What’s in a tech startup name? More specifically, is there a correlation between the type of name a company has and its success?

That’s a question every startup founder and investor should be interested in. Because if there is a correlation, then using a name-based strategy for picking winners would be, well, about as good as any other strategy. And much faster.

Consider the following companies: Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle. And more recently, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga. Or how about these biggies: Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm. These are all top companies, no doubt about it.

Notice anything about their names? None of them has a capital letter in the middle of its name—sometimes referred to as “camel case,” because an upper-case letter in the middle of a word looks like a hump. (Of course, there’s also plenty of startup name-ology around whether to use real words, made-up words, misspelled words, acronyms, and so forth, but we don’t have all day.)

Maybe I’m getting punchy as the holidays loom, but as an end-of-year exercise, I thought we’d play the name game and see where it leads. So let’s drill down into some specifics. What I’m really talking about are company names that are two words mashed into one, where each word or part could stand on its own. Because there are so damn many of them these days. Not just Facebook, Salesforce, Qualcomm, and Rackspace, mind you, but also Admeld, Airbnb, Dropbox, Foursquare, Zipcar, Wayfair, Redfin, Evernote, Flipboard, Shopkick…and the list goes on.

Note that the above companies—all of whom are doing reasonably well, I think—spell their names without the camel case. It’s Facebook, not FaceBook. Salesforce, not SalesForce. You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Historically, camel-case companies have had their share of difficulties. Consider the plight of AltaVista, the early search engine that lost out to Google. Or of struggling MySpace, which seems to have actually changed its moniker to Myspace—exactly my point, of course. More recently, GlassHouse, the cloud computing and virtualization company, withdrew its plans for an IPO earlier this month (for the second time). BlackBerry hasn’t done much to … Next Page »

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Lots of comings and goings in the Boston technology scene in the past week. Here’s a sampling of notable high-level moves:

—Michael Simon, founder and CEO of LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM), has joined the board of Cambridge, MA-based HubSpot, the marketing tech company. Simon replaces former (and longtime) HubSpot board member Gail Goodman, the CEO of Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT). HubSpot chief Brian Halligan wrote in a blog post that Constant Contact’s social media tools “are starting to partially overlap with some of our stuff.” He adds that “the overlap is pretty minimal at this point and our target market is different, but it is close enough that we thought it would be prudent to part ways amicably.” (The board move has been brewing for a while, as Goodman indicated in a recent interview.)

—Ben Levitan, a former partner with In-Q-Tel (the investment arm of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies), joined Waltham, MA-based IMN, an e-marketing firm, as its new CEO as of July. In an e-mail statement, Levitan said he is “excited about returning to operating and to be a CEO again,” as well as participating in the “fast growing world of marketing and customer communications.” He previously served as CEO at EnvoyWorldWide (now Varolii) and James Martin & Co. Levitan spent four-plus years with In-Q-Tel (which he could tell you more about, but then he’d have to kill you).

—Doug Levin, the Black Duck Software founder and former CEO, has joined the board of the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), a Boston venture firm that’s state-owned and invests in Massachusetts companies across software, IT, digital media, health IT, and cleantech. MTDC’s portfolio includes Harvest Automation, OwnerIQ, Illume Software, uTest, Life Image, and Ze-gen. Levin, a former Microsoft exec, most recently founded Ayeah Games, a social gaming startup that closed down earlier this year.

—Daniel Matloff has joined Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies, the solar energy company, as its chief financial officer. Matloff was previously corporate controller for Hittite Microwave (NASDAQ: HITT), which he joined before its 2005 IPO. Before that he was with Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Thermo Fisher Scientific, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. So is 1366 looking to go public? Not just yet, especially given market conditions. But the company is looking to expand its solar-cell manufacturing business, said CEO Frank van Mierlo in a statement. So presumably it’s a good time to get its finances in order.

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Maybe the better question is who isn’t raising a new fund? Venture fundraising seems to be picking up around town after a bleak couple of years. At least for a few prominent VC firms.

We reported back in March that Bessemer, Greylock, and Summit Partners were on the fundraising trail, and now all of them have closed, or are closing, sizable new funds. So it’s no big surprise that a number of Boston-area venture firms are following in their footsteps. Word on the street is that everyone from Flagship Ventures to Sigma Partners has been out pounding the pavement—and having some success.

There is still a lot of talk about VC contraction, though. The consensus seems to be that the top-tier firms will stay strong (and maybe get bigger), and the micro-VCs will continue to attract investors for their small funds. It’s the mid-tier venture firms that are gradually shrinking and might not be able to raise new funds. We’ll be keeping an eye on that, especially around Boston, the birthplace of modern venture capital.

