Managing a venture fund is hugely different from running a startup. Eric Paley told me that last year at this time his primary responsibility was at dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, the MIT spin-off that he co-founded and where he had served as general manager after its sale to technology giant 3M (NYSE:MMM) in 2006. Nowadays, as managing partner and co-founder of new seed fund Founder Collective, his much broader focus includes meetings with a whopping 30 entrepreneurs a week, he said.

Early this month Paley’s firm had an official launch after closing a first fund of about $40 million to invest in seed-stage startups, even though reports about the firm surfaced in June after its initial SEC filings became public knowledge. The firm is made up of a group of successful entrepreneurs who have been backing each other’s startups for ages before coming together as Founder Collective. David Frankel, the firm’s other managing partner along with Paley, was a seed investor in Brontes as well as partner Chris Dixon’s startups SiteAdvisor and Hunch, for example. Their experience as entrepreneurs who have raised venture capital and reached successful exits, along with their compelling investment strategy, could help them succeed in the struggling venture industry.

Founder Collective, which has offices in Cambridge, MA, and New York (where Frankel is based), is taking a much different tack than many funds have taken over the past decade. Paley says that the vast majority of funds closed over the past 10 years have been more than $100 million, while most of the funds were less than that in the previous decade. But the big knock on the venture industry is that it’s done a poor job of returning capital and returns commensurate with their risk profile to their limited partner investors. And large funds often aim to invest big amounts of capital ($10 million or more) in their portfolio companies, even when companies don’t really need that much money, Paley says. Founder Collective’s first fund is a lean $40 million or so, and that money is intended to be invested in capital-efficient businesses that aren’t taking on more investment capital than is needed to achieve their goals. Indeed, we’re seeing this movement toward smallish investments in lean teams, at least in software/tech, all around the country.

Another big downside of a startup raising more venture capital than it requires to execute its plan is the dilution of ownership for the entrepreneurs who founded the company. “We really created the fund out of frustration that there wasn’t a really good answer for the capital-efficient business in the early days to achieve major milestones and increase the value of the company before giving so much of it away to investors,” Paley said.

There are no banker-turned-venture capitalists at Paley’s shop. Many of the partners maintain operational roles at startups they’ve co-founded. Dixon, a founder of Web security firm SiteAdvisor (acquired by McAfee), is full-time CEO of his firm Hunch that provides an online decision-making tool. Also, Micah Rosenbloom, who co-founded Brontes with Paley, is now the general manager of the Brontes business for 3M. (Here’s a full list of the the Founder team on the firm’s website.)

The investment philosophy at Founder is to back startups led by committed entrepreneurs. And though Paley said the firm has no stated limits on sectors or geographic areas in which it invests, the firm will most likely invest, as it has done so far, in …Next Page »

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Robots have already found limited work in healthcare by assisting surgeons with operations and physical therapists with rehabilitating patients, among other jobs. So why can’t robots keep an eye on seniors and give them their medications?

Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ:IRBT) made headlines last month with the announcement of its recently created healthcare division, which is being headed by veteran software entrepreneur Tod Loofbourrow. The company’s ambitious plan is to develop a robot to help seniors live independently in their homes—something that no other company has accomplished. To learn more, I headed over to the firm’s headquarters last week.

The 7-year-old in me hoped to show up at iRobot and find the “medical droid” from Star Wars. But I knew not to expect to see such a humanoid robot, so I wasn’t disappointed when Loofbourrow told me that there were no healthcare robots to show me. Yet at one point during our interview, he flipped open his laptop and showed me a conceptual video of one of the company’s robots rolling over to an elderly person’s bedside and placing a bottle of pills on a side table. He said the video was intended to illustrate the company’s long-term vision for a healthcare robot, but the robot depicted was not a prototype of what the firm plans to market initially.

The senior citizen in the video, however, represented the first demographic iRobot aims to serve with a healthcare robot. There could be tremendous value in a robot that could help seniors live at home and avoid nursing homes, Loofbourrow explained, noting that the average nursing home in Massachusetts costs about $10,000 a month. Supporting patient care in the home may also help seniors avoid costly hospitalizations, which are a major factor in the whopping $2.4 trillion annual healthcare bill in the U.S. But the U.S. healthcare system hasn’t fully embraced using telemedicine—let alone robots—to enable patients to receive care in their homes.

Nevertheless, the leadership of iRobot decided that the time is right to launch a healthcare division, Loofbourrow said. The company has been interested in how its robots could be used to help patients for more than a decade. Indeed, company chairman and CEO Colin Angle told me back in 2006 that a robot for home healthcare was about three years from the market. And two years ago I spotted a concept robot the company developed called “CiCi” at a medical technology conference; an MIT robotics engineer told me for this Mass High Tech story that the stationary robot had two-way audio and remote-monitoring capabilities. Healthcare could eventually become a major business for iRobot, which already has succeeded in introducing robots like the Roomba for the household market and the PackBot for the military market.

“The company sees an opportunity to really transform a market,” Loofbourrow said. “So I’m here to build a very big business and a third leg of the stool for iRobot.”

Loofbourrow’s fascination with robotics dates back at least as far as his teenage years. As the Boston Globe’s Scott Kirsner reported in his blog post last month, Loofbourrow was16 years old when he wrote a book called “How to Build a Computer-Controlled Robot” in the late-1970s. He explained that when he was a child, his father was an engineer at Bell Labs and their basement was filled with circuit boards and other parts for building robots. The robot he built around a single-board microprocessor featured voice recognition and ultrasonic navigation, he said.

The Harvard University graduate was most recently founder and CEO of Waltham, MA-based Authoria, a provider of talent management software that Loofbourrow grew into a $40 million annual business with more than 300 employees in the U.S., Europe, and India. He sold the company in 2008 to White Plains, NY-based Bedford Funding for …Next Page »

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Fate Therapeutics, the San Diego-based company on a quest to develop techniques that make stem cell research practical for the pharmaceutical industry, has raised $30 million in a Series B round of venture financing.

Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led the deal, which included the three venture firms that co-founded the company two years ago—Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates. This time, Fate also drew investment from three strategic corporate investors, two of whom are being named—Astellas Venture Management, and Genzyme Ventures. The company has now raised a total of about $50 million since inception, according to Scott Wolchko, Fate’s chief financial officer.

