s computers, which are based on rigid silicon circuits that are laid out on flat surfaces.

The three-year-old company has garnered increasing attention for its efforts, raising a $12.5 million Series B round led by Braemar Energy Ventures last month. (North Bridge Venture Partners was the original venture investor in 2009.) MC10 also has a deal with Reebok to develop a wearable product that’s very hush-hush (probably electronics integrated into footwear or other apparel for monitoring performance). The startup has also collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions to develop a new type of balloon catheter, equipped with sensors, to assist with heart procedures. Next up: wearable power and newfangled image sensors.

“We’re trying to change the world by reshaping electronics,” says Dave Icke, CEO of MC10. Icke is a semiconductor industry veteran who was previously an executive with Advanced Electron Beams and Teradyne.

The idea of flexible electronics isn’t new. But unlike other approaches over the past decade, such as using organic semiconductor materials or microwires (which tend to be slow), MC10 uses high-performance silicon circuits, which means the devices could be as fast as the computers you’re used to using. The trick is in exactly how the silicon is laid out and combined with stretchy materials. Imagine little islands of silicon linked by springy interconnects—“like a Slinky in between,” Icke says—with the whole thing deposited on a pre-stretched polymer. Depending on the application, the team adjusts the thickness of the islands and the interconnects so as to minimize the strain on the circuitry.

MC10's silicon-based photovoltaic cells could be used for portable or even wearable, personal power generation (image: John Rogers, UIUC)

MC10’s technology is based on research done in the lab of John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a co-founder of the company. Rogers, a former postdoc with chemist George Whitesides at Harvard University, was the winner of the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize announced last month. And the glue for the whole team is Carmichael Roberts, the general partner who led North Bridge’s investment; Roberts also worked with Whitesides as a postdoc, and he knew Icke from a previous company. (Icke, for his part, had gone to business school with North Bridge’s Jamie Goldstein.)

That’s all well and good, but making a living as a hardware startup is no easy task, especially when you’re selling a new technology. So MC10 has identified a couple of potentially lucrative markets for the next phase of its growth. One is portable (or even wearable) power generation—a set of projects supported by existing government contracts. Imagine a flexible sheet of solar-cell material that coats or is woven into the surface of a tent or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to absorb sunlight and store electricity. People have been talking about designing such a material for years, but MC10’s (see photo above) just might be good enough to make it work.

“Instead of having a bolt-on rigid box that gets attached to a roof or vehicle, [people could] integrate those efficient materials into a tent or awning, or into vests and clothing,” Icke says. … Next Page »

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There’s luck. And then there’s pure serendipity.

About a year ago, Baird Venture Partners (BVP) in Chicago had an idea. With Big Pharma increasingly parceling out drug development work to outside firms, the time seemed right for a startup that would offer specialized imaging services to companies who needed to test their therapies on small animals.

BVP searched for such a startup and ultimately recruited an experienced executive to lead one in California. But the venture firm soon realized that the startup would require lots of money and time to bulk up the business.

“One thing that I didn’t fully appreciate is the reality that there is a big barrier to starting a company like this,” BVP partner Peter Shagory recently told Xconomy. “It’s going to be challenging to crank out this space quickly.”

Venture capitalists are looking to “take a lot of risk out of equation early on,” he says. Companies with established technologies and customers “are not easy to find. They’re certainly rare.”

And then fortune struck.

Charles River Laboratories, which had acquired Molecular Imaging Research (MIR) in Ann Arbor, MI in 2008, was looking to pull out of the region. Sensing an opportunity, BVP and Arcus Ventures last month acquired the MIR assets and raised $7 million to restart the company.

“A lot of risk factors associated with a startup in California just went away with this opportunity in Ann Arbor,” says new MIR CEO Tom Ludlam.

MIR’s prized asset? A 20,000 square foot facility near the University of Michigan that houses lab space, a 8,000 square foot virarium, imaging suites, and tissue culture space. Since 2003, the company has performed over 250 imaging studies. Over the past 12 months, MIR provided imaging services to 23 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including eight top 20 companies.

The first step, Ludlam says, is to reboot the operation. The company plans to reestablish contacts with customers and strengthen its sales and marketing teams.

