Joule Unlimited, a biofuels startup located in Bedford, MA, announced today that it has pocketed $70 million in financing to put toward a facility underway in Hobbs, NM, that will demonstrate Joule’s process for converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into fuels such as diesel and ethanol.

The new money brings Joule’s funding total to more than $110 million, and comes from founding Joule investor Flagship Ventures, as well as new and existing investors whose identities were not disclosed. Joule will also use the new funding for its technology development and global expansion, according to the announcement. In April 2010, Joule raised $30 million in second-round funding from Flagship and other institutional investors.

The Hobbs, NM, site is expected to be up and running later this year, and is designed to demonstrate how Joule’s technology could scale up to thousands of acres for commercial production. Joule now has 11 patents, covering technology such as  an engineered bacterium that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels from sunlight and carbon dioxide, and a method for producing ethanol at high volumes and high efficiencies.

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Microsoft’s “Android isn’t free” campaign continues to roll along, with the Redmond software behemoth today announcing a patent licensing deal with handset maker LG to cover Google’s mobile operating systems.

With this deal, Microsoft says it’s got licenses covering more than 70 percent of all U.S.-sold smartphones running Google’s Android operating system. The LG deal also covers the Chrome operating system, a web-based system for laptops.

Prices were not disclosed, as usual, but Wall Street analysts have pegged previous licensing deals at $5 per handset or perhaps more—which means that with Android’s massive market share, Microsoft is making more on Google’s mobile phones than its own, which have a sliver of the market.

It’s the 11th licensing deal covering Google OS products—previous licensees who have paid up to Microsoft include major manufacturers HTC, Samsung, and Acer. “We are proud of the continued success of our program in resolving the IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome OS,” Microsoft deputy general counsel Horacio Gutierrez says in a statement.

As has become typical with these deals, Microsoft executives are on Twitter boasting about the deal. VP and general counsel Brad Smith announced the deal this morning on his feed, and quickly followed up with this gem, somewhat bizarrely inspired by the Occupy protests against concentration of wealth:

Microsoft claiming it’s the 99 percent by getting a patent licensing fee? Somewhere, a protester’s head just exploded.

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[Editor's Note: We asked selected Xconomists a series of questions designed to zero in on the big issues of the year, including "What issues would you be willing to throw a punch over?"]

There are two.

The first is the state of the patent system, particularly as it affects computing hardware and software (broadly construed). Just about everything about the system is broken. In my view it is working strongly against real innovation. Major companies amass enormous portfolios of questionable patents that they can use to bludgeon one another (until they sign cross-licensing agreements, at which point only the little guys are left to be bludgeoned). Organizations that are not in the innovation business acquire portfolios that they assert for profit alone. I have absolutely nothing against the licensing of substantive innovations by those in the innovation business, whether by major companies or little guys . But much of what goes on today does not fall into this category, and something needs to change. I am not sufficiently expert to make appropriate detailed proposals, but I am sufficiently expert to smell a rat.

The second is our “blame the teachers and the teachers unions” approach to improving K-12 education. Yes, K-12 education is a mess, more of a mess in the U.S. than in most industrialized nations, and more of a mess in Washington than in almost all other technology states. (For some facts to support the latter assertion, see this.)

But blaming teachers and unions is a cheap way to avoid confronting the many real problems that plague our K-12 education system and are leading us rapidly down the road to an ever-more-stratified society of haves and have-nots, threatening the raw material upon which the innovation economy depends. Here, too, I don’t have an easy or quick solution—there isn’t one. But we are not going to make progress by sitting around playing the blame game.

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A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

Transgenic foods that are programmed and cultivated not so much to lower costs at the risk of ruining health and the environment, but the opposite—like a tomato that produces lots of Omega3 EFAs.

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

If I can only pick one, I’d patent a functional cure for diabetes—whether it’s an artificial pancreas, a treatment to spare beta cells, or a means to prevent insulin resistance. However it can be done, this is the largest unmet need out there, and therefore an opportunity to improve the lives of tens of millions of people worldwide. We all know the statistics, but it is an enormous threat to our country—chronic, expensive, and debilitating.

