Two trends are driving the current job market: globalization, where everybody is becoming part of the economy, and innovation, which increases productivity and allows fewer people to do the same jobs. These two trends will not slow down during the next few decades. How should students train in college to build careers under these conditions?

The situation is similar to 150 years ago, when 98 perecent of people farmed. Now we need only 2 percent of the population to look after the farms. The other 96 percent are engaged in businesses that did not exist 150 years ago. Similarly, the globalization of the workforce and the concurrent productivity gains will take care of people’s current needs. New graduates over the next decades will be part of businesses that don’t exist today.

What are these new businesses? We know that the world faces several big challenges such as energy, sustainability, poverty, education and healthcare. We need to solve these problems, but no one is sure how they will lead to specific businesses. This is the challenge and the opportunity for new graduates.

New graduates who want to be players in the new economy will need a strong work ethic, rigor in their thought process, and entrepreneurial energy. In the old economy, individuals mastered a specific skill and practiced it over the course of a 50-year career. In the next 50 years, new graduates will probably change their field of practice every 10 years. They need a good work ethic to be able to learn new things. They need rigor in their thought process to learn to learn. They need to be flexible and be entrepreneurial to adapt to new businesses.

No matter what students study, whether it is technology, journalism, art, medicine, business, or law, they will have to be entrepreneurial to survive and prosper in the next 50 years. In universities they learn to solve problems. In addition to solving problems posed by others, students need to learn how to pick problems that they are passionate about solving. A big part of being an entrepreneur is to learn to pick problems that you want to solve.

I am a big believer that students should create experiential learning opportunities during their university years. They should treat the whole world and its problems as their laboratory, as opposed to confining themselves to their campuses. Picking a problem that they feel passionate about and finding a way to solve it builds confidence and gives students a taste of taking charge. New graduates have to be entrepreneurial and innovative in creating opportunities for themselves as opposed to waiting for others to do it for them.

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From cloudy Seattle to the vast suburbs of Silicon Valley, we covered a lot of ground on MIT Sloan’s recent technology trek, which concluded with a leg in Boston.

The first stop was Seattle where it was predictably raining. Visiting Amazon, Microsoft, and Adobe, we came away with an appreciation for how much tech activity is actually going on in that city.

At Microsoft, we got to talk to alumni about what it’s like to work there. Yes, it’s a large company and therefore bureaucratic, they confessed. But, the huge plus is that they have the resources to work on some very innovative projects. Amazon also was big, but the theme there was its quirkiness. In addition to all of the desks being made out of doors, they also have whiteboards everywhere, even in the elevators. I made sure to leave an “MIT Sloan was here” tag in one of the elevators!

Adobe seemed like a more typical office where they provide a pleasant work environment with lots of exposed brick and wood. Overall, I could really see myself enjoying working in Seattle.

Moving on to Silicon Valley, it was noticeably sunnier and warmer. It was also a lot bigger. In Seattle, you could probably get by with just a bike and public transit, but good luck to anyone who tries that in Silicon Valley. Here, you definitely need a car. Being settled with a family might help too, as the area is comprised of endless suburbs punctuated by large office parks where the tech companies are located.

If you want to live where the action is, you’d need to get a job in San Francisco or do the 40-minute commute each way and hope for no traffic. I guess I should point out that Palo Alto does have a downtown, but it’s just two or three streets and most people would still have to drive there.

As for the tech companies, most of the ones we visited were in Silicon Valley and all offered quite a lot of amenities compared to what we saw in Seattle. Free food, gyms, yoga classes, dry cleaners, and acupuncture were just some of the perks you get at most of these companies. I guess they need these things to entice people not only to live away from the city, but also to work some pretty long hours.

For example, the employees at Facebook—who all seemed to be in their 20s—joked that working at some firms in the Valley is like working in a sweatshop. Employees are expected to work extremely hard, but they also provide an endless amount of food that includes a rotating candy of the week. Facebook keeps its employees well fed, caffeinated, and hydrated with the largest cafeteria of all the tech companies we visited.

