Yesterday’s annual open house at Intel Labs Seattle, near the UW campus, did not disappoint. I got a whirlwind tour from incoming lab director Dieter Fox (who also talked with me about Intel and the future of robotics). In attendance were some prominent members of the Intel brass like chief technology officer Justin Rattner, and vice president of Intel Labs Andrew Chien. Vice presidents mixed with professors, researchers, students, and members of the tech startup community. (Among the luminaries I spotted were Matt O’Donnell, dean of UW’s college of engineering, Janis Machala from UW TechTransfer and Paladin Partners, and Matt McIlwain from Madrona Venture Group.)

There has been a lot of progress at Intel Labs since last year’s open house. Here’s a quick tour of the most interesting projects I saw, arranged by the type of technology:

—One of the main themes of the lab is everyday sensing and perception. That encompasses everything from smart sensors in the home that figure out what you’re doing in the kitchen to wearable cameras that help inform you about the world around you. Jeff Hightower, a researcher at the lab who did his Ph.D. at UW, showed me a demo of a project called “Personal 3D audio cursor” which involves a wearable camera, compass, gyroscope, and computer that senses where you are, who you’re with, and what you’re doing. The device then speaks to you over earbud headphones to identify the people around you using face recognition—and the sound appears to come from the direction of the person it is identifying.

It’s just an example of what can be done to enhance your information about the world around you. The real innovation, Hightower says, lies in the “online learning aspect” of the face recognition algorithm. You feed the computer three example photos of a person under different lighting conditions, and the software learns to recognize their face. Hightower says they are starting with photo albums to train the computer, and want to try things like people’s LinkedIn contacts as training examples. (Which makes me think of Learn That Name, the iPhone app for helping people recognize their LinkedIn contacts in the real world.) Hightower says this type of face recognition software will “absolutely be ready for prime time” in five years.

—Just across the room, UW Ph.D. Student Shaun Kane was giving a popular demo on “Bonfire,” a new kind of computing interface for extending your workspace from your laptop to your tabletop (see photo left). Using a camera pointed at the area around his laptop and virtual buttons projected onto the tabletop, Kane showed he could press the virtual buttons to do things like scroll through applications on his laptop. The camera tracked his hand movements and also captured an image of a business card placed on the table, which could be stored for reference. The software can potentially do things like make your laptop aware of all papers and objects on your desk; then the computer might do helpful things like turn off music when you take your headphones off and put them on the desk. This was the first time the project has been shown to the public; Kane will be presenting it at a research conference next week (UIST 2009 in Victoria, BC). The big-picture goal, he said, is to “make interacting with laptops richer, more involved, and smarter.”

—One of the big crowd pleasers was a mobile robot that could plug itself into a wall socket to charge up (see photo below). Software engineer Louis LeGrand, a UW alum, showed me how it works. The robot starts with an internal map of the lab space, so it knows where the electrical outlets are. It uses a range finder to get close to the wall, in the vicinity of the outlet. Then it uses an electric field sensor (not vision) to find the right electrical signature for the outlet—so essentially it senses the electricity in the wall. After about a minute of slow-moving adjustments, it plugs itself in. “We expect in the not-too-distant future, there will be a huge new market for robots—and Intel processors,” LeGrand says.

Next door, Dieter Fox showed me some interesting work on robotic manipulation of an object (like an apple or a bottle of water) using a robot hand and computer vision. Using a camera system, the computer figures out a physical model of what the robot is picking up. This way, Fox says, a robot can learn about the world around it the way a person would, by handling objects and looking at them. It’s a longstanding challenge in robotics, and quite a burgeoning area of research.

—Another theme of the lab is wireless power—everything from being able to charge your mobile device without plugging it in, to antennas and radio frequency identification (RFID) chips powered by the sun. Researcher Emily Cooper, who did her Ph.D. at MIT, gave me an update on the magnetic resonance project for charging devices like a laptop or a phone through the air (we saw it last year). The device now sends both radio signals and power in the same transmission, which could help you find power for your particular mobile device over a range of about one meter.

Lastly, outgoing lab director David Wetherall showed me “WISP” (Wireless Identification and Sensing Platform, see photo left), a type of enhanced RFID tag that contains sensors and a microcontroller and gets its power from an ultrahigh-frequency RFID reader. The device can also use solar cells to harvest more power. The lab is working with academic collaborators who use the WISP for everything from gaming applications to undersea neutrino detection.