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

Broad claims covering delivery of therapeutics using engineered bacteria. Synthetic biology tools emerging in just the last few years have made this possible. The trick, of course, is precise control. If I could patent a sure-fire control technology enabling precise delivery of drugs and biologics through living organisms such as bacteria, I would quit my day job.

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

Two patents:

a. A low-cost holographic pad: an “hPad,” which would sit on your desk and project three-dimensional fixed and moving images. It would include a touchscreen-like functionality. This would not only have extraordinary commercial potential, but would provide very high utility for medical diagnoses, building and infrastructure visualization, energy management, and many other individual and societal benefits.

b. A low-cost photovoltaic coating material and application process for virtually any exposed surface, including road surfaces, which when combined with simple conductor fabric could provide low cost, low maintenance, embedded renewable energy generation infrastructure everywhere energy is used.

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[Editor's note: We asked a group of Xconomists to answer the following question: "If you could patent one thing, what would it be?"]

A DNA sequencing technology that results in full genome scans in less than 24 hours. This would enable real-time profiling of cancer patients, which would be of tremendous value in determining the best treatment approach for an individual patient as well as, their likely response to certain therapies.

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Some big acquisition news before the holidays here. Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), the Web delivery and networking giant, said today it is acquiring a competitor, Sunnyvale, CA-based Cotendo, for $268 million in cash. The deal, which has been rumored for the past month, is expected to close in the first half of 2012.

Akamai has been positioning itself as a provider of a secure software platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud. Cotendo competes with Akamai in the realm of accelerating Web and mobile applications. The California-based company started in 2008 and has about 100 employees, more than half of them based in Israel.

About a year ago, Akamai and MIT filed a lawsuit against Cotendo alleging patent infringement. Presumably that case is resolved now.

This is a relatively rare case of a Boston tech company acquiring a Silicon Valley company. Most of the other big deals this year have gone the other way (such as Oracle-Endeca, Google-ITA, eBay-Where, and HP-Vertica).

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[Corrected on 12/30/11, 1:25 p.m. See below.] Roughly 18 months after Menlo Park, CA-based TechShop announced it was partnering with Ford on a new location in metro Detroit, the communal, membership-based DIY maker space is ready to welcome the public next week at an open house on Dec. 27. [Paragraph has been updated to reflect the correct amount of time that has passed since TechShop announced it would open a Detroit location. We regret the error.]

“Detroit needs a place like this,” TechShop’s CEO Mark Hatch says. “That’s abundantly clear by the number of hacker spaces popping up, almost more than any other city. Detroit has an innate desire to do it yourself, not to mention thousands of engineers. It’s the right place at the right time.”

I arrived for my tour of the approximately $1.8 million Allen Park facility—about a 15 minute drive from downtown Detroit along I-94 West—and was greeted by a man wearing a t-shirt that said, “Trust Me—I’m An Engineer.” It was an appropriately lighthearted garment for a place that aims to give everyone from pre-teen hobbyists to garage-workshop inventors to seasoned engineers a pleasant, affordable space in which to bring their homegrown inventions to life.

And what a space it is. The long, slanted front desk was fabricated in the shop and is meant to inspire members by showing them how simply all the parts fit together. Walls are painted scarlet, teal, royal blue, and hot pink; natural light floods shop spaces that are a serious departure from typically dark and dank industrial facilities.

The atmosphere is bright and welcoming, and contains a tinkerer’s smorgasbord of machines, tools, and software: 3D printers, laser cutters, industrial-grade sewing and textile equipment, mills, lathes, saws, shopbots, an injection molder, a flow jet, a computer lab, a room for large projects that is big enough for a hovercraft, and even a “dirty room” for sandblasting. It even has an auditorium.

