—It wasn’t exactly news when the board at San Diego-based Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN) said it had rejected the $5.7 billion hostile takeover offer from Swiss drug maker Roche. Now Wall Street’s arbitragers are placing their bets on whether Roche can prevail. The most intriguing news about the deal, however, came from The Wall Street Journal, which revealed potential conflicts of interests with Illumina’s key adviser, Goldman Sachs.

—A new molecular diagnostics startup stepped into the light in San Diego. Applied Proteomics named Peter Klemm as CEO, and disclosed it raised $22.5 million in venture capital last summer from Vulcan Capital and Domain Associates. Applied Proteomics also said it moved to San Diego last June from the Los Angeles area, and double its staffing over the next year.

—San Diego-based Tocagen and Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics disclosed a partnership that will begin with Siemens’ support of clinical trials Tocagen has planned for its viral gene therapy treatments for primary brain cancer. Siemens said it will help provide companion diagnostics that are intended to help doctors decide the best course of treatments for patients, based on their unique genetic characteristics.

—San Diego’s OncoSec Medical, which was created out of a reverse merger less than a year ago, is beginning mid-stage trials of a treatment that combines electroporation and immunotherapy in patients with three types of skin cancer. Electroporation is a technology that causes cancer cells to take up higher concentrations of anti-cancer drugs by administering pulses of electricity directly to the cancer cells. OncoSec is trying it on patients with metastatic melanoma, Merkel cell carcinoma, and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.

—Brooks Life Science Systems, a Poway, CA-based division of Brooks Automation, (NASDAQ: BRKS), said it had established a development and commercialization partnership with The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). Brooks plans to manufacture and commercialize a microplate imaging system under an exclusive licensing agreement with the biomedical research institute.

—San Diego-based Prometheus Laboratories Inc., a specialty pharmaceutical and diagnostic company, said it signed a research and collaboration agreement that provides its proprietary cancer diagnostic technology to an unnamed global pharmaceutical. Financial terms were not disclosed. Prometheus said its technology can detect the activation of specific cancer pathways with high levels of sensitivity and specificity.

—San Diego-based Synthetic Genomics and Ipswich, MA-based New England Biolabs (NEB) said they signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement allowing NEB to commercialize the “Gibson Assembly Master Mix,” a one-step, isothermal approach to enable the rapid assembly of multiple DNA fragments. The companies said Daniel Gibson and colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI) developed the technology as part of a program sponsored by SGI. Financial terms were not disclosed.

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Boston startups should be focusing more on creating strategic partnerships with big companies.

An “if we build it, they will come” mindset appears to dominate the Boston startup scene. Too many startups also rely mostly on a pricing and plans revenue model combined with implementing the latest inside sales and marketing 2.0 tools to “get found” while driving demand. A complementary and proactive approach in targeting big companies for strategic partnerships is needed.

Wake up… Most big companies have realized that their current set of technology providers lack the innovation and speed to deliver new competitive solutions. There are new sets of problems that need to be solved that may not have existed even a few years ago. As a result, new innovation programs and budgets have been established, led by senior executives. Their motivation is to fund pilots with emerging technology providers that most times lead to a much larger transaction and partnership strategy. Interesting areas include mobility, social, analytics, and cloud computing.

Take advantage of these customer-funded opportunities as these dollars may also complement your angel and VC funding efforts. Plus, for those leveraging lean startup principles, incorporating a big company “voice” to validate your product development roadmap may commit them to buy additional products and enhancements in the future.

If big companies are approached correctly, senior executives leading innovation programs will make swift decisions. Unfortunately, there are major challenges I see within the startup community to take advantage of these budgets. These include:

• Little focus on proactively targeting big companies. Also, the startup team and their mentors may not possess the sales skills or experience to effectively connect with and relate to big-company senior executives.

• Boston startups are too focused on the product and technology. Big companies are also evaluating their ability to work and collaborate with the startup team. Chemistry is important to these executives.

• You are not the center of the universe. There may be additional value in extending and leveraging existing ecosystem investments.

What I am describing here is not an outdated sales process where the cost to acquire a customer is high and the sales cycles are very long.