Here are a couple more local firms that are out raising money:

—Cambridge, MA-based General Catalyst Partners is talking to investors about raising a $750 million sixth fund, according to WSJ’s VentureWire. The report, based on unnamed prospective fund investors, says General Catalyst’s proposed new fund will include $500 million for early-stage companies and $250 million for growth-stage deals. That is slightly larger than the firm’s fifth fund, raised in 2007, which totaled $715 million (with a similar breakdown between early-stage and growth-stage). GC’s portfolio companies include Backupify, CyPhy Works, HubSpot, iWalk, Jumptap, Kayak, and Yottaa.

—Waltham, MA-based Kepha Partners has received a commitment of up to $15 million for its second fund from Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board (Mass PRIM), as reported by VentureWire. Kepha has targeted a $100-110 million fund, similar in size to its first fund (raised in 2007-08), according to the report. Kepha’s portfolio includes Azuki Systems, Clovr Media, Goby, and OwnerIQ.

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New England biotechs and IT startups don’t seem to indicate a summer slowdown. They’ve been inking some pretty massive financing deals this week, as well as an acquisition or two.

—Cambridge, MA-based drug developer Aveo Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO) raised $100 million, selling 5.75 million shares of stock at $17.50 apiece in an underwritten public offering. Aveo had $233 million in cash and investments as of March 31 and enough cash to operate through 2012, according to federal documents.

—Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) acquired Zurich-based embedded speech software firm SVOX, for 87 million Euros (about U.S. $125 million), in a mix of upfront cash and cash and stock over the next two years.

—Westford, MA-based Aylus Networks raised $16 million to put toward its software for improving video communications on mobile phones. The deal was led by London-based m8 Capital, with participation from previous Aylus investors Matrix Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

—Performable, a Cambridge-based marketing automation startup, was acquired by Cambridge-based HubSpot for an undisclosed sum. Performable’s 18 staffers will join HubSpot, a marketing tech company with more than 260 employees now, at its Kendall Square digs, with Performable founder David Cancel becoming HubSpot’s chief product officer.

–1366 Technologies, a Lexington, MA-based developer of silicon wafer technology for solar cells, said that it received a conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy for a $150 million loan guarantee.

—Boston-based ad tech startup OwnerIQ nabbed a $7 million investment from its existing backers, Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, Kepha Partners, and … Next Page »

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Boston-based OwnerIQ, an advertising tech startup, has closed a new $7 million financing round from existing investors including Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, Kepha Partners, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, as well as new investor Longworth Venture Partners. The news was first reported by Online Media Daily. OwnerIQ, which started in 2006, focuses on targeting advertising systems and proprietary browsing data and most recently raised a $5.8 million financing round in late 2009. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Jay Habegger.

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Far too much has been written about Boston versus New York City. Sports rivalries and cultural differences have a way of coloring our world view to include startup companies and venture capital. However, the past few years tell about a much closer relationship. The real story is Boston and New York City, particularly versus Silicon Valley.

This week, we welcome Xconomy’s most recent addition to its coverage, New York City! While having started in Boston and expanded across the country, Xconomy’s newest addition reflects the growing ties and teamwork between New York and Boston.

Let’s start with a few data points. It’s always been easy to think about Boston and New York as separate worlds. After all, it’s 225 miles between downtown Boston and Manhattan—a journey that takes typically takes 3 ½ hours. In contrast, the trip from San Francisco to San Jose is only 48 miles along the 101, which in the middle of the night is under an hour. With traffic, well, that depends and can take as long as the Boston-NYC trip.

Somewhat ironically, the technology created by entrepreneurs and the VCs that back them have been shortening these distances. Wi-Fi on the Acela and 3G mobile networks let entrepreneurs and venture investors stay productive on the Boston-NYC journey, making the trip seem a lot shorter. Personally, I love working on the Acela. It’s some of my most productive time, and I feel like I’m in the office. I can even have meetings, particularly if I secure the seats facing each other with the table between them. Web networking and collaboration tools make sharing information and coordination much more effective as well, not only between these two cities but across the world.