Anchoring the facility is a wireless-equipped open space with 4 x 8 work tables, each with access to power outlets, compressed air, and a vise. The various labs, organized by discipline, branch out from around this central hub. A common tool bin sits in the back of the room, and members can bring parts from home or purchase them in the small retail store that will eventually be located in the lobby area.

“We want people to have as few roadblocks as possible to getting into their creative … Next Page »

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LivingSocial will skip the IPO and get acquired. Hundreds of smaller daily deals startups will shut their doors. Groupon’s special product offerings will crash and burn.

Those are among predictions for 2012 from Seattle’s Tippr, a daily deals startup that focuses mainly on offering white-label services to publishers that want their own discount brands.

Headed by CEO Martin Tobias, Tippr has taken a pugnacious approach to its competition in the bubbly daily deals sector, unafraid to call out the big names or use its Paul Allen-sourced patent portfolio to wage court battles and takeovers. Not surprisingly, Tobias’s predictions for the year ahead in daily deals reinforce his own position—that standalone consumer brands are hard to build and unsustainable, and partnering with dedicated publishers is the place to be.

So apply that filter when assessing Tippr’s 2012 prognostications. But recall that, with the astronomic ascendance of Groupon (and the whole sector) in the past year or two, there’s going to be plenty to watch in the months ahead—and these guesses are probably as good as anyone’s, if not better:

• LivingSocial Will Be Purchased
In September, it was rumored that the No. 2 daily deals brand behind Groupon (NASDAQ: GRPN) would shelve its IPO ambitions amid a slack market and seek more private fundraising instead. Tippr’s Tobias says that pattern will hold, and LivingSocial—whose investors include Amazon.com—will tie up with “a major e-commerce player. By merging with a company backed by both a large Rolodex and bank account, LivingSocial will be poised to successfully leapfrog Groupon and render it a mere also-ran in the daily deals landscape,” Tippr says.

• 200 Groupon Clones Will Bite the Dust
Even after a wave of consolidation and continued battles for third place and beyond, Tippr says there are still more than 600 companies in the group-buying sector. That means consolidation will continue. Data from the industry aggregator Yipit pegs the number of failed deal sites this year at more than 170, and Tippr predicts that more than 200 will go down in flames in just the first half of 2012.

• Year of the White Label
Tippr shifted its primary focus to providing white-label services to online publishers earlier this year, and Tobias previously told us about his bullish bet on that approach—lower (or nearly zero) costs to acquire an audience being a big part of the calculation. So it’s no surprise that he thinks next year will be the prime time for providers chasing that model. Tippr says that in 2012, white-label providers could make up about 20 percent of the market.

• Branded Sites’ Futures: Instant Contextualized Deals
Also along the lines of the deals-as-a-service idea articulated above, Tippr says the big-name providers Groupon and LivingSocial will find profitability—but only after they start pairing their discounts with relevant content of other types, rather than building standalone commerce brands. Tobias says that Google, Facebook, and other big-audience players will come at this problem from the other end of the spectrum, adding deals in context with the content they already have.

• Lacking Loyalty, Groupon Goods Will Come to a Dreary Demise
Groupon’s foray into direct e-commerce, Groupon Goods, doesn’t have a very bright future in Tippr’s eyes. Tobias cites research from Forrester that suggests a plurality of customers would buy a given good at full price anyway—hinting that those shoppers aren’t loyal to the Groupon discount, but more to the product. “Merchants, lacking the customer acquisition required to justify the steep discounts, will opt out of the site’s partnerships,” Tobias predicts.

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A 48-percent uptick in new company formations, a funding deal, and two acquisitions made for an encouraging week in San Diego’s innovation economy. This is our roundup of tech sector news.