The round is the latest step forward for Fate, which was founded by a band of high-profile scientists from Harvard University, the University of Washington, Stanford University, and The Scripps Research Institute. Fate generated some scientific buzz last month when one of its co-founders, Sheng Ding of Scripps, found a way to use three conventional small-molecule compounds to coax adult human cells into an embryonic-like state. That’s important not only because it circumvents the ethical controversy around destroying embryos for research, but it also paves the way for “industrialized” stem cells. The Ding lab’s method is twice as fast and 200 times more efficient than previous techniques of creating induced pluripotent stem cells—with potential to turn into any type of cell. The Fate method also sidesteps the use of viruses and genetic modification of cells that has been one of the main disadvantages of the prior methods—and a big reason why pharma has steered clear.

Fate’s hope is to keep building enough momentum for its stem cell production technology that it will become a useful tool for creating models of disease in the lab, and for toxicology testing to see which drug candidates have the best odds of success. Further in the future, it hopes to create regenerative medicines to replace damaged tissues in the body.

While that capability is getting built up, and Fate is seeking pharmaceutical partners to help pay the bills, the company is also pushing ahead with its own proprietary drug candidate in clinical trials. The drug, FT-1050—a conventional small-molecule chemical compound that isn’t nearly as risky as an injectable cell therapy—is designed to help improve the effectiveness of adult stem cell transplants for blood cancers like leukemias and lymphomas.

“This is a company that has performed exactly as planned,” says Carl Weissman, managing director with OVP, who is taking a board seat in connection with the financing. “This management team is rounding out into a very sharp and effective group. It made sense for us to double down.”

OVP invested a small amount in Fate’s Series A round, and by betting bigger this time …Next Page »

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“People say if you fail in Seattle, you’re screwed,” said Marcelo Calbucci. “If you fail in the Bay Area, you just have a badge of honor.”

We were at the TechStars reunion event in Seattle last week, listening to early-stage investors Brad Feld, Andy Sack, Steve Hall, Greg Gottesman, Shawn Broderick, and Chris Sheehan speak about entrepreneurship and the tech startup scene in their respective cities. Calbucci, the founder of Seattle 2.0 and Sampa (which folded in August), was asking the panelists about how the tolerance of failure, whether real or perceived, affects a region’s culture of innovation.

It’s a deep question, and it continues the discussion of startup cultures in different cities that I highlighted last week. It’s also part of a debate on failure that has been going on since long before I wrote about it in Xconomy last January. There seem to be two camps. Most entrepreneurs I’ve talked to feel there is a stigma associated with having a failed startup in Seattle. Most venture capitalists, not so much. But it’s a much broader issue than just Seattle. My colleague Bruce talked with a Web 2.0 startup founder in San Diego last week who said his first failure, earlier this year, “was truly a painful experience, and I’m still not over it.” And meanwhile, Brad Feld, the co-founder of TechStars and Foundry Group in Boulder, CO, had some provocative things to say about the failure aspect of Boston’s culture.

But first, Andy Sack of Seattle’s Founder’s Co-op gave his perspective on having failed at his last startup, Judy’s Book, after having had three successes prior to that. “As much as you teach entrepreneurship, as much as there’s supply of capital out there, really when push comes to shove, entrepreneurship comes from within,” he said. “I couldn’t take a job at any of the big companies. We’ve been through the tech boom of the ‘90s. We’re just coming off of a major hiccup. I’d say right now, early-stage investors in Seattle have retreated some; venture capital has retreated some, they’re focused primarily on their portfolio. That said, you [Calbucci] failed and went out and started your own thing. I failed and went out and started my own thing. Because we didn’t know any better. The entrepreneurs that don’t know any better, they just go do it again.”

Greg Gottesman of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group is one of those VCs who says he doesn’t see failure as a black mark. “My sense in this community is, to people who matter most, I don’t think failure is a huge negative,” he said. “There are certain types of failures, like failure of integrity—that’s hard to recover from. But failure of a startup, just speaking with all my partners, that’s not a negative. We talk about that as a learning experience. It’s just another piece of the puzzle.”

So how does Seattle’s tolerance of failure differ from, say, Boston’s or Silicon Valley’s? Feld, who has been investing nationally for 15 years, said, “I actually believe that the shtick of ‘failure as a badge of honor’ is really great shtick. I’ve failed a lot. It’s hard to fail. Failure impacts a person in …Next Page »

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To a large extent, the story of San Diego-based Networkfleet is also an intriguing tale about co-founder Diego Borrego. The privately held company, which currently has more than 100 employees, is one of the nation’s largest providers of technology and services for monitoring the location and status of company-owned vehicles.

Borrego, a Mexican-American who says his first language was Spanish, helped start the company in 1999, quit when he realized he had lost his ownership stake, and rejoined Networkfleet before the business entered a period of double-digit growth. The 42-year-old engineer says his name is on about 10 of 30 patents issued so far to the 10-year-old company.

While wireless fleet management systems are what my Xconomy colleagues politely refer to as “mature” technologies (as opposed to our usual focus on the sweet spot of emerging tech), Networkfleet maintains that not all fleet management systems are alike. Many systems simply use global positioning satellite technology to monitor the locations of company-owned vehicles. Networkfleet’s technology also helps customers reduce their fleet operating costs and vehicle emissions by using the computerized sensors in every vehicle to monitor the vehicle’s performance and engine efficiency.

Diego Borrego

“There are processors now that control the brakes, the engine, transmission, airbags,” says Borrego, Networkfleet’s vice president of engineering. “There’s a rich set of information that we call diagnostics.” He views the technology as more of an IT challenge, because nowadays there is essentially a local area network (LAN) in every new car and truck that links together an average of 25 different computers. “Extracting that data from the vehicle, and somehow transmitting it (in conjunction with GPS) and turning it into information that can be used by fleet vehicle managers is the innovation,” Borrego says.

Networkfleet provides its Web-based service to customers that range from plumbing companies with 10 trucks to the state of Delaware, which operates more than 2,400 government vehicles. Networkfleet installs a piece of hardware that connects to the LAN in every vehicle, gathers information about the vehicle’s operation and transmits the data via cellular links to a data center operated by Networkfleet. Each customer’s fleet manager is given a login to Networkfleet’s website, where he or she can monitor the location of the company’s vehicles. Data about each fleet also can be converted into reports that fleet managers can use to schedule maintenance, optimize operations, and monitor driver behavior.

