MeLLmo, a Del Mar, CA, startup developing graphics and visualization software, has raised $4 million from private investors to accelerate its penetration in the market for 3G mobile devices. The secondary round means MeLLmo has now raised a total of $10 million from its angel investors since the company was founded 21 months ago.

“I think we’ve ended up with a whole new paradigm for how to visualize and analyze data,” says Santiago Becerra, a co-founder and MeLLmo’s chairman and CEO. While the company initially focused its software for use on Apple’s iPhone, Becerra tells me MeLLmo intends to broaden its development efforts to other 3G smart phones. And as the advantages of its software become more widely understood, Becerra says he even anticipates demand among PC users.

The business-oriented iPhone application that MeLLmo introduced in May enables users to restructure statistics and other types of data gleaned from Excel spreadsheets, HTML table data, CSV files, and Salesforce CRM reports into interactive charts and graphical displays. The software also allows users to analyze and share their graphical displays with others.

The company, which currently has 28 employees, plans to use its new funds to expand MeLLmo’s sales and business development resources.

Becerra, who co-founded MeLLmo in January 2008, says it is his fourth company. His previous software company, Infommersion, developed Xcelsius, software that provides consolidated views of key business metrics. Becerra, a former Booz Allen & Hamilton management consultant with a Harvard MBA, sold Infommersion to Business Objects in 2005 (the software is now owned by SAP). He also was the founding CEO of Graphical Information, a software company he sold to Oracle in 1998.

Becerra tells me his current startup was still in stealth mode last …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Brown University student Walker Williams is leading the launch of a new online job service for college students, Jobzle.com, through a marketing campaign that began this week in Providence and is expected to spread to other universities in Rhode Island in the days and weeks ahead.

Jobzle is initially focusing on serving students in the Ocean State for the 2009-10 school year, particularly at Brown, where Jobzle founder Williams has been developing the site since late 2007, during his freshman year, he said. His cofounders are Brown students Kevin Durfee and Ben Mathews.

It’s early days at Jobzle—about 100 Brown students have signed up for the free job service, and there are now some 30 job postings on site—yet Williams sounded serious about scaling up the startup’s operations next year and spreading to college campuses in other parts of the country. While the startup faces huge competitors in the online jobs service market, such as Monster and CareerBuilder, Williams says he is confident that the firm’s exclusive focus on the college-student market and the needs of employers to tap this talented labor pool will help differentiate Jobzle from the rest of the field. To make money, Jobzle charges employers a fee to list jobs; it gets revenue from advertisers such as resume services as well, Williams said.

Jobzle has seen a significant jump in traffic since its Sept. 7 launch, with about 1,300 unique visitors so far this week compared to just a trickle of traffic in prior weeks, according to Williams. “We know we’re getting people interested and the word is getting out,” he wrote in an e-mail this morning. “Now we have to focus… on converting those hits to users and kick-starting the Jobzle ecosystem.”

Jobzle is designed to be accessible only to college students and employers. Similar to social networking venues such as Facebook and MySpace, Jobzle provides users with their own profile page. Yet Jobzle profiles also include the user’s qualifications, a list of their business contacts, as well as their work schedule and job applications. Though Williams is a history major at Brown, he is also a freelance website developer and graphic designer who spent the last two summers as an intern at Sling Media, where he says he worked on the firm’s …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s Metabasis Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MBRX), which warned in May that it might have to cease operations, says it has hired a financial advisory firm to help the company evaluate its strategic options. Metabasis said earlier this week that Mark Erion, the company’s CEO, chief scientific officer, and director, has resigned to join Merck & Co. as a vice president overseeing work on diabetes and obesity. Erion was among a handful of executives remaining at Metabasis, which named chairman David Hale as executive chairman.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Fashion Playtes, a Salem, MA-based provider of a website where girls can design their own cloths and fashion accessories, has raised $1.5 million in a Series A round of financing led by LaunchCapital and New Atlantic Ventures, according to a press release. Both investment firms have offices in Cambridge, MA. The startup says that its website was created for girls aged 6 to 12 to design their own garments online and purchase them to wear. The firm’s site is now in beta and plans are to launch it publicly this fall, according to the press release.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Google Ventures has joined Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an investor in V-Vehicle Co., the San Diego-based startup automaker developing a new line of fuel-efficient cars. The company plans to build its cars in northeastern Louisiana.