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Tadayoshi Kohno spends his career looking at life through the eyes of a criminal, and he’s teaching University of Washington students to do the same. The UW computer science and engineering assistant professor studies computer security and privacy, which to Kohno means anticipating the bad guy’s moves before he does. I chatted with him recently to find out more about the “security mindset,” how you teach it, and what this mysterious bad guy could do using ingenious technology hacks.

“We’re seeing computers in all aspects of our lives, in medical devices, exercise equipment, cars, airplanes, utility systems, power lines, everywhere,” Kohno said. “One of my main concerns is that while we’ve thought a lot about security for our desktop computers, computing is much broader than that, and we need to address security for all of it.”

Kohno’s interest in security goes back to his teenage years, when as a 10th grader he won the Colorado History Day competition with an essay about the history of cryptography. During his doctoral work, Kohno revealed security flaws in the software of electronic voting machines. The machines, which were rising in popularity following the 2000 presidential election, could easily be hacked to manipulate votes or reveal people’s voting choices, Kohno said.

Since then, he and his graduate students at the UW have pointed out security holes in technologies such as implantable cardiac defibrillators, pacemakers, radio frequency identification tags (which are used, among other places, on many credit cards and Washington state’s new enhanced driver licenses), and the Nike + iPod sport kit (the workout tracker that fits inside running shoes). His group has also recently developed software that causes messages or data to self-destruct after a set period of time. The program, Vanish, is one step towards a security answer to the problem of putting all your information into the “cloud” of sites such as Facebook or Google, Kohno said, where it might be backed up and never fully deleted.

I found his group’s revelations about implantable medical devices especially chilling. Right now, devices such as cardiac defibrillators signal wirelessly only over short distances, to allow doctors to adjust them without surgery. But in the future, Kohno said, he can see technology advancing to the point where those wireless signals have a longer range, and that’s where the real danger to the patient comes in. Beyond just gleaning a patient’s medical and other personal information, a defibrillator hacker could send signals to shut off the device or send electric shocks to the patient’s heart. In 2008, Kohno’s group managed to perform these potentially fatal hacks on a real defibrillator (not in a person).

“This is a wake-up call for the industry and the FDA that these are serious issues, or could become serious in the future,” Kohno said. “I believe that providing the first concrete evidence is the first step toward having a broader impact.”

To figure out which piece of technology he’s going to hack into next, Kohno asks what the next big thing in technology is going to be over the next five to 10 years, that people might not have examined for security gaps. Then he tries to think of every damaging thing a devious person could do with that technology, if they hacked into it. “I think I have always liked to play the game of looking for holes in the system,” Kohno said, when I asked him how he first got interested in security.

Kohno, who is kicking off the Technology’s Alliance’s Science and Technology Discovery Series with a lecture this morning, also teaches undergraduate and graduate classes on computer security at UW, and is planning a security lecture or event for middle school and high school students sometime in the next year. Even though most of his students won’t go on to become security professionals, Kohno sees his courses on the “security mindset,” or how to think one step ahead of the hackers, as valuable for the computer industry, so that those working on new technologies will know when to call in the experts. “I want students have the habit of saying ‘what if’ when they see a new system,” he said. “The gritty details are much less important than having the mentality of asking, ‘What if something bad happens?’”

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It was a crazy busy week for deals in the Northwest. Just when we thought the flow might slow down before the end of summer, we saw tons of activity in software, Internet, mobile, gaming, and materials.

—Bellevue, WA-based Apptio, the IT cost management startup led by CEO Sunny Gupta, raised $14 million in Series B funding from Madrona Venture Group, Greylock Partners, Shasta Ventures, and the Andreessen Horowitz Fund. The money will allow Apptio to aggressively expand its sales and product development. Gupta also had some telling things to say about his company’s culture.

—Seattle-based Impinj has teamed up with Coca-Cola to provide radio frequency identification tags and readers for the soda giant’s new Freestyle drink dispensers. Financial terms were not given. The Impinj technology will allow Coke to track and monitor its dispenser operations and customer preferences in real time.

—Hillsboro, OR-based AISI, maker of a testing system for semiconductor memory manufacturing, closed a Series B financing round worth $11 million, as Eric reported. Investors in this round included OVP Venture Partners, TL Ventures, and Intel Capital.

—Seattle and San Francisco-based Jambool raised $5 million in venture funding, led by Madrona Venture Group. Bay Partners also participated in the financing round. Jambool has developed a micropayments and virtual currency system for social online games.

—Vancouver, WA-based ClearAccess raised about $6 million in Series B funding from Blade Ventures, Buerk Dale Victor, and DFJ Frontier, as Eric reported. ClearAccess provides data services and broadband device management for Internet service providers.

—Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $14 million Series B financing round for Boston-based Novomer, a green materials startup, as Wade reported. Physic Venture Partners, Flagship Venture Partners, and DSM Venturing also participated in the round.

—Seattle-based iLike is rumored to be bought by MySpace for some $20 million, as Eric reported. The deal could close by the end of this week. Founded in 2002, iLike is an Internet music company that helps people find new music and concerts and create playlists.

—Seattle-based NewPath Networks, a provider of wireless carrier network technologies, announced a new $10 million line of credit from Square 1 Bank. Back in April, NewPath raised $30 million from New York-based Charterhouse Group and Denver-based Meritage Funds. NewPath designs and operates antenna systems for wireless networks.

—Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), a Bothell, WA-based developer of antibody drugs for cancer, raised $136 million in a stock sale, as Luke reported. JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs led the offering. Seattle Genetics is six months ahead of schedule in a pivotal study of its experimental drug for Hodgkin’s disease.

—Seattle-based Z2Live, a mobile social games startup, has raised $3 million from Madrona Venture Group, according to a report in TechCrunch. Z2Live has developed a free, multiplayer platform for social and casual games on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) announced an alliance that will create adaptations of Microsoft programs, like Office, for Nokia smartphones. Financial terms weren’t given, but the two companies will jointly market the products they create together. Nokia’s Symbian mobile operating system has been a major competitor to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform.

—Lastly, we provided some more in-depth analysis of Microsoft’s sale of Seattle-based Razorfish to Publicis for $530 million, from Cascadia Capital’s Warren Gouk, an expert on mergers and Internet strategy. Gouk said Microsoft stands to gain a lot if the deal drives its search and display advertising business, while Razorfish could expand its international market.

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Seattle-based Impinj, the radio frequency identification (RFID) company, said today it has formed a partnership with Coca-Cola to provide RFID tags and readers for Coke’s new Freestyle drink dispensers. This contraption will give customers a choice of more than 100 flavors of sodas and other drinks, and will track and monitor dispenser operations, as well as customer preferences and other business analytics, in real time. Coke is testing the machines in California, Utah, and Georgia. (Bellevue, WA-based Bsquare is also collaborating with Coke on the Freestyle dispenser, serving as the lead systems integrator.)

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Needham, MA-based Scenic Technology has raised $1.4 million in new funding out of a planned $2.1 equity round, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company makes Microsoft .NET-based software for tracking barcodes and RFID tags on items moving through warehouses.

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Reva Systems, a Chelmsford, MA-based provider of RFID infrastructure software, says it has raised $5 million from previous investors and named Bruce Berger its new CEO. Berger is a former chief executive of North Grafton, MA, optical fiber provider Verrillon, and he takes over for acting Reva Systems CEO Ashley Stephenson. Stephenson will remain chairman of Reva Systems, which he co-founded in 2004, company spokeswoman Pamela Nelson says. The financing was led by previous backers North Bridge Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures, both of which have offices in Waltham, MA.

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In the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen further bloodletting in terms of area tech-company layoffs and closures. It really is brutal out there. Here is a quick recap:

—Exide Technologies (NASDAQ: XIDE), a maker of batteries and energy storage devices in Alpharetta, GA, closed its facility in Sumner, WA, and laid off 43 workers earlier this week. The staff cuts were effective immediately.

—Bellevue, WA-based travel site Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) laid off an undisclosed number of workers about two weeks ago. The latest staff cuts came on the heels of another layoff (numbers also not disclosed) at the company in February.

—Seattle-based Impinj, the maker of novel radio frequency identification technologies, laid off 23 workers (or about 18 percent of its staff of 130) two weeks ago. Xconomy profiled the company’s strategy in February.

—Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA), the software and networking giant, laid off 24 employees in Bellevue, WA, earlier this week. The staff cuts are effective May 30.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is laying off two employees at its Seattle facility near the International District, effective June 30, according to the Washington State Employment Security Department.

—Microsoft is also shutting down MSN Encarta, its online encyclopedia site, as of October 31, 2009. The move is viewed as a response to the changing nature of reference materials and information access, thanks to competing sites like Wikipedia.

—Seattle-based Trusera, the online community healthcare startup founded by ex-Amazon exec Keith Schorsch, said it may close at the end of April unless it can raise more funding in a hurry. Trusera began in early 2007, raised $2 million in angel funding that summer, and rolled out its public site in June 2008.