The company generated about $30 million in sales last year, a 45 percent gain in revenue growth over 2007 that made Networkfleet the second-largest company in the business (based on number of subscribers), according to Keith Schneider, Networkfleet’s president. (The largest is Trimble, a Sunnyvale, CA-based GPS technology company that acquired rival @Road in 2006 for $496 million.) Schneider says many of their competitors tend to specialize in narrow segments of the technology-based business, such as GPS-based vehicle location, advanced routing applications, and workforce management—and he sees the technologies converging. “The industry is poised for massive consolidation,” Schneider says.

The Networkfleet president indicated during our conversation that Networkfleet, which has been owned by the New York private equity firm Apollo Management since 2006, aims to take an active role in that consolidation.

Still, Networkfleet has taken a winding road to get this far—after beginning more than a decade ago on a strategy that came …Next Page »

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Pulmatrix, the Lexington, MA-based company working to stop infectious bugs from being absorbed into the lungs, has raised $30.2 million in a Series B venture round to advance its unorthodox method for treating and preventing respiratory diseases like flu, the company is announcing today.

Arch Venture Partners and Novartis Bioventures Fund co-led the new financing, and were joined by the company’s existing investors, Polaris Venture Partners and 5AM Ventures. On top of that, Pulmatrix is raking in another $2.2 million from the National Institutes of Health to advance its research with broad potential against multiple strains of seasonal and pandemic flu.

The big idea at Pulmatrix, which has its origins in the labs of MIT’s Robert Langer and Harvard University’s David Edwards, has the potential to fundamentally challenge the tradition of antiviral treatment. Instead of engineering a drug to kill a single virus, which the pathogen can resist over time, Pulmatrix is developing a method to stop any strain of invader that might embed in the lungs. Pulmatrix is trying to do this by creating aerosols that contain positively charged ion-based compounds, like calcium and magnesium. These compounds are first supposed to stimulate immune defenses to prevent infection. But beyond that, the Pulmatrix drugs are supposed to alter the viscosity of the mucus that lines the lungs, which activates proteins to form 3-D matrices that create a firewall of sorts, blocking pathogens of any kind from burrowing deep into lung tissue.

“Think of it as like a river with a light coating of ice on top, but with the river flowing smoothly underneath,” said Pulmatrix CEO Robert Connelly, in an Xconomy interview in June. “It’s more difficult to penetrate the surface top layer, and there’s still clearance below.”

Back in June, Connelly said that evidence from animal and early human studies showed the company’s method hasn’t gummed up the mucus lining of the lungs, which could make it harder to breathe, or worse, create a haven for infectious bugs to thrive.

Pulmatrix plans to use the new money to finance “multiple clinical trials” in 2010 and 2011 against a number of respiratory diseases, according to a company statement. Pulmatrix currently has a drug candidate called PUR003 that’s being tested in an early-to-mid stage clinical trial against flu, and it expects preliminary results by the end of this year. The company plans to start an asthma trial by the end of this year, and is also pursuing a treatment for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—an umbrella term for emphysema and chronic bronchitis.

In connection with the financing, Pulmatrix has added Steve Gillis of Arch Venture Partners and Lauren Silverman of Novartis Venture Funds to its board.

“We believe that Pulmatrix’s therapies are uniquely positioned to address respiratory diseases in a fundamentally new way which could result in game changing improvements in the lives of patients with many different types of respiratory diseases,” Silverman said in a statement.

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It seems like every few days since Labor Day weekend we at Xconomy get invited to attend or cover an entrepreneurship competition. This is a good thing. It means there are more and more opportunities for innovators in New England to gain exposure to the business community and investors—as well as a chance to win some cash and other prizes to help get their ventures off to a strong start.

Indeed, many startups in the Boston area have cut their teeth in the business plan competition circuit before raising rounds of venture capital or achieving other milestones. Take some of the past winners of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition: Cambridge, MA-based video game developer Harmonix Music Systems, creator of the hugely popular Guitar Hero franchise, and the dental imaging firm Brontes Technologies, which was acquired by 3M for $95 million three years ago. And Wilbraham, MA-based FloDesign, which won both the $200K MIT Clean Energy Prize and $100K Ignite Clean Energy competition last year, recently learned that it has been tentatively awarded $8.3 million from the U.S. government to advance development of its next-generation design for wind turbines.

There will no doubt be many more successful startups to emerge from entrepreneurship contests in the region in the years ahead. Some of these contests have been around for years. Others are brand new. But even for those that have been around for a while, schedules and prizes can change from year to year. So we thought it would be a good idea to round them up in one place with the latest information about them we could find.

So whether you’re an investor interested in new companies or an innovator searching for opportunities to transform your ideas or inventions into a startup, here is a list—not a ranking—of entrepreneurship competitions in New England that cater to ideas for businesses in the life sciences, clean-tech, and IT sectors. (Please note that the information came from the contest websites or organizers, and in all but one case I didn’t separate cash from in-kind services factored into the value of each prize):

—Babson College business plan competitions

Babson College holds annual business plan competitions for undergraduate and graduate students. In fact, this year the Massachusetts business college held its 22nd competition for graduate students, making it one of the oldest business plan contests in the state.

Undergraduate Track:

Deadline: Dates for the 2010 competition weren’t available online, but last year the deadline for entries was in winter and the finals were in spring.

Top prize: $5,000 (2009)

Graduate Track:

Deadline: Not dates specified for 2010 competition.

Top prize: $20,000 (2009) …Next Page »

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How does $300,000 an hour sound? Walking away with $5,000 for his 60-second pitch, the winner of Thursday night’s MIT $100K Elevator Pitch Contest (EPC), Rouzbeh Shahsavari, seemed pretty excited about it. His idea? Nanoengineered concrete that is twice as strong, cuts CO2 emissions in half, and is dramatically cheaper than typical concrete.

The EPC is the first of three contests that comprise the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. It will be followed by the Executive Summary Contest and the Business Plan Contest. Now in its third year, the EPC is growing at an incredible rate. With over 350 registrations, we had more submissions this year than in the previous two years combined. As for its capacity to produce innovative ideas, just ask Riccardo Signorelli, the winner of last year’s EPC. Last week the Department of Energy awarded his company, Cambridge, MA-based FastCAP Systems, a $5.3 million grant to develop nanotechnology-enhanced batteries.