Venture capitalists and angel groups are expanding and coordinating financing activities between Boston and New York City. “New York is clearly on a roll here. If anything we’ve seen the presence of several Boston firms either opening offices or having affiliations,” said long-time New York venture capitalist and founder of Greycroft Partners, Alan Patricof. Matrix Partners recently opened an office, headed by Nick Beim. New firms like Founder Collective operate fairly seamlessly between the two cities. TechStars’ recent expansion to New York has been a great success. The Golden Seeds angel group several years ago opened chapters in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia that systematically collaborate. Syndication among angel groups more broadly in New England and New York got started around 2005 and has been going through various iterations and improvements.

How does this then play out in the numbers? Silicon Valley may have had the lead for many years, but looking at emerging companies, the Boston-New York team looks like it’s been running a fast break. According to the most recent PwC MoneyTree data, the gap between New York/Boston and Silicon Valley for seed and early-stage companies has closed, whether looking by total deals or by dollars.

Five years ago, Silicon Valley did nearly twice the number of seed and early-stage venture deals compared to Boston and New York combined, 338 versus 178 in 2005. For 2010 the two regions are essentially tied with 400 for Silicon Valley and 392 for New York/Boston. Dollars tell a similar story. For 2005, the ratio was 1.3:1 in favor of Silicon Valley, growing to 2.2:1 by 2007. By last year, that gap had closed to 1:1 with $2.16B invested in Silicon Valley seed and early-stage companies and $2.05B invested in those in New York/Boston (see charts above.) “The startup and entrepreneurial environment in New York is the strongest I’ve seen in the past 40 years,” says Patricof.

But it’s not just adding numbers. The rapid growth of consumer-oriented, ad-tech, and fin-tech ventures makes Boston and New York City highly complementary and drives increasing … Next Page »

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[Editor's Note: Chris Sheehan is a managing director of CommonAngels, which is an investor in Xconomy. This post also appears on Sheehan's blog.]

I was recently asked by a couple of early stage entrepreneurs to talk about angel investing in Boston.  The angel market around town has always been fairly active and cuts across many sectors, e.g. software, hardware, networking, Internet, life sciences, optics, robotics, medical devices, cleantech, retail, industrial products, etc.  There has been discussion lately about the lack of active angel investors in Web-based businesses—and the concerns are legitimate. But the truth is that there is a wide diversity of Boston-area angel investors, each with diverse interests.

For this post, I’ll focus on the market that I invest in and know best—early stage information technology.  I’ve broken this into two parts: Finding angel investors to help get the venture started, and getting angel support for the go-to-market phase.

First step: Looking for Those First Angels to Get Started

The initial company creation phase involves building a product/service and testing some of your hypotheses about the business.  This is the pre-seed or seed stage, or as one of my members puts it, going “from nothing to something.”  For this stage many startups need anywhere from $10k to a few hundred thousand dollars, depending on the type of business (see my earlier post on case studies for this phase).

Around Boston, as in most geographies, there is a shortage of this type of funding—there are always too many startups and seed stage ideas looking for seed capital.  I would say, though, that the gap “feels” a bit more acute at the moment for IT startups, in particular Web-based startups, as a result of three factors. First, the financial mess that hit us in 2008, and what it did to our investment portfolios—we are 1/2 to 2/3 climbing back, but it’s left a “psychological” mark in the short term. Second, more innovation, particularly around B2B and B2C Web-based businesses, meaning there’s more competition for seed capital in these sectors. Third, the lack of recent or sizeable IT exits that in turn creates a bench of wealthy high tech entrepreneurs to invest in the next set of entrepreneurs.

Most of the initial investment I see for this stage comes from:

• Founders’ own dollars/unpaid time and family/friends
• Angels who know the founder(s) or are one or two degrees of separation away. These angels have known you for a while, like you, and basically are betting on “you” along with what they perceive as an interesting opportunity.  These relationships are business, personal, or both. And this is where there is a wide variation—I’ve seen some entrepreneurs quickly raise $200k from their network. On the other hand I’ve seen young, smart entrepreneurs with potentially interesting ideas who unfortunately don’t have a network, and struggle to raise money except from their closest friends and family.
• Domain experts. These are investors who are working in the entrepreneurs’ space (retail, marketing, EDA, online advertising, restaurants, you name it), and can easily identify both emotionally and intellectually with the problem being addressed. You don’t need to convince them that there is something worth solving.  Having said that, many domain experts in the Boston market seem more willing to serve as advisers than as angel investors.
• Most check sizes I see are between $5k to $100k, typically $15k – 25k.

Angel groups will invest at this level, although I’d say most tend to look at the next major funding gap—the early go-to-market stage. Venture firms are less likely to invest at this stage. It’s not that they don’t do seed investing, it’s just not … Next Page »

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The dollar amounts ranged from the modest (FitnessKeeper) to the mammoth (Vertex) for New England tech and life sciences deals this week.