“We need to get back to full strength,” Ludlam says. The company has “been in a bit of a hiatus. One of the things that MIR has suffered from is a lack of broad exposure to the brand. A little bit of investment in sales and marketing is going to pay big dividends for the company.”

BVP and Arcus also want to invest heavily on internal R&D, Ludlam says.

MIR was an attractive asset because of the broad range of cutting-edge imaging technologies it offered, he says, including fluorescence, bioluminescence, and advanced MRI and PET scans. The company will explore expanding into different technologies, applications, and disease targets. For example, MIR wants to look more at topography and metastatic cancers that spread rapidly to other parts of the body.

Jim Adox, managing partner of Venture Investors’ office in Ann Arbor, welcomes MIR. Having worked with a couple of drug … Next Page »

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Michganders are sensitive about jobs and by jobs I mean there are not nearly enough of them.

Mention Pfizer shutting down its research and development center in Ann Arbor, MI or Becton, Dickinson pulling HandyLab’s operations out of Michigan after acquiring the local startup, and people get downright grumpy. What good is an exit if it doesn’t produce jobs?

With that in mind, Molecular Imaging Research(MIR) should be the feel good story of the year. After acquiring the Ann Arbor-based contract research organization (CRO) for $12.5 million in 2008, Charles River Laboratories last year said it too would withdraw from Ann Arbor.

Enter Baird Venture Partners and Arcus Ventures. The two venture firms said Monday that they acquired MIR assets from Charles River Laboratories, based in Wilmington, MA, and raised $7 million to not only keep MIR’s operations in Ann Arbor but also to expand the company.

“This can really become a compelling jobs story for Ann Arbor and Michigan,” Baird Venture partner Peter Shagory told Xconomy. “We’re excited about bringing another significant tech company to Michigan.”

Baird previously invested in Accuri Cytometers, a University of Michigan spinoff that was recently acquired by BD for $205 million.

Baird and Arcus are hardly being altruistic. The two firms had been hunting for an opportunity to crack the CRO market, especially with pre-clinical molecular imaging. As Big Pharma and small biotech firms increasingly outsource R&D services to outside firms, a CRO that focused solely on imaging technologies like fluorescence and advanced MRI/PET/CT scans could really add value to drug makers who need to test therapies on small animals, Shagory says.

“We think it’s a high growth area with significant potential,” Shagory says.

With its expert workforce, solid reputation, and a specialized facility in Ann Arbor, MIR offered the kind of critical mass that will allow Baird and Arcus to hit the market running instead of building operations from scratch, Shagory says.

The company has performed over 250 imaging studies since 2003. In the last 12 months MIR provided imaging services to 23 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, including eight top 20 companies.

Baird and Arcus hope to raise another $1.5 million on top of the $7 million. They hope to expand the facility and hire more people to boost the existing team of 12 employees.

The investors also recruited Tom Ludlam as CEO. Ludlam formerly lead Prologue Research International, an oncology-focused CRO, which was acquired in mid-2010 by Novella Clinical.

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It was a historic week in the Boston biotech field with big acquisition news, but we also saw headlines on stealthier firms and startup financings.

—Ryan took a closer look at H3 Biomedicine, a cancer research house setting up shop in Cambridge, MA, with the support of Japanese drugmaker Eisai. He compared it to the research efforts of other big drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline, which has also created a entrepreneurial startup in Cambridge, Tempero Pharmaceuticals, to fuel new drug discoveries. Eisai is providing $200 million, access to its scientists, and research and development support to H3.

—Bedford, MA-based Hologic nabbed FDA approval for its 3-D imaging system for breast cancer screening and diagnostics, which is designed to supplement existing scanning technology. The device is said to be the first of its kind to provide 3-D images of the breast.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) of Weston, MA, announced that its board of directors had given the drugmaker permission to repurchase 20 million shares of its common stock to offset stock issuances under its share-based compensation plans.

—Beverly, MA-based drug developer Cellceutix settled a compensation dispute with its former CEO George Evans. The company will buy 4.6 million shares of stock held by Evans and/or his sons over the past three years, for $1 million. Evan had previously sought $1.7 million in back salary and future compensation.

—Ryan tracked down a few more details from Tillman Gerngross, co-founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, about his stealthy new spinout Arsanis. The startup is focused on using Adimab’s yeast-based antibody discovery system to find drugs that could serve as an alternative to antibiotics for infectious diseases.

