Heading into the holiday weekend, I thought I’d pull out a few highlights from recent discussions I’ve had with some Boston-area tech companies that are generating buzz. None of them will be taking the holiday off, I’m guessing.

So here’s a snapshot of five companies in different fields, and at different stages (with some common themes of communication, security, and location tech):

ByteLight
This is a new Cambridge, MA-based startup that’s heading to New York this weekend for the big annual National Retail Federation expo. ByteLight, led by founders Aaron Ganick and Dan Ryan (both Boston University grads), is developing technology for indoor positioning based on the circuitry in LED bulbs, together with smartphone cameras, for applications in sales automation, targeted deals, museum tours, and so on. “We view this as the next frontier in location based services,” Ryan says.

HeyWire
This Cambridge-based mobile startup makes an app for free texting and social messaging. But HeyWire has much bigger ambitions around creating a unified platform for social communications. Don’t want to give too much away here, but as engineering and marketing VPs Bill Gianoukos and Glenn Kiladis told me recently, an upcoming release from the company was inspired by the question, “How do we get Bieber to text us?”

Rapid7
This security assessment software company, based in Boston, recently raised a big $50 million venture round and is growing fast—and looking to make acquisitions. Rapid7 has well over 200 employees, and CEO Mike Tuchen says he is looking to add 100 more this year. One security tidbit he passed along: Many companies’ video conferences are surprisingly easy to hack into, because they put them directly on the Internet without security.

The Tap Lab
This Cambridge-based mobile gaming startup is working on its much-anticipated next release, which is still under wraps (but looks like it’s trying to reinvent the concept of location-based gaming—no pressure). In the meantime, CEO Dave Bisceglia is also working on a project to “increase the frequency and quality of hackathons” in Boston, he says. Stay tuned for more on this.

Vivox
This voice and communication software firm, based in Natick, MA, has been making strides through partnerships with T-Mobile and Facebook. Vivox, best known for its voice chat software that lets gamers and virtual world inhabitants talk to each other, is now applying its technology to the broader markets of social networking and messaging (see T-Mobile’s recent Bobsled voice chat app). CEO Rob Seaver told me that his company’s platform is “very scalable and stable for large-scale social interactions.” What’s more, he says, the fields of gaming and communication are “not that separate.”

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Things are looking brighter for New York’s EcoSense Lighting, which on Tuesday said it raised $13 million in a Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures in Boston. Jeffrey Glass, managing director of Bain, says his firm was attracted to the experience of EcoSense’s management in the LED lighting sector.

EcoSense, founded in 2009 by its chairman George Mueller, makes energy efficient LED lighting fixtures for industrial, commercial, and residential use. Mueller calls his products professional grade white LED lighting and says the new funding will help his company increase production and grow its engineering and sales staff. The company currently has a staff of 20. “It will allow us to enter more markets and have more feet on the street worldwide,” he says. Mueller says EcoSense’s prior funding largely came from an undisclosed Series A round from internal investments as well as angel investors.

Mueller previously co-founded Boston’s Color Kinetics, a maker of LED lighting systems that was acquired in 2007 by Royal Philips Electronics for $791 million. “Color Kinetics was a very big business that really invented the color LED space,” Glass says. Ihor Lys, Color Kinetics’s co-founder and former chief scientist, was named technical advisor in Sept. 2010 to EcoSense’s board of directors.

In addition to the management team’s expertise in LED lighting, Glass says Bain Capital was interested in the evolution taking place within the industry. “LED is becoming increasingly competitive with other alternatives for lighting,” he says. “The cost of LED lighting is coming way down while the cost of fluorescent lighting is going up. Incandescent lighting is terribly inefficient.”

EcoSense makes such products as LED floodlights for outdoor use as well as interior lights. The company also made its way into the spotlight last year when its landscape lights were used on “The Vanilla Ice Project”, a home improvement cable television series on the DIY Network.

While Glass says there is room for a variety of players in the LED lighting market, he believes EcoSense’s products appeal to discerning consumers and high-end commercial buyers. “There’s lots of opportunity for many companies [in this market] to be successful,” Glass says.

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Two years ago, we took a close look at Boston-based Black Coral Capital, just as Rob Day was joining the newly formed, cleantech-focused private equity firm as partner. Since then, both the Day and Black Coral names have shown up as part of investments in some innovative cleantech plays in Boston—several that go beyond traditional materials and dabble in the services and IT realms.

On a recent visit, Day had a lot to say about how and why traditional, materials-based cleantech firms should innovate, and the sprouting up of new companies using IT to solve cleantech challenges such as energy efficiency. He’s also pretty rosy on Boston’s up-and-coming (and pretty gritty) cleantech incubators, and the city’s potential to become a center for innovations in energy controls.

Read below for an edited transcript of a chat I had with him at Black Coral’s offices last week.

Xconomy: Tell me about some of your existing area investments, in companies like Next Step Living and Digital Lumens.

Rob Day: With Next Step Living, the business model is coming into homes. It has a full set of options. The idea is, “Hey, what do we have to do to get this home to be more energy efficient and get the homeowner to save more money? What makes most financial sense to homeowners?” They’re establishing themselves as a trusted energy advisor to them.