—The California Public Utilities Commission approved five power purchase agreements that Soitec, the photovoltaic chip maker based Bernin, France, negotiated with San Diego Gas and Electric. The five deals represent a total capacity of 155 megawatts of new solar power for San Diego, according to Soitec. As we explained in April, Soitec says its innovation, which combines concentrating Fresnel lenses and high-performance PV chips, operates twice as efficiently as conventional solar cells. Soitec plans to manufacture its solar modules in the San Diego area, creating about 450 new jobs. Building the solar facility will cost an estimated $500 million.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) acquired HaloIPT, a UK-based startup developing wireless charging technology for electric vehicles. Financial terms were not disclosed. The technology uses inductive power transfer to charge an electric vehicle (EV). The car parks over an electromagnet, which generates an electric field that transfers energy to the EV power system. A couple days after announcing the deal, Qualcomm said it’s planning to carry out a field trial in London that calls for establishing the wireless EV charging systems for 50 vehicles.

—Cubic (NYSE: CUB), the San Diego defense contractor, conducted a series of local exercises to demonstrate new “combat ID” technology, which is intended to reduce friendly fire casualties among U.S. troops in combat. The technology integrates laser targeting with radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs) and a GPS-based system in a rifle-mounted targeting scope, according to Cubic. The RFID tag, mounted on each soldier’s helmet, transits a coded radio signal that enables users to distinguish between friend and foe combatants.

—The San Diego-based Active Network (NYSE: ACTV) paid $21.5 million to acquire RTP (also known as Resort Technology Partners), a specialized IT company in Colorado that provides online reservation and registration services for Vail and other ski resorts. The Active Network already provides Web-based registration services for … Next Page »

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A comprehensive snapshot of San Diego’s innovation economy shows that 76 technology startups were formed during the three months that ended June 30, a nearly 20 percent increase over the 64 startups established during the same quarter last year.

Counting the 70 new tech companies formed during the first quarter, a total of 146 startups sprouted here during the first half of 2011, according to the latest Connect Innovation Report, which covers innovation activity in the San Diego area during the second quarter of 2011. The full report is available here.

Connect’s innovation report also highlights rising tech employment, a three-fold increase in the total value of M&A deals involving tech companies, and a historic high for patent applications. The report was prepared by Connect, the nonprofit group supporting San Diego innovation and entrepreneurship.

Taken as a whole, the indicators suggest that economic activity was improving for thousands of local life sciences, technology, and defense companies during the first half of 2011. For example, the 146 new companies founded during the first six months of 2011 marked a nearly 48 percent jump over the 99 new companies formed during the first half of 2010.

But the encouraging vital signs measured in the report were taken before this summer, when U.S. markets were unsettled by a variety of political and economic setbacks, both foreign and domestic.

Those broader economic concerns could have been a factor in a nationwide survey of CEO confidence conducted during the third quarter by Vistage International. The survey, which Connect included in its full report, found that small-business CEOs anticipate a slowdown in the pace of economic growth amid record-high economic uncertainty. Generally speaking, that means small companies are more cautious about making investments and slower to hire new workers. The September survey of 1,710 small business CEOs resulted in … Next Page »

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Updated 10:45 am Pacific
After Groupon’s season of woe, a truckload of me-too disappearing acts, and last week’s mass-layoff meltdown at third-place competitor BuyWithMe, it sure isn’t looking like a very bullish time to be operating a daily deals startup.

Martin Tobias would disagree. The Seattle entrepreneur, who been through some notable ups and downs in digital and cleantech ventures over the years, still sees a huge upside in the group-buying dynamic that daily deals services have unleashed. He’s chasing that opportunity with Tippr, a roughly 90-person startup headquartered in Seattle’s University District. [Changed headcount number from 120 to about 90---Tippr halved the number of people working in its marketplace division after this interview.]

The trick, Tobias says, is aiming at the white-label side of the market—providing deals services to other publishers, rather than trying to build a standalone consumer brand, as market leaders Groupon and Living Social have done. Cut out the huge marketing and sales expenses, spread the technology and other costs across a pool of customers, and blammo—you’ve potentially got yourself a pretty nice business.