—Boston’s FitnessKeeper, maker of the RunKeeper iPhone application, raised $400,000 from Cambridge, MA-based LaunchCapital and a group of individual investors. Wade chatted with FitnessKeeper founder and CEO Jason Jacobs about his plans for the cash.

—Panraven, a Cambridge, MA-based provider of online image editing tools raised $2.7 million in debt, equity, and warrants, according to regulatory documents. The total planned value of the deal is $3 million.

—Cambridge-based Forma Therapeutics, a drug-development spinoff of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, raised $25.5 million in a Series B venture round. New investor Lilly Ventures took the lead in the deal, which was joined by the Novartis Option Fund and Bio One Capital.

—Falmouth, ME-based Zorap raised $1.35 million of a planned $1.9 million round of equity financing, according to regulatory filings. The startup runs a video chat room website.

—VisibleGains of Waltham, MA, raised $2 million in a new financing deal, according to an SEC filing. Investors weren’t named in the filing but the CEO of the company, a provider of online interactive video technology, told Xconomy in October that the firm was raising money from its previous backers Point Judith Capital and Castile Ventures.

—OwnerIQ, a Boston-based provider of targeted marketing data, raised $5.82 million in Series C funding from Atlas Venture, Common Angels, Egan Managed Capital, Kepha Partners, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation.

—North Billerica, MA-based Contour Semiconductor, a producer of Flash memory chips for mobile devices, reported to the SEC that it has raised $8 million in equity financing.

—Cambridge-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) raised $443 million in an underwritten offering of 11.5 million new shares of stock. The funding is the latest of serveral large deals the company has cut to support the development of its hepatitis C drug, telaprevir, as was as treatments for cystic fibrosis.

—Alkermes (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ALKS]) agreed to pay a fellow Cambridge company, Acceleron Pharma, $2 million in upfront license fees for worldwide rights to technology for making biotech drugs last longer in the bloodstream. Alkermes will also make an $8 million equity investment in Acceleron, and will potentially pay milestone payments and royalties on eventual product sales.

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Boston-based OwnerIQ, which provides advertisers and retailers with targeted marketing data about users who download the product manuals available through its websites, has raised $5.82 million in Series C funding, according to regulatory documents filed today. CEO Jay Habegger says that the funds came from Atlas Venture, Common Angels, Egan Managed Capital, Kepha Partners, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. The same group—minus Kepha—provided Owner IQ with $2 million in Series A funding in October 2007 and a $6 million in Series B funding in June 2008.

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Last week was a good one for New England tech and life sciences startups trying to raise cash. But first, the shape-shifting robots.

—IRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) of Burlington, MA, won a $3.3 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Army Research Office to develop “soft, flexible” robots that can shimmy through tight spaces for reconnaissance and search-and-rescue work.

—Brookline, MA-based online directory firm JazzD Markets reportedly raised $8 million in Series A financing round from investors including Commonwealth Capital Ventures and Pilot House Ventures.

—Navic Networks of Waltham, MA, was scooped up by Microsoft for an undisclosed sum. The firm, whose investors include Pilot House Associates, Highland Capital Partners, Himalaya Capital Ventures, Pequot Ventures, and Lauder Partners, makes ad-targeting software for TV set-top boxes.

—Waltham, MA-based Battery Ventures teamed with Gemini Israel Funds to invest $11.4 million in New Jersey-based Neocleus, which makes virtualization software for Windows desktops and laptops.

—American Well of Boston inked a deal with Hawaii Medical Service Association—American Well’s first major customer—to offer the Boston firm’s online medical consultation services to all of the health plan’s 710,000 members. It also forged an agreement with Microsoft to integrate the software giant’s health information management service, HealthVault, into the American Well interface.

—Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) formed an alliance worth up to $93 million (not including royalties) with Japan’s Kyowa Hakko Kogyo to commercialize an RNAi-based treatment for respiratory syncytial virus in Japan and other major Asian markets.

—Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: [ESLR) received two new long-term orders, worth a combined $600 million, bringing the photovoltaic manufacturer’s total contractual backlog up to $1.7 billion.

—Friday saw a flurry of financings: Newton, MA’s OwnerIQ, which builds websites offering downloadable user manuals for consumer products, raised $6 million in Series B funding from Egan Managed Capital, Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. Sciformix, of Westborough, MA, which handles regulatory paperwork for biotech and pharma firms, closed a $3.3 million Series A round led by Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners. And web consulting firm Optaros of Boston raised $12 million in a Series C round from .406 Ventures, Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, and Globespan Capital Partners.