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What’s the most exciting company in Seattle? I recently put the question to Patrick Ennis, the global head of technology for Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, and his answer surprised me: Impinj. The firm in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood has been around since 2000, and is well-known for its focus on radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies—not exactly the sexiest field in an era of Web 2.0, mobile software, and alternative energy startups.

But dig a little deeper, and the story of Impinj will grab you. Like most successful companies, Impinj has been forced to change its strategy at crucial moments. It has had to navigate tricky technology standards—eventually winning out in a major fight between standards bodies—and adapt to major challenges in the marketplace. Through it all, it has amassed an impressive network of customers, partners, and investors—to the tune of $110 million in funding from the likes of Arch Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, Polaris Venture Partners, and Mobius Venture Capital.

So how is it doing now? After Ennis mentioned Impinj—he led an investment in the firm back when he was a managing director at Arch—I was eager to hear its story, and why its technology and business model are still so promising. I recently had a chance to visit with Impinj’s CEO, William Colleran, and Evan Fein, vice president of finance and administration. What they told me amounted to quite a compelling case study of how to navigate a nascent market.

Impinj was founded in 2000 by a University of Washington professor of computer science and engineering, Chris Diorio, who was a student of microelectronics pioneer Carver Mead at Caltech. Diorio serves as Impinj’s chairman and chief technology officer. “He’s a fantastic professor and entrepreneur,” Ennis says. “Usually, professors just want to be professors. When you do find an entrepreneur professor, it’s heaven. The world needs more people like that.”

As Fein relates, Impinj originally focused on hardware for cell phones and base stations. Diorio had developed a technology called “self-adaptive silicon” that allowed an electronic circuit on a chip to adapt its characteristics after being fabricated. The company released a cellular product in 2001—right as the telecom industry was melting down. “We decided, ‘This isn’t going to work,’” says Fein, who was employee No. 8.

So the search was on for broader applications of integrated circuit technology. In late 2003, Impinj settled on RFID as its new focus, over other promising candidates like ultrasound and GPS. The idea of cheap, tiny chips that could be used to “tag” any product or shipment and improve companies’ supply-chain management was getting a lot of play in commercial circles. What Impinj brought to the table was a …Next Page »

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2009 is barely a week old, and already the Washington and Oregon tech industries have seen massive new layoffs in the struggling economy. A quick recap of the latest bloodletting (see the updated Xconomy Seattle layoff litany here):

—Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) cut 120 jobs at its plant in Liberty Lake, WA. The Santa Clara, CA-based maker of instruments for electronics and life sciences companies has nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. The layoffs are effective January 30.

—Seattle-based software firm Attachmate has laid off 120 employees, or 10 percent of its staff, as reported by TechFlash. It is not clear yet how many jobs are being cut in Seattle. Attachmate is a Seattle-area icon that helps businesses manage and deliver IT services. It has some 65,000 customers, according to its website.

—Intermec (NYSE: IN), an Everett, WA-based maker of technologies for radio frequency identification and mobile computing, has laid off 7 percent of its global workforce, or about 150 people. The cuts are mostly in sales, general, and administrative areas.

—ON Semiconductor (NASDAQ: ONNN), which operates a 500-person chip manufacturing plant in Gresham, OR, is laying off 10 percent of its worldwide staff, or about 1,500 jobs. The Phoenix, AZ-based company is reportedly closing its Oregon plant for at least four weeks in the first half of this year.

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Everett, WA-based Intermec (NYSE: IN), a maker of radio frequency identification and mobile computing technologies, announced today it is reducing its global workforce by 7 percent, or about 150 full-time positions. The layoffs will be mostly in sales, general, and administrative areas, and are expected to save the company $14 million to $16 million a year. Intermec CEO Patrick Byrne cited economic conditions and uncertainties as reasons for the restructuring.

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Awarepoint says it has raised $13.3 million in a Series D round of financing from a trio of private equity investors—who are betting hospitals will continue to invest in RFID systems to track assets and limit spending on medical equipment.

San Diego-based Awarepoint provides software and hardware for real-time location systems (RTLS) in hospitals, factories, and other commercial settings. The company says its fourth round of venture financing will help it to meet demand both in the U.S. and abroad for its systems. Cardinal Partners led the round, which included investments from Venrock and previous backer Avalon Ventures. The financing has brought Brandon Hull, a managing partner at Cardinal, and Brian Ascher, a general partner at Venrock, seats on Awarepoint’s board of directors.

“In today’s uncertain economic environment, only the most extraordinary growth companies will be financed,” Cardinal’s Hull said in a statement. “(Awarepoint) has shown incredible growth in the last 18 months, and has the right technology, intellectual property and product focus to succeed.”