Keep in mind that big companies would rather … Next Page »

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San Diego’s StockTwits is developing a bit of a Canadian accent, eh, through a partnership being announced today with Toronto-based Q4 Web Systems, which provides online investor relations services for publicly traded companies throughout North America.

StockTwits is an online social media network that enables traders and shareholders to share their market insights, ideas, charts, and news in real time via Twitter. The startup structures financial and investor-related information from its Twitter feed by stock, user, reputation, and other criteria. StockTwits also enables users to save the stocks they follow to their own portfolios and to limit the comments tweeted about each stock to trusted sources.

As I reported last summer, the four-year-old startup has determined that its chief source of revenue also lies with the investor relations and public relations units of publicly traded companies.

By introducing a ticker tag symbol for publicly traded stocks, $(ticker), StockTwits makes it possible for public companies to sign up for a higher level of StockTwits’ Web service and to “claim” their stock tickers. Once claimed, a company’s IR and PR teams can use the ticker tag to distribute corporate information over the Web in real time.

By partnering with Q4, StockTwits plans to integrate its services with the subscription-based services that Q4 provides its corporate customers. Q4 says its website services include more than 30 IR “best practices” modules that help companies properly provide information and other services to investors and shareholders.

“We’re working with them to make it easier for people to use both of our products,” says Francis Costello, StockTwits’ chief operating officer. He tells me StockTwits has more … Next Page »

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It’s a question as old as human nature. You’ve heard the stories, you know all the famous examples. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Eisner, the list goes on. All difficult characters with strong personalities—and hugely successful companies.

So, in today’s ultra-competitive tech and business world, does a CEO have to be an asshole to be successful?

First of all, let’s get our terminology straight. There’s no hard and fast definition of the term, but you know it when you see it. Bullying or backstabbing behavior towards subordinates or partners? Check. Public humiliation of employees? Sure thing. Tantrums, abrasive language, egomania, and other unprofessional displays? Yep. (See a related Xconomy story about bad bosses.) But more subtly, there’s stuff like not returning messages, passing people off to underlings, talking way too much, and saying different things to different people. And more generally, not caring what other people think. Which, of course, can also be a very good thing.

Some months ago, a group of prominent Boston-area tech CEOs discussed this question of “assholicism”—rhymes with Catholicism—at their regular meet-up. Some may have felt they should be tougher leaders or negotiators. Some wanted to pick up management tips and strategies. Others were reflective about their own styles that have served them well. So…is it necessary to be a jerk? Apparently the discussion took all day (and even came up in multiple meetings).

The upshot: Yes, a CEO has to be somewhat of a jerk to succeed. At least, it can be helpful—but there were plenty of caveats.

“It was concluded on some level that this was the case,” says Dave Balter, the CEO of BzzAgent (owned by Tesco’s Dunnhumby), who was part of the group. “But there was a huge amount of debate and not everyone agreed.”

One of those dissenters would be Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, the fast-growing marketing tech firm. Reached by e-mail, Halligan said that being a jerk “used to work” for leaders, but that “it is not acceptable today.”

His main reasons—neither of which I would call deeply fundamental to human psychology or the nature of leadership—are that “smart GenY-ers don’t put up with that stuff,” and that corporate information flow and reputations have become more transparent, so CEOs can’t get away with bad behavior anymore. It “used to be that information was centralized at the asshole,” he writes.

I also pinged Brad Feld, the tech entrepreneur-investor, while he was in town. He was unequivocal that good leaders don’t have to be jerks. “Some of the sweetest people in the world are super successful CEOs,” he says.

So perhaps there are deeper trends at work here. … Next Page »

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There’s a new big tech company in town. In fact, it’s arguably the world’s biggest technology company (by revenue), and it’s joining the ranks of IBM, EMC, Microsoft, Google, and, most recently, Amazon, in expanding to the Boston-Cambridge area.

Palo Alto, CA-based Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ) has set up a new office in Cambridge, MA. The operation will serve as a center for technology development, licensing, and outreach to local startups, investors, and researchers. The 37,000-square-foot facility at 150 CambridgePark Drive, near the Alewife subway station, is spread over two floors. The building serves as the new headquarters for Vertica, the Boston-area big-data analytics firm that HP bought last winter. Vertica is in the process of moving its 150 employees from its offices in Billerica to the Cambridge facility this month, and it is currently hiring.

