There is arguably no other place on Earth with the concentrated innovation power of Kendall Square. Within a few-block radius of the Kendall Square T station on Main Street on the edge of the MIT campus, you can find an unprecedented collection of startups, large company labs and offices, and non-profit organizations, from the One Laptop Per Child Foundation to the Broad Institute and, of course, MIT itself. There are public companies, private companies, and incubators—and the work across these enterprises spans medicine and health, biotechnology, IT, the Web, software, hardware, energy, robotics, transportation, nanotech, media, and probaby everything in between.

It’s only fitting that such a unique place as Kendall Square should have its own tagline or motto that reflects its legacy of entrepreneurship and cutting-edge activities, coupled with collaboration, mentoring, and community building—and now it does: “The Future Lives Here.”

The tagline, which is being announced today, is the creation of the Kendall Square Association, of which Xconomy is a member. The association, with well over 100 members, was organized a year ago (its first meeting was this February) by a group of community leaders, including Xconomist Tim Rowe, who besides serving as the KSA’s president is CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center and a venture partner at New Atlantic Ventures. “The purpose of the Kendall Square Association is to foster an environment that encourages creative collaboration and community-building across endeavors of all kinds, and that generates the dynamic energy that helps to transform leading edge ideas into global realities,” Rowe says in the statement announcing the tagline. He tells me the new motto is meant to dovetail with the motto recently adopted by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: “It’s All Here.”

The Kendall Square branding process started this spring and was led by the KSA’s Marketing and Promotions Working Group, which is chaired by Sarah Gallop, co-director of government and community relations for MIT. Gallop, who is one of three MIT representatives on the KSA board, says Steve Herskovitz, president of healthcare-oriented marketing company Hammond Hill of Acton, MA, led the effort to come up with the tagline. And the new slogan represents only one step in the KSA’s branding and marketing push, she says. “We’ve finished the tagline process and are deep into logo work now. After that is complete, we’ll focus on finishing the KSA website.”

Rowe and Gallop say the KSA is just getting started with its plans to strengthen the community of entrepreneurship and innovation in Kendall Square. According to today’s statement, “Besides the branding process, the Association is also focused on a long term vision for the Square, with special emphasis on retail, restaurant, entertainment, and residential objectives.” Those plans include sponsoring a series of local talks and other events. And Rowe, together with many KSA members (including Xconomy) and others, is also privately pursuing the creation of an entrepreneurship-enhancing hangout that’s been tentatively dubbed the Venture Café.

What do you think of the new tagline? Feel free to leave your comments below.

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The woman who runs the 10-year, $1 billion initiative to spur life sciences in Massachusetts has set up her office in Waltham, MA, about a 30-minute drive from one of the world’s leading and most famous clusters of biotech— Kendall Square in Cambridge. And she’s out there for a reason.

This was one of the more intriguing insights I picked up from meeting a couple weeks ago with Susan Windham-Bannister, the president of the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, otherwise known by her colleagues as “Dr. Sue.” I caught up with her at her new office, in a suburban complex carved into a hill on Winter Street, overlooking the reservoir and Route 128.

There were politics to consider, like whether it would upset some people if the agency were perceived to be too myopically focused on Kendall Square or the Longwood Medical corridor, to the exclusion of other parts of the state that don’t want to be left behind in a future of biotech-driven prosperity. But she also didn’t want to appease those interests, only to set up shop in the boondocks, away from the action.

“Mass General Hospital has a big satellite on Route 128; if you go down to the end of Winter Street, there’s a huge campus for AstraZeneca,” Windham-Bannister says. “In addition to Advanced Technology Ventures here, you’ve got Polaris, in this exact same complex. You’ve got North Bridge Partners here. Up the road you’ve got the Mass Medical Society. Across the street you have Thermo Fisher Scientific. From where I sit, I’m looking at the new campus for Shire. Around the corner from Shire, you’ve got Cubist. If you go up one exit or two, you get closer to Burlington and Billerica, which is where Serono is building a huge campus.

“This is the next big life sciences cluster,” Windham-Bannister says. “Maybe it’s because I’m a strategic planner by profession before I took on this role, but I like to say as Wayne Gretzky used to say, I like to skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck is. On our part, it’s a recognition that this is a very important life sciences cluster.”