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ThingMagic, the Cambridge, MA-based maker of radio frequency identification (RFID) systems, announced today that it has signed a strategic investment and technology development deal with In-Q-Tel, a venture firm founded by the CIA. Under the agreement, terms of which were not disclosed, ThingMagic will expand its development efforts “to facilitate the integration of RFID and sensors into a wider range of applications” with both commercial and security purposes, according to the announcement.

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Nexus Medical Partners of Quincy, MA, is the lead investor in a $14 million financing round for Pittsburgh-based Aethon, a maker of RFID systems for tracking hospital equipment, the startup said yesterday. New York, NY-based Radius Ventures co-led the round, which was also joined by existing investors Trident Capital, Pacific Venture Group, Salix Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures and Ascension Health Ventures.

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Last week we wrote about ThingMagic’s compact new RFID reader, Astra, which is designed to fit into small spaces such as office ceilings, allowing more kinds of organizations to use RFID technology to track tagged items. This week ThingMagic is bringing out an additional set of products intended to help organizations experiment with RFID technology.

It’s a trio of “development kits” that include all the hardware and software engineers need to write and read RFID tags. The kits, which are available from a ThingMagic web storefront that opened today, cost $1,495 and include one of the company’s three embedded RFID reader modules along with a chassis, connectors, antenna cable, power converter, and other hardware. The kits also come with ThingMagic’s RFID firmware (which is the same for all three reader modules) and sample RFID tags.

Up to now, RFID technology has been deployed mainly in warehouses and retail locations, where it’s used to keep track of tagged packages and products. The point of the kits is to help potential ThingMagic customers and partners come up with new applications of RFID technology, moving toward the “Internet of things” envisioned by ThingMagic’s founders.

They could use the development kits, for example, to build and test prototype devices that contain embedded RFID readers, the way ThingMagic itself has worked with Ford Motor Company and DeWalt to put RFID readers in the beds of Ford 150 trucks, where they scan for tagged construction tools.

Many ThingMagic customers and business partners are “eager to explore, research and develop embedded and mobile RFID solutions that require small form factors and low power requirements,” ThingMagic CTO and co-founder Yael Maguire said in a statement. “The development kits include everything they need to experiment with, design and develop RFID applications that meet these needs.”

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ThingMagic may sound like an oddly whimsical name for a company that makes some of the key hardware and software behind radio frequency identification (RFID) systems—machines that have serious real-world jobs like tracking the hundreds of thousands of products that pass through the dock doors of Wal-Mart warehouses and other distribution centers every day. But if you spend any time talking to the principals at the company, most of whom came out of Neil Gershenfeld’s physics and media group at the MIT Media Lab almost nine years ago, you’ll realize that for them, RFID technology is just a means to something bigger: an “Internet of things” where every common object or device is tagged with an electronic identifier and can wirelessly interrogate every other object, creating a real-time picture of everything passing through a given space.

That world, in turn, will need what Ravi Pappu, director of advanced development at ThingMagic, calls a “reality search engine”: a combination of sensors and software that can tell you at a moment’s notice whether you’ve got enough widgets in the warehouse to fulfill today’s orders, or whether all the tools you’ll need at the construction site are in the back of your truck, or who’s got the closest defibrillator, or where you left your other green sock. So even though ThingMagic is concentrating for the moment on fairly prosaic challenges such as making ever-smaller gizmos for reading RFID tags, “it’s the gravitational attraction of that [reality search engine] that makes me get up in the morning,” says Pappu.

On this particular morning, ThingMagic is taking its latest step toward the reality search engine, releasing a new device called Astra. It’s a flat, 10-inch-square box that includes both the computer hardware and the antennas needed to read RFID tags—which only give up the information stored on them when they get a big enough hit of radio energy— from up to 30 feet away. Designed to be placed in fixed locations in facilities such as offices and hospitals, Astra is about the same size as its predecessor, ThingMagic’s Mercury5 fixed RFID reader, except that the Mercury5 required massive external antennas in order to transmit sufficient radio power and hear the weak signals returned by RFID tags. By shrinking the reader hardware and taking advantage of improvements in RFID tag technology, ThingMagic was able to squeeze everything needed to detect RFID-tagged objects into a single box no bigger than a laptop computer, and power it all over a standard Ethernet cable.