HP already had a sizable presence in Massachusetts, with its campus in Andover. But the new Cambridge office represents an unprecedented investment by HP in outreach and partnerships with local entrepreneurs, venture capital firms, and the academic research community in the Boston area. The company hasn’t specified a firm commitment of future dollars, but just setting up the new space—including a state-of the art lab and all its associated infrastructure—has cost more than $10 million, says Chris Lynch, the chief executive of Vertica. (His HP title is vice president and general manager.)

Lynch, who is leading the new facility, calls it a “big-data center of excellence” for HP. The idea is it will be a technology hub for the firm, a bit like HP Labs in Palo Alto—but different. (Lynch wouldn’t go so far as to call it “HP Labs East.”) The center will be a base from which HP could make deals to license its technology or invest in early-stage startups alongside venture firms, he says. The center also plans to bring in students and early-stage entrepreneurs for hackathons and other tech-themed events. And it will serve as a base for other types of outreach, such as to local K-12 schools, Lynch says.

So why Alewife instead of, say, Kendall Square? “We wanted to bridge the gap between getting access to the younger people living in Cambridge … Next Page »

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As early stage biotech startups advance their drug candidates into pre-clinical development, many must decide at some point whether to start working with a big pharmaceutical or biotech partner to continue to pursue their program through clinical trials.

It’s no small decision, and a topic of increasing industry interest, especially since initial public offerings (IPOs) by life sciences companies have fared poorly in recent years, curtailing their ability to raise cash and develop new drugs on their own. Of the 12 biotechs that went public in 2011, for example, 10 raised substantially less cash than they wanted to, according to the BIO industry group.

The IPO class of 2010 also was schooled in terms of post-IPO performance, with shares in just four of the 12 biotechs trading higher at the end of 2011 than when the companies began trading. Small wonder, then, if Wall Street traders are asking, “Why buy biotech shares at the IPO when we can get them cheaper later?”

So joining forces with larger drug companies offers a wise alternative strategy, which was evident in a new conference that Biocom organized last year to focus on the nitty-gritty of biotech-pharma partnerships. (The Second Annual Global Life Science Partnering Conference convenes in San Diego on Feb. 1, with an agenda that includes VIP speakers from GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Vertex, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.)

Under the circumstances, you’d think these times would be ideal for partnership deals. After all, big pharmas are prospecting for new drug candidates outside their own R&D programs, and late-stage venture financing remains tenuous for today’s startups. But to borrow a pop psychology concept, pharmas and biotechs are from different planets. Startups are almost invariably motivated by a need for capital to advance their drug development program. Hooking up with a particular pharma may or may not align with their true strategic desires. Big pharmas, on the other hand, are looking to fill their pipeline with new products, but they have trust issues. The pharmas ask themselves, “Does that biotech want a true drug development partner, or just some tawdry substitute for venture financing?”

Of course, this isn’t something that happens on Match.com. The process of choosing the right partner and negotiating a … Next Page »

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Some interesting news tidbits in Boston-area mobile and marketing/ad tech today.

—Zmags, the Boston-based mobile and social commerce company, has raised $7 million from Square 1 Bank and existing investors OpenView Venture Partners and Northcap Partners. Zmags makes a software platform to help brands and retailers design marketing and merchandising campaigns across mobile devices, tablets, and Web. The new money roughly doubles the amount Zmags has raised to date; the company expects to close an additional growth equity round this year. Last May, CEO Michael Schreck spoke with me about the firm’s transition from digital publishing to commerce, and about mobile marketing trends over the past decade.

—Jumptap, the Cambridge, MA-based mobile advertising firm, has been working with Mitt Romney to create and run targeted campaign ads (at the zipcode level) for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primaries. The company says Romney is the first candidate to run mobile ads in both sites. We’ll be watching to see how mobile technologies influence the upcoming presidential election.

—Apperian, the Boston maker of a mobile-app platform for businesses, is powering AT&T’s new mobile application management product. The software helps companies and other organizations create, distribute, and manage secure mobile apps. Apperian has worked with AT&T for the past several years, but the new announcement could be an important validation of where Apperian stands in the market.