Google had a similar environment with lots of … Next Page »

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I think learning the fundamentals of a discipline is the most important thing that students can do to prepare themselves for jobs both today and tomorrow. That discipline may be biology, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering or others. I also think doing research is great preparatory experience. Furthermore, I believe the opportunities offered by the convergence between biology, medicine, and engineering are rapidly increasing.

Thus, courses and research at this interface may be increasingly attractive. At MIT, for example, training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the Broad Institute or the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program may be very helpful. At many universities, there are also special programs or activities that students can be involved in that may be useful. At MIT such programs include the $100K business plan competition. At Stanford they have a Biodesign Program. Finally, summer jobs in companies involved in biotech or pharma or medical devices can offer great experiences.

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Some people set a goal of losing weight in the new year, but if you’re Bob Langer and Omid Farokhzad, it’s apparently time to start another new biotech company.

The prolific biotech entrepreneurs (Langer is from MIT, while Farokhzad is at Harvard Medical School), along with colleague Stephen Lippard of MIT, said today they have come together to start another new company called Blend Therapeutics in Watertown, MA. Langer and Farokhzad, who previously put their heads together for Bind Biosciences and Selecta Biosciences, now hope to come up with novel combinations of medicines that they say should “target distinct disease pathways with optimal efficacy and safety.” Flagship Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and NanoDimension have invested $2.8 million to start Blend, according to a report in FierceBiotech.

The company plans to hire about a dozen people this year, and will grow “methodically” until it is mature enough to hire a top-tier CEO, FierceBiotech said. Farokhzad told the industry news site that Blend could have raised more money, but opted instead to raise a smaller sum, create some value, and then raise more money. The initial plan, Farokhzad said, is to focus on treatments for cancer, inflammation, pain, and infectious diseases.

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‘Tis the season to reflect on the past year and take a look at some of Xconomy Boston’s top stories.

As usual, these aren’t necessarily the highest-traffic stories (though in some cases they are). They are stories that exemplify what we are trying to deliver to our readers every day—narratives about the people, companies, and ideas that are shaping the future of technology, life sciences, and cleantech in our region, and across the country.

It was very hard to pick just 20 stories, like I usually do. I guess that’s a good thing. So I fudged it and actually picked slightly more—a dozen tech stories, and a dozen life sciences and cleantech stories.

In any case, our editor’s picks for 2011 span the fields of software, mobile, Internet, security, health IT, biotech, life sciences, energy, and hardware/materials.

They range in topic from people stories (Adriana Jenkins, Steve Jobs) to company strategies (Acme Packet, Vertex) to trends and analysis (big data, biotech risks); from universities (Harvard accelerator) to startups (MedicalRecords, Harvest Power) to big companies (IBM, Pfizer, Biogen Idec); from Q&As (Rob Day, Jim Baum) to company profiles (EnVivo, MC10) to news features (testing the nation’s first car collision-avoidance system); and from big community projects (Entrepreneur Walk of Fame) to cheeky area clusters (top 10 “boring” tech companies).

Here they are in their full glory, our top 20-ish stories of the year, sorted by sector:

Top 12 Tech Stories

Adriana Jenkins, Boston Biotech PR Maven, Dies from Breast Cancer at 41

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Big drug collaborations and acquisitions took the spotlight in the New England life sciences news pool this week.

—Coronado Biosciences, which moved from New York to Burlington, MA, this past August, debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange, with an opening share price of $6.50 on Monday. The company (NASDAQ: CNDO) went public not through a conventional IPO, but by registering all of its privately held shares as common stock.

—Cambridge, MA-based Metamark Genetics and Johnson & Johnson unit (NYSE: JNJ) Janssen Biotech inked a research agreement to validate gene targets that play in a role in the spreading and progression of tumors. Metamark will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible for up to $365 million in milestone payments.

—Thousand Oaks, CA-based Amgen, which has R&D operations in Cambridge, signed a collaboration agreement with New Jersey-based Watson Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: WPI) to develop and sell antibody drugs that are knockoffs of the originals, known as biosimilars. Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) will contribute its research and expertise to making the protein drugs that are produced in living cells, and Watson will put as much as $400 million into the development.