We also talked about some of the weightier matters on her desk at the moment. Here are some edited highlights:

—On whether she expects a financial return to taxpayers by providing loans to biotech startups: “We expect that in a number of cases that will be what happens. We developed this with a roundtable of VCs. We expect to be able to recycle some of that money, and give it to additional young companies who can really benefit from it. The real return on us is to see those companies grow up, have ribbon cuttings, and see them hire more employees. And get those great ideas into the marketplace. That’s our return, our mission.

—On what the agency is doing to foster better education and workforce training: “We realize companies need an entry-level workforce that has practical, hands on experience, and that’s a big gap in biomanufacturing. This summer, the center is sponsoring what we call an internship challenge. We’ll provide stipends that will make available 100 to 200 interns. They’ll have a chance to go work in a company lab, or an academic lab. Anywhere in the state. These are juniors and seniors in college, or recent graduates who have an interest in life sciences. What we’ve done is turned our website into Monster.com for young people interested in life sciences. They can go and post their resumes there. They go and fill out a short application. Then companies can come and surf our site, and do queries, by geography, major.

We have 450 resumes there in a just a three to four-week period. About 30 companies and 15 institutions are already making matches. We have 25 interns already placed.

—On how corporations like Johnson & Johnson and venture capitalists are compensating …Next Page »

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Companies, merchants, and residents in the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge banded together last week to form the Kendall Square Association, a non-profit group whose mission, according to its new president Tim Rowe, is to “improve, protect, and promote” the technology-saturated neighborhood. After several months of informal discussions, representatives from dozens of area organizations, including Xconomy, met at Genzyme Center on February 24 to formally incorporate the association and elect board members and officers.

With funding from member organizations, the association expects to take on both short-term issues such as repairing sidewalks and setting up a free Wi-Fi network and longer-term challenges such as optimizing transportation patterns, improving the mix of retail outlets, eateries, and entertainment venues in the area, and developing a 20-year plan for the neighborhood’s growth.

While there have been previous efforts to organize local businesses to promote the Kendall Square area—notably the Kendall Square Manufacturing Association, which was formed in the 1920s and later morphed into the current-day Cambridge Chamber of Commerce—Rowe says there has been no active group representing the area’s interests since a group called Kendall Square Business Association, founded in the 1970s, petered out more than a decade ago. Given the area’s rapid transformation over the past few years, including the addition of multiple office and laboratory buildings and the impending construction of a huge biotech park on the neighborhood’s northern edge, it was time for stakeholders to start talking about how to guide the area’s future, Rowe said in an interview last week.

“We are in a world now where there is a lot of interest in civic engagement,” Rowe says. “The time seemed to be right; there was a need that was growing, a rising tide that crested the dike.”

Rowe is well known around Kendall Square as the founder and CEO of the Cambridge Innovation Center, which rents space to more than 170 small and medium-sized technology companies at One Broadway. He’s also a partner at New Atlantic Ventures, an infotech-focused venture fund based in Cambridge and Reston, VA.

He says part of the impetus behind forming the group came from watching other organizations successfully promote their own neighborhoods in Cambridge—especially the Harvard Square Business Association, which has helped bring more attractive development and more cultural events (not to mention free Wi-Fi coverage) to the area around the Harvard campus.

But the idea isn’t to put Kendall Square in competition with Harvard Square or other local neighborhoods, Rowe says. If anything, it’s to underscore Kendall Square’s attractions compared to locations on the West Coast.

“The real competition is Palo Alto,” says Rowe. “I talk to a lot of startups trying to decide between two destinations, and it’s not Kendall Square or Harvard Square, it’s Kendall Square or Palo Alto. But the fact that both Google and Microsoft set up major offices in Kendall Square in the last few years is a big win for this area. It’s jobs we’ve brought in, and we want to have more of that.”

In fact, Kendall Square—which the association defines as the area within a 10-minute walking radius of the Kendall Square subway station—has benefited from massive investment and lightning-fast growth, compared to most other areas of Massachusetts. But that growth has been mostly …Next Page »

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I recently had coffee with a venture capitalist at the Starbucks across the street from Biogen Idec’s (NASDAQ:BIIB) headquarters in Kendall Square, and he asked me what I thought were the biggest life sciences deals of 2008. The question is really tough to answer, both because the answers are somewhat subjective and I didn’t want to forget to mention a big M&A event. (Full disclosure: I was also distracted by the uncanny sweetness of my eggnog latte.)