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Illinois-based Baxter International (NYSE: BAX) is tapping into Cambridge, MA-based Momenta Pharmaceuticals’ abilities as a generic drugmaker in a new collaboration deal focused on developing so-called biosimilars, or knockoffs of biologic drugs.

Momenta (NASDAQ: MNTA) will receive $33 million upfront in the deal, according to an announcement yesterday, and could receive another $419 million in potential milestones and option fees. The companies will develop up to six biosimilar compounds under the agreement.

Last year Momenta nabbed FDA approval for a generic version of Sanofi’s anti-clotting drug enoxaparin (Lovenox). That product is being marketed by Sandoz. And the FDA is currently reviewing Momenta’s generic form of  glatiramer, a multiple sclerosis drug marketed today by Teva Pharmaceuticals under the brand name Copaxone.

The Momenta-Baxter deal is the latest we’ve reported in a string of activity around biosimilars. Just this week, Thousand Oaks, CA-based Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN), which has R&D operations in Cambridge, announced a $400 million partnership with New Jersey’s Watson Pharmaceuticals to develop biosimilar cancer drugs. Earlier this month, Weston, MA-based Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) and Korean conglomerate Samsung formed a $300 million joint venture focused on biosimilars. And Merck (NYSE: MRK) has been fine-tuning its own biosimilars strategy in preparation for guidelines the FDA is expected to release on how to develop the generic biotech drugs.

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SweetLabs co-founder Chester Ng tells me a new class of intense social network games are threatening to disrupt some of the established players in the desktop gaming business, such as Activision Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and Electronic Arts’ Star Wars franchise.

Perhaps.

Today, as EA releases its much-anticipated Star Wars: The Old Republic, San Diego-based SweetLabs and Kabam of Redwood City, CA, are launching new Pokki desktop apps for four popular Kabam games: Dragons of Atlantis; Edgeworld; The Godfather: Five Families; and Thirst of Night.

As we reported in June, SweetLabs launched Pokki as a new platform (for Windows PCs) that gives desktop users easy-to-access apps with an “always on” experience more familiar to smartphone users. After creating a number of utility apps, Sweetlabs is now expanding its Pokki product line by introducing game apps for Pokki that enable users to quickly get into Kabam’s massively multiplayer, synchronous strategy games.

SweetLabs, which got $13 million in venture funding three months ago from Intel Capital, Google Ventures, and Bessemer Venture Partners, also announced a “Pokki 1Up” contest. The company is offering a total of $50,000 in cash prizes for developers who create new Pokki game apps.

SweetLabs ran a similar contest, the “Pokki Challenge,” just a few months ago as an incentive to encourage programmers to build out the Pokki app catalog. Before launching Pokki six months ago, SweetLabs developed a variety of apps for its own platform, including apps that enable users to easily access Facebook, Rdio, Gmail, Twitter, and other websites.

At the end of November, SweetLabs said developers submitted more than 60 apps and its Pokki judging panel selected Mixtape, an app by Mohamed Tedjani Meftah, for the $30,000 grand prize. Chess by Jeet Singh received the $13,000 second prize, and Instagrille, a photo app by Denis Denisyuk based on the popular Instagram service, took third place with a $7,000 prize. The contest enabled SweetLabs to make all the winning apps, along with a number of additional apps created for the Pokki Challenge, available for downloading at www.pokki.com/contest.

Creating game apps that are available without the inconvenience of launching a Web browser is an extension of what SweetLabs set out to do with Pokki, according to Ng, who says SweetLabs’ move into online games will be a killer app.

“These games are highly addictive,” Ng says. “It’s pretty crazy how much time people are playing on social networks like Facebook. We just wanted to make it really easy for users to access their favorite games right from their desktops.”

For Kabam, “This partnership with Pokki expands Kabam game distribution to reach more gamers and provides unique value to our players,” Kabam COO Chris Carvalho says in a statement released today. “It has the potential to usher in a powerful new chapter in core social game distribution.”

The games Kabam customized for the Pokki platform are free, Ng says. Some players, though, acquire virtual goods that can help them score extra points. “It’s free to play,” Ng says, “but as you start to play, you might want to speed up the game.”