Joe Fisher, a New York spokesman for the San Diego startup automaker, confirmed the corporate venture fund’s investment, which was not previously disclosed. The clue was in a recent regulatory filing, which lists David Drummond as a member of V-Vehicle’s board of directors. Fisher confirms he’s David C. Drummond, Google’s senior vice president for corporate development and chief legal officer. But the spokesman declined to say how much Google has invested.

V-Vehicle’s regulatory filing shows the green automotive startup has raised almost $62.26 million in venture funding, and plans to raise an additional $4 million in the current round. When V-Vehicle made its debut at a news conference with Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal about six weeks earlier, press reports indicated that Frank Varasano, the former Oracle executive who is the automaker’s founding CEO, already had lined up $100 million in venture funding.

At the time, the company said its prominent investors included Silicon Valley VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and T. Boone Pickens, the Texas energy maverick. Two Kleiner Perkins partners, John Doerr and Ray Lane, also have seats on the company’s board. But Pickens investment, if he’s made one, is not apparent in the filing. The filing lists V-Vehicle’s directors as Varasano, Lane, Doerr, and Drummond.

The VC funding qualifies V-Vehicle to a portion—about $10 million—out of an anticipated total of $67 million in Louisiana state economic development funds. The company plans to begin renovation next year of a shuttered auto parts factory in Monroe, LA, where it plans to assemble its “green” car. James Davison, a Ruston, LA, trucking magnate who owns the property, also was identified in June as an investor.

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:        

KidZui, a San Diego Internet startup for children, says it is launching ZuiTube—a kind of YouTube with a user-interface designed for kids and a library of almost 60,000 videos pre-approved by an editorial team of parents and teachers.

The online video destination is free, but the essential challenge for ZuiTube, like KidZui itself, is differentiating itself from such child-friendly rivals as PBSkids, Webkinz, Nickelodeon, and Club Penguin. KidZui’s chief advantage is it provides a way for children to visit thousands of Web sites while preventing them from straying into the seamy and even predatory parts of the Internet.”KidZui is not a walled garden,” says co-founder Cliff Boro, the startup’s chairman and CEO. “From a kid’s point of view, this is all about freedom and independence.”

Yet KidZui has boundaries. The late architect Charles W. Moore famously described Disneyland as a place where children can safely learn the skills of adulthood (by driving the looping concrete freeway of Autotopia, for example) without risking any permanent harm. The same can be said for KidZui, which offers s a different sort of magic kingdom—where kids can safely hone their skills in Internet browsing, online gaming, social networking, and video sharing. The company was founded three years ago by Boro, Vidar Vignisson, and Tom Broadhead with the goal of erasing parental fears about websites that might be icky, shocking, and even dangerous for children while at the same time empowering kids to independently explore the Web.

KidZui User Interface

The company launched its parental-control Internet service with considerable fanfare in March 2008. The company says its KidZui browser, which is an add-on for the Firefox Web browser, allows children to explore more than 600,000 websites, watch videos, and play games that have been screened and approved by an editorial team of 200 parents and teachers. Within KidZui’s software, kids also can create their own cartoon-like avatar, a persona known as a “Zui” with customized hair, clothing, and other features.

KidZui’s basic service is free, but parents can sign up for weekly e-mail reports that detail all the websites their kids visit. KidZui’s membership privileges also gives parents veto power over the catalog of Web sites their children visit.

“I started an Internet company when I was 24 in 1994,” says Boro, who tells me …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

New England’s life sciences companies gave us a number of cool new technologies and interesting deals to talk about this week.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ) finished cleaning up its Allston, MA-based plant after a viral contamination which caused 6-to-8 week supply shortages of two of its best-selling drugs.

–-Archemix, also of Cambridge, forged an alliance with Boulder, CO-based miRagen Therapeutics to develop drugs that combine the Massachusetts firm’s “aptamer” technology with the Colorado company’s microRNA technology. Specific financial terms of the arrangement weren’t disclosed.

—Waltham, MA-based medical device company Augmenix revealed in an SEC filing that it had collected $4.7 million out of an equity round potentially worth $7.5 million. Augmenix is developing a synthetic material to protect healthy tissue during radiation treatments for prostate cancer.

—Joule Biotechnologies, a heretofore stealthy startup in Cambridge stepped into the sunlight to show off its technology, which aims to produce fuels and chemicals using engineered microbes capable of photosynthesis—no plant material or algae required. Founded in 2007 by partners at Flagship Ventures, Joule believes its technology is capable of producing more than 20,000 gallons of ethanol or hydrocarbons per acre on an annual basis, and yielding transportation fuels at prices that rival those of petroleum-based fuels.