—Excelimmune, a Woburn, MA-based developer of so-called polyclonal antibodies, took in $12 million in financing from a private investor that it did not publicly name. The money will go toward developing Excelimmune’s molecules that aim to combat infectious diseases like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

—Cambridge-based Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company got access to a new portfolio of small molecule cancer drugs that are designed to block variations of the target in cancer biology known as the PI3 kinase pathway. That came through the acquisition of San Diego-based Intellikine by Millennium’s Japan-based parent company, Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

—My colleague Arlene wrote about Enumeral Biomedical, a New York startup founded on science from MIT chemical engineering professor J. Christopher Love. He developed technology called protein microengraving that measures how the human body responds to infection and disease.

—PatientKeeper, a Waltham, MA-based developer of physician workflow software, pulled in another $6 million in growth funding, from Flybridge Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Whitney & Company.

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San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says founding CEO Irwin Jacobs plans to retire from the board this spring, marking his final separation from the San Diego wireless technology giant.

Jacobs, 78, co-founded Qualcomm in 1985, and served as chairman and CEO through the company’s first two decades. During the trying early years, Jacobs led a prolonged and wide-ranging battle to establish Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, the wireless standard Qualcomm had developed. It was a time, however, after many European countries—and much of the world, it seemed—had adopted Groupe Spécial Mobile (GSM), also known as “Global System for Mobile Communications.”

By the time Jacobs stepped down as CEO on June 30, 2005, CDMA had been adopted in the United States as a wireless standard (in 1993) and Qualcomm was a public company that had grown big enough to be listed on the S&P 500 and Fortune 500.

One of the company’s most important watersheds came in 1999, when Qualcomm settled its long-running legal dispute with Sweden’s Ericsson over the wireless standards for what would then be the next-generation (3G) of mobile phones. The deal removed a cloud of uncertainty that had weighed on Qualcomm’s fortunes, and the price of Qualcomm shares skyrocketed in the following years.

When Jacobs stepped down as CEO, he was succeeded by his third-eldest son Paul, a Qualcomm veteran who was then president of Qualcomm’s Wireless and Internet Group. Irwin Jacobs continued to serve as Qualcomm’s chairman through March 2009, when Paul Jacobs took over the chairman’s role as well.

“Qualcomm’s business model and culture of innovation are due to Irwin’s vision and leadership,” Paul Jacobs says in a statement from the company. “He continues to inspire all of us here at Qualcomm as we pioneer the next generation of mobile technologies.”

Jacobs arrived in San Diego as a young engineering professor at the University of California, San Diego, after spending seven years on the engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He left UCSD in the early 1970s to found Linkabit, a satellite communications and technology company that served as a launching pad for scores of other tech startups in San Diego. M/A-Com acquired Linkabit in 1980, and Jacobs remained as a vice president until he departed to start Qualcomm.

“When we first started Qualcomm, I told my wife Joan that, if we were lucky, we might grow to 100 employees,” Irwin Jacobs says. “We clearly have surpassed that. I am immensely proud of the company we have built, its more than 22,000 employees, and the impact Qualcomm has made on the telecom industry and the lives of mobile users worldwide.”

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Geneticist Arthur Tinkelenberg has always been struck by the lack of strategy in scientific research. “Historically it’s been somewhat ad hoc,” he says. “For example, why do we study fruit flies? Because somewhere in the dim past, somebody did something interesting with a fruit fly, and now you have a whole field.”

So when Tinkelenberg was presented with the opportunity to lead New York-based biotech startup Enumeral Biomedical last spring, he jumped at the opportunity. Enumeral is based around technology invented by J. Christopher Love, an associate professor of chemical engineering at MIT who developed a way to measure how the human body responds to infection and disease. Enumeral’s technology, called “protein microengraving,” allows scientists to take cells from people who, say, have survived cancer, and then scrutinize those cells to identify antibodies involved in fighting the disease.

Enumeral’s startup team is marketing the technology as a completely new way to find ideas for innovative drugs—namely by studying real human cells, as opposed to fruit flies, bioengineered mice, or any of the other critters biotech researchers generally use. “We have to find better ways to validate drug candidates, and the way to do that is to start with human-based samples,” Tinkelenberg says.