SweetLabs’ Ng declined to describe how the partners will share revenue from the new Pokki game apps. “We’re experimenting on revenue-sharing models with all of our partners,” Ng says, “but I really can’t go into any details.”

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This is a tale of two CEOs whose reputations precede them. It is a short tale.

The news today is that Cambridge, MA-based Kinvey and Portland, OR-based Urban Airship have formed a technology partnership involving mobile applications. Basically, Kinvey will handle the data back-end for mobile app developers whose apps reach end users through “push notifications” powered by Urban Airship; push notifications are typically marketing or news messages sent by publishers over a data network. Financial terms of the partnership weren’t given.

But this story isn’t really about financials. These are two startups, separated by 3,000 miles, and each has a personal flair. Last year, Urban Airship CEO and co-founder Scott Kveton told me about how his company first got off the ground. It was June 2009, Urban Airship had barely started, and Kveton and his team couldn’t afford to attend the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Instead, they bought $1,500 worth of donuts and camped outside the Moscone Center, chatting up (and feeding) hundreds of developers waiting in line about their mobile messaging needs.

Fast forward, and today Urban Airship’s thousands of customers include ESPN, Fox, LivingSocial, Warner Bros., and the White House. The company has raised more than $20 million, and its investors include Foundry Group, True Ventures, Founder’s Co-op, Intel Capital, Salesforce.com, and Verizon.

Kinvey’s back-story is no less dramatic. The founding team moved to Boston from Austin, TX, and graduated with the most recent class of TechStars Boston. Last July, when founder and CEO Sravish Sridhar and chief technology officer Morgan Bickle were stuck underground for two hours on the Red Line subway, they spent their time chatting up commuters about their mobile-app needs.

Sridhar’s startup has since raised a $2 million seed round from Atlas Venture, Avalon Ventures, and numerous angel investors. Kinvey is building its business around providing cloud-based back-end services like storing and managing app data, handling security and analytics, and enabling purchases. We’ll be watching to see how much its partnerships, like the one with Urban Airship, help boost its profile among developers and publishers.

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Anti-theft technology for mobile devices just got smarter. Boston-based Skyhook Wireless announced today that its location-finding software has been deployed by Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC) in its new Norton Anti-Theft Web service. Financial details weren’t given, but the arrangement will put Skyhook’s software on more devices over a broader range of applications—namely, security.

The anti-theft Web service enables people to lock, locate, and, if all goes well, recover a lost or stolen laptop (Windows-based), smartphone (Android), or tablet (Android)—all from afar. Skyhook’s technology, which uses Wi-Fi, cellular, and GPS signals to locate a given device, is already used by tens of millions of devices and applications, the company says.

Skyhook has been embroiled in two lawsuits against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) since last year. The suits allege that the search giant infringed on four of Skyhook’s patents and interfered with deals that Skyhook made with Motorola and Samsung. Those deals involved putting Skyhook’s location-finding software on Android devices.

Symantec’s deployment of Skyhook’s software is the latest example of how Skyhook has managed to maneuver its technology onto Android devices despite its feud with Google, which, like Apple, wants to own location technology for its devices itself.

Back in May, Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan talked about his company’s technology being deployed by MapQuest, Citysearch, Priceline, and other Web applications on Android (and other) devices. “We’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers,” he said.

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San Diego’s Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute says today it’s joining the Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI), a global network that New York-based Pfizer established a year ago to foster collaborations between basic research and clinical applications.

The Pfizer network of drug discovery innovation centers includes academic medical centers in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and is expected eventually to extend overseas as well. When UC San Diego Health Sciences joined the network in August, it said its partnership agreement with Pfizer could be worth as much as $50 million from the pharmaceutical giant over the next five years.

The statement from Sanford-Burnham says nothing about funding, although an institute spokeswoman says its financial agreement with Pfizer is comparable to UCSD’s. The medical research institute says it will likely collaborate with UCSD when a research project reaches the clinical stage, and joint research projects would presumably draw from the same pool of funding at Pfizer.

The Sanford-Burnham also noted it is one of only two participating medical research centers in the CTI network that are not academic medical centers. (The other, Harvard Medical School, is not considered an academic medical center because it does not have its own research hospital with clinical trials and access to patient samples.)