As an organizer of this year’s EPC, the experience has been pretty incredible. I distinctly remember how much energy I felt in the room during our kickoff meeting, and things seemed to take off from there. I was repeatedly amazed at the amount of work and energy that my peers put into organizing the events. All of that work finally came together at the finale show Thursday night (for a taste of that energy, see the crowd shot below and the small photo gallery at the end of this post).

The finale really does have a lot theatrics to it. With ”Space” as this year’s theme, the emcees were dressed as astronauts against the background of a giant spaceship made out of PVC pipe (This is MIT after all, what else would you expect?). Audience members clapped thunder-sticks together and shouted “3, 2, 1, Liftoff!” before each presentation. In addition to the pitches, the show featured an interview with the winner of last year’s BPC, Waseem Daher. When asked about the interview experience, he said: “Being a speaker was a lot of fun—it was definitely strange being on the ‘other side’ so soon, because I definitely still see myself in the shoes of the participants…taking a bold new idea—in our case, rebootless software updates—and making the case for it to everyone who is willing to listen (and some who aren’t).”

The format of the event kept the excitement level pretty high as well. The top 10 finalists from each of six tracks (Energy, Life Science, Development, Mobile, Web/IT, and Products & Services) were announced before hand and asked to be in attendance. Of those 60, the top 2 from each track would then deliver their elevator pitch to the audience and judges. However, the finalists didn’t know who they were until their name was announced and they were called down to give their pitch then and there.

During the preliminary rounds I was mainly out front at the registration desk, so I didn’t get a chance to preview many of the pitches. Seeing them at the finale, I was astounded by …Next Page »

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Raytheon Company (NYSE:RTN) said yesterday that it has wrapped up its buyout of Cambridge, MA-based BBN Technologies for about $350 million. The amount of the purchase was not disclosed when the Waltham, MA-based provider of defense systems first announced the deal last month. Wade put the buyout in perspective and explained what BBN has meant to the development of the Internet and the Boston innovation scene over the past several decades.

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The Department of Energy this morning announced that FloDesign Wind Turbine of Wilbraham, MA, and five other Massachusetts startups and laboratories are among the 37 companies and organizations awarded research and development grants under the department’s new Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program. FloDesign has tentatively been awarded $8,325,400 to advance its research on radical new designs for electricity-generating wind turbines.

The other local winners include 1366 Technologies of Lexington, MA, Agrivida of Medford, MA, FastCAP Systems of Cambridge, MA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Sun Catalytix, also of Cambridge. Massachusetts organizations won $33.3 million in all, or 22 percent of the overall funds awarded, making the Bay State the largest recipient by far of the ARPA-E funds. United Technologies Research Center of East Hartfort, CT, was awarded $2.25 million, bringing the New England total to nearly $36 million.

“I think the fact that Massachusetts organizations received over 22 percent of the money allocated by the DOE is clear testament to how fast the region’s cleantech cluster has grown, and to how much of an economic impact it will provide in the future,” says Nick d’Arbeloff, president of the New England Clean Energy Council, a Cambridge, MA-based non-profit working to boost the region’s cleantech economy. “Companies like FloDesign, 1366, Agrivida and Sun Catalytix represent the future of high technology in the Commonwealth.”

[Update 10/27/09: Massachusetts also has a plausible claim as the home to the top grant winner in the competition, Foro Energy, which will receive just over $9.1 million. As Xconomy reported last night, the Littleton, CO-based startup, which is developing a new drilling technology for tapping geothermal energy deep in the Earth, was originally launched in the Boston area and is funded by Waltham, MA-based North Bridge Venture Partners.]

FloDesign CEO Stanley Kowalski says his company learned about its award this morning in an e-mailed letter from the Energy Department.

“It will accelerate to market what is inherently a risky endeavor,” Kowalski says. “Or at least, it’s been risky in the past because of the many false starts by others. This will allow us to put the proper money into research and development, which is the most capital-intensive phase, and will hopefully help us to get out to market with a reliable turbine.”

FloDesign is building and testing wind turbines with an unusual tube-like design reminiscent of a jet engine. The company says this design allows it to capture more of the energy in wind than a conventional free-bladed wind turbine can. Though the startup has tried to remain stealthy, it has been in the spotlight almost since its beginning—it won a $200,000 grand prize in the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition in May 2008, and later scored an investment from prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

FloDesign shared a copy of its notification letter from the Energy Department, which said the company’s application was “among those of the very highest scientific and technical merit, and is part of an ARPA-E portfolio of high impact projects that have great potential to revolutionize the U.S. energy sector.” A total of $151 million was handed out to the 37 organizations on today’s list, who are all finalists in a competition launched last spring as part of a $400 million boost to Federal energy spending contained in the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, colloquially known as the stimulus bill.

The $8.3 million awarded to FloDesign is the third-largest amount awarded today, after Foro Energy’s $9.1 million and an award to Dupont of Wilmington, DE, of $9 million.

The ARPA-E grant will make a big difference to FloDesign, Kowalski says. “It’s a sizeable investment, and I think it’s indicative of where we are and the capabilities of the team we’ve got on board,” he says. “We continue to recruit world class talent and we certainly have a radically different turbine that nobody has ever attempted to commercialize in the past. The support from ARPA-E will allow us to fund that appropriately for the R&D effort that’s approaching.”

1366 Technologies was awarded $4 million in the competition. Agrivida will get $4.6 million, FastCAP Systems will get $5.3 million, MIT will get $6.9 million, and Sun Catalytix will get $4.1 million. The full list of awardees is here; the Department of Energy said it selected the 37 winners from an initial pool of more than 3,600 concepts, from which the department requested 300 full applications. The exact amount of each award will be determined in final negotiations between the department and the winning organizations.

The 37 ARPA-E winners hail from 17 states. The department said that 43 precent are small businesses, 35 percent are educational institutions, and 19 percent are large corporations.

In a statement on the awards, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said, “After World War II, America was the unrivaled leader in basic and applied sciences. It was this leadership that led to enormous technological advances. ARPA-E is a crucial part of the new effort by the U.S. to spur the next Industrial Revolution in clean energy technologies, creating thousands of new jobs and helping cut carbon pollution.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Xconomy didn’t score a ticket to President Obama’s speech on clean energy at MIT today, so we can’t bring you a first-hand report. But we’ve got something that’s arguably even better: perspectives from a range of local community members who were inside MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for the speech, which took place at about 12:45 p.m. today. We invited people from across the local energy ecosystem—including students, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy leaders—to contribute their reactions to the President’s remarks.