Although it’s only been around about five months, Enumeral has already piqued the interest of venture capitalists and pharmaceutical companies. It has raised a total of $4.25 million from a group of investors led by Harris & Harris, a New York-based venture capital firm that invests in nanotechnology startups. And Tinkelenberg says the company is in ongoing discussions with potential pharmaceutical partners and hopes to have two to three deals locked up in the first quarter of 2012.

The quest to make drug discovery more human has been a major priority for Big Pharma in recent years. The industry has placed much of its hope in so-called humanized mice, which are rodents that have been engineered to possess fully human immune systems. Scientists expose the mice to human diseases and then extract … Next Page »

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What exactly does 6×6 come out to? A half-day of understanding a bit more about how geniuses run companies; listening to innovators share new ways to tackle Web publishing, marketing, travel search, cloud IT, unmanned aerial vehicles, and more; and catching on to new startups. Oh, plus some very high-quality networking. That’s what we saw at the Xconomy Forum last Thursday, called “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas,” hosted graciously by the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in Boston.

Stephen Wolfram (aforementioned genius) kicked off the event with a keynote talk about taking on seemingly impossible projects and making them succeed. The program followed up with presentations from six companies across the Xconomy network with six potentially transformative ideas: Jason Baptiste of OnSwipe (New York); Nathaniel Borenstein of Mimecast (representing Detroit); Dave Icke from MC10 (Boston); Adam Goldstein from Hipmunk (San Francisco); Kabir Shahani from Appature (Seattle); and Bill Walker from Northrop Grumman (San Diego).

Shorter “burst” presentations from emerging Boston-area startups (Krush, Jana, Apptegic, Crashlytics), and an interactive demo of emotion-analyzing tech from Affectiva rounded out the day.

We’d like to extend a special thanks to our event sponsors, Turnstone and Windstream Hosted Solutions, for making this day possible. Thanks also to our event partner, MassTLC, and our design sponsor, Mixtur, and to all of our underwriters and venture capital members.

We can’t fully do justice to the thought-provoking presentations and incredible mix of guests and speakers here, but we’ve boiled it down as best we can with a 25-picture photo gallery. You can click through below to get a glimpse of the presenters and snapshots of our audience.

	NEXT IMAGE >>
	6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas – Audience listens in as the program kicks off
	photo by Keith Spiro of Kendall Press

… Next Page »

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There, sitting about 10 feet in front of me, was the ninth most powerful person in the world, according to Forbes.

Dressed in his signature t-shirt and jeans, you wouldn’t be able to tell Mark Zuckerberg apart from a random college student outside the lecture hall. As he took his seat and began speaking about the technical challenges he encountered at Facebook, the fun he had during his (short) time at Harvard, and his enthusiasm for recruiting people to join the company, I could tell he was at ease in front of this crowd of hand-picked computer science and engineering students. He even cracked programming jokes: “My roommate decided to learn how to program and bought a book about Perl. Who writes anything in Perl?” Mark laughed. The audience laughed. It was a truly inspiring homecoming for Harvard’s most recent entrepreneurial success.

His talk was infused with anecdotes about his time at Harvard. Mark originally thought he would be a Classics major before he decided to major in computer science. Dustin Moskovitz, Zuckerberg’s technical co-founder, learned how to program on the fly, having only taken the introductory computer science course at Harvard. He even used to sit in the quintessential Harvard pizza place, Pinocchio’s, to discuss the technology world with his friends.

Harvard today has support for entrepreneurs that Mark could never have imagined as a student back in 2004. The new Harvard Innovation Lab is bound to be where the next Facebook prospers, and students today mentor each other and forge connections like never before. (My own mentors, Peter Boyce ’13 and Andrew Rosenthal HBS ’12 probably know all of the Boston tech ecosystem between them.) Students simply have the resources to start the companies they want. Add that to the burgeoning Boston startup community, and you have an environment that even Mark admits would have kept him in Boston.

The entire experience was surreal for everybody in the room. For many people, including myself, Mark Zuckerberg was the reason we came to Harvard. The promise of being the next Zuckerberg or Gates was often too alluring to turn down. Having heard from many of my friends who also attended the talk, the general feeling is that Harvard will now have a second uptick in startup fever, after an initial excitement following the release of The Social Network.