Sanford-Burnham has expanded significantly in recent years. The National Institutes of Health awarded Sanford-Burnham a $97.9 million grant in 2008 to establish a high-throughput screening center. It was renamed as the Conrad Prebys Center for Chemical Genomics in 2009 when San Diego philanthropist Conrad Prebys agreed to donate $10 million to the institute. Philanthropist T. Denny Sanford prompted a similar name change for the institute itself when he pledged $50 million and the research center became the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute.

The institute says working with Pfizer’s Centers for Therapeutic Innovation will provide scientists at Sanford-Burnham with access to additional resources, including select Pfizer compound libraries, proprietary screening methods, and antibody development technologies.

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When Xconomy first reported the launch of a new biotech company called Karuna Pharmaceuticals in January, the Boston startup declined to reveal much about what it was working on, except to say it had two drug-development initiatives in schizophrenia. Last week, Karuna unveiled one of those programs: a group of compounds that it has licensed from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The drugs may offer a completely new way of treating schizophrenia—a brain disorder that causes hallucinations, delusions, and a range of social disabilities.

Karuna was incubated at PureTech Ventures, and its CEO is ex-Pfizer executive Ed Harrigan, a neurologist by training. Harrigan is particularly excited about the Vanderbilt compounds because they appear to address all three classes of symptoms that schizophrenia comprises. “Positive symptoms” are hallucinations and delusions, while “negative symptoms” include the inability to experience pleasure or to carry on normal social interactions. Then there are “cognitive symptoms,” such as memory loss. “Current treatments are relatively good at addressing positive symptoms, but there’s a huge need to control the other symptoms, which can be debilitating,” Harrigan says.

Instead of targeting serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, as most schizophrenia drugs do, Vanderbilt’s compounds inhibit a protein called glycine transporter one (GlyT1). When this protein runs amuck in the brains of patients, it pumps glycine away from neurons. Blocking that pumping action may have a wide-ranging effect on schizophrenia, says Jeff Conn, a professor of pharmacology and director of the Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery at Vanderbilt. “We believe it has the potential to address all three major symptom clusters,” he says. “If that’s the case, it would be a breakthrough.”

The Karuna compounds operate in a part of the brain that has become a specialty at Vanderbilt: the “glutamate system,” a network of signals that control memory, learning, and information processing. In 2008, Cambridge, MA-based Seaside Therapeutics awarded the University … Next Page »

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Boston area radio listeners may have noticed something pretty cool on Friday morning: Xconomy’s on-air debut, during “Morning Edition” on WGBH’s 89.7.  The Xconomy Report segment, which will be a regular feature Fridays at 7:49 am, is the product of a new partnership between us and WGBH Radio. It should come as no surprise that several of us on the Xconomy staff are huge public radio dorks, and WGBH is one of the best in the biz, so we’re really excited about this one.

The idea behind the segment is to give 89.7 listeners a weekly dose of news and analysis about how technology, life sciences, and other innovation industries are affecting the economy and our lives. It is part of a broader effort on WGBH’s part to grow its coverage of innovation—and of course it’s a natural extension of what Xconomy does on our website, in our feeds and newsletters, and through our events.

So without further ado, here’s last week’s segment:

Please tune in to WGBH at 89.7 on Fridays at 7:49 to catch future installments of the Xconomy Report. We hope you’ll enjoy it, and look forward to your feedback at editors@xconomy.com.

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The world of mobile software applications has evolved so rapidly in the past couple of years, it will make your head spin. One guy whose head isn’t spinning, though, is mobile-app veteran Greg Raiz. In fact, he is probably doing the spinning for everyone else.

Raiz is the founder and CEO of (aptly named) Raizlabs, a Brookline, MA-based mobile development shop that started in 2003. The company is known for developing mobile apps and doing consulting and design work for a lot of startups and big companies, especially in the Boston area—RunKeeper (FitnessKeeper), Intuit, Rue La La, and Sermo, just to name a few.

Earlier this month, Raizlabs rolled out its first software-as-a-service offering, called AppBlade. (The name is meant to connote a Swiss army knife.) The suite of tools helps developers distribute their apps to customers and helps them keep the apps secure and updated after crashes, as well as providing insights into how people are using the apps, among other things, Raiz says. The project grew out of “gaps in the workflow” at Raizlabs, he says. The goal over the next six to 12 months is to transform it from a host of app-development tools into a “robust platform,” Raiz says.