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We usually get deluged with funding news on Mondays —but a small rash of venture capital rounds were announced (in one form or another) this morning, so we thought we’d wrap them up into one post.

First up is OwnerIQ, which we have written about before. The two-year-old Newton, MA-based startup—which operates a network of websites packed with freely downloadable user manuals for all manner of consumer products, coupled to user-generated content about those products and its own editorial content—just received $6 million in Series B funding. The round included new investor Egan Managed Capital, plus all existing investors: Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation.

The company pulled in a $2 million Series A round in October—and founder Jay Habegger says the company will use the money to expand the range of services OwnerIQ offers for consumers and also grow its advertising programs. Consumers come to the site looking for lost user manuals and other product information about appliances and devices they own, and OwnerIQ sells product companies aggregated information about owners of specific devices or groups of people with similar devices. That way, he says, a company with a new product can target its advertising directly to consumers most likely to be interested.

“We’re the first media outlet that allows a marketer or a product manager to target an advertising campaign based on the brand definition and the brand understanding—as opposed to the way they do it today, which is they have to take that and reduce it to demographics and then match those demographics to publications that reach those demographics,” says Habegger. “We allow them to short circuit that process and go directly to consumers that…have the purchasing behaviors that are consistent with their brand.” Habegger says OwnerIQ is now registering over 100,000 users per month, and has over one million total registered users.

Next in the funding parade comes Sciformix, which is headquartered in Westborough, MA, with operations in Mumbai, India. Sciformix’s business idea is to help biotech and pharma companies with their regulatory paperwork, which, for example, might mean outsourcing statistical analysis of clinical test data or writing reports on drug side effects to the FDA. Sciformix announced today that is has taken in $3.3 million in a Series A round led by Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners.

“Currently estimated at $820 million and projected to grow to $1.2 billion in the years to come, the drug safety and clinical data management markets are key focus areas for the life sciences industry,” said CEO Dinesh Thakur in a statement. “The funding will enable us to accelerate our ability to meet the rapidly growing needs of life sciences companies for high-quality drug safety services.”

The last fundee, but not the least since it reportedly has taken in $12 million in a Series C round, is Boston-based Optaros, a consulting firm that describes itself as designing and assembling “solutions from loosely-coupled software components into supported composite applications.” (I think that’s a good description of how they do things but not what they do, which after perusing their website for about 10 minutes I was still left wondering about—apparently helping companies build their websites). In any event, the funding news, based on a regulatory filing, was reported by PE Week, which says 406 Ventures was joined in the round by previous investors Charles River Ventures, General Catalyst Partners, and Globespan Capital Partners. The company had previously raised $19.5 million.

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I’m one of those people who makes special folders in my filing cabinet for the owner’s manuals that come with every new gadget or appliance I buy. If you want to see the manual for my radioactive-green Nokia 6130 cell phone, I can probably dig it up. (Never mind that I haven’t used that phone since 1998. If you’re busy making file folders, you don’t have time to cull them.)

For all of you less splendidly organized mortals, there’s OwnerIQ. Founded in 2006, the Newton, MA-based startup operates a network of 13 websites bursting with freely downloadable user manuals for all manner of consumer products, from digital cameras to dishwashers, and from cordless drills to charcoal grills. The documentation for the Nokia 6130 isn’t in OwnerIQ’s database, but the manuals for 1,137 other Nokia cell phones are. Along with the manuals for 26 kinds of Honda snowblowers, and DVD players from 215 different manufacturers.

We wrote about OwnerIQ briefly last October when they pulled down a $2 million Series A financing round from Atlas Venture, CommonAngels, and the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. I got the latest on the company yesterday from CEO Jay Habegger (who also happens to be an investor in Xconomy, through CommonAngels).

Since the funding, the company’s been focused on two tasks, according to Habegger. The first is adding content and features. Just in the last month, OwnerIQ has turned on six new sites, covering cameras, home appliances, lawn and garden, outdoor cooking, phones, and power tools. Community forums, where registered members can help each other find manuals, are another new feature. “That has dramatically increased our traffic, and we have some really good stories about people reaching out and making connections,” says Habegger.

