Some interesting news in the world of startups and big cloud providers today. Verizon Communications announced it has acquired CloudSwitch, a Burlington, MA-based software startup, for an undisclosed price. CloudSwitch will be combined with Verizon’s Terremark IT services division, the company said, as it tries to take a “step forward in defining the enterprise cloud.”

CloudSwitch started in 2008 and raised a little over $15 million from venture investors including Atlas Venture, Matrix Partners, and Commonwealth Capital Ventures. The startup was co-founded by Ellen Rubin and John Considine. In early 2010, my colleague Wade profiled the trials and tribulations of CloudSwitch as it went through beta trials of its software tool, which creates a temporary work space on a cloud service (like Amazon’s EC2) where companies can run virtualized applications as if they were still running on their home infrastructure.

There are plenty of startups and well-established companies trying to solve this problem, which still stands in the way of a lot of big companies moving their workloads to the Internet cloud.

“Our founding vision has always been to create a seamless and secure federation of cloud environments across enterprise data centers and global cloud services,” said CloudSwitch CEO John McEleney, in a statement. “Together, we will be able to provide enterprises with an unmatched level of flexibility, scalability and control in the cloud.”

New York-based Verizon (NYSE: VZ) is better known for its wireless network and broadband Internet services. But it has been making inroads in cloud computing lately and wants to own its fair share of the enterprise cloud—whatever that might end up looking like.

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We’ve got a trio of quick Seattle-area technology fundraising items today, fresh from the SEC filings.

Livemocha reports that it has raised about $5 million in a Series C round, which appears like it could grow to the $7.5 million range with warrants and options. I tried to get more details on that aspect from Livemocha, but it instead dispatched a PR person to say the company is holding back the information so it can come out with a larger pre-packaged story of some kind later this month.

Anyway: Livemocha runs an online language-learning network that hooks people up virtually with native speakers. They’ve been entertainingly pugnacious about their rivalry with Rosetta Stone, the publicly traded language-instruction company whose product is traditionally based around CD-ROMs. Previous investors in Livemocha include Maveron and August Capital. I didn’t see any new VC board members in the latest paperwork.

Seattle-based Telecom Transport Management has sold $4 million in equity. The company provides “backhaul” networking to major wireless carriers, helping them build out from the main spine of a network into all the smaller sections on its way to consumers. TTM says it has networks in 15 metropolitan areas, concentrated in the Midwest and eastern U.S., with offices in Virginia, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Minnesota. This newest fundraising round is kind of small potatoes—TTM raised about $40 million in a previous fundraising round that spanned 2009 and 2010.

And finally, Bellevue, WA-based RootMetrics (still known by former brand name Root Wireless in government filings) has sold $1 million of an equity round that could be worth up to $5 million. RootMetrics tracks and analyzes wireless network speeds through consumer smartphone apps and commercial data-collection from the carriers. That allows it to publish maps of mobile network strength for consumers, and sell the sliced and diced data back to the carriers. RootMetrics told GeekWire that the new money was from existing investors.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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Let’s count the juicy consumer-Internet trends piled up in Seattle startup Lockerz: Social networking, photo sharing, gamification, deals, and original content. That’s a mouthful, and investors apparently like what they see—Lockerz’s $30 million venture round is by far the biggest equity deal in Washington state for the month of April, according to data compiled by research firm CB Insights.

Lockerz is led by Kathy Savitt, a veteran of Amazon.com. Also in April, Lockerz added another former Amazonian, Mark Stabingas, as chief operating officer. The site claims 18 million users, who earn points for watching videos, uploading photos (Lockerz previously acquired Plixi) and other social-networking interactions. The aim is to redeem those points for deals on consumer products. Lockerz is very well-financed for a Seattle tech startup—it previously had raised $30 million.