I see them as a channel, solution provider to the home. I keep not being excited about residential energy efficiency technology and products because there aren’t any good channels. That’s where Next Step Living can solve a major problem.

Digital Lumens is much more your classic technology play. They’re putting together what LEDs can do and what controls can do with LEDs. That’s much more of a hardcore tech play.

The similarity is, in all of these markets you need to provide a full solution.

X: What do you see as some of the next big plays in energy efficiency?

RD: There’s a good opportunity to continue to take building energy intelligence downstream. Energy intelligence for buildings has been aimed at homes, like smart thermostats, or it’s been aimed at very large buildings. But there are hundreds of thousands of buildings out there that are too small to use the existing solutions. There is an opportunity there. Ninety-plus percent of commercial buildings don’t have any intelligence out there.

The key is going to be coming up with something that is very flexible [for buildings between 25k - 50k square feet]. They’re going to need to come up with hundreds of thousands of solutions, and they’ll have to be a little bit more cookie cutter-ish. Because the buildings are all different, it has to be highly flexible and easy to configure. Even EnerNOC is starting to get involved in this. I think Boston has a particular opportunity to be an area of expertise of energy controls for buildings.

X: Is the popular notion that cleantech startups are having trouble getting money true?

RD: It’s certainly out of favor right now with investors, at least … Next Page »

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Michigan may have potential in medical devices and software but in the end, the state’s high tech future, for better for worse, is really tied to cleantech.

For one thing, it offers the most natural and logical extension of Michigan’s core expertise in automobiles/manufacturing, experts say. Think lithium batteries, electric cars, next generation engines equipped with software that smartly manages energy consumption.

“I think Michigan has a great chance at cleantech because it so tied with transportation,” says Chris Rizik, CEO and fund manager of Renaissance Venture Capital Fund in Ann Arbor, MI. Rizik is a featured panelist for Thursday’s Xconomy: Michigan 2031, a forum for the state’s best investors and entrepreneurs to envision the future of Michigan’s high tech economy and brainstorm ways to make that vision a reality.

But here’s what really pushes cleantech ahead of the pack: unlike medical devices and software, cleantech enjoys significant financial and institutional support from both Uncle Sam and Michigan’s top politicians.

Last fall, Watertown, M-based A123Systems opened a lithium battery plant in Livonia, MI, thanks a $249 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and $125 million in refundable tax credits from Michigan’s 21st Century Jobs Fund. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, along with then Gov. Jennifer Granholm and Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, attended the plant’s opening ceremony.

In 2009, Michigan established the Centers for Energy Excellence program, which provides $45 million over three years to fund technology commercialization and research between companies and universities and national laboratories.

Later this month, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and University of Michigan are hosting a conference exploring Michigan’s investments into manufacturing and clean energy.

“Though Michigan’s research infrastructure suffered during the deep recession that forced major cutbacks in the research funded by the auto industry, the state has leveraged local investment, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act [federal stimulus] funding, and the strengths of its universities to begin rapidly rebuilding manufacturing by investing in new industries,” the DOE said on the conference website. “Many of these new investments are in clean energy, and the DOE is interested in learning from this natural experiment in rapid rebuilding of R&D and manufacturing capability.”

Not surprisingly, local cleantech startups attracting investor cash are developing auto-related technologies. Khosla Ventures, for example, is backing lithium ion battery maker Sakti3 in Ann Arbor, MI, and EcoMotors in Allen Park, MI, which is developing a more energy efficient engine. (Sakti3 CEO Ann Marie Sastry will be joining ups at Michigan 2031 as well.) General Motors has invested $5 million in wireless charging startup Powermat in Commerce Township, MI.

But is there more to Michigan cleantech than just greener cars? … Next Page »

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Boston-based cleantech startup Digital Lumens has taken in $10 million in a Series B funding from its existing investors Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Stata Venture Partners, and has nabbed a line of credit from Silicon Valley Bank. The deal brings Digital Lumens’ funding pot to about $25 million.

Digital Lumens has married software and networking technology with light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to enable the more efficient lighting of commercial facilities like warehouses. Multiple fixtures in a lighting system can communicate wirelessly to automatically shut off in areas that don’t need as much illumination. The company has said that the technology can slice commercial lighting costs from $1 per square foot to one dime per square foot.

The new money will go to amping up sales efforts—both in the U.S. and abroad—and further developing the product. “We’re growing pretty aggressively in response to really great adoption in the marketplace,” CEO Tom Pincince told me in a phone call on Monday.

Digital Lumens, which just moved into new office space in Boston, has added six or seven employees just this year, bringing its total headcount to about 30, Pincince says. “People want to be part of a company that’s experiencing real customer traction,” he says. “It’s the demand to be a part of the cleantech revolution.”

Speaking of that cleantech revolution, which Pincince also referred to as the “next story in New England,” Digital Lumens has also recently attracted some executives from other Boston-area energy and lighting companies. In February, Fritz Morgan joined the company as chief product officer. He was previously CTO of Burlington, MA-based LED maker Philips Color Kinetics, and most recently worked as senior vice president of engineering Joule Unlimited, a Cambridge, MA-based renewable energy firm. Last November, Digital Lumens announced that Mike Rubino, former chief financial officer of Waltham, MA-based battery maker A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE) would be joining Digital Lumens as CFO. [[An earlier version of this post mistakenly said Fritz Morgan was CEO of Philips Color Kinetics. We regret the error.]]