He shares the heartwarming example of a woman from the Midwest who recently called OwnerIQ’s office about her breadmaker. “My VP of sales picked up,” says Habegger, “and the woman said she had noticed that a bunch of folks on the site were looking for a particular manual for a Magic Chef breadmaker. She said ‘I’ve got that manual—I know how to photocopy it, but I don’t know how to scan it, can I just mail it to you and have you post it?’ So that’s what we did.”

The other task—and the one that could eventually make OwnerIQ into a lucrative enterprise—has been building a targeted advertising system that monetizes the information OwnerIQ collects about visitors. The fact that you’re on OwnerIQ looking around for the manual for your $8,000 Jenn-Air built-in refrigerator is a pretty good “ownership signal,” to use Habegger’s term: a sign that you either own a Jenn-Air already, have a family member who does, or are interested in high-end kitchen appliances. And that makes you someone online advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach.

To Habegger’s mind, serving targeted advertisements to such visitors is a far better way of reaching prospective appliance buyers than making wild guesses about who’s reading a newspaper, magazine, or website. “Targeting a message based on what people own makes a lot of intuitive sense,” he says. “Product marketers often think about branding in terms of the other things people own, the kinds of homes they live in, and what other kinds of products they buy. But then, in the traditional advertising world, they have to translate that into the demographics of a particular publication and decide whether it fits with the people they’re trying to reach. We allow you to short-circuit that process and just go after the people who actually own these things.”

In other words, OwnerIQ is all about lead generation. And so was BitPipe, the company Habegger co-founded in 1998 and sold to Needham, MA-based TechTarget for some $40 million in 2004. BitPipe’s business was to … Next Page »

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Regular readers may have noticed that from time to time we like to give you a roundup of the last week’s worth of biz/tech news (and from time to time—like when we’re too busy with this week’s news—we skip it).

This time a couple of things are different, though. First, I’m going to focus only on deals news—because there was a whole lot of it last week. And second, this is our first roundup since we launched our News Xpress section, which covers on a more real-time basis many of the items we previously would have saved for the roundup. (The most recent News Xpress headlines are in the green box at the top of our homepage, or if you prefer we also have a complete full-text listing of all News Xpress items.)

So let us know, dear readers: Is it helpful to have both the real-time and roundup options for following the news, especially deal news? If not, which do you prefer and why? We’re at editors@xconomy.com.

Now, here’s the deal with those deals…

—Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) partnered with Shanghai Sunway Biotech to commercialize its lead gene therapy product candidate in China.

—OwnerIQ of Newton, MA, raised a first round worth $2 million for a network of websites containing consumer-device user manuals.

—Somerville, MA’s Dataupia—a data warehousing firm—raised $16 million in a Series B funding round.

—Acceleron Pharma of Cambridge, MA, closed its third big venture round, worth $31 million, led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

—Storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), of Hopkinton, MA, announced it would acquire a Richardson, TX, data-center-software firm called Voyence for an undisclosed sum. Wade offers some nice perspective on how the deal fits into EMC’s strategy and the data industry in general.

—Cambridge, MA’s Zipcar and Seattle’s Flexcar announced they would merge.

—Boston-based document storage and data protection company Iron Mountain announced it would pay $158 million in cash for Mountain View, CA’s Stratify.

—SoundBite Communications (NASDAQ: SDBT), a voice-messaging firm in Bedford, MA, priced its IPO well below expectations in the wake of a rival’s claim of patent infringement.

—Waltham, MA-based Tego, an RFID firm, raised $6 million in a Series A round led by Bainco International Investors.

—And on Friday came the news that four Massachusetts firms—Newton’s HemaQuest Pharmaceuticals ($20 million), Sherborn’s Ascent Therapeutics ($8 million), Cambridge’s Bikam Pharmaceuticals ($3.6 million), and Lowell’s Virtual Iron ($13 million)—had collectively closed venture deals worth $44.6 million.

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Newton, MA-based OwnerIQ, formerly known as Most Effective Media, announced today that it has raised $2 million in venture backing from Atlas Venture, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, and Common Angels. The company has built a network of websites containing user manuals for hundreds of brands and models of consumer devices, from microwave ovens to car stereos; it monetizes traffic to the sites through what it calls “ownership targeting.” Explains CEO Jay Habegger: “We take a common consumer frustration—looking for user manuals and other self support literature—and make that stuff easy to find. And by virtue of the fact that you’re looking for a manual on your stove or your camera, we know that your household has a particular device, and through our registration model we know how to reach you. If we aggregate that enough times over a particular product type, we can create ownership-targeted media campaigns for advertisers.” Habegger is also an investor in Xconomy, through Common Angels.

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