Tippr CEO Martin Tobias

It also doesn’t hurt to be armed with a trove of patents. Tippr’s were acquired from former Paul Allen company Mercata, and Tobias has not been shy about using the portfolio, employing it in a licensing program, using it to gain at least one acquisition, and more recently opening up a broad federal patent lawsuit that, as we reported last month, has now been quietly settled.

Interestingly, Tippr has thus far gone after other middle-tier or small group-buying companies in the courts, but not market leaders Groupon or Living Social—when asked about that in our interview, Tobias declined to comment.

Tippr is backed by $9 million in venture financing, led by New York-based RRE Ventures (Vulcan Capital also acquired a stake in parent company Kashless in the patent deal). The startup debuted in February 2010, but by that November had announced the white-label provider service that is now the company’s major focus.

That software platform, called PoweredbyTippr, runs daily-deals offerings for other website publishers around the country. A prominent example is Yollar, the daily-deals offering from TV station owner Belo (NYSE: BLC). Tippr provides the technology back-end for the Yollar service, but the local TV stations keep their own branding on the group discounts that are offered to subscribers.

That strategy appears to be paying off. Tobias wouldn’t talk revenue specifics, of course, but left plenty of bread crumbs that point toward a possible multi-million-dollar revenue stream for the startup.

The overall daily deals sector in North America is pegged at $2 billion-$3 billion by such observers as research firm BIA/Kelsey and daily deals aggregator and data provider Yipit.

Yipit also estimates that white-label operators only make up about 10 percent of the daily deals market right now. But white-label providers should have success “working with media companies as a way to monetize existing subscriber bases rather than having to build entire bases from scratch, which is the plight of most smaller daily deal sites,” said Unaiz Kabani, a Yipit data analyst.

Tobias pegs the white-label slice at 5-10 percent of the overall market. And he says Tippr’s the leader of that white-label subsector, with about 35 percent market share. That leads me to a back-of-the-envelope figure of maybe $44 million-$88 million in possible annual revenue.

Tobias says Tippr’s annual revenue growth is “comparable to a Groupon. We are growing at hundreds of percent year over year.”

“Our numbers aren’t the size that they are. But if you actually look at our quarterly growth rate versus the first couple quarters of Groupon, we’re growing faster than they did when they came out,” Tobias says. “I haven’t raised a lot of money and I’ve got 120 guys, so do the math. I’m doing OK. I’ve raised $9 million. Groupon’s raised a billion and a half.”

Continuing that growth, of course, depends on more publishers jumping on the daily deals bandwagon with gusto. That’s a potentially dicey proposition, since a lot of … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures is stepping up its position in the mobile patent wars, suing Motorola Mobility in federal court today for allegedly infringing on a range of patents covering hardware and software.

Irony alert: Google, which is in the middle of acquiring Motorola Mobility for about $12.5 billion, has been listed in previous court filings as an investor in Intellectual Ventures, possibly through a licensing agreement. Motorola’s own patents were a major reason behind the acquisition—they were touted specifically by Google CEO Larry Page in this August blog post.

Patent expert and blogger Florian Mueller writes that, even though Google’s financial stake is in an IV subsidiary fund that’s not involved in the new Motorola suit, the development amounts to an “own goal” on Google’s part. (He’s also got some critical analysis of Google’s willingness to defend the Android ecosystem).

In a blog post announcing the lawsuit, Intellectual Ventures lawyer Melissa Finocchio writes that IV has “a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license.”

“Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business,” Finocchio writes.

As Ina Fried at AllThingsD points out at the end of this post, this suit just adds to the long list of patent claims being tossed around between technology heavyweights, including Apple, Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft. One thing of note, however: I wouldn’t say this really constitutes Intellectual Ventures “joining” the mobile patent wars, since it already has publicly cut licensing deals with both Samsung and HTC, among others.

Intellectual Ventures was co-founded and is led by Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. The court filing says Intellectual Ventures has “a portfolio of more than 35,000 assets,” with more than 3,000 patents or applications the result of the firm’s in-house invention lab or its network of contract inventors.