Digital Lumens started out focusing on warehousing customers, but has also begun to look to lighting up manufacturing sites and retail stores. It’s targeting all aspects of the supply chain: customers “who make things, who store things, and who sell things,” Pincince says.

As far as product development goes, Digital Lumens has plans for the software and networking components that control the LED light strips and fixtures in its products. Pincince ultimately sees that technology as playing a part in smart buildings, by helping building managers understand their energy footprint and better respond to overall energy demands. Later on down the line, Pincince says he hopes the Digital Lumens technology could collaborate with other third-party applications to “become a foundation for intelligent buildings.”

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There’s a hidden tax when you pay your electricity bill, says Umesh Mishra, a professor in the college of engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It’s the energy lost when power is converted from the alternating current coming out of a wall socket to the direct current needed by computers, TVs, and other appliances, or from one voltage or frequency to another. By some measures, 11 to 12 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. dissipates into the air as heat thanks to inefficient power conversion.

If we could get that power back, it would contribute more to the economy than solar, wind, and every other form alternative energy put together. It would make electric vehicles more economical, improve the output of rooftop solar modules, cap energy waste in buildings, and reduce the huge energy bills paid by Internet companies like Google that run vast data centers. (These companies are, in a sense, taxed doubly: they’re forced to buy even more electricity to run the cooling systems that carry away the heat leaked by their thousands of servers.)

The silicon-based transistors inside most power converter modules hit a physical limit years ago—there’s simply no way to make them any more efficient. But there’s a company in Goleta, CA, outside Santa Barbara, that’s spent the last three and a half years perfecting a next-generation power conversion technology based on gallium nitride, a semiconductor commonly used in light-emitted diodes (LEDs). Called Transphorm, the company was co-founded by Mishra and his former student Primit Parikh, and it has been working behind a thick, almost NSA-worthy wall of stealth—if you’d Googled it before today, you’d have found speculation that it’s working on “hydrogen generating technology,” among other misinformation.

But the company decloaked in a big way at a press conference today in Mountain View, CA, where Google Ventures, the search giant’s venture investing wing, revealed that it was the lead investor in a $20.2 million Series C financing round completed last year for Transphorm. Foundation Capital also participated in the Series C round, joining previous investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Lux Capital. The company has raised about $38 million in total.

Transphorm’s financing round was actually disclosed in an SEC filing in May 2010, but the documents escaped the notice of journalists; they show that Google Ventures partner Wesley Chan, Kleiner partner Randy Komisar, and Foundation partner Richard Redelfs are all board directors at the company.

It’s the first publicly disclosed energy investment for Google Ventures—but it’s not hard to understand why the fund would be interested, despite the green energy industry’s reputation for being capital-intensive and slow to yield returns. ”One thing that attracted us to Transphorm is that we have an intimate undersanding of this problem, with a global network of data centers,” Bill Maris, managing partner at Google Ventures, said today. “Having an understanding of the problem made it a natural fit.”

“Google Ventures is highly tuned to the need for improved energy efficiency, especially when it applies to servers,” Mishra said in an advance interview with Xconomy on Tuesday. “When we made our presentation to Google Ventures, there was an appreciation of the scope and importance of the problem.”

Transphorm will sell its custom-designed power modules directly to power equipment manfucturers, who are expected to embed them in everything from consumer electronics devices to industrial motor drives. If the products win widespread adoption, it wouldn’t just benefit data center operators, says Mishra. “Imagine taking the whole West Coast off the grid—the impact would be huge. Transphorm’s impact could be that big, and saving this kind of energy is a huge business opportunity,” he said at the press conference. “It’s good for the planet and good for business.”

“It’s a real pleasure to finally share what this venture has been able to accomplish,” Komisar said at the event. Transphorm “has met or exceeded expectations at every juncture, which is really unusual.” Kleiner Perkins invested in the company, Komisar said, in part because of the scale of the problem—he said the energy savings from better power converters could be three times greater than that from other much-heralded technologies such as digital lighting. “The opportunity is to take 300 coal-fired plants off-grid, effectively, with more efficient power conversion modules,” said Komisar.

In power converter modules based on gallium nitride rather than silicon, waste heat is reduced by up to 90 percent, according to Peter Hébert, a board observer at Transphorm and a managing partner at Lux Capital, which invested in Transphorm’s Series A round. “This is absolutely transformative,” Hébert says. “One of the biggest and most important applications would be HVAC, building systems, elevators—buildings consume something like 40 percent of all electricity produced. Also, … Next Page »

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Relume Technologies might become one of the great growth stories in the state of Michigan’s tech sector next year. The Oxford, MI-based maker of light-emitting diode (LED) lighting products and networked lighting control systems is aiming for significant increases in revenue and employment over the next year, president and chief technology officer Peter Hochstein says.