—Waltham-based Avila Therapeutics raised $30 million in a Series B financing round led by the Novartis Option Fund and joined by return investors Abingworth, Advent Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, and Polaris Venture Partners. Avila and Novartis Option Fund also reached an agreement worth as much as $200 million in upfront and future milestone payments to co-develop Avila’s drugs, which are designed to bind more tightly to their targets that traditional drugs.

—Clinical trials management software maker Phase Forward (NASDAQ: PFWD), also of Waltham, shelled out $11 million to acquire Indianapolis, IN-based Maaguzi. The Indiana firm runs an online service for collecting data from patients.

—Cerulean Pharma of Cambridge raised $10 million in a Series B financing round from return investors Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock Associates, Lux Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners. The startup is developing nanoparticle-based treatments and plants to use some of the new funding to push it’s lead drug candidate, a cancer drug, through clinical trials.

—Shares of Cambridge-based Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) surged after the company released promising preliminary data from a mid-stage trial of its lead drug candidate, ridaforolimus, as a treatment for breast cancer. More complete data on the drug should be available later this year.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The monthly startup index created by Seattle 2.0 went up today with the highest number of new startups, 23, since March. Zillow and Pet Holdings maintain their traffic lead from last month, and Seattle 2.0 is now on the list for the first time. Moving up the list is Survey Analytics, breaking the top ten for the first time.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s TelCentris is announcing an upgrade to its VoxOx universal communicator service that includes a personal assistant feature, a virtual service that can answer your phone calls and route them according to your personal preferences. With the technology, you can direct phone calls from a family phone to reach you on your cell phone, office phone, or home phone—and you can send phone calls from that pesky sales rep to your voicemail.

The company says VoxOx is meant to solve your personal communications overload by unifying all the different methods that you use to communicate into a single user interface. While the startup faces a number of larger rivals—such as Google Voice—that offer unified communications service, TelCentris executives maintains that its service represents a different proposition than Google Voice or Skype. “There’s really no other product like it that’s out there,” says TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz.

TelCentris CEO Bryan Hertz

Before today’s announcement, Hertz told me that while some rivals have combined communication services, most “unified communications” are usually done within the limits of an enterprise software application. Microsoft Exchange Server, for example, enables users to get audio voicemail messages, faxes, and e-mail delivered in their mailboxes, and lets them access their mailboxes from their cell phones or wireless devices.

In contrast, Hertz says VoxOx is “technology agnostic.” Unlike Google Voice, Hertz says VoxOx can be used to integrate a variety of communications services from a variety of third-party providers. So a VoxOx user can combine his or her existing phone number with their Gmail or Microsoft e-mail service and an outside instant messaging provider such as Yahoo, AIM, MSN, as well as social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter. “We’re not necessarily here to replace them, but we are here to organize them,” Hertz says.

The new VoxOx service—which is free—also aggregates the user’s list of contacts from different sources into a universal address book that is part of an iPhone-like graphical user interface. “We go much deeper than any of these other tools do individually,” says Hertz.

For example, if you use the VoxOx desktop display to update …Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Fido just might be a homeowner’s new best friend. The watchdog in question isn’t a vigilant Doberman or German Shepard, but rather the flagship product of EcoDog, a home energy-monitoring start-up based in Vista, CA. The device connects to a home circuit breaker and delivers real-time information on the home’s energy usage.

"Fido" keeps watch on your electric grid

One nifty aspect of the technology is that Fido does not use an internet data or wireless technology to transmit the data to your home computer. Instead, once Fido is installed, it automatically uses your home’s electrical wiring to send data. Fido delivers a detailed report on the electricity usage of the house, room by room, appliance by appliance.

Founder and CEO Ron Pitt, a software engineer by training, used to work in the alternative energy industry. But he became increasingly frustrated with the impracticality of solar and wind-generated power for the average homeowner. He thought there was an overemphasis on “how to generate one more kilowatt per hour.” Instead, Pitt decided that focusing on energy management “can make a much greater impact than any number of solar panels you put on roofs.”

EcoDog CEO Ron Pitt

This philosophy has translated into EcoDog’s marketing, which touts how Fido can save homeowners money by offering complete transparency of their utility costs. “Environmentally green is good, but money green is better,” says Pitt. “People want to do the right thing, but unless you make it financially advantageous to them, it’s never going to gain wide acceptance. Solar is not a compelling financial model.” It just so happens that by bringing down their electricity costs, homeowners simultaneously streamline their energy usage.