Intellectual Ventures also reiterates that it has earned more than $2 billion so far from licensing patents, and has paid more than $400 million to “individual inventors.”

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It’s been a wild few months for companies peddling daily deals. As market leader Groupon faces criticism for its accounting and turmoil in its executive ranks, bigger competitors continue to expand or kill their efforts, while smaller fish get gobbled up in a spree of consolidation.

If that’s not enough churn, you can also add some pretty hefty lawsuit filings.

Over the past several months, the parent company of Seattle-based Tippr added defendants to a federal patent-infringement lawsuit, eventually targeting a total of 14 other daily deals companies. The roster of defendants included reasonably well-known players like BuyWithMe, DealOn, and HomeRun, along with a clutch of smaller companies like Click-N-Shout and Deal Co-Op—but not the biggest players, Groupon and LivingSocial.

The case file is crowded with claims, motions, accusations, and denials—the kind of paperwork warfare that can earn intellectual property lawyers a pretty good living. Some of the defendants struck back, countersuing Tippr’s parent company, Kashless.

But now, suddenly, the fight is over. As of Sept. 15, every last defendant has settled with Kashless or been dismissed—in fact, the federal judge signed seven of the dismissal orders on one day.

The idea of some IP lawsuits from Kashless/Tippr isn’t really shocking. Martin Tobias, the entrepreneur behind Tippr, has been pretty outspoken about his patent holdings and their usefulness as a lever in the current Wild West era of daily deals offerings.

When he acquired a trove of related patents from the former Paul Allen company Mercata in 2010, Tobias told us that he’d just picked up “the pocket aces of IP in group collective buying.” He later said that “Tippr has the most extensive and deep patent portfolio in group buying.” And when Tippr acquired Austin, TX-based FanForce, Tobias said the deal was driven by the fact that “They realized what they were doing was covered by my patents.”

The sheer scale of this lawsuit is pretty interesting, however. When we originally reported on the lawsuit (and a related local case) in February, the patent claims only targeted BuyWithMe and DealOn. Why such a flurry of lawsuits through the daily deals chain? Even though the cases are now all settled, I couldn’t get any of the other companies involved to comment on the record (some were not even reachable).

Via email, Tobias confirms that his company “reached agreement” with all the defendants. Asked if that meant Tippr/Kashless had cut patent licensing deals with them, Tobias says, “I don’t want to say licensing agreements. The correct term is ‘settlement agreements.’ We are not disclosing the details of any of the settlement agreements. Tippr is extremely happy with the outcome of these settlement agreements.”

In my spelunking of the court files, I found just one reference to a licensing agreement (I could have missed something, since there are nearly 190 separate filings). It’s in this proposed dismissal motion, which says Kashless and Demand Chain (parent of Homerun) have “a settlement and license agreement … executed July 26, 2011, the terms of which shall remain confidential.”

One source with knowledge of the lawsuit, who insisted on anonymity, said Kashless had been trying to get many defendants to sign a licensing agreement to settle the cases—one that would take 4 percent of gross revenues. “That’s like the profit margin in this business,” the source said.

“But they probably got someone to. That’s what they were trying to pressure everyone into,” the source said. “A lot of these guys that he had on there were pretty small … People are going out of business like crazy.”

That’s not to say there’s no money left in the sector. Two days before the final Tippr/Kashless settlements were signed, research firm BIA/Kelsey bumped up its growth forecast for daily deals, instant deals, and flash sales, saying the market “will grow from $873 million in 2010 to $4.2 billion in 2015.”

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San Diego life sciences research and development, the engine that drives innovation, got some new digs at Isis Pharmaceuticals, and J. Craig Venter started the digging for the construction of a new genomics research headquarters. But we didn’t have to go digging for news; our roundup begins now.