Click on a name to jump directly to comments from:

• Nick d’Arbeloff, New England Clean Energy Council
• Gregg Dixon, EnerNOC
• Forgan McIntosh, MIT Energy Club
• Furqan Nazeeri, Virdus
• Joel Rodriguez, Commonwealth Capital Ventures
• Bilal Zuberi, General Catalyst Partners

So, dig in. If you missed the President’s speech, MIT has posted the video here on the MIT World video portal. And if you were there, or you watched the video on the Internet, by all means share your thoughts in the comment section. (You may also want to check out this priceless CNN video of Hawaiian-shirt-clad Alex Slocum, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, explaining his idea for undersea wind energy storage to President Obama, with MIT President Susan Hockfield, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Senator John Kerry looking on.)

Nick d’Arbeloff, president, New England Clean Energy Council

Man, that guy is a rock star. It is just incredibly refreshing to see the leader of this nation speak so eloquently and forcefully about clean energy, after the eight years prior. This morning he toured a couple of labs at MIT, including, I believe, one lab that is actually using viruses to grow batteries, as opposed to assembling them. So he was exuding enthusiasm about what he had seen and his positive impressions of the innovation culture that exists within MIT and the broader region.

Needless to say, Obama gets it, and he gets it in a big way. Also attending were, of course, Governor Patrick, and Secretary Bowles, but also John Kerry, who has emerged as a major leader on energy as the Kerry-Boxer bill has made its debut. It’s hard not to look at this event, combined with Kerry’s bill, as the beginning of a new chapter in America’s journey to real climate leadership.

There is a very tough path to tread between here and some type of cap-and-trade bill in Congress, but the President was incredibly upbeat, and he made it clear that difficult odds have been overcome on many many occasions in our nation’s history, and he was confident that we would overcome the odds this time around.

In front of him were roughly 800 clean energy leaders and students whose interests lie within the energy field, and I think they walked away believing that—well, every day is a mixture of optimism and pessimism with regard to Congress and the U.S. energy future, but we have a leader in the Oval Office who is really not going to rest until he makes this one of his legacies. And it’s really nice to know, speaking as one agent of the clean energy revolution, that we’ve got Barack Obama at our backs.

I think it was cheerleading—but it was well-directed, well-received cheerleading. I don’t think there’s a lot to announce here. There are a lot of moving parts in Washington right now, and he could have enumerated all those different parts and he could have made bets on which part is going to move first, but I don’t think that would have made sense. More important is simply to say this battle will be joined and the war will be won.

This is a president who is completely committed to the value that science brings to the table, to the proposition that science and the exploration of scientific truth and the innovations that are derived from it are fundamental ingredients in our way out of this crisis. And granted, it wasn’t a big, honkin’ announcement, but science is a really important thing to stress. Put it this way: if this President had arrived at MIT with a history over the past 10 months of less commitment to clean energy and less commitment to scientific research and less commitment to climate leadership and then made a major announcement, that would be only a fraction as important as what has transpired instead, namely that the administration has been completely committed to clean energy. The fact that no major initiatives were announced today is, in that context, not a huge disappointment at all.

Gregg Dixon, senior vice president of marketing, EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC)

My general impression is that President Obama is getting behind the promises he made on the campaign trail, and cleantech is certainly one of those promises. MIT is a great place to make a speech and to get people excited and to raise awareness. Very simply, it was an executive-level commercial for clean energy, to say ‘Let’s go.’ That can never hurt.

You want to go where you’ve got a friendly crowd if you’re going to push an issue, so that makes sense to me. But the proof is in the pudding. It’s a facade of a building that still needs to be built. You’ve got to build this clean energy economy. So simply throwing money at the problem and talking a great game doesn’t …Next Page »

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[Update, 12:05 p.m., 10/23/09: The time for President Obama's speech has been pushed back to 12:25 p.m., according to the White House. It appears that MIT's video servers are being overwhelmed by traffic; if you want to watch the speech online, we recommend trying the White House's own live video stream.]

When Air Force One touches down at Logan Airport at 11:30 a.m. today, there will already be a small crowd of students, faculty members, and local technology leaders waiting inside MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for President Barack Obama to arrive.

In his noontime speech at Kresge, announced just three days ago, Mr. Obama is expected to call for stronger U.S. leadership on clean energy research and press for passage of the Senate energy bill, S. 1733, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and California Senator Barbara Boxer.

Invitations to the MIT speech are the most coveted tickets in town today. While Kresge seats some 1,300 people, only about 60 students and 40 faculty members have been invited, according to estimates by The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper. The White House has also issued invitations to a hand-picked group of local leaders in energy entrepreneurship and investing.

The President will meet briefly before the speech with a select group of MIT energy researchers, according to the MIT News Office.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will be on stage with the President, who is expected to attend a campaign fundraising luncheon for the governor at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston before returning to Washington. In a video published on his campaign website this week, Governor Patrick said, “In many ways our agenda here in Massachusetts is very closely aligned with the agenda of the Obama Administration.” He included a reference to “our work to expand innovation industries that will create the opportunities for tomorrow, like IT and clean energy and biotech.”

If you weren’t one of the lucky few who won an invitation to attend the President’s speech in person, here are a few ways you can follow his visit:

—MIT will share a live webcast of the speech at http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/

—The White House will also offer a live video stream at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/, and CNN says it will stream the event live.

—If you can make it to Cambridge, MIT will be showing a closed-circuit broadcast of the speech in various rooms around campus (4-237, 1-190, 26-100, 32-141, 32-155, and E51-315) as well as the MIT Museum.

—Xconomy has recruited a posse of local students, investors, and technology leaders who scored tickets to the speech to write to us with their impressions of the event, and we’ll be compiling their contributions in a post early this afternoon.

—Organizers of the Fifth Conference on Clean Energy, to be held in Boston November 12-13, will be sharing real-time posts about the speech on Twitter using the hash tag #CCE-2009.

—Finally, MIT will post a recording of the speech late this afternoon on its video portal site, MIT World.

According to the MIT News Office, today’s visit marks only the second time a sitting U.S. president has visited MIT. President Bill Clinton was MIT’s commencement speaker in 1998.