So I turned the question over to him (a good technique for avoiding a question without avoiding a topic). Naturally, he mentioned deals that involved his venture firm as an investor or stockholder. Similarly, I mentioned the deals that Xconomy had covered. The result of our conversation was an incomplete recollection of the most important deals of the past year, but it inspired me to research the topic further.

It was indeed a big year for life sciences deals in the Boston area, despite the lack of IPOs. Instead of tallying the “biggest” deals of 2008 in terms of dollars, I’d rather talk about the “most memorable” deals. (To look at the biggest of the big, check out this fun post from the In Vivo Blog.) Why look at this differently? Because there are some deals that didn’t boast the largest sums but were still meaningful because of the giant leaps of faith investors made in an emerging field of science.

So let’s reminisce about the deals (listed here in no particular order):

Concert Pharma Jammed with VCs

—Concert Pharmaceuticals is working on a method to retool the chemical composition of existing drugs to make new pharmaceuticals. The Cambridge, MA-based startup, which swaps the hydrogen atoms of existing drugs with deuterium atoms to form new treatments, raised $37 million in a Series C round of private equity financing in the first half of 2008. Luke wrote about the company’s lead drug candidate, a form of antidepressant paroxetine (Paxil) that has undergone the firm’s deuterium-for-hydrogen makeover, to treat hot flashes.

ProteoStasis Launches With Big Cash Stash

—Here’s one exception to the issue of scarce financing for newly hatched biotech firms—also known as the valley of death. Cambridge-based ProteoStasis Therapeutics pretty much leapt from the gates last year with …Next Page »

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If things break right for Helicos Biosciences, president Steve Lombardi will have to make a big decision about growth. Specifically, where to build a manufacturing plant for hundreds of highly skilled people making its genetic analysis machines?

To hear Lombardi tell the story, no decision has been made, but he’s leaning toward doing it in Massachusetts. Why? He says it’s because the state legislature passed Gov. Deval Patrick’s 10-year, $1 billion life sciences initiative last month. Some money in there for workforce training should help his company recruit a steady stream of folks with bachelor’s and master’s degrees with skills to do the manufacturing work, not far away from its R&D headquarters at Cambridge’s Kendall Square.

“If you go to Silicon Valley and look around, it is littered with large amounts of manufacturing in and among the education, research, and product development community,” Lombardi says. “It’s the combination of them all together that made the entity of Silicon Valley happen.”

He didn’t want to say manufacturing is a weak spot in the Bay State, but he did add, “What’s intriguing about the governor’s plan is it hits this idea dead-on. It recognizes there are places beyond Harvard, MIT, and BU that can put out a lot of smart people that aren’t going to win the Nobels, but are looking to make a career in life sciences.”

Lombardi is speaking a bit here from personal experience. He’s a native of Everett, MA, and has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Merrimack College, a small Catholic university in North Andover, MA. After he graduated, he worked a year locally, and moved to North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park for a better opportunity. He went on to get 25 years’ experience in biotech, mainly at a couple of California-based heavyweights in scientific instruments, Applied Biosystems (NYSE: ABI) and Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX).

After he turned 50, he and wife became empty-nesters, and they decided to come back to Massachusetts in June 2006 for the job with Helicos (NASDAQ: HLCS). “We asked ourselves, what can we do to have fun and take a flier?” he says.

He was attracted back to Massachusetts, he says, because of the dynamism of research and development in the Cambridge area, supported by the National Institutes of Health, anchor biotech companies like Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ), and drugmakers with research centers, like Novartis (NYSE: NVS).

“This is the place to be. About 10 percent of the market for the tools we make is within about five square miles,” he says.

Helicos currently has more than 100 employees, mostly in R&D. The company would prefer to keep commercial manufacturing close by for the sake of smooth communication and location near its vendors, all while finding a place with lower rent than Cambridge. Like lots of executives, Lombardi gets wooed regularly by economic development headhunters from around the world who lust for some of those high-wage manufacturing jobs. The state’s passage of the bill came at an opportune time, because the company is discussing the manufacturing location decision “as we speak.”

“We want to stay in the state with manufacturing, but we don’t have to,” he says. “It’s partly a financial decision, but it isn’t just about the numbers. Workforce is so important.”