Other methods of measuring home energy consumption, Pitt says, are based on canned questionnaires, which offer little insight into the specific details of an individual residence’s electricity costs. “The beauty of Fido is that it is able to take actual usage data from your home, as well as the projected rate from the utility company, to deliver a report tailored to you.” A homeowner may find out that certain inefficient appliances are responsible for the bulk of the utility bill. Pitt cites one homeowner in the pilot program who discovered that a single dehumidifier in a storage room was responsible for $90 a month in electricity.

“The point of the system is to measure where the problem areas are,” he says. “You don’t have to guess.”

EcoDog has come a long way since 2005, when Pitt sodered his first energy …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

In December 2005, the biggest maker of polyurethane foam blanks used to make the core of surfboards (and other products) abruptly shut down—creating a huge void among Southern California surfboard makers and the composites industry.

I have worked in the composites industry for nearly 30 years and I was keenly aware of the highly toxic nature of the fiberglass composites used to make surfboards, sailboat hulls, and other products. I knew there were no environmentally friendly alternatives. I’ve seen friends and colleagues get sick and even die from continual exposure to these chemicals. So I saw the closing of Clark Foam in Laguna Niguel, CA, as my chance to change the composites world by developing cleaner and healthier ways to make composite products—and to do so with as little environmental impact as possible. I focused initially on the foam core material, but in response to customer demand, we have developed processes and sourced materials to make both the skin material and resins—all from more sustainable sources, such as bamboo, hemp, and kelp fabrics, and soy and linseed oil resins.

Malama Composites surfboard

Two partners and I experimented for two years, testing various methods and formulas to develop an alternative foam product that was clean and green. Finally, we perfected our recipe, an ideal blend derived from plants. But our foam blanks are not only green—they also outperform traditional rigid polyurethane composites made from petrochemicals. So we’ve taken fossil fuels out of this part of the process altogether.

We see the market for our foam as huge and the range of our products as almost endless, but the three of us had bumped against our ceiling. We couldn’t take things to the next level on our own. We needed more money, more management experience, legal and accounting help – just about everything required to make a real business out of a good idea. A friend introduced me to Leif Christofferson, who has worked as an environmentalist for non-governmental organizations and did bio-prospecting for San Diego-based Diversa (now part of Verenium) in addition to consulting work in bio-fuels. Leif saw the opportunity immediately and soon Leif and I had assembled a team.

Our team also sought the help of Connect, the San Diego non-profit group that helps accelerate regional technology innovation by linking entrepreneurs with the business experts and resources they need to grow as a business. Through Connect’s springboard program, which provides free business mentoring and coaching, we were assigned several Entrepreneurs-In-Residence (EIR), former executives who donate their time, talent and connections to help start-up companies grow successfully. Our EIRs guided us in preparing marketing, organizational and financial plans, examining every detail and assumption we had and helping us refine our business model. The process was amazing – I felt like I was in grad school and soon we honed in on what we were as a company, where we fit in the market, how our financials made sense, and perhaps most importantly, the inherent value that this business posed to potential investors. Coming from a surf background and having …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

I’m extremely pleased to report that Xconomy’s headquarters in Cambridge are jam packed this week, since everybody flew in from our Seattle and San Diego offices for the inaugural XSITE—Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship—yesterday at Boston University. It’s a rare treat to have everybody together and, fortuitously, we’re also coming up on the second anniversary (this Saturday) of publishing Xconomy.com.

Today and tomorrow we’ll be taking a little time to celebrate that milestone and taking advantage of the surplus of colleagues (and working around the deficit of space) to work on making the site even better in the years to come. As always, we welcome the comments and suggestions of our readers—you can reach us at editors@xconomy.com or simply post in the comments below.

Our own posting will be light today and tomorrow, but we’ll be back Monday full force. Thanks to our incredible team for making Xconomy such a success and so damn fun to put together each day. Thanks to our underwriters, sponsors, and partners for two years of exceptional support (and in the case of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, for solving our aforementioned space problem). And thanks to all of you for reading, participating in our events, sharing your ideas and opinions, and helping us to build our network. We’re all looking forward to the next two years.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego-based Sorrento Therapeutics has raised $2.3 million in a one-time equity investment, according to a filing yesterday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The biotech, which specializes in new methods for developing 100-percent human monoclonal antibodies, was founded in 2006 and lists Steve Zaniboni, Antonius Schuh, and Henry Ji as executives and directors.