The company raised its first institutional capital last year from Beringea, the Farmington Hills, MI-based venture firm, Hochstein says. Ever since, the company has been investing in modernizing its manufacturing operations in Oxford and improving its sales and distribution. The investment appears to be paying off.

Relume, which is expecting sales of around $8 million this year, has gained orders for next year that could help the firm double its revenue in 2011, Hochstein says. Also, the firm might double its work force of about 50 people over the next year because of the expected increase in business. In the first quarter of 2011, he says, the company expects to raise more money from Beringea as one of multiple investments that are expected to total about $7 million.

The LED market consists of major players like General Electric, Osram Sylvania, and Philips Lighting, but when it comes to the design and assembly of LED lighting products, “no one does anything close to what we do,” Hochstein says.

Relume has differentiated methods for fabricating its lighting assemblies to make them last longer and perform better than others, Hochstein says. While the firm doesn’t produce LED semiconductors, it makes … Next Page »

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Merrimack, NH-based GT Solar, a provider of technology in the solar and LED spaces, announced today that it plans to purchase and retire 26.5 million shares of its common stock from all of its private equity investors, at $7.66 per share. The $203 million deal, expected to close on or before November 12, will reduce GT’s total shares outstanding from about 151 million shares to about 124 million. GT Solar paid for the transaction in cash, but has also gotten a commitment from Credit Suisse for a credit facility of up to $200 million, for greater flexibility in pursuing future business opportunities. The firm has also promoted GT Solar director and former Western Digital chairman and CEO Matt Massengill to the position of chairman to replace J. Bradford Forth, who resigned alongside board member R. Chad Van Sweden as part of the stock repurchase transaction.

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Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, the nanotechnology startup that has struggled to regain altitude after a high-flying debut in 2001, is switching on the afterburners this week.

To finance a move to a larger facility where it will have more space to manufacture its nano-engineeered materials for lighting and digital displays, the company is about to close a $25 million Series E venture round, with $5 million more potentially to follow by October 1, CEO Jason Hartlove told Xconomy on Monday.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, is supplying $15 million of the new equity investment through its affiliate Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The rest is from the company’s existing investors, and the $5 million second tranche is reserved for new investors. [Correction: In an earlier version of this paragraph, the second tranche amount was listed as $10 million.]

At the same time, Nanosys is announcing two other agreements with Samsung. There’s a multi-million-dollar licensing deal that will give Samsung access to Nanosys technology that could help it manufacture more efficent thin-film solar panels. And Samsung will also fund work at Nanosys to develop new quantum-dot crystals—the core of the startup’s technology for lighting enhancement—that don’t contain cadmium, a toxic element whose use is restricted in Europe and other regions.

The deals are critical ones for Nanosys, which wandered for years without a commercial product and brought in Hartlove as a turnaround CEO in 2008 (see this July 21 profile). The agreements give the startup more resources to expand into the two markets—displays and batteries—where Hartlove believes it can most quickly commercialize its own work, while at the same time allowing it to cash in on unexploited parts of its patent portfolio, particularly in solar technology. “This is a strategically important deal for us,” Hartlove says.

Gearing up to move to new quarters has been one of Hartlove’s highest priorities. The company has won a contract to supply the quantum dot phosphors inside the “QuantumRail,” a component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to Korea’s LG Innotek, and is pursuing additional customers. That means it now has to make the phosphors in industrial quantities. But in its current location—tucked into a Palo Alto office park with burgeoning Web and software companies such as Facebook a stone’s throw away—the startup is “basically out of capacity, really footprint-limited and fire code limited,” says Hartlove.

The company will use the growth capital round to open a new facility in a larger industrial park. “It’s here, still, within the Bay Area,” Hartlove says. “We haven’t announced a site yet, but that’s what the new capital is for, the capacity expansion to meet our 2011 revenue goals.”

The next problem is an environmental one. Manufacturers of smartphones and notebook computers can use the QuantumRail technology to tune the frequencies emitted by the LED backlights in their liquid crystal displays, resulting in a far richer range of colors. But there’s a downside—the quantum dots, which are actually nanocrystals made of cadmium selenide. Cadmium is a … Next Page »

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Nate Bezanson sits at a table beneath the i3Detroit hackerspace tent at last weekend’s Detroit Maker Faire in Dearborn, MI. In front of him are two flashlights—one labeled “stock” and the other labeled “hacked.”

The “stock” flashlight is your normal store-bought halogen model, the “hacked” one looks very much like it’s been, well, hacked to pieces and then put back together. Instead of the normal bulb, this one features LEDs.

“I’m not a big fan of the incandescent bulb,” says Bezanson. “It’s been around for a century and it hasn’t done us any favors.”

Bezanson has this simple display in front of him for two reasons.

First, he really is fascinated by LEDs and their possibilities for the future. “I’m building lights you can’t get commercially,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun.”

The second reason, though, gets at the heart of what hackerspaces like i3Detroit are trying to accomplish—to spark the imagination of people who might at first be intimidated by the whole “maker” culture that’s burgeoning around Detroit. Flashlights are easy to understand, so adding LEDs are relatively easy, Bezanson says. You simply need to know how to connect a few wires and put the thing together. So, within that, you can get creative and “the sky’s the limit as far as what shape you want the light to be. It’s an easy thing for people to get into.”