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It wouldn’t be a visit to Google if it didn’t include a game of some sort.

In the elevator on the way up to Google’s new Kendall Square digs, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick was “talking smack” about his table-tennis prowess, according to Google’s Cambridge site director Stephen Vinter. So before allowing the governor to leave the housewarming party Google threw for itself yesterday, Vinter challenged him to a ping-pong match in the company’s colorful cafeteria/lounge.

Nobody kept score. And let’s just say that neither player is about to make the Olympic team.

“So, this is just a typical day at the office,” Vinter remarked, as TV cameramen recorded the match and newspaper photographers flashed away.

“It is for me—with the press watching every move,” Patrick quipped back.

The half-spontaneous, half-staged moment of geek athleticism was in keeping with the studiously casual atmosphere that Google prefers to project to the world—and that is captured much more precisely by the company’s newly renovated space at Five Cambridge Center than it was by Google’s cramped old offices at the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway. The third-floor cafeteria, which was also the setting for the Google Games pitting MIT students against Harvard students five weeks ago, feels for all the world like a basement rec room on ‘roids, except for the wraparound windows (admitting some welcome springtime sun yesterday) and the impressive Fenway Park mural, with its caricatures of local-born celebrities like Leonard Nimoy in the stands.

The open house included the requisite serious panel discussion, with Vinter, the governor, and a few Google sales and engineering execs fielding softball questions about Google’s importance for the local economy. But the real point of the day was to give journalists and local luminaries a look at the space where Google programmers and salespeople will continue to manage the New England theater of the company’s war for global dominance in search, social media, and online advertising.

And the Boston Globe’s Rob Weisman got it exactly right in his story yesterday evening when he observed that the space is “done up in the company’s extravagant, self-consciously quirky Silicon Valley style.” Between the ping-pong tables, the massage chairs, the yoga balls, the Rock Band equipment, and the abundant microkitchens—all cloned from the Googleplex in Mountain View—it’s a mystery how anyone at Google gets any work done. But one clue came from a staffer accompanying journalists on the office tour, who said Googlers who clamp themselves into the massage chairs usually bring their laptops along for the ride.

Along with the architecture, Google showed off four consumer-facing projects involving Cambridge-based programmers, including YouTube, the Friend Connect platform for adding social networking features such as message boards and picture-sharing to existing websites, the Book Search project that’s making the full text of many new and public-domain books searchable online, and the Android open-source phone operating system.

Rich Miner, who’s been leading the Android effort since Google bought his mobile-software startup in 2005, was on hand to demonstrate the latest version of the system, which currently runs on Windows, Mac, or Linux computers inside an “emulator” that shows how it will look and behave on an actual phone. The interface plainly builds on many of the user-interface innovations pioneered by Apple for the iPhone, but with some interesting improvements, including pop-up menus that allow quick access to basic functions without returning to the phone’s main screen, and the ability to jump from link to link inside a Web page with a thumb-click, enabling one-handed interaction.

Of course, the biggest thing distinguishing Android from the iPhone’s operating system is that it’s open-source, meaning that anyone can adapt it for their own phone hardware, and that anyone can write and distribute applications for it without having to go through a central authority. Miner said that the project is on schedule so far, and that the first phone running Android will ship in the second half of 2008.

Before leaving the event, I put it to Vinter that the environments Google has assembled at its Cambridge office—one of 10 Google satellite sites in North America—is so comfortable for young software engineers that many who might otherwise start their own entrepreneurial ventures are instead enticed into joining the search giant, perhaps stunting innovation in the region.

“I think that kind of misses the bigger point, which is that too many smart people are leaving this area,” Vinter responded. “We can’t do enough to create more opportunities for them. The more we can do to build a mixed ecosystem of small, medium, and large-sized companies, the more it will be self-sustaining and self-expanding, which leads to more competition, which leads to more opportunities.” For more from Vinter on Google’s approach to hiring, see Globe writer Scott Kirsner’s video from the open house.

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When Xconomy set up shop in Kendall Square, Cambridge, last year, we knew it was the innovation hub of New England, but we still didn’t realize just how deep the bench is here. Practically every week we learn about a new startup or an established technology firm with an office near ours. My most recent discovery was VMware (NYSE: VMW)—the virtualization company I usually describe as “a Palo Alto, CA, subsidiary of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC.” Turns out VMware has a 150-strong research and development laboratory right in the Cambridge Center complex, a stone’s throw from the Kendall subway station and just upstairs from Google’s new Cambridge spread.