Zaniboni was named in February as the chief financial officer at Xifin, which provides Software as a Service to support laboratory billings and financial management operations. He previously worked as CFO at San Diego’s AviaraDx, Arcturus Bioscience, and Sequenom, and held financial management positions at several life science companies in the Boston area.

The filing did not identify Sorrento’s investor. But Miami-based OpkoHealth said earlier this month it had made an investment in Sorrento Therapeutics in exchange for a one-third stake in the San Diego biotech. Opko says it also received an exclusive license to the Sorrento antibody library for the discovery and development of therapeutic antibodies in the field of ophthalmology.

Ji is named on several recent patents relating to new ways for amplifying and cloning a specific region or sequences of immunological genes to generate antibody libraries.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

We all look for milestones in life, but several San Diego biotechs are approaching important junctures where they’re expected to report positive results from their drug development studies. Read on to find out which ones, and to catch up on the rest of San Diego’s life sciences news.

—San Diego’s Ardea Biosciences (NASDAQ: RDEA) reported some encouraging results last week for the drug it is developing to treat gout. A small number of patients found the drug lowered the amount of uric acid in their blood to acceptable levels within eight days. Still, Ardea is facing increasing competition, since the FDA approved Takeda Pharmaceutical’s gout drug in February and an FDA advisory panel recommended Savient Pharmaceutical’s gout treatment earlier this week.

—Trius Therapeutics CEO Jeff Stein told Luke the company plans to present full results from its recent clinical trial of a new antibiotic for treating MRSA at a conference in September. The startup also is working on a pivotal clinical trial strategy, and it is searching for a potential partner.

—San Diego’s Biocom, the life sciences industry trade group, hosted the CalAsia conference for the first time this week, and more than 300 representatives of the international biotech community attended. In a Q&A with Xconomy, Dr. Hui Cai of Inflexion BioPartners discussed the concerns that U.S. companies have about doing business in China—and China’s concerns about doing business with U.S. companies. In an e-mail yesterday, she adds, “A consensus out of CalAsia is [that] the line between U.S. and Asia certainly is becoming fuzzy. Gaps we see today in knowledge, processes, and other aspects will eventually disappear, and global standards will be established.”

—San Diego’s Lpath is nearing a make-or-break milestone in its development of sonepcizumab, an experimental cancer drug. The biotech stands to receive up to $8 million from Merck Serono for achieving performance targets related to the clinical trial Lpath is wrapping up, and an additional $31 million if the Swiss pharmaceutical company exercises an option to develop the drug.

—San Diego-based aFraxis, which is focused on developing treatments for Fragile X syndrome and autism, has raised $750,000 in early stage funding, according to a recent SEC filing. The startup is backed by San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, and Avalon’s Jay Lichter is listed as chief executive and director.

—Illumina, the San Diego biotech that provides DNA research tools for scientists, plans to offer a service that will enable consumers to get their DNA sequenced—at a cost of $48,000. As expensive as that may sound, it is half as much as the DNA sequencing service offered by Cambridge, MA-based Knome. The idea is to give patients access to comprehensive, personalized information about their vulnerability to disease.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Is San Diego’s Lpath (OTC: LPTN) on the right path? The answer will emerge over the next several weeks as the biotechnology company wraps up a key clinical test of its experimental cancer drug. A successful outcome will position the cash-starved company to receive $39 million from development partner Merck Serono of Switzerland, enabling Lpath to continue its research. A poor result most likely means the Merck Serono deal has reached a dead end, putting the very existence of Lpath in doubt.

“It is a bit binary,” CEO Scott Pancoast deadpanned during a phone conversation last week.

Lpath develops antibody drugs that target bioactive lipids, fatty substances that regulate key cellular functions. The company’s experimental drug neutralizes a lipid called sphingosine-1-phosphate, which cancer cells use to form new blood vessels. The theory is that cancer cells will die if they cannot access the blood supply.

The effect of the drug sonepcizumab, dubbed Asonep, is similar to that of Genentech’s bevacizumab (Avastin), a blockbuster cancer medicine that blocks a protein called vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). Pancoast said sonepcizumab is potentially more powerful than bevacizumab because the Lpath drug also causes certain cells to destroy themselves, a process called apoptosis. Even so, taking on bevacizumab would be a formidable challenge.