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Partners HealthCare’s Center for Connected Health is holding its sixth big Connected Health Symposium in Boston this week, and there’s definitely more optimism here that information technology is becoming more mainstream in healthcare than in years past. The big focus of the conference is on technology that is used to extend healthcare outside of traditional clinics or hospitals into the homes of patients—something often called telemedicine or, at least at Partners, connected health.

Telemedicine got a big boost when IT was identified earlier this year in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (a.k.a. the economic stimulus) as playing an important role in improving quality of care—and perhaps most urgently—reducing healthcare costs. Currently there are provisions in bills under consideration in Congress that would create incentives for healthcare providers to adopt, say, remote patient monitoring and teleconferencing technologies. Indeed, the healthcare reform train is moving fast in Washington nowadays, and major players in the telemedicine market such as Philips Healthcare and Intel—which both have strong presences here at the symposium—are working hard to jump aboard and ensure that technologies that allow connectivity between patients and doctors are part of the agenda.

This symposium is interesting because it attracts a rare mix of physicians, entrepreneurs, hospital administrators, academics, and technology executives. Big names in tech like Google, Microsoft, and Verizon Wireless have sent executives here. Meantime, there are plenty of folks from Harvard, MIT, and the multiple research hospitals in town involved in the discussions to add a strong clinical or scientific perspective to the conference.

I’m also seeing or catching wind of new innovations from the gaming and wireless industries that have the potential to help patients stay healthy in their homes. (However, I have to say that the Boston Park Plaza Hotel, replete with its great big crystal chandeliers and Romanesque columns, makes an incongruous backdrop for someone talking about how an academic used the popular video game Warcraft in her medical research.)

Here are five of the VIPs who spoke here on Wednesday at the symposium:

—Daniel Palestrant, CEO of Sermo. Palestrant, a surgeon by training, has led the growth of Cambridge, MA-based Sermo into an online community of 120,000 physicians.

—Paul Bromberg, vice president and general manager at Philips Healthcare. Bromberg, whose office is in Framingham, MA, heads Philips’ remote patient monitoring unit.

—Ben Sawyer, founder of Games for Health, based in Portland, ME. Sawyer, a devoted gamer who plays Rock Band and other games in his spare time, does R&D on gaming technologies that are designed to improve healthcare.

—Jamie Heywood, co-founder and chairman of PatientsLikeMe. PatientsLikeMe, based in Cambridge, provides an online forum and community for patients with diseases such as HIV/AIDS, depression, and multiple sclerosis to share information about their illnesses with each other.

—U.S. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat representing Massachusetts. Though I wasn’t around for his panel, Markey and Partners CEO Jim Mongan talked about healthcare policy and politics in Washington.

Here, in no particular order, are a few of the themes emerging from the symposium that I think are particularly interesting:

—Philips’ Bromberg noted that 24 percent of patients treated for heart failure are …Next Page »

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Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick traveled to Holyoke, MA, yesterday to talk about the next steps for the planned Holyoke High Performance Computing Center, a massive project designed to advance the state of the art in “green computing” for life sciences, cleantech, and other applications, while also bolstering business development in economically depressed western Massachusetts. Construction is slated to begin in the fall of 2010 and be completed in late 2011, the governor said.

The partners in the project—which is a collaboration between the Massachusetts state government, Accenture, Boston University, Cisco, EMC, MIT, and the University of Massachusetts—have raised over half of the money needed for construction, according to a press release yesterday from the governor’s office. (The actual dollar amounts weren’t named in the release.)

Since the state’s initial announcement about the project in June, the partners have made “considerable progress” on a working plan for the facility, according to the release. That includes setting up an organizational and business structure for the center, estimating capital costs and operating budgets, outlining a research agenda, and creating preliminary building designs and construction schedules. It’s expected that the facility will be located somewhere near the Connecticut River, which produces abundant hydroelectric power, or along Holyoke’s network of industrial canals, which could provide cooling water for its computing and climate-control equipment.

The three academic institutions contributing to the Holyoke center—BU, MIT, and UMass—issued a statement yesterday saying they are committed to “work diligently over the next 120 days with the Governor, Housing and Economic Development Secretary Bialecki, Energy and Environment Secretary Bowles, and other cabinet officials, Congressman Olver, Holyoke officials and our colleagues in industry to move to the next stage of planning the HPCC.” The statement said the next steps include acquiring a site, setting up agreements on how the various institutions involved will share responsibility for the center, and raising the rest of the money required.

Several entities assisting with the project—the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, the City of Holyoke, and the John Adams Innovation Institute—have also collaborated to launch a website called Innovate Holyoke as a resource for news on the facility. The site was developed by Ten Minute Media, a Web design company run by young Holyoke-based entrepreneur Brendan Ciecko, who wrote about the computing center project for Xconomy in June.

In remarks yesterday, Governor Patrick said the computing center would serve as “an anchor of a highly competitive and vibrant innovation district in the Pioneer Valley,” which includes the three western Massachusetts counties traversed by the Connecticut River. “The potential for job growth and advances in technology and research is unprecedented, and both the center and this collaboration will serve to create long term prosperity for Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”

[Update, 10/23/09: The John Adams Innovation Institute of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative has published a useful summary of yesterday's event in Holyoke.]

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Luminus Devices in Billerica, MA, may hold the record among Massachusetts technology companies for the shortest time between conception and launch. But the journey since then has been anything but straightforward.

One summer day in 2002, recent MIT PhD graduate Alexei Erchak and his former advisor, physicist John Joannopolous, were meeting to talk about whether Erchak should accept a lucrative job offer he’d just received, or start his own company—perhaps around the work he’d done in Joannopolous’s lab on ways to use photonic crystals to extract more light from LEDs. “John said, ‘Let’s give Ray Stata a call and see what he thinks,’” says Erchak.

Stata, of course, is the famous MIT alum who co-founded Analog Devices, and a frequent venture investor in local startups. He took the call, and said he had half an hour to talk—but only if Erchak and Joannopolous could come to his office right away.

“We flew out of John’s office, sped down the Mass Pike at 90 miles per hour—at this point I still had jeans and a T-shirt on—and we ended up at that meeting,” Erchak recalls. “We walked into a big board room totally unprepared, except for some slides I’d grabbed out of my PhD presentation. We said ‘We have no idea how to deploy this technology, but if you give us some seed funding, we’ll go figure it out.’ Ray, being a very entrepreneurial-minded person, said that was all he needed to hear.”