“Before, you needed a lot of power to power up the tags, and also you needed a lot of isolation between the transmitter and the receiver,” Pappu explained to me when I visited him at ThingMagic’s radio lab in Woburn, MA, last week. “It was the same as you yelling at the top of your lungs while trying to listen to me whisper one kilometer away. Now the tags require lower power, and when you are transmitting at lower power you can hear yourself better.”

You can also use smaller antennas. Whereas the RFID assembly that ThingMagic sells to warehouses–the old Mercury5 reader plus two antennas—is a couple of feet wide and taller than a person, the Astra unit is so small that “you can just hide it in the ceiling and it creates this zone of RFID. That’s starting to approach the Internet of things.”

In a sense, then, Astra is a sign that ThingMagic is returning to its roots at the Media Lab, where Gershenfeld led a consortium called “Things that Think” that brainstormed technologies such as coffee makers that would recognize your cup and serve up your favorite blend. Pappu was one of five Media Lab PhD graduates (Bernd Schoner, Rehmi Post, Yael Maguire, and Matt Reynolds were the others) who formed ThingMagic as a consulting company in 2000. At first, the company worked on very “thingy” technologies such as electronic-ink-based price tags for retail shelving that could be rewritten remotely, and an RFID-driven device that would help consumers calibrate home medical devices such as glucose meters.

But gradually, the company drifted away from a focus on tracking discrete things used by individuals and toward the specialized field of supply chain management—that is, warehousing and distribution. Around 2002-2003, MIT’s Auto-ID Center was spearheading a global switchover from old-fashioned barcodes to a new product identification standard called the Electronic Product Code (EPC). ThingMagic built the world’s first EPC-compatible RFID reader, and licensed it to manufacturers such as ADT Sensormatic and Omron, who sold the devices for use in stores and warehouses.

By 2004-2005, when it looked as if companies like Wal-Mart were going to rebuild their supply chains around EPC and RFID technology, ThingMagic couldn’t resist the temptation to …Next Page »

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EBay Case Shows Flaws in Internet Law

A ruling this week that eBay isn’t responsible for ensuring that goods are not counterfeit disappointed Tiffany’s, which brought the suit, but cheered the online auction site. But as a piece in the Wall Street Journal points out, the U.S. judge’s decision comes just two weeks after a judge in France ruled the opposite way. The author says the competing decisions show just how difficult it is for businesses to navigate the law as it applies to the global Internet.

Warming May Lead to More Kidney Stones

We’re used to predictions of rising oceans and dying species, but here’s a new effect of global warming to worry about. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences predicts that warming will cause increased dehydration in people, raising the risks of kidney stones by up to 30 percent. Science News says the study predicts between 1.6 million and 2.2 million new kidney stones between now and 2050.

Scientists Propose Burial at Sea for Carbon

One way to counter global warming may be to inject carbon dioxide into porous volcanic rock on the ocean floor, thus keeping it out of the atmosphere permanently. Science Now reports that scientists at Columbia University have surveyed deep-sea basalt formations for their potential to store carbon. The researchers say there’s an area off the Oregon coast that could hold more than 120 years’ worth of U.S. carbon emissions.

Saltwater Crop Could Provide Food, Fuel

One concern with the Bush administration’s push toward more biofuels is that it’s using up arable land and driving up the price of food crops. The Los Angeles Times brings us the story of a researcher who’s looking for ways to grow crops for both food and fuel in areas with poor soil and a lack of fresh water. The scientist, Carl Hodges, grows a crop called salicornia, which he nourishes with seawater from a manmade canal.

RFID Could Prove a Problem in Hospitals

Hospitals are increasingly using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for such uses as monitoring the freshness of stored blood. But the New York Times reports on a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association that found some tags could produce electromagnetic interference with other hospital equipment, such as external pacemakers. The study recommends on-site tests before the tags are used in intensive care units or other critical areas.

Traffic Cameras Link to Cell Phones

One way to cut down on energy use and pollution is to reduce the hours commuters spend stuck in traffic jams. The Washington Post’s Post I.T. section reports that a new service is coming to the D.C. area to let drivers receive live video and photos of traffic on their cell phones. The service, which relies on cameras owned by various highway departments, is also available in New York, Houston, Detroit, and Los Angeles. No word on what this says about the danger of driving while watching your cell phone.

New Type of Battery Could Power Future Autos

As part of the push to create more plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles, researchers are trying to improve the safety and storage capacity of batteries. Daily Tech tells us that a company called ZPower, of Camarillo, CA, is working on replacing the current lithium-ion batteries with devices made from silver and zinc. A silver-zinc battery could hold about 40 percent more energy than a lithium-ion battery, and is less volatile, the company says.