—Healthcare companies accounted for a 60 percent chunk of the funding raised by Massachusetts startups in January, according to … Next Page »

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The one thing Mok Oh was afraid of getting last month was an offer he couldn’t refuse. As it turns out, that’s exactly what happened.

Oh, the founder and former chief technology officer of Newton, MA-based EveryScape, had just left the company and was looking at his options for what to do next. He wanted to start another company. He had a 10-page slide deck ready for prospective team members. He was talking to angel investors. Then Walt Doyle stepped in and put an end to that. At least for now.

Doyle, the CEO of Where, a Boston-based mobile software firm, played the godfather role and hired Oh as chief innovation officer, starting this week. The two have known each other since around 2005, as they were both broadly involved in the field of local search. “Where makes sense in many different ways,” Oh says. “The company is growing, and the marketplace is changing.”

In the past year, Where has grown from 30 to 85 employees, most of whom work on the development side. The company says it has been profitable for the past six quarters. Its mobile application for consumers has about 4 million users and counting, and its location-based advertising network includes 250 publishers and reaches 50 million people in North America, Where says. Its third business unit is still emerging: merchant services and group-buying deals. The company acquired deals site LocalGinger last fall. And in December, Where said it had been granted a key patent covering a swath of location-based services related to delivering certain kinds of advertising, alerts, and coupons to mobile devices.

So, what does a 3-D imaging guy like Oh bring to a mobile startup like Where? A lot of what it needs, apparently. EveryScape is about providing immersive photos and virtual tours for restaurants and stores in local search results. Where is about helping consumers find places they want to go and connecting them with local businesses that want to find those customers. As Oh says, it’s all about “connecting with merchants in the mobile, local, and social space.”

Whether you call it local search or small-business brand marketing, all the big players—Google, Bing, AOL, Groupon, Amazon—want to own the sector. Which makes the field pretty interesting (and dangerous) for startups. One question is what expertise in this sector Oh will specifically bring to his new company.

For now, it sounds like his “innovation” role at Where is fairly loosely defined. Oh says he’ll “be involved in all aspects of the company, from the business side of things to the technical and product side of things as well.” He adds, “When we think ‘innovation,’ it’s not just creating something new, it’s also a supporting role in supplementing existing products and technologies and business strategies as well.”

Talking more broadly about his new job, Oh says, “It’s the intersection of the place graph and the social graph. The vision of Where is using mobility and location to accelerate [different] types of markets. Innovation happens when it’s not something out of the blue. It’s combining multiple ideas and being able to work with a team.” (On a related note, David Beisel of NextView Ventures has penned a series of blog posts about “how to find the perfect startup job” as an employee rather than a founder; many of the issues would seem to be relevant to Oh and others who are joining startups.)

It will be interesting to see how Where ultimately fares in the ultra-competitive field of location-based ads, recommendations, and deals. And we’ll be watching to see what a veteran startup founder (and deep thinker) like Oh will bring to this fast-moving and ubiquitous field.

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Bedford, MA-based Hologic said on Friday it has received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for its 3-D imaging system for doing breast cancer screening and diagnosis. The company’s X-ray mammography device, called the Selenia Dimensions System, is the first of its kind to provide 3-D images of the breast, according to the FDA. Radiologists in two studies showed a 7 percent improvement in their ability to distinguish between cancerous and non-cancerous cases when they viewed both 3-D and conventional 2-D images, as compared to 2-D images alone. The idea is that Hologic’s 3-D imaging technology can supplement, not replace, conventional breast scanning. The company’s imaging system is already available in more than 40 countries, including Canada and Mexico.

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Want to peer into the mind of an entrepreneur who’s starting over after nearly nine years in the trenches? Or maybe you’d like a glimpse of the Next Big Thing through the eyes of a deep technologist?

Me too. That’s why I caught up with Mok Oh yesterday. The founder and former chief technology officer of Newton, MA-based EveryScape said over the weekend that he has left the company to pursue his “next journey.” That’s interesting news (and you can read more about it here), but I really wanted to know what that “next journey” might entail. After all, here’s a guy who’s been out of the job market for nine years, but who understands technology and business. I figured there would be plenty of common themes and lessons to pull out for the current generation of tech entrepreneurs.