There was a tie for second-largest equity financing in April, with two companies raising $6 million each. One was Decide.com, a stealth-mode startup that says it is focusing on online consumer electronics shopping. The company was co-founded by University of Washington professor and Internet search expert Oren Etzioni. It’s led by CEO Mike Fridgen. The pair worked together on Farecast, the airfare-prediction startup that was acquired by Microsoft.

The other $6 million startup in April was Spokane-based ReliOn, which makes commercial and industrial fuel cells based on “proton exchange membrane” technology. The company has been around since 1995, but went through a name change in 2004, according to the corporate website. ReliOn says it has about 3,500 kilowatts’ worth of cells worldwide, and serves public and private customers.

Coming in fourth was Xeround, which raised $4 million. Xeround, based in Bellevue, WA, offers cloud-computing software to help businesses, primarily in the telecommunications industry, to help them manage their data. The company says it has developed an “intelligent data grid” that allows customers to put all their information in one place instead of having it scattered across multiple databases.

Rounding out April’s top five was Mpire, a Seattle-based advertising company that raised $3 million. That wasn’t the end of the company’s news last month: Mpire also named a new CEO, and changed its name, switching over to AdXpose—adopting the moniker of its marquee product. That was the completion of a switchover that the company started about a year ago, when it announced it was ditching its previous Widgetbucks advertising network to focus on the AdXpose technology, which is dedicated to “optimizing” ad spending online.

Check out the table for the rest of the month’s Washington equity deals, and a few debt financings to boot.

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Newton, MA-based Kaminario, a data storage startup, said today it has closed a $15 million Series C round from new investor Globespan Capital Partners and previous investors Sequoia Capital and Pitango Venture Capital. Kaminario started in 2008 and is led by co-founder and CEO Dani Golan. The company has raised a total of $34 million. It uses off-the-shelf blade servers and solid-state drive technology to create what it calls a “distributed storage grid appliance” for businesses. Kaminario says its customers include financial services firms, Web media companies, telecommunications companies, and government agencies.

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Big data, schmig data. I know, you’re sick of it. Too bad.

Let’s get right to the trash talk, shall we? A few weeks ago, Netezza CEO Jim Baum (who’s now part of IBM) was telling me about the competitive landscape in “big data” analytics—the software and machinery that businesses are using these days to analyze increasingly huge amounts of data on customers, sales, logistics, and so forth.

While touting Netezza’s products, Baum dished on the shortcomings of other players in the sector like EMC/Greenplum, Oracle, and especially Hewlett-Packard, which acquired Billerica, MA-based Vertica in the data analytics arena last month. Baum pointed out some of HP’s recent struggles in data warehousing and business intelligence. He said the company has suffered “a tremendous brain drain” and that its “talent pool is gone.” He concluded that “HP has completely missed the boat” on big data analytics.

Vertica, whose acquisition by Palo Alto, CA-based HP (NYSE: HPQ) officially closed last week, would beg to differ. Chris Lynch, Vertica’s chief executive, started out by giving me a quip of his own about Netezza. “Their tag line is ‘The power to question everything,’” Lynch says. “So the first question is: why do they need proprietary hardware? The second question is: why are they using a database engine that’s based on technology from 1982?”

Netezza would probably dispute those assertions, but let’s hear Lynch out. In comparison to Vertica’s software-only “next generation architecture,” Lynch says, Netezza’s technology is “like taking an AMC Pacer and putting a turbocharger in it.” He also says Netezza faces “challenges architecturally” and, in its integration with IBM, will have to navigate the “politics of five competing databases” at Big Blue.

Lynch (see left) also defended his own house, pointing out (in response to Baum’s remark about HP’s talent) that Vertica hasn’t lost a single engineer during his year-long tenure or as a result of the acquisition. In that regard, he says, HP’s talent pool is quite strong, thank you very much. What’s more, Vertica is currently hiring top talent across sales, engineering, and product management, he says, and is looking to more than double the size of its Boston-area headquarters to more than 200 workers sometime later this year.

It also sounds like HP is letting Vertica run pretty autonomously, as its own … Next Page »

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West Lebanon, NH-based SustainX, an energy-storage startup out of Dartmouth College, said today it has received $14.4 million in financing from GE Energy Financial Services and other investors including Cadent Energy Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Rockport Capital. SustainX, which started in 2007, uses compressed air in above-ground vessels to store energy in an efficient way. Possible applications of the technology include storing wind and solar energy and improving the stability of the electric grid.

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Burlington, MA-based Emptoris, a maker of supply and contract management software for businesses, said today it has acquired Rivermine, a Virginia-based developer of telecom expense management software. Financial terms were not disclosed, but the acquisition was financed by Marlin Equity Partners, which is Emptoris’s majority owner. The combined company has 650 employees and added more than 100 of them in 2010, including a couple of senior executives from Oracle and SAP.

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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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Venture capitalists and venture-backed CEOs are feeling more optimistic about 2011, according to the fifth annual outlook survey being released today by the National Venture Capital Association and Dow Jones VentureSource. The most recent “Venture View” survey is based on responses from more than 330 VCs and 180 executives that were collected nationwide at the beginning of December.

With investors returning to the public markets (the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index is up 11 percent this year, and more than 80 percent since March 2009), two-thirds of the VCs say they expect to see more venture-backed companies going public in 2011. Venture capitalists also predict that venture firms also will invest more capital in the coming year—which is a good thing, since more than two-thirds of the CEOs say they plan to pursue additional funding in 2011.

Venture-backed chief executives say they expect to hire more, sell more, and (of course) get paid more in 2011.

The survey suggests that VCs are gaining confidence in the improvement of their industry, and in the recovery of the U.S. economy in general.

At this time last year, the survey showed that venture capitalists were only cautiously optimistic. “The market was so troubled in 2009, the sentiment was that things had to get better in 2010,” says NVCA President Mark Heesen in a statement. “The improving exit market and a renewed excitement in the IT sector have engendered a confidence among VCs and the CEOs of the companies in which we invest that promises to propel the startup community forward in 2011.”

VCs were less confident, though, about their own prospects for fund-raising—which poses a concern for the industry’s well-being. When asked “How will U.S. venture capital fund-raising fare in 2011?” 38 percent of the VCs said they expect fund-raising to increase, while 32 percent expect it to decrease, and 30 percent anticipate that fund-raising will remain unchanged. Nearly half (48 percent) said they expect to see more … Next Page »

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There’s a new organization of angel investors in town. Well, sort of.

The new entity is being announced today as the merger of two existing Boston-area angel groups—Launchpad Venture Group and Race Point Capital Group, which are headed up by tech investors Hambleton Lord and Christopher Mirabile, respectively.

Lord and Mirabile will co-lead the combined angel group, which will have more than 70 members, making it one of the largest in New England. (Nine-year-old Launchpad has about 60 members, while Race Point, which started in mid-2009, has 22.) The group will use Launchpad as its working name, but is also considering a new name.

Its investments will target early-stage tech (and some life sciences) companies, and will be made by individual members—Launchpad doesn’t have a fund, and Race Point’s fund (of undisclosed size) will continue to be managed by Mirabile. Launchpad’s portfolio includes a wide range of companies such as Boston Heart Lab, EveryScape, Localytics, Mobius Imaging, and TimeTrade, while Race Point’s includes such startups as Daily Grommet, Pixability, and Zyrra.

The move exemplifies area investors’ increasing focus on seed-stage startups that have progressed beyond the level of an incubator or accelerator program like TechStars or MassChallenge, but are not yet ready to raise a full-blown Series A venture round. Indeed, Launchpad plays in a crowded investor space that now includes angel groups such as CommonAngels (which has recently ramped up its seed investing) and Golden Seeds; “micro-VCs” and other seed-stage-focused firms like Project 11 Ventures, NextView Ventures, LaunchCapital, and Founder Collective; and more traditional venture firms.

The amount of Boston-area entrepreneurial activity “has really accelerated in the last couple years,” Lord says, and is moving “to a different stage.” Specifically, he says, there are now more seed-stage companies looking for financing, operational mentorship (including help with recruiting employees and acquiring customers), domain expertise, and contacts.

Which is exactly what Launchpad is looking to provide. The combined angel group will continue to focus on small startups in New England that, over time, will need less than $5-10 million in … Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures said today it has filed three patent infringement lawsuits against a total of nine companies in three different technology sectors—software security, memory, and integrated circuits. The suits were filed in federal court in Delaware, where Intellectual Ventures is a registered entity. The amount of monetary damages the company is seeking was not disclosed. According to the complaints (see links in the press release), IV sought to reach settlements with the companies before going to court.

These are the first patent infringement suits brought by Intellectual Ventures, which is in the business of developing, acquiring, and licensing intellectual property worldwide. The patents in question—16 in total—were all acquired by IV at various times. Critics have slammed IV for being a “patent troll” that buys up intellectual property, tries to squeeze true innovators into coughing up settlements, and doesn’t develop much valuable intellectual property of its own—and today’s news probably won’t do much to stem that criticism.

“These are companies incorporating our inventions [and intellectual property assets], and they don’t have a license,” says Melissa Finocchio, Intellectual Ventures’ chief litigation counsel. She says that in some cases there were discussions with the companies before filing suit, but that others named in the complaints would not engage IV in discussions.

The first lawsuit is against Redwood City, CA-based Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ: CHKP), Santa Clara, CA-based McAfee (NYSE: MFE), Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), and Tokyo-based Trend Micro, and concerns four patents that IV says are used in “many products including anti-virus and security software.”

The second lawsuit is against Tokyo-based Elpida Memory and Seoul, South Korea-based Hynix Semiconductor, and concerns seven patents around computer memory technologies, including certain types of synchronous dynamic random access memory (widely used in computers, servers, and workstation) and flash memory (used in cameras, media players, cellphones, and USB drives).

The third lawsuit is against San Jose, CA-based Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR), Hillsboro, OR-based Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ: LSCC), and Irvine, CA-based Microsemi (NASDAQ: MSCC). This one concerns five patents used in field programmable gate array (FPGA—a common type of customizable chip) devices for telecom, wireless, defense, broadcast, and networking industries.

It’s all part of an increasing trend towards patent litigation in the high-tech industry. Last week, we had a story about the University of Washington suing industrial giant General Electric for infringing on an ultrasound patent. “We believe this [trend] is a recognition of the value of invention and the value of intellectual property,” says IV’s Finocchio.

How will Intellectual Ventures respond to the patent troll criticism now? “We can’t control how people want to label us,” Finocchio says. “We are no different from any other company in the high-tech space that owns intellectual property.” She adds that although IV primarily acquires patents versus filing its own, in many cases it improves the claims and makes them stronger and more relevant to various industries.

An Intellectual Ventures spokesperson added that the company expects people to use the “patent troll” term, but “this is simply our company protecting its assets.” She says IV prefers to follow its licensing model, whereby companies pay for patent protection and access to IV’s extensive portfolio, which includes more than 30,000 “IP assets.” Recent examples include licensing deals with Samsung and HTC in the past month.

In any case, don’t expect to see much significant activity in the court cases over the next few months. “Litigation is a long road,” Finocchio says.

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A couple of startup companies set a world aviation record last night.

But they were pretty low-key about it. As I walked into the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, WA, a half hour north of Seattle, I saw little activity. It was after hours, and the hangar-like building was nearly deserted except for the futuristic planes suspended from the ceiling—Burt Rutan’s “Quickie” and a Beechcraft Starship—and part of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuselage on the display floor. It was a bit like “Star Wars” meets “Night at the Museum.”

Tom Nugent, the co-founder and president of Kent, WA-based LaserMotive, greeted me and said they were almost ready for showtime. A small team of engineers divided its attention between the back of a command truck and the adjacent trailer that held the laser optics equipment that would make the show possible. Two German guys who hadn’t slept in days (and were still on Munich time) were sprawled out on deck chairs in front of computer monitors like they were playing a video game. One held a remote controller that he used to guide a “quadrocopter”—a small, 1-kilogram, square-shaped flying contraption with blinking lights and four spinning rotors—made by their company, Ascending Technologies.

Jan Stumpf and Michael Achtelik, the co-CEOs of Ascending Technologies, partnered with LaserMotive to perform this feat last night. The goal: to use a laser to power an aircraft in continuous flight for about 12 hours (far longer than its battery would last without recharging, which is only about five minutes). That would be a world record, by a long shot, for the longest free flight of an electric vehicle.

Indeed, this demonstration is a big deal for the future of electric planes, said Barry Smith, the executive director of the Future of Flight facility. Imagine putting a laser on top of every cellular tower, he said, so that certain types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would never need to land to recharge or refuel. That could potentially revolutionize communications, surveillance, and security and defense applications. Longer term, it could even impact the long-held dream of powering manned aircraft with electricity instead of jet fuel—though that is very far off.

For now, Nugent says, “The significance is we’re going to show this quadrocopter, and any aerial vehicle [of this size], will be able to fly effectively forever. It’s no longer limited by battery capacity.”

LaserMotive has done smaller flight tests before, but not on a free-flying vehicle like this. The company is best known for winning the $900,000 NASA Power Beaming Challenge last year, in one of the levels of the “Space Elevator Games.” That involved using a laser to power a climbing robot up a cable to a certain height (1 kilometer) at a certain speed (about 9 mph). But lately the company has been targeting UAVs as a big commercial application of its wireless power technology. (The next level of the NASA challenge, which was supposed to happen later this year, is still up in the air, so to speak.)

“Goggles on!” someone shouted, and we all complied. That meant the infrared laser, which puts out about 200 watts of light power, was switching on. The beam was directed using a series of mirrors and optics and shot out the top of the trailer. You couldn’t see it with the naked eye except for a reddish halo on the 50-foot ceiling. At the same time, the quadrocopter lifted off (under its own battery power), guided by Stumpf, and floated up to meet the beam, about 30 feet off the ground (see left).

“Not centered,” Nugent said. Then the computer vision system of LaserMotive’s setup kicked in. Software and cameras aligned with the path of the laser beam tracked the vehicle’s position, and positioned the beam so it hit the photovoltaic cells on the underside of the craft; those solar cells transformed the laser’s energy into electricity to continuously charge the quadrocopter’s battery.

With that, all human corrections fell away, and it was just a drone hovering eerily in space, rotors humming quietly. It swayed a few feet from side to side, and the laser tracked it. It was about 7:40 pm.

This is the boring part, Nugent said. And boring is good. Exciting is bad. For the next 12 hours, if all went well, nothing more would happen. The craft would stay up all night (as would the crew), … Next Page »

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Yesterday’s acquisition of Cambridge, MA, technology firm ThingMagic by Silicon Valley-based Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) left a lot of people in the radio frequency identification (RFID) and location-based tech sectors wanting to know more. I spoke with both companies late in the day to get some answers.

Overall it sounds like a fairly standard acquisition that allows ThingMagic to continue its RFID operations and business under new ownership. “We decided it was best to acquire the assets from ThingMagic—the people and the team, experience, and the [intellectual property], name, and branding. All [employees] are invited to come on over,” says Jurgen Kliem, vice president of Trimble’s strategy and business development.

ThingMagic is now a 33-person division of Trimble, which has some 3,800 employees in 23 countries (it already had a small software group in Waltham, MA). The ThingMagic offices in Cambridge and Woburn will remain, and employees will be staying put for now. That seems important, since the company is one of the stalwarts of Kendall Square and the local tech startup scene, having been founded in 2000.

“The benefit and opportunity, from my perspective, is enormous,” says Tom Grant, ThingMagic’s chairman and CEO, and now a general manager at Trimble. “We’re beginning to see substantial growth in RFID…and need to make sure we continue to fuel that growth.” Trimble represents a “shot in the arm,” he says, in that ThingMagic now gains the financial support of a billion-dollar company. Grant will lead a division that “lets us continue with our global market strategy,” he says.

The deal represents an exit for ThingMagic’s venture investors, which have included (all in the past five years) Tudor Ventures, The Exxel Group, Cisco Systems, Morningside Technology Ventures, and In-Q-Tel. The companies did not disclose the size of the acquisition, so it’s hard to tell how well the investors made out. (Word on the street is that ThingMagic raised more than $30 million, and—this is pure speculation based on what I’ve heard from sources outside the companies—the acquisition is for less than $55 million.)

“To our investors, this was a desired outcome. They wanted this and we accommodated it,” Grant says.

It’s not totally clear how Trimble plans to integrate RFID into its asset-tracking and … Next Page »

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“Micro VC” and “super angel” funds are all the rage these days. These terms refer to the emerging segment of venture capital and angel capital in which a growing number of investors are putting small amounts of seed money into very early-stage startups—mainly in Internet software.

How are traditional venture firms reacting to this movement? Many already make seed-stage investments, and others are starting to do more. I recently sat down with Izhar Armony, a partner at Charles River Ventures, which has offices in Waltham, MA, and Silicon Valley, to talk about many things—among them, how he views the micro-VC landscape. Charles River Ventures has had its own formal seed-stage funding program, called QuickStart, since 2006. In this program, the firm invests $250,000 in the form of a loan to each startup, and it has backed more than 30 of them to date. “For a certain kind of investment, it’s good,” Armony says.

Armony’s expertise runs the gamut from mobile software, open source, and software-as-a-service, to intellectual property and alternative energy. He was a veteran of Onyx Interactive, a computer-based training company in Israel, before joining Charles River Ventures in 1997. His startup exits have included Virtusa, iPhrase, ThinQ, Yantra, Guardent, and Oberon. He is currently involved with a number of companies we report on regularly at Xconomy, including Intellectual Ventures, RPX, TerraPower, 24M Technologies (the new spinout from A123Systems), and Vlingo. [Disclosure: The author’s brother-in-law, Mike Phillips, is a co-founder of Vlingo---Eds.]

Here are some excerpts from our chat, about micro-VC strategy and some misconceptions that first-time entrepreneurs may have about building companies. I thought it was particularly interesting to hear these things coming from a well-established tech VC in town:

Xconomy: What do you think about the evolution of micro VC?

Izhar Armony: In general, I think it’s a positive phenomenon for the entrepreneur to have a more approachable source of capital that can write very small checks to begin with. Specifically, for certain kinds of startups—consumer Internet startups, less so [software-as-a-service] companies, but maybe, where within weeks you’re up and running, and the cost to launch is in the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but not millions—it’s very good. As Chairman Mao said, “Let a thousand flowers bloom.” From the entrepreneur perspective, it’s a good thing.

But there are two problems. One is that innovation is much broader than Web 2.0. … Next Page »

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EvoNexus, the free incubator launched last November by San Diego’s CommNexus telecom industry group, is preparing to send its first fledgling startups into the wild—and to choose a few new startups to replace them.

The comings and goings are taking place as both EvoNexus and CommNexus are settling into new office space themselves, just months after the privately held Newport Beach, CA-based Irvine Company took both organizations under its wing. The nonprofit telecom group and its EvoNexus incubator moved rent-free into the fourth floor of an Executive Square office building in San Diego’s University City neighborhood about two months ago, according to CommNexus officials. The arrangement is part of a broader initiative by the Irvine Company to renew the area as a center of innovation for technology startups, which were priced out of the market during the go-go years of Southern California’s combined tech and real estate booms.

“We’re trying to bring the idea and brand back,” says Doug Holte, president of office properties at the Irvine Company. The real estate developer and property management company owns more than half of the office buildings near the upscale University Towne Center shopping mall, which serves as the de facto center of the area also known as UTC. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the community also is sometimes referred to as the “Golden Triangle,” because the Interstate 5, State Route 52, and Interstate 805 form a triangle around the master-planned mix of condos, apartment buildings, hotels, shopping malls, hospitals, and office buildings.

Holte says the Irvine Company, which owns about 33 million square feet of office space from Silicon Valley to San Diego, has been working to “re-introduce UTC” as a tech hub on the strength of its original concept as a commercial and residential center for UC San Diego, a few miles to the west.

CommNexus has been helping the Irvine Company promote the area, and last night the industry group hosted an invitation-only “open house” for the local tech community. In an interview yesterday, CommNexus CEO Rory Moore told me, “We look at UTC as a new convergence tech cluster,” with the EvoNexus incubator as a key source for the innovation. The nonprofit telecom industry group founded EvoNexus in mid-2009 as a way of keeping the flame of innovation flickering in San Diego amid the Great Recession’s capital crisis and a dearth of … Next Page »

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Boston-based American Tower, an owner and operator of wireless towers and other communications sites, said today it plans to raise $700 million in a registered public offering of senior unsecured notes due September 2020. The company says the net proceeds of the sale, expected to be about $693.8 million, will be used to finance the recent acquisition of Essar Telecom Infrastructure Private Limited, based in India, as well as “other recent and potential acquisitions.” American Tower (NYSE: AMT) was formed in 1995, and says it currently owns and operates more than 32,000 wireless communications sites in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and India.

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San Jose, CA-based Oclaro (NASDAQ: OCLR), an optical communications and laser technology firm, announced today it has acquired Mintera, based in Acton, MA, for $12 million in cash upfront. The deal could be worth as much as $32 million in total, if Mintera reaches cumulative revenues of $70M over the next 18 months. Mintera’s annual revenue was about $20 million over the most recent fiscal year, according to the press release. The company was founded in 2000 and specializes in high-speed optical transmission systems. Its investors included Court Square Ventures, JDSU, Polaris Venture Partners, Portview Communications Partners, RRE Ventures, and Star Ventures. Terry Unter, Mintera’s CEO, will remain with Oclaro for a transitional period of unspecified length.

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We saw news of financings for stealthy startups in healthcare and IT, as well as an acquisition in the mobile space, and a business competition prize winner.

—Predictive BioSciences raised $25 million in Series C funding, to put towards selling its test for bladder cancer and for developing its diagnostics technology. New investor ProQuest Investments, a Princeton, NJ-based venture firm with offices in San Diego, led the financing round for Lexington, MA-based Predictive. Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Kaiser Permanente Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates also put cash towards the Series C.

—Norwood, MA-based Boston Biomedical, a company developing drugs that target stem-cell-like properties of certain cancer cells, wrapped up a $2 million equity offering.

—Affirmed Networks, a Waltham, MA-based telecom startup, grabbed $10.9 million of a planned $11.5 million equity offering. Mass High Tech first reported the funding news and wrote that the company is backed by Matrix Partners and is incubated at Charles River Ventures.

—Cambridge’s Daktari Diagnostics plumped up its Series A round with another $820,000, bringing the financing’s total to $3.7 million. Hub Angels, Launchpad Venture Group, Mass Medical Angels, Norwich Ventures, Partners Innovation Fund, and individual investors have put money toward the round. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, of Seattle, has also put $600,000 into the startup, which is making devices for less expensively monitoring HIV patients in developing countries.

—Jackpot Rewards, a Newton, MA-based provider of online rewards and sweepstakes programs, raised $14.1 million in a convertible debt financing. The company pulled in … Next Page »

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