Agreement Keeps YouTube User IDs Private
The lawsuit brought by Viacom against Google won’t lead to the major invasion of privacy that many privacy advocates feared, now that the two have reached an agreement on how to share data. ComputerWorld reports that Viacom agreed to let Google conceal the user ID and IP addresses of users when it provides data about viewing habits on YouTube, which it bought in 2006. A judge in Viacom’s lawsuit, which alleges that YouTube users infringed on copyrights of movies and television shows owned by Viacom, had ordered Google to turn over all information about who watched videos and what they watched, leading to a public outcry.

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The RFID business is getting hot again. A few weeks ago, Waltham, MA-based RFID software maker OATSystems was gobbled up by New Jersey’s Checkpoint Systems, and last week Greg reported that Seattle-based Impinj had sold off its memory business and bought Intel’s RFID division. Now Cambridge, MA-based ThingMagic, an MIT spinoff that makes hardware for reading RFID (radio frequency identification) tags, says that it has closed a $9.5 million Series B funding round.

On top of an $18.5 million pot raised in early 2006, the new round brings the company’s total financing to more than $28 million. Existing investors Tudor Ventures, The Exxel Group, Morningside Technology Ventures, and .406 Ventures ponied up for the round.

Founded in 2000 by a group of MIT Media Lab physicists, ThingMagic has just under 40 employees working from offices at One Broadway in Cambridge and a laboratory space in Woburn, MA. The new funding round coincides with what CEO Tom Grant calls a “fundamental shift” in the company’s product strategy. While the first round of venture funding was used mainly to ramp up manufacturing of large, fixed RFID readers used mainly in locations such as warehouse dock doors—where they detect RFID-tagged packages or products as they move past—Grant says the company has recently settled into a new focus on smaller RFID readers that can be embedded inside a variety of other devices.

ThingMagic worked with Ford Motor Company and toolmaker DeWalt, for example, to put its credit-card-sized M5e reader into the truck beds of specially equipped Ford F150 trucks, where they scan to make sure that all of a carpenter or construction worker’s RFID-tagged tools are present and accounted for at the beginning and end of a work day. And Lexmark has put the M5e into its T640rn laser printer, where it can program RFID tags embedded in paper documents as they pass through the printer.

The smaller readers (some of which are manufactured by Impinj) have a “form factor that encourages broader use of RFID as an enabling technology,” says Grant. ThingMagic still manufactures its larger (pizza-box-sized) readers for stationary applications, mainly in supply chain management. And all of the company’s products use the same fundamental operating system, called Mercury. But putting the system into a package as small and flexible as the M5e means that “we can now do two things as a company,” says Grant. “We can create a broad base of OEM [original equipment manufacturer] clients who base their own products on our hardware and software. And at the same time we can take on fairly difficult projects like the Ford experience, where we are hired to design a new functionality into an existing product. That’s led to an enormous improvement in our fundamental economics as a company.”

Grant says ThingMagic will use the new funding round to continue developing new applications for the M5e line, to move on to the next products on the company’s roadmap, and to expand its sales and marketing efforts into new regions. “We’ve seen enormous growth in demand for our products outside of North America,” Grant says. “But being able to set up the partnerships needed to pursue that—it’s good to have the funding to do that.”

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Last month we reported that Seattle-based Impinj, a prominent maker of radio-frequency identification (RFID) technologies, had sold off its memory business to focus on its core RFID products. Now the company has announced that it is acquiring Intel’s RFID business, which specializes in making chips for smaller-size applications like handheld readers.

It’s a “huge step for Impinj,” said CEO William Colleran in a statement. Although financial terms were not disclosed, the deal sends RFID chips and patents, a handful of employees, and a couple dozen new customers worldwide to Impinj, in exchange for Intel gaining an unnamed equity stake in the startup.

Intel’s chips fill a clear need for Impinj, which focuses on the ultra-high-frequency band: they allow the company to sell RFID hardware not only for high-performance stationary devices (at gates, tollbooths, border crossings, and check-out lanes, say), but also for smaller, faster, and cheaper readers that can be carried around warehouses and stores or embedded in vehicles for keeping track of supplies, tools, or products. Starting this fall, for instance, new Ford trucks will have an option for a built-in RFID reader.

“For a while now, Intel has been looking for the right home for this product line. There’s a lot of satisfaction to see this business graduate,” says Kerry Krause, marketing director of Intel’s RFID business, based in Portland, OR, and now with Impinj. The deal “puts Impinj in a terrific position,” he adds, because it opens up “a much broader range of applications and a broader worldwide customer base.” Krause cites a list of new customers that includes ThingMagic in Cambridge, MA, Alien Technology in Morgan Hill, CA, South Korea-based Samsung and Ceyon, and Sense Technology and Hopela in China—with a couple dozen more customers in the works.