Plus, you have a friend or someone else in your hackerspace who is a designer? An artist? Let them have a go at a new flashlight design. The result is a final product that is new, brighter, cleaner, and something that nobody else has created before. See? It’s easy to become a maker.

Representatives of Detroit-area hackerspaces came out in force for the Maker Faire, sponsored by O’Reilly Media’s MAKE Magazine. Most of them will tell you that their main mission is education and outreach to the community. These are not introverted geeks who just like to be alone with their toys. They recognize that they are part of a larger movement of hope for an improved entrepreneurial culture of inventors—one that holds the best chance of rescuing the city they love.

It’s why Bezanson first got together with some like-minded friends at a coffee shop a little more than a year ago. He had all the stuff he needed in his own garage to tinker to his heart’s content. But something was missing.

“Even if you have all the same tools in your own garage, what you have here is the social aspect,” Bezanson says. “People to talk to, to show off to, to bounce ideas off of. No matter what skill level you are, there’s someone you can teach stuff to and someone who can teach you stuff.”

Bezanson places the appeal of the hackerspace into three main categories. Eighty percent … Next Page »

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Jason Hartlove has a name and a rakish mug worthy of a soap-opera star, a resume that any Silicon Valley engineer would envy, and a bit of swagger as a turnaround CEO. He co-invented the optical mouse at Hewlett-Packard, ran a 3,000-employee manufacturing operation for HP spinoff Agilent in Malaysia, and set South Korea’s struggling MagnaChip Semiconductor on its current path to an IPO. “One of my investors said this—so I won’t claim it for myself—but I am a technology MacGyver,” Hartlove says. “If you give me some piece of technology, I can really figure out what to do with it.”

But at Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, where he took over as CEO in October 2008, Hartlove may be facing his biggest challenge yet. With an impressive portfolio of patents based on work at MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and other institutions, the nine-year-old company has repeatedly been described as one of the most promising in a batch of nanotechnology startups that emerged around the turn of the millennium. In its early years, it investigated areas like solar cells and display electronics where it was thought that nano-engineered materials could lead to higher power output or greater efficiencies. But real commercial applications for nanotechnology insights have been slow to emerge, and Nanosys has yet to bring a single product all the way to the market (the first is set to appear in the fourth quarter of this year, if all goes according to plan).

“The clock is ticking for Nanosys…since its financial backers are counting on a return on investment in another three to five years,” wrote Technology Review magazine. That was in 2004—just a few months before Nanosys called off a planned IPO that still hasn’t happened.

Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove

After the pulling the plug on the IPO, “the company sort of struggled a little between 2005 and 2007 about what exactly its mission was,” Hartlove told me earlier this week. “It continued to do some directed research but didn’t really have an eye toward commercialization.” The shakeup year was 2008: CEO Calvin Chow was let go, former Symyx Technologies CEO and Venrock partner Steve Goldby became the company’s interim leader (he’s still chairman today), and the board recruited Hartlove to find Nanosys some real products.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Hartlove’s tactics since 2008 MacGyveresque, and so far, he hasn’t even used a Swiss Army knife. He has focused the company on the two research programs that seemed most likely to produce marketable products in the near future. And he has pushed forward one of them, a “QuantumRail” component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to the point that the company is earning “real revenue from real paying customers,” in Hartlove’s words. The first customer is LG Innotek, which plans to use the QuantumRail in 5 million phone-sized displays by the end of 2010; its purchases recently contributed to Nanosys’s first break-even month.

Demand for the nanocrystals that go into the QuantumRail, as well as the high-capacity anode material that Nanosys is developing for the lithium-ion battery industry, is growing fast enough that the company will soon need to find larger quarters outside Palo Alto, Hartlove says. And within 18 months, he says, the company hopes to be in a position to restart the IPO process. “We’ll have display products on the market, battery products on the market, a track record of revenue and profitability,” he says. “Those are the milestones.”

At least one Nanosys investor, Lux Capital, seems to buy into Hartlove’s optimism. “Things have really accelerated and they’re on a rapid path to success,” says Josh Wolfe, a managing partner at the New York-based firm, which contributed to a … Next Page »

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[Updated, 6/16/10] We’re excited about our full-day Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship coming up this Thursday, June 17, which will be packed with presenters from all slices of the tech and startup space in the Boston area. And we’ll be capping off the day by bringing you a dozen young companies that we believe are poised to transform the life sciences, IT, and energy/cleantech sectors. They’ll each give a three-minute rundown on what they’re out to do, after which the audience will vote on the most transformative in each category. Talk about high pressure!

So here I am to introduce you to the 12 companies who will take the stage for the rapid-fire Xpo. They’re a diverse bunch, even within each individual category. For example, our life sciences track features a company out to bring open-sourcing to drug discovery, a stealthy startup making a device for better skin grafts, an award-winning maker of medicine packaging technology aimed to intercept counterfeit drugs, and a maker of a sleep-tracking device that’s captured the heart of Regis Philbin. Read on to learn a bit about all the companies in each of the track, and sign up for XSITE 2010 so you can hear more about each of these fascinating ventures straight from the folks who are bringing them to life.