“It’s a startup within a startup,” he adds. “We’ve been incubating this idea for the past year.”

The idea, as I see it, is that every company and its brother wants to have a mobile presence. But developing a good business app is just the beginning—getting the app into the hands of a company (and its customers) requires making connections in a half-dozen places, and that can be very challenging for developers. So Raizlabs wants AppBlade to be a hub for all things mobile development. “We’re trying to centralize the experience,” Raiz says.

To that end, the firm is looking to solidify its partnerships with many businesses, some of which are working to extend the software service further into areas like app testing, analytics, financial reporting, and advertising metrics.

In recent years Raizlabs has been doubling in size every 12 to 15 months, Raiz says. Right now it has 14 full-time employees. The company overlaps a bit with Boston-based Apperian and a number of other firms looking to provide a unified software platform for creating, deploying, and managing enterprise mobile apps.

I asked Raiz, a former Microsoft program manager, for some broader trends he’s observed over the past year, and how that bodes for the future. “Companies you would not think of as mobile, or having a mobile app, have taken a much stronger position,” he says. “We’ve seen mobile going into the mainstream of business.” (He cited some New England firms with a national presence like Kayak, TripAdvisor, Monster.com, and Fidelity.com.)

What’s more, he says, “mobile sales professionals are replacing laptops with the iPad as a key sales tool.” So companies are getting custom applications built for tablets, he says. And emerging in the next year or so, will be “synergy between mobile and Web,” he says. As Raiz puts it, the first generation of mobile apps were useful on their own, but the second generation will “tie into Web services” and push data back and forth between platforms. (This echoes some recent analysis from wireless guru Tom Huseby on how “mobile is going towards the Internet,” instead of vice versa.)

Raiz, like most observers, is also interested to see how the Google-Motorola merger plays out. “We’re seeing a clash of the titans where companies that were very large in mobile, like Nokia and RIM, are getting displaced by Android and Apple and other companies like HP,” he says. Companies are “making their move and figuring out how to position themselves.”

Bringing it all back to what AppBlade can do, Raiz says: “It’s the right beginning of a story of how we understood the mobile ecosystem. We are able to build tools to help other people build applications.”

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San Diego’s life sciences community was teeming with news over the past week. We’ve got it all cultivated for you.

—Shares of San Diego’s Adventrx Pharmaceuticals (NYSE Amex: ANX) plunged by more than 55 percent after the biotech company said the FDA refused to approve its new lung-cancer drug vinorelbine injectable emulsion (Exelbine) until a key bio-equivalence trial is repeated. Adventrx CEO Brian Culley has said the company has enough capital to shift its focus to other drugs in its pipeline.

—Qualcomm’s (NASDAQ: QCOM) wireless health team hit the halfway mark today in an eight-week fitness challenge that has equipped 32 employees with wireless monitors and weight scales to help increase their activity and lose weight. I posted a Q&A with Qualcomm’s Don Jones, who also posted this update today on the Qualcomm blog. A Qualcomm spokesman tells me the 32 participants have burned a total of roughly 1.9 million calories and lost a total of 48.5 pounds.

—Pfizer added UC San Diego Health Sciences to its network of drug discovery innovation centers that includes prominent research institutions in Boston, New York, and San Francisco. UC San Diego Health Sciences’ partnership agreement with Pfizer could be worth as much as $50 million over the next five years.

—The La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology officially opened a new center today that is focused on RNA interference technology, and is intended to operate as a collaborative and open resource for the scientific community in San Diego and elsewhere. The RNAi Center was funded by a $12.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. If scientists make discoveries of potential clinical benefit, “the natural next step would be to seek partnering opportunities for clinical translation and potential drug development,” said Steve Wilson, the center’s executive director and chief technology officer.

—Former SKY MobileMedia CEO Naser Partovi introduced a year-old startup that provides outpatient management software called Wellaho. Partovi told me that Wellaho operates a HIPAA-compliant social media network around the chronically ill, and which is tailored to the needs of that patient. “You can’t just join Wellaho,” Partovi says. “It must be prescribed for you by your doctor.”