VMware has been in the spotlight for months, thanks mainly to a spectacular August IPO and the seemingly unstoppable stock climb that followed. (Share prices peaked at almost $125 on Halloween, but have since returned to the much more earthly $40 to $60 range.) But here at Xconomy we’ve also cast a critical eye on the company’s long delay in issuing a patch for a critical software vulnerability affecting three of its workstation virtualization products. A fix was finally released on March 18, more than five months after Boston-based security firm Core Security notified VMware about the problem.

I’d spoken with several company officials for those stories by phone, but recently I got an invitation to meet some of the folks at VMware personally. So I headed over to the Cambridge facility and had breakfast with senior director of R&D Julia Austin, who is the lab’s site director, as well as director of product management Ben Matheson. They gave me the lowdown on the lab’s activities, which focus on advanced product development—”visionary work looking at new architectures and solutions not core to VMware today but where we think there is a business opportunity three to five years out,” in Austin’s words.

VMware, whose software helps companies save money on computer servers by allowing multiple operating systems to run on the same machines, opened a small R&D shop in Kendall Square shortly after EMC (NYSE: EMC) acquired the company in 2003. About three years ago, the operation moved to its current location, a 50,000-square-foot space on the tenth floor at Five Cambridge Center. (Soon the lab will swallow up an additional floor and double its capacity to 300 staff members, Austin says.)

Siting the lab was a no-brainer. “Being right here in Kendall Square has been a phenomenal opportunity for us,” says Austin. “Being across the street from MIT, and just down the street from Harvard and BU and Northeastern, and not too far from Columbia and Carnegie-Mellon, has been very helpful for us, for recruiting and growing our academic programs.” In addition to its core staff, the VMware lab hosts 25 summer interns from local universities, as well as visiting researchers such Richard West from Boston University’s computer science department as Larry Rudolph and Saman Amarasinghe, both from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

While there are at least three advanced development projects underway at the Cambridge lab, Austin and Matheson could only speak publicly about one of them—a system for disaster recovery that’s currently exiting the development stage and becoming a real product.

In a post-9/11, post-Katrina world, “the ability to recover from a disaster—natural or man-made—is one of the biggest problems across businesses of all sizes,” says Matheson. “Say an earthquake hits Boston. [Which isn't as implausible as it may sound---the city was badly damaged by a 6.0-to-6.5 temblor in 1755.] An IT administrator hits the proverbial big red button, and our site recovery manager is going to start all of the servers at your backup site in the right order, in a very fast, reliable way, so that you can recover really quickly.”

Virtualized systems actually lend themselves to being transplanted from an operations site to a backup site, since virtual machines look pretty much like …Next Page »

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Fans of browsing uber-geeky tomes on computer graphics, operating-system design, programming, and all other deeply technical matters have something of a wake to attend tomorrow afternoon. Kendall Square’s Quantum Books, which will be shuttering its brick-and-mortar store this weekend, is hosting a 5:30 p.m. goodbye party for longtime customers, according to the Cambridge Chronicle.

Quantum owner June Kapitan—who with her husband opened the store more than 20 years ago a few blocks away from its current 4 Cambridge Center location—told the Chronicle that rising rent and electricity costs and a shrinking customer base were to blame for the store’s closing. (Another faction evidently blames tech publisher Tim O’Reilly.) Quantum’s online store and warehouse in Wilmington, MA, will remain in business.

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On November 11, 2005, tech blogger Om Malik challenged his fellow bloggers to “Stay GYM Free” for a week. “Whether we hate them, or we love them, we do love to talk about them…Them being Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, aka GYM,” he wrote. “What would happen if the blogosphere decided that we would not talk about the Big Three for a whole week?”