Energy
Difra
Digital Lumens
Levant Power
Promethean Power Systems

Life Sciences
Ligon Discovery
MoMelan Technologies
Sproxil
Zeo

Information Technology
Goby
Marginize [Updated: Marginize will be replacing Prysm as an IT Xpo presenter]
OmniStrat
Vgo Communications

Difra
Allston, MA

The Difra team made it into the energy track of our Xpo because they’re out to democratize the building and customization of homes, and make construction more environmentally friendly in the process. Co-founded by MIT graduates, the company is using computer-aided design and manufacturing software to model homes in 3D and translate those models into 2-D pieces that can be cut out of engineered wood with a laser device and assembled using only a rubber mallet and (optionally) glue.

The company’s co-founders see its technology, which they say results in less waste than traditional construction methods, translating into personalized homes for people who wouldn’t normally be able to afford them. The system could also enable the construction of basic housing in the wake of floods or earthquakes. “Building a home is like laying out a giant 3D-puzzle,” co-founder Morris Cox told Xconomy. “It is the perfect community project. Most of it can be done by ordinary people. We see it as a rewarding and socially enriching project for neighbors, relatives or other groups.”

Digital Lumens
Boston, MA

This Boston-based startup is combining more efficient LED lighting with networking and energy monitoring software to enable commercial facilities to light up their operations for a tenth of what it used to cost. The company makes devices that contain strips of LED lights and a mini computer processor designed to network with other devices in the same vicinity. Facilities managers can program the devices to work in zones, and collaboratively turn on and off depending on the functions of the building. Digital Lumens’ system also includes a software interface that tracks energy usage, to inform managers on how to more efficiently program the lighting in the future. A typical 250,000 square-foot commercial facility using traditional incandescent lighting (think warehouses or big-box retailers) costs about $1 per foot to light annually. Digital Lumens aims to bring that cost down to a dime per foot.

Goby
Boston, MA

Goby’s website, which was recently unveiled after more than a year in stealth mode, is out to help users find fun things to do. You plug in what kinds of activities you like, where you’d like to do them, and when you have the time to do them, and Boston-based Goby’s search engine scans data from a slew of Internet travel sources. It arranges the options in order of distance from a central point, offers information on driving directions and photos, and displays the results on an interactive map. The company has designed its site to give users much of the information they need to make travel plans without actually having to leave the site.

Levant Power
Cambridge, MA

It’s no shock that engineers and the auto industry are looking to all sorts of sources as avenues for going green, but shock absorbers are one I just hadn’t heard of yet. Until I read about Levant Power, an MIT spinoff that is out to harvest energy from the bouncing of vehicles as they drive down bumpy roads. Levant is testing its shock absorbers on buses, trucks, and military vehicles and aiming to get the technology to production in 12 to 18 months, Chief Operating Officer and co-founder Zackary Anderson told Xconomy earlier this spring. The plan is to first retrofit heavier vehicles, then take the technology to smaller passenger cars after one to two years. Levant’s product is more expensive than traditional shock absorbers, but is designed to pay for itself in less than two years.

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When you think of Concord, MA, you’re more likely to visualize Revolutionary War skirmishes or Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond than factories full of complex machinery. But in fact, Concord was once a major hub of the clockmaking industry—in 1800 there were at least seven well-known clockmakers in the city, along with a network of suppliers including brass foundries, iron forges, wire mills, and cabinet builders. And as I learned during a recent visit to display maker Prysm, whose facility sits just across an abandoned railroad right-of-way from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute, the manufacturing spirit is alive and well in Concord.

At the core of Prysm’s plant—in a clean room that I was only allowed to visit after putting on a gown, shoe covers, and a hairnet—are four large screenprinting machines that are in nearly continuous operation, churning out the rubbery layers of phosphor material that make up the heart of Prysm’s displays. The way the company’s engineers explain it, the machines work just like those used to print designs on T-shirts—except that the phosphor stripes on Prysm’s screens are just millimeters wide, are made of exotic chemicals that glow red, green, or blue when exposed to laser light, and must be positioned with absolute precision. Which is not too different from clockmaking, when you think about it.

“Our first printing machine wasn’t even in a clean room,” says my host, Patrick Tan, Prysm’s vice president of panel development and manufacturing. “It was in the old Clock Tower Place mill building in Maynard, directly below the offices of Monster.com. Any time they had a party, it would rain wood fibers. We lived with that for as long as we could, but eventually we had to move—and that’s why we’re here in Concord.”

The startup finished that move last August, back when it was still known by its stealth name, Spudnik. It wasn’t until this January—almost five years after its founding by Boston University alums Roger Hajjar and Amit Jain—that the company finally lifted the veil on its technology, which it calls the laser phosphor display, or LPD. As I wrote in one of the first published profiles of the company, Prysm has big plans to use this old-meets-new technology to disrupt the market for large-format displays—that is, the wall-sized displays used for trade shows, stage productions, train station departure-time screens, and Times Square billboards.