Hamed, Zuckerberg, and Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan at the Harvard Innovation Lab

The irony is that part of Mark’s motivation to drop out came from a visit that Bill Gates made to Harvard when Mark was still a student here. “The advice Bill gave me when he came to Harvard was to take time off and build something,” he said. While Mark’s talk was billed as a recruiting talk, there was an undercurrent of the same advice: join us at Facebook for an amazing career, but don’t be afraid to make something cool on your own and run with it.

At the end of his talk, Mark made his way to the Harvard Innovation Lab for a surprise visit. He walked around the building with i-Lab Director Gordon Jones and i-Lab coordinator Neal Doyle, observing the huge new space that will foster innovation across Harvard University and the Boston community as a whole. He watched as Tivli founders Nicholas Krasney and Ho Tuan demoed their live TV streaming startup, built completely at Harvard.

“Wow,” Mark said. “This is actually pretty cool.”

It was a unique moment of one generation of entrepreneurs fostering and encouraging the next generation of startup founders. Indeed, the next Mark Zuckerberg may very well have been in the room Monday. Let’s just hope they don’t code their idea in Perl.

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This week’s roundup of New England deals includes companies working on vocal cord repair, cancer stem cells, database software, IT services, and drug counterfeiting prevention.

—Prolific MIT professor and inventor Bob Langer is working on a new project with a Harvard University surgeon that’s aiming to repair damaged vocal cords. The vibrating gel they’re developing has attracted funding from The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and actress Julie Andrews, and could help treat aging singers as well as throat cancer patients.

—Verastem, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of treatments focused on cancer stem cells, has filed for an initial public offering after just 15 months in business. The startup—founded on the science of MIT’s Bob Weinberg and Eric Lander and led by biotech entrepreneur Christoph Westphal—is looking to raise $50 million in the IPO.

—Basho Technologies, a Cambridge-based database software maker, raised $5 million in new funding from its existing equity holders. And Waltham, MA-based Innocentive, whose collaboration software platform has roots at Eli Lilly, bumped its most recent funding round up to $5.1 million.

—Henri Termeer, former CEO of Cambridge-based Genzyme, joined the investor syndicate of Seattle-based NanoString Technologies, a startup developing a diagnostic tool to better enable personalized medicine. NanoString collected a $20 million Series D investment from Termeer, GE Healthcare, BioMed Ventures, Clarus Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and OVP Venture Partners.

—MindShift Technologies, a Waltham-based provider of cloud, data center, and other IT services for businesses, was acquired for $167 million by Best Buy (NASDAQ: BBY). The retailer said the acquisition helps it expand its IT services offerings for small and mid-sized businesses. MindShift, meanwhile, will keep its name, leadership team, and all 500 employees.

—-Late last month, Lebanon, NH-based PharmaSecure raised $3.9 million in a round of funding led by Innovation Endeavors—the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—with participation from Gray Ghost Ventures, Healthtech Capital and TEEC Angel Fund. My colleague Arlene took a closer look at the four-year-old startup, which is developing drug packaging technology to prevent counterfeiting in markets like India.

—Newton, MA-based Zeo, a maker of sleep management technology, raised $1 million of a debt-based offering that could hit $4 million, an SEC filing showed. This September the startup expanded its sleep coaching system to a mobile app.

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If you want something done right, the old saying goes, do it yourself. That’s exactly what XL Hybrids, a Boston-based transportation tech startup, is up to these days.

Despite a thin layer of gloom that pervades much of the cleantech industry, XL Hybrids is advancing in its quest to make commercial vans and trucks greener and more fuel-efficient. The two-and-a-half-year-old company is announcing today it has appointed Richard Canny, a longtime Ford Motor exec and electric vehicle expert (former CEO of Think Global), to its board of directors. Canny is based in the Detroit area and gives XL Hybrids some more gravitas and deeper connections in the auto industry. But there are a lot of other things going on under the hood at this ambitious startup.

“We’ve been hard at work not only in technology development but also in re-examining our market,” says Justin Ashton, the company’s co-founder and vice president of business development.

Part of that re-examination includes ending a partnership that XL Hybrids had formed about a year ago with U.K.-based Ashwoods Automotive, which makes a vehicle retrofitting kit. The plan had been for XL to adapt the kit for the U.S. market. But XL found the process was taking too long, in part because European vehicles are so different from American ones. “It made sense to work on our own,” Ashton says.