—After meeting with federal regulators, San Diego’s Orexigen Therapeutics (NASDAQ: OREX) said it is restarting work on its experimental diet pill, a combination of naltrexone and bupriopion (Contrave), after declaring in June that it was suspending development of the drug. Orexigen shelved the program after the FDA said the company still needed to conduct a costly, long-term clinical study of more than 60,000 patients to demonstrate that the proposed diet pill wouldn’t increase the risk of heart attack or stroke. Orexigen found a way to move forward, however, by proposing a two-year cardiovascular study that would enroll 10,000 patients. Orexigen said the FDA’s feedback was “reasonable and feasible.”

—San Diego-based Independa, a wireless health startup developing technology to help seniors live independently, raised $1.6 million in an early stage financing round involving Miramar Venture Partners and City Hill Ventures, with an additional $200,000 loan from Silicon Valley Bank. Independa plans to spend the money on development of its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) technology and to expand its marketing and distribution.

—NuVasive (NUVA: NUVA), the San Diego medical device company developing new surgical products and techniques for repairing the spine, said it gave more than it got in a continuing patent dispute with Medtronic. While a formal judgment has not yet been entered, a jury reviewing four of the nine contested patents determined that Medtronic should pay NuVasive $660,000 plus interest for infringing on a NuVasive patent. The jury also found that NuVasive should pay Medtronic $101 million plus interest for infringing three Medtronic patents.

—San Diego scientist J. Craig Venter and local dignitaries attended a ceremony Tuesday as construction began on a new $35 million building to house the West Coast headquarters for the J. Craig Venter Institute (JCVI). It’s going in near the Salk Institute and the new Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine. A JCVI spokeswoman said the 45,000-square-foot building will be support 125 scientists and staff in a state-of-the-art, carbon-neutral building on the UC San Diego campus. The work will be focused on genomic research, including human genomic sequencing and analysis, synthetic genomics, and environmental genomics.

—Carlsbad, CA-based Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS) has completed the consolidation of three R&D facilities into a single corporate and research facility. An Isis spokeswoman said the company’s 320 employees continue to be focused on research and drug development, with technology that enables the company to move three to five new drugs into its pipeline every year. The cholesterol-reducing drug mipomersen is the company’s most advanced drug.

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It looked like so much fun, they just had to join. Sprint is an unabashed fan of the U.S. Justice Department‘s lawsuit to block the AT&T and T-Mobile merger, and has now jumped into the fray itself with a separate antitrust lawsuit that expands on the DOJ’s arguments.

Interestingly, Sprint (NYSE: S) reportedly wanted to buy T-Mobile before it was cool. But, like the feds, Sprint sees eliminating the fourth-place carrier as a death knell for competitiveness in the red-hot mobile sector. My big question: What becomes of T-Mo if this merger is indeed blocked? Deutsche Telekom clearly doesn’t want the property, but could it survive untethered?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is working on its own tablet computer. Yeah, it’s been a rowdy few months for leaks and rumors surrounding such a device, so I used the aggregation and curation tool Storify to keep a running list detailing the trail of information.

Gamification is one of those next-wave tech trends that gets a lot of eye-rolling for each bit of promising news. Here’s something that makes it look like this emerging trend is acting more grown up: Seattle’s BigDoor Media acquired OneTrueFan, a 500 Startups company based in the San Francisco area. The OneTrueFan gang is now BigDoor’s Silicon Valley branch, working on expanding their footprint in helping website publishers keep readers clicking along by offering all kinds of rewards for their activity.

The crew at Seattle TechStars alum Giant Thinkwell is taking its creative and technical talents into a new environment: the “Live Web.” The startup, best known for its Facebook-based game promoting Seattle hip-hop icon Sir Mix-A-Lot, found that very few fans actually wanted to jump in and play the new game. So Giant Thinkwell took a page from one of its biggest promotional successes and assembled FlickMob, a new social YouTube-based video sharing site that mimics the experience of Turntable.fm‘s music rooms.

Robert Nelsen, co-founder and managing director of ARCH Venture Partners, says a patent reform bill making its way through Congress is a loser for American innovators and a win for big-business lobbyists. “The bill was conceived to solve the problem of truly frivolous lawsuits in the technology and banking industries,” Nelsen writes. “That problem was solved in five minutes, and then the big companies got ahold of the bill and added all their bells and whistles and it passed based on sheer inertia.”