Prysm’s current product isn’t huge by the standards of today’s flat-panel displays—it’s a 25-inch-diagonal screen, code-named Maui. But the screen on the Maui has no bezel, which means the units can be lined up edge-to-edge and stacked vertically to form a single, nearly seamless display of any required size. And perhaps the biggest selling point for the new display is that it’s driven by highly efficient lasers—the same commodity blue-violet lasers, in fact, that are found inside Blu-ray players. LPDs therefore use far less electricity than today’s dominant technology for large-format displays, arrays of light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

“Our first targeted application is for large indoor venues like airports, train stations, shopping malls, and convention centers, where LED displays are fairly entrenched today,” says Tan, a veteran of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). “One of the big problems with LED installations is that the first order of business is to get Tony the electrician to install power, they’re such big power consumers. For us, we should be able to run off of wall sockets.” A 142-inch screen that Prysm demonstrated recently in Amsterdam (shown in the picture here) used no more power than a microwave oven, Tan says.

The part of the Maui unit that’s being manufactured in Concord, inside a 32,000-square-foot building that formerly housed a maker of components for electron microscopes, is the business end—namely, the phosphor-covered layer of glass where … Next Page »

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Customers of three Michigan companies might soon see much better now that the Michigan Microloan Fund has given them a combined $121,000 to develop their products.

Seeing what you’re killing: RiserCam, based in Saline, MI, makes video equipment for the outdoors industry. Its flagship product is the Roscoby Riser Cam, which is a flash memory video recorder mounted on crossbows and shotguns. The technology enables hunters to create video records of their hits and misses. A video explaining how it works can be found on the company’s Web site. Richard Millunchick, RiserCam’s CEO, is grateful to Ann Arbor SPARK, praising the venture incubator that manages the fund for being “willing to assist and take risks with young companies like RiserCam at a time when traditional lending institutions are not.”

Seeing who you’re hiring: Inventure Enterprises, based in East Lansing, MI, develops technology for workforce management and background checks. The funding will help Inventure commercialize its idView suite of background-check products, which it says streamlines and raises standards for screening of potential federal, state, municipal, and private employees. The microloans will help complete product development and marketing, and hire some college interns, says Robert Fulk, Inventure president.

Just seeing better: LED Optical Solutions, based in Washington, MI, develops LED bulb technology that allows municipalities to easily retrofit streetlights for energy savings of 50 to 60 percent. The technology can also be used in parking structures, and on billboards or highway signs. CEO Ingo Schneider says the loan comes “at a perfect time,” with 10 prototypes about to be placed in several cities signed up for pilot-testing programs.

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Boston isn’t Houston as far as energy industry hubs go. But here in New England, there is a lot of innovation with light-emitting diodes, these energy-conserving tools that can be found everywhere from homes to warehouses to urban skyscrapers, and embedded in products like TVs, projectors, medical devices, and software systems.

Light-emitting diodes, which are semiconductors that release energy when voltage is applied, are commonly referred to as LEDs for short. They’ve long been seen as energy-efficient lighting replacements, but the technologies sprouting up out of this city aren’t nearly so straightforward.

“There’s no doubt that we’re at the front end of a major trend here,” says Flybridge Capital Partners general partner Jon Karlen, who sits on the board of Digital Lumens, a Boston-based startup. LED technology started with massive architectural lighting displays from Philips Color Kinetics (another Boston-area fixture), but is spreading to more everyday, consumer uses, he says. “We’re just seeing it crack open general illumination. Everywhere you see a light bulb, there’s going to be an LED fixture in the next five to 10 years.”

We’ve counted at least five companies working in the LED space in Boston. These companies make everything from LED chip inserts for existing lighting fixtures, to commercial scale LED displays, to smart lighting systems that pair efficient LED lighting with sensors and computer systems to intelligently control the illumination in industrial facilities.

There’s a reason why the area’s LED-related companies each seem to do something a bit different, says Canaccord Adams senior equity analyst Jed Dorsheimer, who follows trends in the lighting and solar industries. In almost every segment of the LED production process, there’s room for innovation—from cost to efficiency to overall technology, he says.

“It’s well suited to smaller companies that are more nimble and that can focus on a particular piece or aspect of the supply chain,” he says.

Read below for snapshots of the five companies we rounded up in the space.

—Last year, Wade wrote about this Luminus Devices’ near speed-of-light transition from concept to business. This company is the brainchild of MIT-trained physicist Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, John Joannopolous. Luminus Devices, based in Billerica, MA, now says it makes the world’s brightest LED, in the form of what it calls PhlatLight chipsets, named for photonic lattices. The technology could light up everything from residential spaces to arenas to TV studios, but that depends on getting the LEDs into preexisting devices and fixtures.

This condition hasn’t deterred Luminus investors. The company has raised … Next Page »

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Everyone knows that traditional incandescent lamps are inefficient and energy-wasting. But LEDs, one of the technologies vying to take their place, produce light that feels harsh and cold by comparison, leading many customers to shy away from them.

Watertown, MA-based QD Vision thinks it can use its “quantum dot” technology to solve both problems—energy waste and LEDs’ unpleasant color—and it’s about to get a chance to test that belief in the marketplace.