I remember covering RFID technologies five years ago, back when Gillette and Wal-Mart were just starting to buy into the tracking-tag approach, and I’ve been wondering how the industry has been doing. According to Krause, the main hurdles to adoption—such as agreeing on international standards and getting the right hardware—have largely been overcome. And startups like Impinj have been cashing in. Since 2000, Impinj has raised more than $100 million in venture funding from the likes of Arch Venture Partners, Madrona Venture Group, and Polaris Venture Partners. With today’s deal, the company is clearly positioning itself to be the RFID market leader in chips, readers, and other hardware—at least for now.

Mark Roberti, founder and editor of RFID Journal, speculates that Impinj might eventually get out of the RFID reader business and just sell the chips, once the market takes off. But that will be another two to three years or more, he says, because end users are still figuring out the physics and economics of RFID tags and readers.

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Seattle-based Impinj, a maker of radio-frequency identification systems, has announced that it has sold its nonvolatile-memory intellectual property business to California-based Virage Logic for $5.2 million. Impinj will focus on its core business, which is developing RFID tags, readers, software, and antennas, while Virage Logic has hired the 30-odd Impinj employees who work on nonvolatile memory.

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Science Debate Needed, Tech Advisor Says

Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama ought to have a debate focusing on science and technology policy, a former White House technology advisor says. Mike Nelson, who worked in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Bill Clinton, tells Wired’s Threat Level blog that the topics should include universal broadband Internet access. But he’d reframe a debate on science as a debate about America’s future, Nelson said.

Public Opinion on Tech Policy Sought

To help frame the debate on science, TechCrunch, which has been covering the just-finished Personal Democracy Forum in New York City, offers a poll to find out what technology policies its readers would give priority to. Among the choices, “mandate net neutrality,” “promote renewable energy,” and “appoint an engineer to the FCC.” Netscape creator Mark Andreessen suggests “brain draining the world” by offering work visas to anyone with a college education.

Visa Rules Leaving Tech Jobs Unfilled

Andreessen may be onto something. An insufficient number of work visas and green cards is forcing foreign students educated in the United States to take their skills and go home, leaving “a tremendous number of unfilled jobs,” warns an industry trade group. The New York Times reports that a technology industry trade association, AeA, has released a report, Cybercities 2008, saying the US is not producing enough of its own technology graduates to fill its needs.

Open Source Ideas May Improve Healthcare

Getting medical records online so doctors can be assured of complete and up-to-date information on their patients is turning out to be a huge task. John Halamka, chief information officer at Harvard Medical School, thinks the healthcare world ought to take a page from Linux and bring the community together to develop open standards for collecting and sharing the data, according to CNET News.

RFID Can Interfere with Hospital Devices, Study Finds

The Food and Drug Administration may want to turn its attention to a Dutch study that found radio frequency identification tags can cause electronic interference that can switch off ventilators, reset intravenous drips, or reprogram pacemakers. New Scientist reports that the researchers are calling for better engineering of RFID devices to avoid such problems. The FDA last year issued a draft of proposed guidelines, but says so far it has received no reports of injuries due to interference.

Tropical Diseases Attacking Poor Americans

Public health officials need to keep better track of 24 exotic diseases that are spreading among the poor in places like Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, a new study says. Peter Hotez of George Washington University, who published the study in the Public Library of Science journal Neglected Tropical Diseases, tells the Los Angeles Times that the diseases–including the parasitic infection schistosomiasis, the bacterial infection brucellosis, and the virus dengue fever–are under everyone’s radar, but affect at least 300,000 Americans.

Washington Should Promote “Internet for Everyone,” Campaign Says

The quality and accessibility of broadband in the U.S. is falling behind that of Europe and Asia, groups from the ACLU to Google believe. So the groups have joined together in a campaign called “Internet for Everyone,” to urge the next administration to make universal broadband access a priority. The Google Public Policy blog explains the company’s reasons for joining the push.

Solar Thermal Power Burns Up the Track

When people talk about solar energy, they’re usually talking about photovoltaics. But the Environmental News Network reports that, thanks to technology improvements, concentrated solar power is actually the second fastest growing utility-scale alternative energy source, following wind power. Concentrated solar power plants use mirrors or lenses to focus sunlight that heats up fluid-filled pipes.

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