Dan Shapiro, who recently joined Google through its acquisition of Sparkbuy, has some sage advice for entrepreneurs: If you’re looking for investors, make sure to use your network right. The easiest way to screw up your fundraising dreams, Shapiro writes, is to just lazily cast about for introductions to investors. “It’s sort of like when, on the second day of school, a goofy freshman asked me if I could introduce him to any girls.”

Seattle’s Livemocha has remade its business model in recent months, going after big-fish customers in business and government who want to leverage the company’s web-based in-person language-learning tools for their employees. That kind of scale also didn’t hurt when a big Brazilian company, Abril Educacao, came calling about a partnership in the up-and-coming nation. Abril wound up investing in Livemocha, and CEO Michael Schutzler is bullish about the prospects for future countries and partners.

Finally, a couple of personnel moves of note: BigFish Games has added former Amazon VP David Stephenson as its new CFO, and Kal Raman has resigned as CEO of the GlobalScholar unit of Scantron.

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American innovation lost big again as the U.S. Senate passed “patent reform” and caved to big business lobbyists at the expense of true innovators in small companies and universities. Bottom line: America has dominated innovation in the world for 100 years based on our patent system and protection of risk-takers. Innovation is the one thing we still dominate in the world economy. It is our job engine. The first rule of governing should apply here: If it aint broke don’t “fix” it.

The sponsors, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, worked extremely hard and were well-meaning, but the big lobbyists hijacked the process. The bill was conceived to solve the problem of truly frivolous lawsuits in the technology and banking industries. That problem was solved in five minutes, and then the big companies got ahold of the Bill and added all their bells and whistles and it passed based on sheer inertia. Few in Congress like this law, but they went along because big companies have more power than true innovators. Many will cheer it just to suck up to their representatives. Not me. Few, like Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state, had the courage to call the bill what it is and that it “tramples the rights of small inventors.”

We gave some real competitive advantage to Europe and China with our “first-to-file” from first to invent. Now big companies and foreign firms with fleets of patent lawyers can “scoop” university professors and independent inventors by filing first. Our national investment in research and development has been devalued.

A lot of the reform was driven by the fat and happy tech companies like Intel, Cisco, Google and large New York banks. I call them the “infringers lobby” because their overt goal is to use their market power to steal other’s ideas without paying. That is what this bill does with its business methods section and also the new “post grant review” provisions.

These poor companies, most with market caps over $100 billion, whine loudly about how they are being harassed by the little guy. Never a larger load of horse manure have I heard in my 25 years of starting companies. They have forgotten their roots as venture capital-funded companies who relied on patents to get their funding in the first place. Now that they are less innovative, bloated bureaucracies, they want to repress the innovations of the little guy.

These technology companies and big pharmaceutical companies and others will use the new post-grant review clause to slow the patent process down, and to bleed small companies dry. It happens now, and will be much worse in the future, by big companies filing objections to the true innovations over and over, drying up small inventors’ ability to raise capital.

We have inadvertently put another nail in the coffin of American competitiveness. Our future, and the only way we can compete with China, is our unique ability to invent. It is the core American ideal. We can find our way out of any problem, and the little guy, be he Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Steve Jobs, Jonas Salk, or Gordon Moore, can dream big and invent new industries. All protected in their infancy by a strong patent system.

Not a single job will be created by this bill. Just happy smiles from big oil, big tech, and big pharma, lawyers and lobbyists, and with downright glee in China and the EU.

The most alarming fact is this law is just part of an even larger assault on innovation in the USA. Everywhere you turn, there is less capital available, higher taxes proposed on small business investors, more regulations on IPO companies and investors, an FDA gone wild, and crazy immigration and border policies that drive the best and brightest from our shores. The talk in Washington seems to be all about innovation saving us, and the policies seem to be all about killing it.

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