Quantum dots are tiny crystals of semiconductor material that emit light when excited by light or electricity. QD Vision, a six-year-old MIT spinoff, has come up with a way to apply thin films containing the quantum dots to the external faces of conventional LEDs. That converts the harsh LED light into something warmer and more pleasing, similar to the light produced by incandescent bulbs, without sacrificing the high energy efficiency typical of LEDs.

According to QD Vision, LEDs processed with quantum dots are roughly six times more energy efficient than incandescent bulbs, and over three times more efficient than halogen lamps with comparable color quality. Converting all incandescent lighting in the U.S. to LED lighting could reduce the nation’s total electrical usage for lighting by a third, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

A sign that QD Vision’s technology is gaining traction appeared this month when Charlotte, NC-based LED manufacturer Nexxus Lighting (NASDAQ: NEXS) announced initial production and shipment of its new replacement light bulbs, which use QD Vision’s quantum dot films. Nexxus says its so-called Array Quantum LED bulb fits directly into 400 million lighting fixtures already in place in the U.S. It’s the first time QD Vision’s quantum dots have turned up in a commercial product.

“Our Quantum Light optic is the first product that lets manufacturers make warmer-colored, high-efficiency LED lamps,” QD Vision president and CEO Dan Button said in a statement. “These features are vital to their widespread adoption.”

Xconomy first profiled QD Vision in April 2008. While there are a number of companies around the globe developing quantum dot technology, the Watertown startup is the first to apply them commercially, according to Button.

The Nexxus Lighting deal dates back to December 2008, when … Next Page »

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Investors continue to pour cash into Luminus Devices, the Billerica, MA-based maker of bright, efficient LEDs, at a rate that would startle most entrepreneurs in the life sciences, let alone the hardware, computing, and infotech industries. Luminus announced today that it has raised $19 million in Series F funding, from a group of existing investors that includes Argonaut Private Equity, Braemar Energy Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Stata Venture Partners. The round, the first since a $72 million Series E round in May 2008, brings the eight-year-old startup’s total financing to roughly $159 million. Xconomy profiled Luminus in October 2009.

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Advanced RenewableEnergy Company, a Nashua, NH maker of equipment for growing and processing the sapphire crystals used in LEDs, has raised $5 million of a $10 million equity round, according to an SEC filing. The filing lists Hemant Taneja, managing director of Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst Partners, as a director of the stealthy ARC Energy.

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If you’re seeing electronic displays on every wall, window, billboard, and passing dirigible, it’s a sure sign that you’re stuck in a science-fiction movie. While a few real-world destinations like New York’s Times Square and Tokyo’s Ginza district are plastered with outdoor displays, such technology is still too expensive and electricity-hogging to put everywhere.

But this might not be true forever. In fact, Prysm, a San Jose, CA, startup that came out of stealth mode yesterday, is working to ease the biggest limitations on large-screen displays, especially their power requirements. The company says that screens using its new laser phosphor display (LPD) technology suck up only one-quarter as much electricity as screens using today’s dominant liquid-crystal display (LCD) or light-emitting diode (LED) technologies.

Moreover, Prysm’s LPD screens—which the startup plans to manufacture at a plant in Concord, MA—can be built in any size or shape, from square tiles to long, thin ribbons, meaning they could turn up almost anywhere someone wants to convey information or advertising, day or night. “We can make it as big and bright as you can imagine,” says Roger Hajjar, Prysm’s co-founder and chief technology officer and the primary inventor of the company’s LPD technology. “That’s the goodness here—the size and brightness are scalable. If you need more brightness, you just add more laser power.”

Hajjar and Prysm CEO Amit Jain, who have been friends since their undergraduate days at Boston University, co-founded the startup under the stealth name Spudnik back in 2005, with venture funding from Artiman Ventures of East Palo Alto, CA, and Partech International of San Francisco. Hajjar says large LPD-based screens—which actually have more in common with old-fashioned cathode ray tubes (CRTs) than they do with LCDs—became practical for the first time in the 2000s thanks to the development of new phosphor materials by the LED industry and the increasing power and efficiency (and declining cost) of laser-light sources. Unlike many hardware startups, Prysm won’t merely license the intellectual property it has developed to other equipment makers, but plans to manufacture and sell LPD products under its own brand.

The company isn’t saying yet exactly which applications or markets it will pursue first, and it’s only showing off its prototype displays in private, invitation-only settings such as a booth at the Integrated Systems Europe audio-video trade show in Amsterdam next month. But a glimpse at the Prysm website shows where the company’s thoughts are heading. In Prysm’s glossy version of the future, LPDs will light up theaters, casinos, trade shows, stadiums, shopping malls, broadcast studios, train stations, airports, command centers, financial exchanges, hotel lobbies, museums, even churches.

LPD screens may initially cost more to install than LCD or LED screens, but Prysm vice president of sales and marketing Dana Corey says they’ll cost far less to operate, since they use less power and … Next Page »

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QD Vision, of Watertown, MA, said today that it has raised $10 million to bankroll the rollout of its quantum dot nanomaterials for use in LED-based solid state lighting and displays. Investors in the round were Boston-area venture firms North Bridge Venture Partners and Highland Capital Partners, as well as In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community, according to QD Vision. The startup, founded by MIT researchers in 2004, said it has now raised $30 million in venture capital.

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