—San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN) and Japan’s Takeda Pharmaceuticals said they are halting further development of pramlintide/metreleptin for the treatment of obesity. Their program was in mid-stage development as a … Next Page »

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Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

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A local tech startup that has been toiling away for four years saw its first partnership with a big company come to fruition last week—and it could be a sign of bigger things to come.

Back in February, Cambridge, MA-based OfficeDrop, a digital filing software company, inked a deal with Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN), the speech and imaging tech firm in Burlington, MA. OfficeDrop provided the software and expertise for Nuance’s new cloud-based scanning and document-managing service, called PaperPort Anywhere, which rolled out last week.

It’s a big deal for OfficeDrop, which stands to get about $1 million in revenue from Nuance in the first year of the partnership, says Prasad Thammineni, the co-founder and CEO of OfficeDrop. Nuance’s scale could help the startup reach millions of new users—so it’s a distribution model that Thammineni is looking to replicate with other big companies in the next year or so.

OfficeDrop lets people (primarily in small businesses) organize, index, and share their digital data, and look at their documents instead of a list of files, for example. “We take visual elements of paper and replicate it,” Thammineni says. “And we bring search to the table.”

The startup sits somewhere in the middle of a swirling ecosystem of companies, many with Boston roots, offering cloud-based services like data storage (EMC), online backup (Carbonite, Backupify), paper digitizing and document management (Iron Mountain), personal file management and search (Evernote), and file hosting and sharing (Microsoft SharePoint, Box.net, and Dropbox, the astronomically-valued startup du jour).

OfficeDrop (formerly called Pixily) started in 2007 as a service to help people scan in and digitally organize their paper documents. It has evolved to include collaborative features and mobile apps, so people can scan documents and access their files from their iPhone, iPad, or Android device. The company has 20 employees, split about equally between the Boston area and Brazil, where most of its software developers are.

Interestingly, although the three founders are Indian, OfficeDrop has no employees in India. Thammineni says that’s because most software developers in India have a big-company mentality that doesn’t mesh well with a startup. Brazil, on the other hand, has a lot of “out of the box” talent that fits with the OfficeDrop culture. “They challenge you at every turn,” he says.

Thammineni’s company, his fifth so far, was self-funded in its early days. It raised a small financing round in 2009, followed by a $1 million angel round this spring—and it will be looking to raise more money this fall, he says. But for now, OfficeDrop’s main focus is on “making the product better and better,” Thammineni says. And on squaring away its next big-company deal.

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Pfizer has extended its chain of drug discovery innovation centers in Boston, New York, and San Francisco to include San Diego. UC San Diego Health Sciences says today it signed a partnership agreement with Pfizer that could be worth as much as $50 million in funding from the New York pharmaceutical giant over the next five years.

Pfizer established its Centers for Therapeutic Innovation (CTI) as part of a drive for more open, collaborative, and entrepreneurial-minded research, with the goal of dramatically slashing years from the time spent in drug development. The local CTI staff will include researchers from Pfizer, the UC San Diego School of Medicine, Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, and other UCSD scientists.

The partnership is intended to build on the expertise in translational medicine that UC San Diego boosted last year, when its Clinical and Translational Research Institute received a five-year, $37.2 million award from the National Center for Research Resources, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Under the partnership, Pfizer will open some of its antibody libraries and technologies to UC San Diego scientists. The pharmaceutical company also agreed to help support the pre-clinical and clinical development of sponsored programs. Pfizer grants intellectual property rights to its partners, who also are granted milestone payments and royalties based on how well drug candidates advance.

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Lexington, MA-based Imprivata, a security tech company focused on health IT applications, said today it has landed a multimillion-dollar deal with NHS Scotland to provide secure access technology to that country’s healthcare workers. No further financial details were given in the release, but another report puts the price at 1.8 million pounds (just under U.S. $3 million) over five years. The product will be delivered in partnership with Northgate Managed Services, an IT services firm. Imprivata, which is backed by a number of Boston venture firms, has developed a system that lets clinicians and other users sign on to their computer once, instead of needing multiple passwords for different applications, to do things like access health records. Xconomy first wrote about Imprivata’s single sign-on technology in 2007.

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