By the end of the day, Erchak was at an attorney’s office signing incorporation papers—and had a promise of $200,000 from Stata.

Seven years and at least three iterations of its business plan later, Luminus Devices makes the world’s brightest LEDs, using highly guarded methods based on Erchak’s research and other technologies to manufacture its own “PhlatLight” chipsets right here in Massachusetts. (The “Phlat” stands for photonic lattice.)

The company is poised to help reinvent not only portable devices such as pocket projectors, but the entire lighting industry. Retail, residential, outdoor, stadiums and TV studios, you name it—almost anywhere there’s a conventional incandescent or fluorescent bulb, Luminus’s technology offers a brighter, longer-lasting, less toxic, and in many cases more energy-efficient alternative.

“This company is a home run just waiting to happen,” says Keith Ward, a lighting industry veteran who joined Luminus five months ago as president and CEO, replacing founding CEO Udi Meirav. “LEDs are seven times more efficient than incandescent and starting to surpass halogen and metal halide, so if you can fit them into the existing infrastructure, it’s a win.”

Unfortunately, that’s a big if. The one shadow in Luminus’s outlook is that the company is entirely dependent on device makers, lighting-fixture manufacturers, and other partners to get its PhlatLight LEDs out into the world. It’s a fact that has sent the startup back to the drawing board twice—the first time shortly after Stata’s seed investment, when it became clear that the company’s initial target market, cell-phone manufacturers, weren’t ready to incorporate a new light source into their displays, and the second time just in the last two years, as an unexpectedly rapid drop in the price of big-screen LCD televisions killed off demand for rear-projection DLP televisions, an application for which Luminus’s large, bright LEDs were thought to be ideal.

But Luminus’s investors have signaled their confidence by continuing to pour cash into the company—most recently, in a $72 million Series E round led by …Next Page »

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Business school applications require many thousands of words’ worth of essay questions, usually dealing with those universal but ephemeral corporate themes of Teamwork, Impact, and Dealing With Difficult Situations. Somewhere within this morass the applicant is generally expected to answer the question, “What are you going to do with an MBA?” To this there are three types of answers:

1. The Exceedingly Grandiose (“Harness the power of sustainable development to change the fate of the Third World”).

2. The Believable But Contrived (“Leverage my current skill set and augment it with a top-notch experiential education”).

3. The True But Obviously Unacceptable (“Get a job that doesn’t make me want to kill myself”).

Needless to say, upon matriculation these claims are immediately forgotten, as the practical matters of schoolwork and socializing take over. But right around the time that everyone starts giving serious thought to their summer internship, the question, unbidden, comes roaring back. What am I going to do with my MBA?

The summer internship, as the mid-point of the two-year MBA, carries far more import than regular people usually ascribe to the word “internship”. It is often assumed that upon graduation the student will give serious consideration to a full-time position at the summer employer or, at the very least, remain in the same general industry. This past January, at the MIT Sloan School of Management, anxieties around internships began to escalate. As a first-year, I found the whole process to be like a pop quiz, blindsiding me into making a life-changing decision before I was ready. I mean, I came to business school to escape the real world.

Eventually, however, an attractive opportunity presented itself. Through an old colleague I was introduced to a startup in Boston called WordStream, which got its funding a year ago and launched its product in January. WordStream is run by Rob Adler, a serial entrepreneur who was brought in a month after the company’s funding to be CEO. Rob, a Harvard Business School grad, exudes enthusiasm, and is one of those mysterious people whose number of connections on LinkedIn is listed as “500+”, which always make you wonder exactly how much larger than 500 people their network is.

WordStream is still at the stage where the company’s strategy is constantly being reexamined and openly discussed amongst everyone in the company (there are currently only 18 full-time employees). Who is our target customer? What exactly is our value? How should the product change?

The entrepreneurship professors at Sloan, veteran entrepreneurs themselves, often speak in quasi-romantic tones about working for a startup as a capitalistic ideal, the intersection of high-minded business strategy and dirty, sweaty reality. They could not be more correct. About a week after starting at WordStream, Rob came over to me, looking grave. “I’d like to speak with you for a minute,” he said. He brought me into …Next Page »

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Seattle has more than its share of brilliant biologists for a medium-sized American city. But if people and ideas are going to properly mix to create a thriving local biotech industry over the next two decades, we could use a few more common places with intellectual sparks—like bars. At least according to one of the region’s top life sciences entrepreneurs.

When in Boston and San Francisco, Stephen Friend says he gets most of his work done by socializing with scientific colleagues he meets for coffee or a drink. Not so here.

“The way Seattle is currently set up, I don’t have a place I go for a coffee or a drink. A place where I run into the people who are ready to try a new idea. That’s an important anchoring ingredient that we’re missing, and should be happening,” says Friend, the former senior vice president of cancer research at Merck, and co-founder of Seattle’s Rosetta Inpharmatics.

(Coffee itself is certainly easy to find, but Stephen may want to check out Xconomy’s handy Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster guide for the spots that are best known as innovation mixing pots.)

That was one of the many insights that emerged during Seattle Life Sciences 2029, a sold-out event Xconomy organized on Monday night at Seattle Biomedical Research Institute (see the photo gallery here). This event brought together a group of industry visionaries who have rarely, if ever, appeared on the same stage in front of a local audience: Ben Shapiro, the former executive vice president of basic research at Merck; Steve Gillis, the managing director of Arch Venture Partners who co-founded Immunex and Corixa; and Friend. The panel was moderated by Carl Weissman of Accelerator and OVP Venture Partners, and biotech pioneer Leroy Hood offered his thoughts in a video message on how Seattle can make strides to get bigger and better at biotech over the coming two decades.

This came up during a freewheeling audience Q&A, which covered a lot of ground. I’m not going to recap everything here—I think with some of the jokes, you probably just had to be there—but here were some of the best little acorns that that I squirreled away with my digital recorder, which are edited as always for length and clarity:

Steve Gillis

Steve Gillis on what entrepreneurs need to do to adapt in today’s financial climate: “Entrepreneurs need to be open to combining their ideas with existing organizations. Or combining those ideas with like-minded new proposals from other folks, as opposed to always wanting to have what I call their own pie. In the world in which we live, in which money is quite tight, people have to be open to joining forces earlier in evolution. That will result in everyone having a smaller slice of the pie, but it will also result in the possibility of someday eating pie. Instead of just dreaming about it. It’s a fundamental mind-set that needs to change.”