So, XL Hybrids is handling the technology for commercial fleets by itself now. “Our strategy has shifted to doing all systems development [ourselves] but working with tier-one suppliers for components,” Ashton says. That means employing large battery makers and established electric motor manufacturers, he says. “Our role is to build the hybrid architecture from the ground up.”

The architecture consists of a hybrid electric powertrain (for which XL has patents pending) that can be installed on either existing vehicles or new ones. It includes a lithium ion battery, electric motor, and control software. The computer-aided design drawing of the system (see left) resembles a space-age tuba, or maybe a Star Wars pod-racing engine, but the point of the powertrain is to store energy wasted in braking and reapply it during acceleration. XL says this results in about 20 percent lower fuel consumption and emissions for high-mileage city driving, in standard cargo vans (typically made by GMC or Chevy).

Starting in January, XL Hybrids is working with commercial fleet companies to start pilot tests of retrofit cargo vans in the Boston area. If all goes well, there will be a couple dozen vehicles on the road around New England by June, Ashton says.

But he emphasizes that there is a bigger opportunity. “This business is not about retrofit. Long term, it’s about creating a unique hybrid powertrain for a large market,” Ashton says. “We can do retrofits where they make economic sense for our customers. But we have a lot of interest from customers in what’s called ‘upfitting’”—putting the technology into new vehicles.

Of course, this could be a difficult journey for a small startup—but XL is focusing on a market it thinks it can handle. “The real challenge in transportation is finding your path to get your product to market. And dealing with some of the largest companies in the world with long product cycles,” Ashton says. “We don’t want to wait. You have to find a business model that is relatively capital efficient, that leverages existing infrastructure.” He adds, “Right now we’re focused on a niche within a niche. The commercial vehicle side is dwarfed by the consumer segment. Our strategy is to position ourselves.”

XL Hybrids was founded by a team of MIT grads in 2009 and has about 10 employees. The company has raised roughly $4 million from angel investors and the Massachusetts Green Energy Fund. It says it plans to raise more money next year.

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Groupon raked in so much cash through its initial public offering last week that it could buy the entire class of life sciences companies that have gone public in 2011.

For those of you who aren’t following the Groupon melodrama, the Chicago-based online daily deals site raised $700 million last week in its IPO after overcoming serious questions about its accounting practices. Groupon shrugged that off and saw its stock (NASDAQ: GRPN) boom 31 percent on the first day of trading. TV news commentators cheered, just like when social networking site LinkedIn (NYSE: LKND) went public in May.

The biotech IPO market, by comparison, has been about as exciting as the average Seattle Mariners game was this year.

Not everybody thought it would be this dull. Heading into 2011, market prognosticator Steve Burrill predicted there would be at least 25 biotech IPOs this year in the U.S. The final tally will be nowhere close to that. Renaissance Capital of Greenwich, CT, says there have been 13 healthcare IPOs this year, compared with 37 from the tech industry. Even by reaching for the loosest definition possible of the “life sciences” industry, there have been 16 life sciences IPOs so far this year, as tallied in August by The Burrill Report. But if you get rid of specialty chemical/biofuel companies, and you whittle out a Tibetan medicine company and a health IT player, that brings the group down to 10 true life sciences IPOs by my count. Six are drug developers, leaving a couple of medical device companies, a diagnostics company, and an instrument maker.

Here’s a quick rundown of the life sciences IPO class of 2011 that I put together. Three have gained value this year, two are basically treading water, and five have declined. The grand total of IPO money that went to these 10 companies is a paltry $640 million—less than a single online daily deals site raised last week. Just as worrisome, I’m almost certain that when scientific eyes look at this list, they glaze over with boredom.

It’s a sad state of affairs today that some daily deals website, which produces nothing of lasting value and will probably end up the poster child of another tech bubble gone bad, can generate so much attention and actual money.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think investors should just start taking fliers on unproven biotech companies. The vast majority of people who try that would surely get burned, like I’m guessing most people will get burned by Groupon.

This dynamic isn’t going to change anytime soon. The biotech VC world is in crisis, pharma companies are cutting their R&D capabilities, and the federal government is contemplating budget cuts that would put a dent in basic academic research. Hardly anybody, other than a few focused philanthropies, seems to be stepping up to invest in the risky, messy business of biomedical discovery that keeps the whole industry moving forward. Certainly IPO investors have made clear the past few years they want no part of that kind of risk.

Ironically, this same abundance of caution is coming during the same year of some major biotech home runs. There has been a string of outstanding innovation this year in life sciences from … Next Page »

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

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Cambridge, MA-based Verastem has big names and big science on its side, which a lot of startups have, but now it’s doing something quite unconventional for a company that’s just 15 months old—it’s trying to go public.

Verastem, the company led by former Sirtris Pharmaceuticals CEO Christoph Westphal and founded on science from MIT luminaries Bob Weinberg and Eric Lander, most recently made news in July when it raised $32 million in venture capital. But today it looked to raise even more more, filing a prospectus for an initial public offering to raise as much as $50 million. The proposed deal is being underwritten by UBS, Leerink Swann, Lazard Capital Markets, Oppenheimer & Co., and Rodman & Renshaw.

Unlike most biotech companies seeking to go public, Verastem doesn’t have any drugs yet in clinical trials, which are easier for public investors to evaluate. Instead, the company’s IPO prospectus says it has drug discovery technology that seeks “to create a stable population of cancer stem cells to screen for and identify small molecule compounds that target cancer stem cells.” These cancer stem cells, sometimes called tumor-initiating cells, are thought to be one of the reasons why cancers often develop resistance to existing therapies and enable cancer cells to spread.

Scientists have long struggled to isolate enough of these elusive cells in the lab, and have found it difficult to keep them stable for experiments, and there has been great debate in academia about their ultimate value to cancer treatment. Verastem says it will seek to prove its concept with a lead drug known as VS-507, which targets breast cancer stem cells. The drug is still in preclinical studies, Verastem says.

What Verastem lacks in clinical proof, it makes up for with scientific and drug development experience. The company’s scientific advisory board includes George Daley of Children’s Hospital Boston; Nobel laureate Phil Sharp of MIT; Jose Baselga of Massachusetts General Hospital; Roger Tung, the CEO of Concert Pharmaceuticals; and Julian Adams, the president of Infinity Pharmaceuticals. Former Genzyme CEO Henri Termeer is on the board of directors.

Christoph Westphal is chairman and CEO of Verastem

Verastem has raised about $48 million in a pair of venture financings since it was founded in August 2010, and had burned through about $8.5 million of its cash through the end of September, according to the prospectus.

Several venture investors stand to quickly get some liquidity in their ownership stakes if Verastem can entice public investors to bite on an IPO. The biggest holders in Verastem, according to the filing, are Longwood Founders Fund, with a 15.5 percent stake; CHP of Princeton, NJ with 13.5 percent; MPM Bioventures with 13.2 percent; Bessemer Venture Partners with 12.9 percent; Eastern Capital Limited with 7.8 percent; and Advanced Technology Ventures with 5.1 percent. Westphal, 43, personally has 1.76 million shares of common stock in his name, or about a 3.4 percent ownership stake, according to the filing.

Verastem isn’t the only company going after cancer stem cells. Redwood City, CA-based OncoMed Pharmaceuticals has partnerships to develop drugs that go after cancer stem cells with Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline. The Verastem IPO filing also lists divisions of Astellas Pharma, Sanofi, and Glaxo as competitors.

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Bob Langer has probably been called a rock star a time or two, but now the famous MIT scientist’s work is being supported by actual rock stars.

Langer, an Xconomist, is working on a project to create a vibrating gel which is thought to have potential to rejuvenate damaged vocal cords, according to a feature story from Bloomberg News. The project, which Langer is doing in collaboration with Harvard University surgeon Steven Zeitels, has gotten financial support from The Who’s lead singer Roger Daltrey, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and actress Julie Andrews, according to Bloomberg.

The gel in question, which is supposed to vibrate fast enough to replicate human vocal cords, isn’t just for aging rock stars with voices damaged from years of wear and tear. The gel is also being developed as a treatment for throat cancer patients, and is scheduled to enter its first clinical trial in 2012.

There’s no mention in the story of whether this gel project is part of a company, although it does refer to Langer’s prolific record as an entrepreneur and his relationship with Polaris Venture Partners (which we described in a family tree post back in April.)

There are some good quotes from Langer in the story. At one point, he reflects on his career, saying that as he’s gotten older, his main focus has become “how to get the stuff you’re doing to affect more people.”

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Score one for open source startups. Modo Labs, a Cambridge, MA-based mobile software company, is announcing today it has closed a $4 million Series A round from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures. The round includes $2 million that the startup raised last year; the new money ($2 million) comes from Silicon Valley-based Storm, led by founding general partner Tae Hea Nahm.

Modo Labs, which grew out of MIT’s Mobile Framework project, makes an open source software platform called Kurogo, which helps universities and other organizations put their information online and make it quickly available on devices like smartphones, tablets, and so forth. Lots of colleges are already using Kurogo for their mobile sites, including Boston College, Brown University, Harvard University, Middlebury College, University of Vermont, and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Modo Labs says it wants to open up its platform to student developers.

But the 20-person company sees a big opportunity in enterprise apps as well. Specifically, big banks and hospitals need the kind of tech support Modo Labs provides, the company says. And it’s about more than making tools for developers.

“We have some really deep interest in making sure the users’ experience is the best they can be,” says Modo Labs CEO Andrew Yu. That means providing “solid and robust templates” so that enterprises can get their websites and apps up and running fast, he says.

Modo Labs is “aggressively hiring right now for developers” of native and mobile Web software (both iOS and Android), says chief technology officer Marshall Vale. He stresses that business customers “absolutely have to deal with multiple device types” across operating systems, handsets, and tablets, and that his company’s software is optimized for that.

Storm Ventures has a couple of notable companies in its portfolio that are complementary to Modo Labs: MobileIron (mobile device management for businesses) and Appcelerator (enterprise mobile development platform).

On a more human-interest note, Storm Ventures is a particularly apt name. Yu, Modo’s CEO, was scheduled to fly out to the West Coast to pitch the firm in August, but his flight was canceled because of Hurricane Irene. So he had to do the pitch by phone. While there was some concern about the geographic distance from a main investor, Yu emphasizes that Storm “really understood this space and was really willing to work with us.”

Let’s hope the unseasonably early October snow, and future storms, don’t wreak havoc for Modo and its investors. It could be a long winter in Boston.

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Here comes another venture capital downturn. Maybe. That’s my not-so-definitive take after looking at the VC investment numbers for Massachusetts in the third quarter of 2011, which broadly reflected the national trend as well.

How any such downturn will compare to 2008-09 is anyone’s guess. Maybe it’s just a blip, or a healthy resetting after a few high-flying months for early-stage companies and their valuations. But maybe the real bloodbath is yet to come.

In any case, venture firms invested a total of $505 million in 95 Bay State companies from July through September, according to the most recent MoneyTree report from PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, with data from Thomson Reuters. That’s down by almost 50 percent from the $1.0 billion invested in 105 deals in the previous quarter (when there was rampant talk of a new tech bubble). But the dollars invested are still 10 percent above the $458 million that VCs put into 92 deals in the third quarter of 2010, according to the report.

We’ll be keeping a close eye on what happens from here. In the meantime, here are the 10 biggest venture deals for Massachusetts companies from the third quarter of 2011, according to MoneyTree (along with links to our prior coverage), below.

The #1 investment was MIT biotech spinoff Verastem; but #10 was an interesting social marketing software company, Awareness, that I hadn’t heard very much about, even though it’s been around since 2000. I’m betting most techies out there haven’t heard of some of the companies from #2-9 either, but the life sciences folks will know them well:

1. Verastem, $32.1M

2. Avedro, $25.5M

3. Care.com, $25M

4. Fluidnet, $25M

5. T2 Biosystems, $23M

6. Second Rotation (Gazelle), $21.7M

7. Epizyme, $19M

8. Arsenal Medical, $18.3M

9. Proteon Therapeutics, $15.2M

10. Awareness, $13M

And a few other notable investment deals: CloudBees ($10.5M), Foundation Medicine ($10M add-on), and peerTransfer ($7.5M).

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

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

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

… Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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