First, a little more about his old company. Oh founded EveryScape (originally called Mok 3) in 2002 and served as chief technology officer. The company has raised more than $17 million in venture financing to date. Its investors include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Dace Ventures, LaunchPad Venture Group, New Atlantic Ventures, and SK Telecom.

Xconomy first wrote about EveryScape in 2007, when the startup rolled out 360-degree, panoramic outdoor street views in four cities (Boston, New York, Miami, and Aspen). It also had created virtual-tour graphics of building interiors for real estate and advertising applications—which is where the company has put most of its efforts recently. Just last month, EveryScape ramped up its partnership with Microsoft’s Bing to provide interior images for restaurants and stores in local search results.

It’s not usually a great sign for a company when its founder departs—but in this case, Oh says he was ready to move on, and EveryScape, which has about 50 employees, “has gotten to the point where it can fly all by itself.” At the same time, he says, “It’s scary, it’s exciting. I feel sadness too, leaving something that’s my baby.” (For now, he remains on the company’s board.)

But he did what’s in his heart. “I think of myself as early-stage,” he says. “Being able to think about new problems and spin them in an innovative and constructive way. The best days of my life were in the early stage [of EveryScape] and thinking creatively about how to solve a customer’s problem.”

Prior to the company, Oh did his Ph.D. in computer graphics at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (before it became part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory). He had also studied art history as an undergrad. In 2002, literally the day he took off his graduation cap and gown, he started coding something that would combine his interests in art and computer science—and what would eventually become EveryScape’s core technology.

Over his nine-year run, the most memorable times were also the hardest times, he says. “When we had no funding, we bootstrapped for a few years [until 2004], going around begging for … Next Page »

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Here’s an interesting snapshot of a small startup working with a tech giant to change how people check out local establishments on the Web—and also how those establishments advertise online.

The startup is Newton, MA-based EveryScape, which creates 3-D panoramic tours of restaurants and other businesses from photos of their interiors. The tech giant is Microsoft’s Bing search engine, which has been ramping up its efforts in local search (among other things). Today, at a Microsoft Search Summit in San Francisco, Bing and EveryScape are announcing that they’ve teamed up to deliver “immersive imagery” for businesses across all of Bing’s local search results.

The partnership is a major extension of the collaboration the companies announced last June, which involved creating 3-D views of Boston-area restaurant interiors on Bing. The new deal makes EveryScape’s virtual tours available in Bing’s local search results for all establishments that EveryScape has catalogued—which amounts to “thousands” of businesses worldwide, the company says.

What this means is if you search for a nearby restaurant on Bing, say, and if EveryScape has stitched together the necessary imagery, you can click on the “step inside” button (see lower part of screenshot below) and get a virtual tour of the inside of the restaurant. Presumably this gives you a better feel for the ambience, and can help you decide whether you want to go there for a business meeting, private dinner, lunch date, or what have you.

Financial terms of the Bing partnership were not disclosed; EveryScape declined to comment on whether it will receive technology licensing fees and/or a cut of advertising revenues.

From a strategy perspective, EveryScape is now pursuing an interesting mix of big distribution partnerships (Bing for example) and consumer-focused software—its iPhone app, released last summer, provides visual restaurant guides for several U.S. cities. But the company seems to have shifted more of its sales focus to local advertisers. “The deal with Bing is an important step in our strategy to bring immersive advertising and search into the mainstream,” says Jim Schoonmaker, EveryScape’s CEO, in an e-mail. “Bing is a fantastic anchor tenant that provides an important source of local search traffic.”

EveryScape was founded in 2002 by chief technology officer Mok Oh. In 2008, the company raised $7 million in Series B financing from Dace Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Draper Fisher New England, Draper Atlantic, and Launchpad Venture Group.

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[Updated 11/30/10 with signup link. See below] Seattle-based Sparkbuy has come out of stealth mode today, rolling out a comparison shopping website for consumer electronics, starting with laptops. The company also confirmed that it raised $1 million last month led by Benaroya Ventures and angel investor Geoff Entress. Sparkbuy’s website is now in closed beta trials. (Here’s a signup link that’s good for 100 registrations.)

Sparkbuy is led by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro, who previously co-founded Ontela (now Photobucket), a mobile imaging startup that focused on technology for sending camera-phone pictures to friends and family. Earlier this month, I reported on rumors I’d heard that Sparkbuy was focused on comparison shopping for consumer electronics—which, of course, turned out to be true.