But that’s getting ahead of the game. For now all eyes are on the early-stage trial, which was designed to assess the safety and biological activity of sonepcizumab. Lpath stands to receive up to $8 million from Merck Serono for achieving performance targets related to the trial, and an additional $31 million if the Swiss company exercises an option to develop the drug. Lpath will know the outcome of the trial by the end of August, Pancoast said, and Merck Serono has until October 29 to weigh the results and make its decision.

“They will either pay us $31 million and take over the program, or say ‘No thanks’ and give us the keys back,” Pancoast said. “Obviously, there is a huge delta in terms of Lpath’s economics between scenarios.”

The deal with Merck Serono, announced last October, could be worth …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

We’ve heard talk since the middle of last year that MIT inventors Michael Cima and Bob Langer had again united with top venture capitalists in the Boston area to launch a life sciences startup. But the founders of the startup have tried to keep lid on their activities—until today. Taris Biomedical, formerly known as Certus Biomedical, is expected to unveil its drug-delivery device for bladder disorders during a meeting at MIT this morning.

Christine Bunt, co-founder and chief operating officer of Taris (which the company puts in all capital letters to stand for targeted intravesical system), gave me a sneak preview of the startup’s presentation due to be made this morning by Cima at IdeaStream, a symposium on innovation organized by MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. A big piece of previously undisclosed news is that the Lexington, MA-based startup quietly closed a $15 million Series A round of venture capital last August, with contributions from initial backer Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners, Waltham, MA-based Polaris Venture Partners, and Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA.

Taris was formed last April to commercialize an implanted device that Cima and his colleagues at MIT invented to improve how drugs are delivered to the bladder. The device has the potential to be used for treating urinary tract infections, cancer, incontinence, and other bladder disorders. Though Bunt kept many of the details of the drug-delivery device under wraps—due to the startup’s plans for a full public launch at XSITE 2009 (the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship) on June 24—she filled me in on some basics of the technology.

The firm’s device is designed to function like an osmotic pump, using osmotic pressure to release drugs into the bladder. Bunt compares the size of the device—which is made with such materials as silicon and a nickel alloy wire—to a medium-sized paper clip, and its shape to a pretzel. The device would be inserted in short catheter-based procedures in a doctor’s office or hospital. Once implanted, the system is designed to deliver drugs into the bladder for a certain period of time. Then the device is removed after, say, a couple of weeks. (Taris plans to disclose its initial use of the technology at XSITE, the COO says.)

Delivering drugs to the bladder is tricky business. The current options include oral tablets, which must travel through the body to get to the bladder and can cause side effects in other organs. Some bladder diseases are treated with individual infusions or injections of a drug. But there are limits to how much of the …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

San Diego’s Biomatrica, which has developed a dehydrating technique for storing biological samples at room temperature, released some cold, hard facts today about laboratory energy costs. Biomatrica says a major U.S. research university could cut its electricity usage by 40 million kilowatt-hours, reduce its carbon footprint by an estimated 18,000 metric tons, and save $16 million in operating costs over a decade by unplugging its lab storage freezers. Biomatrica based its results on a pilot project at Stanford University.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Insulin pump developer Tandem Diabetes Care has raised $21.4 million in a $52.3 million financial round, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. San Diego-based Tandem specializes in new insulin pump therapy technology. Last June, Tandem raised $13 million in a Series B round led by Domain Associates and Texas Pacific Growth.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Chumby Industries has raised $3 million through a combination of debt and security offerings, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The San Diego company makes a Web-enabled device called Chumby that is partly an Internet terminal, partly a stuffed toy, and partly a video player. As I reported, Chumby previously raised a total of $20 million in VC funding.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Slacker, the San Diego-based online music streaming service, disclosed in a regulatory filing this week that it has raised almost $9.7 million so far in a secondary venture round intended to raise $10.2 million.

As Xconomy’s Juha-Pekka Tikka reported Tuesday, Slacker raised $5 million in venture funding just six months ago from Rho Ventures of New York, Centennial Ventures of Denver, CO, Mission Ventures of San Diego, and Austin Ventures of Austin, TX. Sevin Rosen Funds of Dallas, TX, also has been a major investor in the company. But in its filing Wednesday, Slacker did not identify the venture firms that participated in the latest round.

Gary Byrd, a spokesman for the company, declined to comment, saying in an email that “Slacker doesn’t comment on financing issues.”

Before this week’s filing, Slacker had raised a total of $59.5 million, according to previous filings. Slacker has more than 8 million users who listen to its music service on the web, mobile phones, televisions and Slacker portable music players.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share: