Seattle-based Dendreon Corp. (NASDAQ: DNDN) said today it has named John Johnson to the position of president and CEO, succeeding longtime CEO Mitchell Gold. Johnson was previously the CEO of East Brunswick, NJ-based Savient Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SVNT).

The appointment comes after a difficult run for Dendreon. In 2010, the company won approval for sipuleucel-T (Provenge), the first in a new class of immune-boosting therapies for prostate cancer. But the product has been slow to take off, causing the company to fall short of Wall Street expectations. On January 5, Dendreon surprised investors by announcing that it sold $228 million of the drug in 2011—better-than-expected results—but it hasn’t been enough to sway shareholder sentiment.

Today’s news was welcome on Wall Street. “I am very pleased to hear this morning about Dendreon’s succession plan for its CEO and Chairman,” wrote shareholder activist Brad Loncar in a statement.” In August, Loncar sent a letter to Dendreon chairman Richard Brewer expressing concerns about poor management at the company. “After joining together and asking for this change, this is a big win for Dendreon’s shareholders and for corporate governance in general.”

Dendreon’s shares rose 6 percent to $14.40 in pre-market trading.

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Monster Worldwide (NYSE: MWW), the New York parent company of Maynard, MA-based Monster.com, the jobs and recruiting site, said in a regulatory filing that it has laid off about 400 employees, or 7 percent of its worldwide staff of 5,700.

The layoffs include fewer than 100 job cuts in Massachusetts, according to the Boston Business Journal. No more specifics on that were available.

In the Form 8-K, Monster Worldwide says it is taking a “series of strategic restructuring actions” in 2012 to invest in marketing and sales and “improve its long-term growth prospects and profitability.” The company says it is consolidating some office facilities as part of the restructuring.

Monster reported fourth-quarter 2011 revenues of $250 million and a $13 million profit. The company made a $46 million profit for the year, compared to a loss of $9 million in 2010. Monster’s stock is down about 13 percent to $7.80 this morning.

Last spring, Monster.com spoke with me about its recent efforts in mobile apps and social media partnerships. The company has been investing heavily in R&D to keep up with a slew of newer, hip competitors.

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One thing you can say about having Sprint as a majority investor: It’s not boring.

Shares of Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) bounced up today after the third-quarter earnings report from Sprint (NYSE: S), particularly CEO Dan Hesse’s comments about a possible deal for Clearwire’s as-yet-unbuilt long-term evolution network.

As quoted by Forbes’ Eric Savitz, Hesse said that Sprint has “signed a nonbinding cooperation agreement with Clearwire, to work together on the technical specifications of the Clearwire LTE network and to ensure a superb customer experience for Sprint customers on the Clearwire LTE network.” That kind of agreement is needed to pave the way for any broader deal to buy LTE service from Clearwire, Hesse added.

As Bloomberg reports, any Sprint deal to use Clearwire’s LTE network wouldn’t be in the picture until 2013. Clearwire still needs to actually build an LTE-based network—its fourth-generation infrastructure is currently based on a different kind of technology, called WiMax. It could cost Clearwire around $900 million to make the switch, but Sprint apparently isn’t ponying up cash for that effort yet.

This may all sound like pretty minor stuff, given all the tentative deals and possible partnerships and no commitments of money. But given Clearwire’s money-losing financial performance and the recent buffeting it’s taken on Wall Street, any appearance of a lifeline from its patrons at Sprint makes for big news.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that another round of Sprint statements sent Clearwire stock tanking. At that time, Sprint was rolling out its own Clearwire-free plans for an LTE 4G network, and Hesse pointedly said that he had nothing to announce beyond 2012 regarding Clearwire. Pressed by investors in that previous call, Hesse basically said that a bankruptcy by Clearwire wouldn’t be that bad.

Clearwire responded to that beating by pre-reporting some selected third-quarter financial numbers, showing record quarterly revenues and subscriber additions, along with a narrowing loss. Clearwire is scheduled to release its full third-quarter earnings report next Wednesday after the market closes.

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I’ve been flat-out for the past week or so. Here are three pieces of Boston-area tech news that are worth catching up on, and a few thoughts on each:

—Fig Card, the mobile payments company that just started last year, was acquired by eBay, via its PayPal division, for an undisclosed sum. Co-founders Max Metral and Hasty Granbery (one of the better names around town) have joined PayPal’s mobile division. My colleague Wade profiled another one of Metral’s and Granbery’s creative projects, Povo, back in 2008, introducing it thusly: “Mix one cup of Wikipedia with one cup of Google Maps, add a generous dollop of MIT-bred geekdom, and bake for about 14 months. Serves 600,000.” These guys look like a great addition to PayPal, which is increasingly focused on mobile commerce (see its recent acquisition of Boston location-based services firm Where).

It’s a fairly small deal, but it raises a couple of big questions on both coasts. Is PayPal getting ready to split off from eBay? And who’s the next mobile company to get bought in Boston? (I have my guess, but I’m not telling yet.)

—Eons, the social networking site for baby boomers launched in 2006 by Jeff Taylor, was scooped up by San Francisco-based Crew Media for an undisclosed price. Eons has been shrinking in recent years, and it spun off its more successful obituaries business, Tributes.com, in 2008. Former Eons employees have told me that the company failed for a number of reasons, ranging from “50 year olds are not viral” to classic startup mistakes like “taking too much money and hiring too fast before you get traction.”

—Audio firm Bose announced on Friday that founder Amar Bose has given MIT the majority of the stock in the company, in the form of non-voting shares. Financial details weren’t given. Professor Bose is an MIT “lifer” who served on the Institute’s faculty for 45 years, retiring in 2001. MIT, which is now the majority owner of Bose Corporation, will receive annual cash dividends on those shares, but has no control over the company and its operations and cannot sell the shares.

A story in the New York Times raised tax questions about the gift, but didn’t resolve the issue. The Times quotes Nate Nickerson, an MIT spokesman (and a former editor at Technology Review), as saying the gift was “very significant” and that the dividends will be “used broadly to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission.”

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An intriguing Boston-area tech company is going public after more than 10 years—and it’s not too late to shake things up in its market. I’m not talking about Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP), which had its long-awaited IPO a couple weeks ago. I’m talking about SMTP, a pioneering e-mail software firm based in Cambridge, MA.

Yes, the company with the famously boring name—it makes software for e-mail delivery management and marketing—is going public today. It’s not debuting on the Nasdaq or New York Stock Exchange; rather, trading of SMTP’s stock begins this morning on the over-the-counter bulletin board (OTCBB: SMTP). Companies that trade over the counter generally don’t have to meet the same SEC filing requirements as those that trade on the more regulated stock exchanges; it can also be harder for investors to trade OTC shares, partly because buyers and sellers must arrange their trades directly.

About two months ago, SMTP made an initial stock offering to 81 shareholders, who invested a total of $100,000 at 25 cents per share. The deal is different from a traditional, big-company IPO in that there is no investment bank involved as an underwriter—the offering went directly to a small pool of investors.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill penny stock, though. SMTP says it doesn’t need the money, so it can afford to separate the process of going public from fundraising. The idea is that the firm could raise a few million in a secondary offering down the road—if its stock goes up—and in the meantime, it will keep growing and work towards becoming a much bigger player in e-mail tech. What’s more, its CEO has a contrarian’s sense of timing (and other important lessons to share), which we’ll get to in a minute.

SMTP, known as EMUmail until about a year ago, started in 1998 and first released its product for businesses in 2002. The company has grown a lot in the past year and has been making a small profit—just under $400,000 after tax in 2010, on $2.7 million in revenue. The firm had about 10,000 customers worldwide at the end of December. It says it competes with bigger companies like Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), JangoMail, MailChimp, and Amazon.com, which recently got into e-mail bulk delivery. SMTP currently employs 31 people, most of them in Ukraine; four are based in Cambridge.

“It’s small, but it’s solid, growing, and profitable,” says Semyon Dukach, SMTP’s chief executive (see photo, left). “Once we begin trading, we may very well go and raise a few million dollars in order to make acquisitions of related companies in our space.”

Indeed, anything seems possible when you have a guy like Dukach at the helm. While some might call him crazy (he wouldn’t deny it), Dukach has made a modest fortune thumbing his nose at the establishment. Most people know him as a swashbuckling master of disguise and leader of the MIT blackjack team, popularized in Ben Mezrich’s books Bringing Down the House and Busting Vegas. (He has the distinction of being the latter book’s main character.) But you might also say that Dukach, who is 42 and has five kids, has grown up a lot since then.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s go back to the beginning. Dukach is a Moscow native who came to the U.S. when he was 10, settling in Houston, TX, via Newark, NJ. He studied computer science at Columbia University and came to MIT in 1990 to do a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His thesis was on e-commerce and Internet money exchange (“way before it was cool,” he says).

Dukach got involved with the MIT blackjack team in the mid-1990s, and that story has been told. But it isn’t how he made his millions. That would be from his first software startup, … Next Page »

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals’ winning ways are being felt on Wall Street this morning. The Cambridge, MA-based drug developer’s (NASDAQ:VRTX) shock price was up 15 percent to $44:03 per share as of 10:14 am Eastern time today as investors reacted to positive results the firm revealed this morning from a late-stage trial of its treatment VX-770 for certain patients with cystic fibrosis. My colleague Luke Timmerman provided the details this morning of the game-changing study for certain patients with the genetic illness that causes thick mucus to build up in their lungs. The results follow the company’s impressive results from late-stage studies of its experimental treatment for hepatitis C infections, telaprevir. The company now has a market value of about $9 billion.

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Who’s the $500 million tech company that nobody has heard of? That would be Bedford, MA-based Progress Software, one of the largest software makers in the state. Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) has been on quite a run lately, with its stock rising steadily since September—from a low of $26.71 on Aug. 31 to around $41 for the past few weeks in December.

In advance of the company’s quarterly earning announcement later today, I spoke with CEO Richard Reidy to get an update on the firm’s, well, progress toward some pretty ambitious goals. I particularly wanted to know what’s new at Progress since March 2010, when Reidy (pronounced “reedy”) and chief technology officer John Bates sat down with my colleague Wade Roush for an extensive two-part interview (here and here). One comment Reidy made in that Q&A stood out to me—that Progress is like a $500 million startup in some ways.

Turns out he didn’t mean that in the usual sense that big companies talk about—that they can innovate, do lots of R&D, and be nimble like a startup. He meant that Progress is making a fresh start, given its 30-year history—it has been publicly traded for 20 years—and given its extensive experience in lots of distinct business software markets. “Now we’re in a major transition into a very focused company,” Reidy says.

“We’ve always been way too entrepreneurial, way too curious, and meandering all over the place,” Reidy adds. “The notion of the ‘$500 million startup’ is now we’ve got all those assets, customers, technologies—what do we do to double the size of the company going forward? We’re embarking on a whole new strategy.”

Progress’s focus in the past year has been on selling software that helps companies be much more “operationally responsive.” That means if you’re an airline or travel agent, and your customers are all grounded by the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, you figure out the logistics of trains, boats, and cars, and help them get on their way. If you’re a telecom company, you handle the day-to-day billing and services as mobile customers sign up across different devices. If you’re a bank, you need software to manage your computerized trading and react quickly to changes in the market.

In all these cases, what Progress provides is a sort of “control tower” that a business or operations person can use to track patterns and adjust to events as they occur. The interface goes beyond … Next Page »

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The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating whether a surge in call option trading on 3Com shares just hours before the announcement that Hewlett-Packard would take over the Marlborough, MA-based networking equipment maker for $2.7 billion was a result of insider knowledge of the deal, Bloomberg and other outlets are reporting today. Trading in call options—which guarantee the right to acquire a stock at a certain price—hit a 26-month high on November 11, just before the after-hours announcement of the acquisition. That “screams insider trading to the SEC,” Wayne State University law professor and former SEC attorney Peter Henning told Bloomberg, whose report was based on information from an unnamed source inside the agency.

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New England tech and life sciences firms forged several interesting new partnerships this week.

—Apperian, a Boston-based startup developing enterprise-oriented iPhone applications, raised $1 million in a Series A venture round led by CommonAngels of Lexington, MA.

—Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) teamed with Seattle’s Delve Networks to provide a new online platform for publishing videos and distributing them to any digital media player. The new service will compete against that offered by Cambridge-based Brightcove.

—Cardiorobotics of Newport, RI, and Pittsburgh, PA, raised $11.6 million in a Series A round from Eagle Ventures, the Slater Technology Fund, the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, and others. Eric wrote a nice profile of the startup’s efforts to develop a “snake robot” that would make heart surgeries less invasive.

—Advanced Electron Beams of Worcester, MA, closed a Series C round of financing worth $14.2 million. Flagship Ventures led the deal, which was joined by return investors Agman Partners, Atlas Venture, GE, General Catalyst Partners, and RockPort Capital Partners.

—Cancer drug developer Ariad Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ARIA) of Cambridge netted $30.9 million in an offering of 19 million new shares of stock-–$3 million worth of which were purchased by CEO Harvey Berger.

—Boston-based data-storage firm Iron Mountain (NYSE:IRM) announced a planned notes offering worth $450 million.

—IT-focused venture firm Longworth Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, reportedly raised $122 million of a targeted $180 million for its third fund.

—Cambridge-based drug developer Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:ALNY) inked a deal with Vancouver-based Tekmira Pharmaceuticals (TSX:TKM) to develop new particles to deliver RNA-interference drugs. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

—Idenix Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:IDIX), also of Cambridge, priced a secondary public offering of 7.25 million shares at $3.14 each. Idenix develops treatments for Hepatitis C.

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Worcester, MA-based World Energy, which runs online auctions for energy contracts as well as carbon emissions allowances, said today that its stock will be listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol XWES. Since its 2006 IPO, the company has traded only on the Toronto Stock Exchange, under the system XWE. “Gaining increased exposure to the U.S. investment community through a listing on NASDAQ has always been part of World Energy’s capital markets strategy; I’m glad to say we have achieved this important milestone,” CEO Richard Domaleski said in a statement.

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Woodinville, WA-based Loud Technologies (NASDAQ: LTEC), a pro audio and music company, has announced it is delisting its common stock from NASDAQ, effective in February. Loud cited management time and costs to maintain the listing, limited trading, and its 2008 financial results as some of the reasons for the move.

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If you’re like me, you’re to the point where you can’t focus for more than two sentences without pausing to check FiveThirtyEight.com and Intrade, so I kept the roundup of Boston-area deals short this week.

—Battery Ventures of Waltham, MA, led a $17 million Series B round for Sunnyvale, CA-based ZeroG Wireless, a developer of low-power Wi-Fi chips. Morgenthaler Ventures and Greylock Partners participated in the deal as well.

—Andover, MA-based Helium, an online marketplace for writers, reportedly closed a $17 million Series A financing round and slashed its staff by roughly 30 percent, or 18 people. The cuts were distributed across engineering, customer service, and sales.

—Fairhaven Capital Partners, a spinoff of TD Capital in Cambridge, MA, closed its second investment fund with $250 million—$50 million more than it set out to raise. The firm plans to invest the money in early-stage technologies, as it did with its first fund.

—Newton, MA-based biotech firm Clinical Data (NASDAQ:CLDA) acquired Avalon Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:AVRX)of Germantown, MD, for $10 million.

—Video-hosting firm Brightcove of Cambridge, MA, inked a deal with AOL under which the media giant will manage all of its online video using the new Brightcove 3 platform starting in early 2009.

—Adding a bit of confusion to the digital-video space, one of Brightcove’s major suppliers, its Cambridge neighbor Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) forged an agreement with Microsoft to develop an adaptive streaming system for high-definition video that’s nearly identical to a service that will be included in the Brightcove 3 platform.

—Cambridge, MA-based HealthCare Ventures led a $28 million Series B round of financing for Trevose, PA-based InfaCare Pharmaceuticals. Atlas Venture, Longitude Capital, and FirstMark Capital joined the round.

—Drug developer Dyax (NASDAQ:[DYAX) of Cambridge, MA, inked an agreement under which investment fund Azimuth Opportunity will buy up to $50 million of its common stock over an 18-month period, Dyax reports. The money would help Dyax further the development of its lead drug DX-88 for hereditary angioedema.

—Watertown, MA-based EnVivo Pharmaceuticals, a developer of drugs for Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia, reportedly raised $65 million in a Series D venture financing from Boston-based Fidelity Biosciences. Fidelity also bought out all of EnVivo’s other investors, including BCM Technologies, Cogene Ventures, and NeuroVentures Capital, according to the report.

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There was not one venture financing among Boston-area life sciences firms that I could find this week, but plenty of news nonetheless.

—Luke took a look at Provasculon, the second company to be taken under Biogen Idec’s (NASDAQ: BIIB) wing at its Cambridge, MA-based incubator. Formed around research from Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Provasculon is aiming to develop drugs that help stimulate the growth of new blood vessels after they’ve been damaged by a heart attack.

—Natick, MA-based Boston Scientific (NYSE: BSX) went into PR-damage-control mode after co-founders Pete Nicholas and John Abele involuntarily sold off about 13 million of their shares of company stock in one day as part of an automatic share-selling plan. The company later explained that 31 million of Abele’s and Nicholas’ shares had been sold that week through the automatic plan, and that further sales were possible. Both founders expressed regret about the sales. Boston Scientific CEO James Tobin, meanwhile, exercised $2.1 million worth of options on company shares, reportedly as an “an expression of confidence in the company.”

—Luke orchestrated a conversation with Roger Tung, the CEO of Concert Pharmaceuticals, a Lexington, MA-based startup whose strategy of taking existing drugs and replacing a few of the hydrogen atoms with deuterium atoms has yielded potential treatments for menopausal hot flashes and HIV.

—Ryan checked in with Mark Benedyk, the new head of Pfizer’s (NYSE:PFE) incubator in La Jolla, CA. Though the previous incubator chief had made public comments about launching a second Pfizer incubator in the Boston area, Benedyk said he wants the incubator to be a virtual entity in markets outside of its San Diego base.

—Lexington, MA-based Synta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SNTA) earned $25 million from GlaxoSmithKline for reaching milestones in development of the cancer drug elesclomol, which is in late-stage trials as a treatment for metastatic melanoma.

—RXi Pharmaceuticals obtained a worldwide license from the University of Massachusetts Medical School for technology for the oral delivery of treatments based on RNA interference. The Worcester, MA, firm, co-founded by the medical school’s Craig Mello, focuses exclusively on RNAi-based drugs.

—Biotech veteran Keith Dionne, the former CEO of Alantos Pharmaceuticals, took the reins as president and CEO of Boston’s Surface Logix, a privately held developer of small-molecule drugs.

—Cambridge, MA-based Targanta Therapeutics announced it has a date (November 19) to make the case to the FDA for approval of its antibiotic, oritavancin, for hard-to-treat skin infections. The FDA has until December 8 to review Targanta’s application for the drug, which would be its first marketed application.

—Biogen Idec found itself the subject of much debate when it denied the request of a dying cancer patient—a famous trial attorney and Democratic fund-raiser—for access to Tysabri, a drug currently only approved for treating multiple sclerosis and Crohn’s disease. Luke explained the complicated circumstances of the case, and the reasoning behind Biogen’s decision. Be sure to read readers’ comments as well; the discussion is getting really interesting.

—Wilmington, MA-based Charles River Laboratories International (NYSE:CRL) said it’s opening a 60,000-square-foot pre-clinical facility in Shanghai to support the global drug-development needs of its clients.

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Boston Scientific CEO James Tobin exercised $2.1 million worth of options on shares of the Natick, MA-based medical device firm yesterday as an “an expression of confidence in the company,” according to a report in the Boston Business Journal. The CEO’s purchase of 350,000 shares of Boston Scientific (NYTS:BSX) stock at $6.13 per share followed on the heels of co-founders Pete Nicholas and John Abele’s involuntary sale of about about 13 million shares as part of an automatic selling plan. Shares of Boston Scientific are trading at $7.31 at around 1:00 pm EST; the 52-week low for the stock is $8.10.

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Yesterday was a dark day on Wall Street, and, according to many observers, a dark day for our political system. But what does the financial crisis mean for innovation, and what are the key things that investors, entrepreneurs, and big companies should do or not do during such an upheaval? Xconomy asked this question of a panel of our Xconomists, and also asked what the crisis likely means for each of their specific fields.

The responses have been pouring in. You can click a name below to jump to that person’s response, or simply page through the whole post. And we’ll be updating this post frequently as more Xconomists are heard from, so check back from time to time.

• Michael Greeley
• Clay Siegall
• Michael Schrage
• Chris Gabrieli
• Ken Morse
• James Geshwiler
• Bill Aulet
• Martin Simonetti

Michael Greeley (9/29/08)

Staggering. There is no other way to characterize what we just witnessed. Our elected officials in Congress just put themselves in front of the collective national good. I am sure that their philosophical differences are real but today was a day for compromise. Many millions of investors around the world just spoke—and they did so very loudly. While flawed, the bail-out was a critical first step in what will be a long difficult recovery and it should have passed. There will be significant job losses; many companies will go bankrupt as they struggle to access credit to fund basic operations, much less expansion.

So where does that leave the “innovation economy?” Arguably battered and bruised, but like Rocky, it will answer the bell. Venture capitalists are obviously concerned—less about the losses today in the public markets than what that implies for how long they will need to support a portfolio of private companies that require on-going funding as these companies build their products, develop new markets. Any plans we had for liquidity were suspended months ago. VCs have been focused on building valuable private companies for generations—so now we just need to hold on to them a few years longer. Over many investment cycles it has been proven time and again that investments in innovation outstrip returns investors can get elsewhere.

The bar has been set even higher for the funding of new investments—but expect that there will continue to be investment activity, especially in the early stage marketplace. Entrepreneurs will most likely be asked to take less capital and focus on near-term milestones. Venture-backed companies will be asked to look at aggressive cost-cutting scenarios to understand worst-case scenarios. And VCs will re-evaluate their reserve policies across their portfolios to ensure that existing investments will be adequately supported. Unfortunately for those under-performing companies, expect to see less investor patience and a higher mortality rate than we might see in less volatile times.

Clay Siegall (9/30)

I have experienced a few financial downturns, most recently post-9/11 which lasted into 2003. At times like these, it is important to focus on what you do best, while being careful to utilize the resources that you need, not those that you want. I have observed that most truly innovative ideas come from individuals or small teams that can ask and answer questions rapidly.

For entrepreneurs, financial uncertainty forces efforts to be streamlined. This is often when the best concepts arise as great innovators are excited by and step up to challenges much as great athletes reach deep within themselves to achieve peak performance. Above all, don’t follow others during a downturn as that is a sure way to halt innovation and progress.

Investors should take positions with companies that have a diversified product portfolio and strong balance sheet. It is times like now in which investors … Next Page »

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Newton, MA-based biotech firm Clinical Data (NASDAQ:CLDA) said today that it has inked a deal to raise some $25 million in a private placement of stock and warrants. The agreement, with affiliates of Clinical Data board chair Randal J. Kirk, includes some 1.5 million newly issued shares of common stock and warrants on another 757,000 shares.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: VRTX) announced that the underwriters of its stock offering have exercised their option to purchase 1.1 million additional shares, bringing the overall size of the deal to 8.6 million shares worth a total of $220.0 million. The Cambridge, MA-based developer of the hepatitis C drug telaprevir last week priced 7.5 million shares at $25.50 apiece, for a total of $191.3 million.

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Cell Therapeutics said today its board has authorized a 1-for-10 reverse stock split, meaning that shareholders will get one share of common stock in exchange for 10 they own. The Seattle-based biotech company (NASDAQ: CTIC) said the change will take effect Aug. 31. The move was made primarily to regain compliance with Nasdaq listing requirements, the company said. Shares of Cell Therapeutics fell 2 cents to 25 cents at 10:57 a.m. Eastern time today.

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On the up side, the IPO drought was broken by a New England company. On the down side, the stock took a bit of a tumble. That and the rest of last week’s deals news below.

—GT Solar (NASDAQ: SOLR) raised about $500 million for its parent company, which sold 30.3 million shares of the Merrimack, NH-based manufacturer of solar panel production equipment in the first PE-backed IPO since the end of the first quarter. Shares closed the week at $12.59, however, down 24 percent from their debut price of $16.50.

—Tech luminaries Esther Dyson and Tim O’Reilly were among the seed-stage backers of Good Data, a Cambridge, MA-based business intelligence software startup. Good Data founder and CEO Roman Stanek and New York-based VC firm Windcrest Partners also participated in the $2 million deal.

—Biofuel and biochemical developer BioEnergy International of Quincy, MA, bought the assets of Cambridge, MA-based OmniGene Bioproducts; financial terms of the agreement weren’t disclosed.

—Accretive Exit Capital, a secondary private equity firm based in Boston and West Palm Beach, FL, closed its first fund, totaling $125 million. Accretive said it raised the money in just 45 days.

—Cambridge, MA-based CambridgeSoft raised $21 million from New York-based Goldman, Sachs & Co. The company provides management and database software for biotech, pharmaceutical, and chemical firms.

—Stealthy currency-trading startup Tradual of Boston reportedly collected $2.4 million of a $4 million Series A funding round led by Waltham, MA-based North Bridge Venture Partners.

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The long-delayed initial public offering for Merrimack, NH-based GT Solar International is scheduled to go forward on Thursday—and so many investors are interested in the company that the offering is already oversubscribed, according to Ben Holmes, publisher at research firm Morningnotes.

The stock will trade on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker symbol SOLR. According to Morningnotes’ research, it will debut in the price range of $15.50 to $17.50 per share, potentially raising $470 million to $530 million for the company, which makes equipment for manufacturing photovoltaic panels and has landed some big contracts recently. The company dusted off and expanded its long dormant plan to go public on July 7 after first filing for an IPO in April 2007.

Morningnotes reported today based on information gathered from the deal’s underwriters—who include Credit Suisse, UBS Invest Bank, Banc of America Securities LLC, Deutsche Bank Securities, Piper Jaffray, and Thomas Weisel Partners LLC—that the IPO is “oversubscribed with no appreciable price sensitivity,” meaning investors are willing to buy in even at the high end of the $15.50-$17.50 price range. The underwriters “didn’t give a degree of oversubscription—just more than one times,” Holmes says.

GT Solar was founded in 1994 and is controlled by private equity firm GFI Energy Ventures and alternative-energy investment manager Oaktree Capital Management. If the offering goes ahead as planned, it will be the first IPO by a U.S. venture- or PE-backed company since the end of the first quarter, breaking not only the regional New England IPO drought but the national one as well.

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