Stephen Friend on how universities need to relax rules on how inventive faculty spend their time: “The concept that you are either inside or outside of the university, and that some fraction of your time has to be spent inside the university, and that some percentage of your time has to be spent in your role as a tenured professor at the university, that has to go away. It’s the concept that someone could teach courses, and can be a role model for education, has to be kept separate from someone who’s actually running a company. The best example I know of is what MIT is trying to do. That organization, the person who leads it, she [Susan Hockfield] feels the university has to become, in a broad sense, the incubator. I don’t think many people, particularly at some universities in this town, are ready to think that creatively. It’s a mistake.”

Ben Shapiro on how Seattle ranks as a hub for life sciences innovation: “It’s worth …Next Page »

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It was a cold and drizzly night (how’s that for original writing?) last Thursday, and I was running late. But Dogpatch Labs Cambridge was holding its housewarming party across the street from Xconomy World Headquarters, so I braved the elements to stop in.

I walked into a crowded house of 70 folks or so, boxes of pizza, ice tubs of beer, and a lot of energy in the funky space, which is nestled inside the offices of e-retail infrastructure company Allurent in the American Twine Building on Third Street here in Cambridge, MA.

Dogpatch is a workspace/incubator run by Polaris Venture Partners. I profiled the original Dog Patch Lab in San Francisco earlier this year, and then wrote about Dogpatch Cambridge when it was announced last month. There’s enough desk space for 15 or so people in a big open area. The idea is that entrepreneurs will come for a few months, work on their ideas, and hopefully emerge ready to take things to the next level. Polaris provides the space, Internet connections, and no doubt some advice free of charge, but takes no equity in the companies—trusting that good things will happen if the companies grow and need funding.

I grabbed a brew just in time for a short welcome by Polaris’ Dave Barrett, who told the crowd his firm was trying to create the same kind of nurturing atmosphere for nascent companies as in the heavily Internet-oriented San Francisco offices—except that Dogpatch Cambridge is meant to reflect the diversity of the local innovation community, with its expertise in energy and life sciences, as well the Web space. The lab will “pull on that” wider expertise, is how he put it.

I then had a great time catching up with folks I knew, and meeting new entrepreneurs and other guests. Here are some notes and impressions:

—There are 16 Dogpatchers in what Barrett calls the “first pledge class.” (See the end of this story for a list of the current roster). Ten have started already, the rest are coming in this week. Over 100 teams have applied!

—Dogpatch keeps changing its name! It was originally Dog Patch Lab (singular). Then when the Cambridge branch opened, it became Dog Patch Labs. Now it is Dogpatch Labs. This is bad, because it makes it look like we journalists got things wrong in previous stories. (The Dogpatch website’s About page still says Dog Patch, by the way.)

—I also met Sami Shalabi, co-founder of Zingku, which did “supercharged” mobile text and picture messaging. Zingku was acquired by Google two years ago, and Shalabi works at Google in Kendall Square. He and Polaris’ Amir Nashat were college roommates at MIT.

–One of the newest Dogpatchers is Raj Aggarwal, of Localytics, which does analytics for mobile apps. Localytics was part of TechStars’ first Boston graduating class last month and just moved into the kennel last Wednesday.

—Speaking of TechStars, one Dogpatcher who wasn’t …Next Page »

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You know how Hollywood always goes overboard with gizmos and hijinks when it’s trying to represent young people doing science? (I’m thinking especially of 1980s movies like WarGames, Real Genius, and Weird Science.) Well, the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, looked exactly like that last Friday as the annual “MIT Energy Night” event showcased dozens of energy-related research projects and entrepreneurial ventures, from photon-trapping dyes for solar concentrators to a Matrix-like project for extracting electrical energy from human body heat.

Organized by the MIT Energy Club and sponsored in part by local venture firms General Catalyst Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners, the packed-to-capacity event was a celebration of the amazing variety of energy-related labs, projects, initiatives, clubs, and prizes at MIT. I wandered in around 6:00 p.m., got my green drink-ticket wristband, and spent the next couple of hours checking out the demos on solar, wind, and geothermal energy; building technology; electric vehicles; nuclear power; and even the out-of-favor but far-from-outmoded coal, oil, and gas industries.

Student-led poster presentations were the main dish at the event, but I was even more interested in the local energy companies who sent employee-ambassadors to the event. A quick rundown:

A123Systems—This Watertown MIT spinoff (NASDAQ: AONE), which makes advanced lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles, power tools, and the like, has garnered plenty of news lately for its wildly successful IPO. Like most of the other companies present, it seemed to have recruited its youngest employees to run its table—most of them looked like undergrads.

DyPol—I first ran into this membrane technology startup, a spinoff of Paula Hammond’s chemical engineering lab at MIT, at a venture-sponsored university research symposium last April. They’re working on a green, layer-by-layer method for building polymer membranes that, the company hopes, will be used in the next generation of methanol fuel cells to make the devices more efficient. But Juliet Duffy, an MIT Sloan MBA student who’s working for the company, told me that in order to generate revenue while methanol fuel cell technology matures, DyPol is also investigating nearer-term applications for its membranes, such as water filtration. Duffy says the company is seeking a seed investment so that it can rent and equip local lab space.

EnerNOC-–This Boston-based public company (NASDAQ: ENOC) has pioneered the area of “demand response”—Internet-mediated management of electrical demand, which helps utilities forestall construction of new energy generation plants to meet peak demand. It isn’t an MIT spinoff, and oddly enough, there isn’t a single MIT degree among its senior management team. But it’s involved in MIT’s energy entrepreneurship culture as a sponsor of the 2009 MIT Clean Energy Prize competition.

FloDesign Wind Turbine—Based in Wilbraham, MA, FloDesign won the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Entrepreneurship Prize in 2008 and continues to test prototypes of its new jet-engine-like designs for wind turbines that sidestep the “Betz Limit.” (That’s the physical law that prevents open-fan wind turbines from extracting more than about 59 percent of the available energy from wind.) A staffer told me the turbine designs portrayed on the company’s posters, videos, and web materials are actually quite outdated, and that it isn’t showing off its latest designs in deference to …Next Page »

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