Reached by e-mail, Shapiro talked a little about his motivation for starting Sparkbuy. “Am I the only person who doesn’t want to read five pages of reviews in order to feel like an informed consumer?” he wrote.

He also said a bit more about his experience as a second-time entrepreneur. “Ontela was something I was excited about. Sparkbuy is something I’m passionate about. I’m a hardcore tech shopping geek, and I always feel like it takes too long, and is too hard, to find the perfect gadget,” he says. “If I was the suspicious type, I’d think manufacturers were deliberately obfuscating their products to make it hard to find the best one.”

I haven’t had a chance to try out the new site yet, but if you have, please leave a comment below (or leave a note with Marginize—just click on the tab to the right of this story) and let us know how well it works.

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Pelican Imaging in Mountain View announced a $10 million Series B round led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from previous investors Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and In-Q-Tel. Pelican makes optics, sensors and software algorithms for smart phone cameras, enabling a thinner camera with higher quality images, and will use the new money to commercialize the technology. Barry Schiffman, a co-founder of Globespan, will join Pelican’s board.

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Quick, name a semiconductor company in the Boston area that’s been getting lots of venture financing lately. OK, well, you already read the headline, so that one doesn’t count. My point is, there haven’t been too many of those—until today.

SiOnyx is the Beverly, MA-based semiconductor materials company that is working on commercializing so-called “black silicon.” This is essentially silicon that is much more efficient at absorbing light at certain wavelengths (and producing electricity) because it has been treated by just the right combination of laser pulses and chemicals. That means black silicon could potentially be used to make ultra-sensitive image sensors for digital cameras, night-vision goggles, and medical imaging equipment, as well as much more efficient solar cells. As my colleague Wade reported almost exactly two years ago, SiOnyx thinks it can revolutionize these fields, in part because its advanced technology can piggy-back on conventional silicon-based manufacturing processes.

Today the company is announcing a $12.5 million Series B financing round that includes new investors Crosslink Capital in San Francisco and Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm. Strategic partner Coherent, a laser company in Santa Clara, CA, also has signed on as a new investor in SiOnyx, and existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Harris & Harris also participated in the round. The $12.5 million represents the completion (and sum total) of the financing round that Xconomy first wrote about in June.

“When we last talked about the company, we were vague about the application areas,” says SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor. “It’s a platform technology, and you want to evolve it and see where the value is.” (More on this in a minute.)

The SiOnyx technology is based on research from physicist Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard University. In the late 1990s, Mazur’s team first developed (and coined the term) black silicon in a series of experiments that used sulfur gases and femtosecond lasers—which emit sharp pulses of light that last only a millionth of a billionth of a second—to roughen up the surface of silicon wafers (see photo below). After discovering how well the resulting material absorbed photons, and delving deep into its atomic properties, the team decided to start a company.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, and the following year, it gained an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize its process. In 2007, the startup raised $11 million in venture capital from Harris & Harris, Polaris, and RedShift Ventures. It also has raised an undisclosed amount of non-dilutive financing from government sources and partners, Saylor says, which brings the company’s total funding to more than $35 million.

So where is the first big commercial market? Try camera phones taking pictures in low lighting—at night or in a dark bar or restaurant. And other applications like night-vision cameras, next-generation automotive sensors for detecting driving hazards, security and surveillance, and medical imaging devices. The basic idea, as Saylor explains, is that black silicon gives you performance in the dark comparable to what a conventional image sensor can do in daylight. That’s partly because the material is much better at absorbing photons in the near-infrared part of the spectrum than conventional silicon detectors.

“We’re going where [others] are blind, and we enable you to see,” Saylor says. “There is no other way to deliver this kind of performance.”

The question, then, is whether SiOnyx can scale up its capabilities fast enough to … Next Page »

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We saw a number of startup financings, acquisitions, and partnership deals in the healthcare IT, cleantech, life sciences, Web, and software spaces this week in New England.

—Black Duck Software, a Waltham, MA-based open source software firm, announced that it had purchased Ohloh.net from Geeknet (NASDAQ: GKNT) for an undisclosed sum. Black Duck said it will maintain Ohloh’s free open source directory and software developer Web community, and will integrate the directory into its own code search site, Koders.com.

—Cambridge, MA-based cleantech startup Sun Catalytix announced it had raised a $9.5 million Series B round, led by global conglomerate Tata Limited, owner of the largest auto company in India. Existing backer Polaris Venture Partners also participated in the second-round funding for Sun Catalytix, whose technology is built around MIT professor Daniel Nocera’s discovery of a process that uses water, electricity, and a low-cost catalyst to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. The hydrogen can then be used to power fuel cells, engines, and energy-storage systems, the company says.

—NitroSecurity, a Portsmouth, NH-based maker of cybersecurity and event-management software, wrapped up a $6 million Series B financing, led by existing backers Brookline Venture Partners, First Analysis, and NewSpring Ventures. NitroSecurity also said it acquired the security business unit of LogMatrix of Marlborough, MA, an IT and network management company.

—Waltham-based biotech ImmunoGen (NASDAQ:IMGN) said it inked a deal with Novartis, who will pay $45 million for the exclusive rights to use ImnunoGen’s technology to make antibody drugs for several cancer targets. The firm will also finance ImmunoGen’s development expenses plus some research and manufacturing costs. ImmunoGen could receive $200 million in milestones for each target picked by Novartis that leads to a cancer drug, in addition to royalties on sales of the drugs.

—FashionPlaytes, a Salem, MA-based Web startup, added another $4 million, to bring its Series A round up to $5.8 million. The financing was led by new investor Fairhaven Capital, and was joined by existing FashionPlaytes backers New Atlantic Ventures, LaunchCapital, and Golden Seeds. The website enables girls ages five to 12 to design custom clothing using a game-like interface.

—Waltham- and Menlo Park, CA-based Battery Ventures announced it had bought clinical laboratory data management software maker Data Innovations—its third acquisition of a healthcare-focused software firm in the past three years. Financial terms for the deal weren’t disclosed.

—InfraReDx, a Burlington, MA-based maker of coronary imaging systems, said it raised $21 million in Series D funding from new and existing investors. Its technology combines infrared light and intravascular ultrasound techniques to create detailed images of fatty plaque in the arteries. The newest cash will help kick off U.S. sales of InfraReDX’s newest generation system, which nabbed FDA approval this summer.

—Waltham-based Care.com, a provider of a website for rating family care services, announced it had pulled in $20 million in funding, led by New Enterprise Associates and joined by return investors Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures.

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Ryan McBride

Burlington, MA-based InfraReDx said today it has raised $21 million in a Series D round of equity financing from new and existing backers. The cash infusion will enable the firm to start U.S. sales of its latest-generation coronary imaging system, which gained FDA clearance this summer.

The 12-year-old firm says that its “LipiScan IVUS” system is the first to combine near infrared light and a type of intravascular ultrasound to provide detailed images of a type of fatty plaque in the arteries. Last year, the firm released its first version of the system, which doesn’t seem to include the ultrasound technology. (Here’s more on InfraReDx‘s infrared technology from our previous coverage.)

For the commercial release of its latest product, the company plans to target top catheterization labs in the U.S. and expand its sales to Europe in 2011. Catheterization labs are where doctors perform stenting procedures to prop open a patient’s artery after blockages are removed. The firm says that its imaging system can enable precise placement of stents, limit complications of stenting procedures, and help doctors to figure out the best treatments for a patient’s heart disease.

“The LipiScan IVUS system will enable interventional cardiologists to accurately and rapidly identify the lipid core plaques that complicate stenting and are believed to be the major cause of heart attacks,” said James Muller, the company’s founder and CEO, in the announcement.

InfraReDx, which has now raised more than $100 million from investors, named only its previous backer Sanderling Ventures of San Diego and San Mateo, CA in this latest round. The company declined to release the names of its new investors.

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Viewdle is one of those technology startups that probably should have stayed in stealth mode a lot longer. The San Jose, CA-based company created a stir around the time of its public launch back in September 2007 with demos that promised real-time facial recognition for digital video—a still-unsolved problem that, if definitively licked, could help to make Web video just as easy to search as text. Building on computer-vision algorithms first developed for the Soviet military by Ukrainian computer scientist Mikhail Schlesinger, the company said it would help large media organizations index and better monetize their video archives—claims that propelled the company to first place in the LeWeb startup competition in Paris in 2008.

But then Viewdle did a slow dissolve, so to speak. Three years after its public debut, the startup still hasn’t brought any products to market, and its website, which once featured examples of its facial recognition software detecting the faces of celebrities like George Clooney and Britney Spears, now shows just a logo and a “Stay Tuned!” notice. So it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for an outsider to conclude that Viewdle was no longer really on the air.

Except that it is. In July, John Albright, co-managing partner of RIM’s BlackBerry Partners Fund, told Beet.TV that the fund had put some Series B money into the startup. And today the company revealed more details about the funding round, which totals $10 million and also includes Best Buy, Qualcomm, and existing investor Anthem Venture Partners, which put an undisclosed amount of Series A funding into the company in 2007. The startup will be launching “exciting new consumer applications” within the next few months, CEO Laurent Gil said in the announcement.

Mikhail Schlesinger

The company isn’t talking about exactly what those applications might be, but chief product officer Jason Mitura told me that the strength of Viewdle’s latest facial recognition technology is that it can run on many platforms, including smartphones. “One of the differentiators of our technology is that it works everywhere from the palm of your hand to the cloud, for pictures and videos,” Mitura says. He says the company’s philosophy is that the billions of digital photos and videos that consumers capture every year would be much more useful if they could be automatically tagged—at the moment they’re captured, shared, or uploaded—with the names of the people who appear in them.

Reasoning backward from these clues, and from the identities of the Series B investors, it seems safe to say that Viewdle’s emphasis has shifted from the media and publishing world to the consumer market, and that it’s developing facial recognition software that could be embedded in consumer gadgets such as smartphones, digital cameras, and videocams.

“For consumers, it’s all about real time,” said Kuk Yi, vice president of Best Buy’s venture capital wing, in today’s press announcement. “Viewdle is leading the market by creating compelling consumer experiences that are both real-time and cross-platform—that is why we invested in the company.” Yi has joined the Viewdle’s board as a result of the investment, as has Albright.

Viewdle has an exclusive commercial license to facial recognition technology that chief scientist Schlesinger, a computer vision expert at the Institute for Computing and Information Technologies in Kiev, Ukraine, originally developed for … Next Page »

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The third quarter of 2010 is going out with a monsoon in New England. It seems like a good time to hole up indoors and look back at some of the top stories we’ve done at Xconomy Boston over the past three months.

These are our editors’ picks. They aren’t necessarily the ones that got the most traffic or the most attention. Rather, they are stories that highlight our unique style of on-the-scene reporting and in-depth analysis, and will stand the test of time. They range from startup profiles in health IT, security software, and drug development, to analysis pieces on leading companies’ acquisition and expansion strategies, to unique venture capital perspectives and quirky, strange-but-true facts about New England innovation leaders.

So, without further ado, here are our top 20 stories of the third quarter, in reverse chronological order (plus a bonus story, in honor of Unica founder Yuchun Lee, a former member of the MIT Blackjack Team, selling his company to IBM for $21 a share):

Genzyme Boss Henri Termeer Not Ready to Sell to Sanofi, Ride Into the Sunset, Sources Say

MeYou Health Enters Social Gaming Realm with Daily Challenge for Improving Well-Being

IBM’s Software Acquisition Strategy in Massachusetts (Plus Tips on Getting Acquired) From VP Mike Loria

Skyhook, Fighting for Its Life in Suit Against Google, Cries Foul: “Call in the Referees and Review the Tape”

Bluebird Bio, Third Rock & Genzyme’s Gene Therapy Bet, Shows Promise for Blood Disorder

Who Knew? Part 3: Xconomy Uncovers Even More Strange-But-True Facts About Boston’s Innovation Leaders

PerkinElmer Expects to Make Acquisitions After $500M Business Sale: CEO Talks Boston-Area Talent and Growth in Software, Imaging

A123 Opens Lithium Ion Battery Plant in Michigan, Wants to Create Global Hub for Electric Vehicles

Good Start Genetics Emerges from Stealth with $18M Series A Round

Reality Show Project Seeks to Capture MassChallenge Competitors in Their Entrepreneurial Element

Vertex Nails Third Big Trial With Hepatitis C Drug, In Toughest Patients to Treat … Next Page »

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