Om fell off his own anti-GYM wagon the very next day. But in his defense, we at Xconomy probably would too—especially these days. In fact, we can’t help pointing out that with Yahoo’s acquisition of Maven, announced yesterday, Kendall Square has scored a GYM hat trick. Before 2007, none of the Big Three had independent operations in Kendall Square. Now they all do, almost in a straight line down the Main St.-Broadway corridor:

• Google occupies offices on the 7th and 13th floors of the Cambridge Innovation Center at One Broadway, and is renovating nearly 60,000 square feet of space at Five Cambridge Center, with a move expected early this year.
• Yahoo, with the Maven acquisition, will have at least 60 employees at Maven’s Four Cambridge Center location.
• Microsoft is renovating space at One Memorial Drive for a new concept development center, a new outpost of the Microsoft Research division, and employees brought on as a result of Microsoft’s 2006 acquisition of Softricity.

Because we’re map freaks, we’ve put together this little pictorial guide to the GYM presence in Kendall Square, with help from Google Earth. Once Google moves, the three companies will even be in proper G-Y-M order from west to east. (For more fun with maps, check out out our Greater Boston Innovation Map.)

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Got this photo in an e-mail from Reed Sturtevant, who’s creating a new Microsoft advanced development lab in Kendall Square. He was walking to lunch in the square yesterday with another former Lotus legend, Bob Frankston, when an unusual sight stopped them in their tracks. As Sturtevant described it: “a hawk eating a pigeon in the middle of the sidewalk while about a dozen people stood around and watched. Bob had his camera and took this pic.”

Frankston is an Internet pioneer who, along with Dan Bricklin, co-founded Software Arts, where he implemented VisiCalc. In 1986, he joined Lotus Development and went on to create Lotus Express. Sturtevant, whom we most recently wrote about a couple days ago, was brought into the Lotus fold around the same time and worked on LotusNotes, among other things. Before joining Microsoft in September, he most recently worked at Eons, IdeaLab, and Refer. You can find a litany of the companies Sturtevant has been involved with here.

But the important part—what caption to put on the picture? Frankston’s suggestions:

—Early Exit

—Typical VC Lunch in Cambridge Center

—Who says East Coast investors are wimps?

Feel free to chime in with your own suggestions by adding a comment below. Who knows, there could be a prize for our favorite one…

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If you were creating a satellite office for Google 3,100 miles away from the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA, yet you wanted to make it authentically Google, what would you do? The short, superficial answer would be to buy a few lava lamps, paint the walls in bright primary colors, build a great cafeteria with lots of free jelly beans and energy bars, and offer piles of options on Google’s $600-something-and-rising stock to your recruits.

Stephen Vinter, site manager at Google’s fast-growing Cambridge, MA, operation, has done all of those things. Oh, I forgot to mention the big rooms crowded with workstations, the giant posters of Google’s clever holiday logos, the Rubik’s Cubes, and the smiley-face mylar balloons flying over the desks of the new employees. Google’s offices on the 7th and 13th floors at One Broadway in Kendall Square, where Vinter showed me around on Tuesday, have those too.

But that’s just the Google that visitors, magazine photographers, and new job candidates perceive. The real essence of Google’s Cambridge operation is something you can’t see—or rather, something that you can only understand by listening to Vinter explain his personal strategy for replicating Google’s amazing global success on a local scale.

“Google has made a commitment to having distributed offices, meaning we have engineers across the globe,” says Vinter, whose official title is engineering director. “The key to making sure the satellite offices are as succesful as they can be is to figure out how you can get the best-motivated people in the local area.”

He’s found quite a few already. Google’s cramped Cambridge office has more than 100 employees, up from just a handful less than a year ago, and is still growing fast. It’s not clear exactly how fast—”We don’t talk about rates,” Vinter says. But the company’s real-estate deals may say something about its expansion plans. Google has hired a construction firm to renovate a reported 59,000 square feet on three floors at Five Cambridge Center, just down the street. That’s three times as much space as the company is currently leasing at One Broadway.

Google communications senior associate Erin Gleason confirms the renovation project, but says a move-in date hasn’t been announced. Google isn’t, of course, the only West Coast tech giant that’s in rapid-expansion mode in Kendall Square. Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant, as Bob reported this morning, is preparing to staff up a special innovation group at One Memorial Drive, where Microsoft has taken a lease on about half of the 17-story tower, and networking leader Akamai just signed leases at Four and Eight Cambridge Center that will nearly double its Kendall Square footprint to 250,000 square feet.

For Google, filling up its new space will mean exploring every corner where talent is hiding. Vinter, true engineer that he is, goes to the whiteboard in the tiny conference room where we’re meeting and draws a box surrounded by bubbles and arrows. Boston is a fantastic setting for filling up the Google box, he explains, because there are so many bubbles around it: MIT, Harvard, BU, Brandeis, Northeastern, U Mass, and the other great schools churning out new graduates; a large ecosystem of high-tech firms employing ambitious programmers and scientists (and Vinter considers both information technology companies and biotechnology companies to be fair hunting grounds); graduates from other regions who want to move to the Northeast; and people already inside Google who want to do the same.

“There are not many places in the world with that collection of people, and with the attractiveness of Boston and its culture, and with great upward mobility for people in high-tech,” Vinter says.

But what do you put inside the Google box, to make sure people are happy and productive once they get there? You start with what Vinter calls “a complete compensation package,” including, of course, those coveted Google stock options. Then there’s the …Next Page »

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Boston’s mayor, Tom Menino, isn’t known for precise comments to the media (they don’t call him Mumbles for nothing) but something in Tuesday’s Boston Globe struck us as wacky, even for him. In an article about a big new lab that Joslin Diabetes Center is building in the Longwood Medical Area, Jeffrey Krasner wrote: “Menino said the project is a sign that the epicenter of the local biotech cluster may be moving from Kendall Square in Cambridge to the Longwood area in Boston.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” says the always-candid Willy Lensch, an Xconomist and himself a member of the Longwood biotech community. That pretty much summed up our feelings about it, particularly since we spent a shocking percentage of our time this spring competing with local biotech (and other) startups for office space in Kendall Square. But we thought we’d give Cambridge Mayor Ken Reeves a chance to respond as well.

Reeves, in an e-mail, was a bit more diplomatic: “Boston remains the important ‘Hub’ in Massachusetts, but there’s no doubt that Cambridge is the ‘brains’ of Biotech with M.I.T, Harvard, Biogen Idec, Genzyme, Novartis, and Vertex all headquartered in Cambridge.” Damn straight, Mr. Mayor.

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Next month marks an important anniversary for the pharmaceutical industry, and for HealthTalker founder Andy Levitt: In August 1997 the FDA eased restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs so that the ads could actually say what the drugs were for. Remember those Claritin ads that spread like ragweed that summer? Blame Levitt. He was the Claritin brand manager at the time and was, along with a colleague, in charge of all of the (wildly successful) direct-to-consumer marketing for the drug.

Which is to say that, more than a lot of people, Levitt understands the power of polished, professional marketing to sell patients on prescription medications. But these days Levitt and his still-wet-behind-the-ears Kendall Square startup are focusing on a more amateur sort of drug marketing, one that lets consumers themselves make the pitch. The idea is to recruit people who use a certain drug or have a certain condition and train them to be “health talkers” who tell their friends and acquaintances—via the company’s social-networking tools or via old-fashioned offline word-of-mouth—about how much a product has helped them.

Levitt argues that people naturally, eagerly talk about this type of thing all the time (the contractors who recently renovated his apartment had plenty of good things to say about erectile-dysfunction drugs, evidently) but that “the pharma industry hasn’t done enough to tap into those conversations.” The tricky part in helping drug companies do so, he says, is making sure, through training, that their citizen “ambassadors” don’t run afoul of the still-complicated regulations that govern direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing. If a health talker says a drug approved only for diabetes really helped with her arthritis, for instance, it would be like a TV ad promoting the same “off-label” use of the drug—and that’s a big no-no.

There are already other outfits that employ social networking platforms for word-of-mouth marketing (Levitt mentions Boston firm BzzAgent and Procter & Gamble’s Tremor). But Levitt says that because of the regulatory challenges, “no other company does what HealthTalker does–play specifically in the niche of Rx products.”

From what Levitt will reveal (which is not a lot; he only started working on the project in earnest in February and is still shy about publicity) drug companies are eager to join the game. HealthTalker is slated to launch its first campaign in September, with three more planned tentatively for 2008. Not bad for a months-old company financed exclusively by Levitt’s personal savings and a home-equity line of credit and staffed until now by Levitt alone.

Last week, in preparation for the addition of HealthTalker’s first employee, Levitt moved the company from his dining room table into an office in a local incubator. Handing over the first rent check marked a hard transition after so much bootstrapping, he says, but it was time. “Now I need to grow up a little bit,” he says.

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