Healthcare deals are going one way, tech deals another. That’s my read from the past week in the Northwest, where we’ve seen some of the biggest biotech deals around, even as a prominent Seattle tech venture firm (and software financings in general) head south.

—Bothell, WA-based Alder Biopharmaceuticals scored one of the biggest biotech partnerships of the year, as Luke reported today. The company has formed a collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY) to develop Alder’s experimental rheumatoid arthritis drug, ALD518, and the deal could be worth more than $1 billion. In exchange for granting Bristol a worldwide exclusive license to develop ALD518 for all uses except cancer, Alder will get $85 million upfront, as much as $764 million in development and regulatory milestone payments, sales-related milestone payments that could exceed $200 million, and royalties on product sales.

—I took a look at the venture and debt financings for Washington companies last month (and the previous two months), and concluded that large investments in software startups aren’t coming back anytime soon. The data, courtesy of New York-based ChubbyBrain, shows most of the money is in healthcare and life sciences.

—Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire has secured an additional investment of $1.5 billion from Sprint, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Intel, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal. Google, a previous investor, is not participating in the round. The money will support Clearwire’s (NASDAQ: CLWR) deployment of its WiMax broadband network.

—Verathon, a Bothell, WA-based maker of ultrasound technology, has been acquired by Sarasota, FL-based Roper Industries (NYSE: ROP) as part of a pair of transactions worth a combined $356 million, as Luke reported. The price of Verathon’s sale by itself was not announced. The company develops a 3-D diagnostic imaging tool that helps doctors diagnose bladder disorders.

—One of Seattle’s most prominent tech VC firms will not be raising another fund or making new investments. Len Jordan of Frazier Technology Ventures confirmed the news as he announced he’s moving to Madrona Venture Group at the beginning of next year.

—Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences Oncology has lined up $35 million in follow-up financing to develop its drug-device treatment for cancer, as Luke reported. The investors weren’t disclosed, but the deal gives Light Sciences the right to access a $23.3 million line of credit, and $11.8 million more if investors choose to exercise warrants. The company raised $40 million from undisclosed VCs last year.

—Seattle startup Movaya Wireless has been acquired by Digby, a mobile commerce firm based in Austin, TX, for an undisclosed price. Movaya was founded in 2006 by Phil Yerkes and Stanley Wang, and focuses on making digital goods storefront applications for the iPhone, Android, and mobile Web platforms. The company’s development team in China will serve as the basis for Digby’s operations in Asia.

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There must be some new force pulling West Coast tech CEOs to visit Boston. Last month, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was in town; yesterday it was Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

To mark the unusual occasion, Google invited a raft of journalists to its offices in Cambridge for an open, on-the-record roundtable discussion with Schmidt. Google’s Cambridge site director Steve Vinter served as moderator. Many of the questions tossed Schmidt’s way focused on specific Google projects such as Chrome, Wave, and Android 2.0, and when they’ll evolve into major consumer-facing offerings. While some of that was interesting, I thought Schmidt’s comments on a few of the bigger strategy and policy questions revealed more about the company’s outlook on the world.

Below are some of the high points from the discussion—including Schmidt’s thoughts on strategies for economic recovery, why people fear Google, and what role the company may play in the survival of journalism.

Google is growing fast in Cambridge.

Vinter said Google’s Cambridge office, which handles a variety of projects from Google Friend Connect to Google Book Search, has passed the 200-employee mark and will be “hiring very aggressively” in the coming months. (That’s in stark contrast to Microsoft, which reduced its headcount yesterday by some 800 people, including some here in Cambridge.) “Virtually every project we have is scaling up,” Vinter said. Schmidt (who attended both Princeton and Berkeley) said Google was attracted to Cambridge in the first place because it “likes cities with extremely good technical universities.”

Many more people will be getting a look at Google Wave in the near future.

Up to now, Google has been carefully parsing out invitations to Google Wave, its experimental real-time e-mail/chat/collaboration/document sharing platform. Schmidt said the company is “getting ready for a broader distribution very soon—weeks, not months.” He said feedback on the software from early users has been positive, but the company has been slow to invite in more users for fear of outages. “So far the experiment has yielded a very innovative model and a lot of buzz, and now we want to see if it can scale,” he said.

Google has very big plans for the Chrome browser and its bigger cousin, Chrome OS.

Adoption of Google’s Chrome Web browser is progressing “very well,” Schmidt said. But for Google, Chrome is “more than a browser,” he said. “It’s a platform for powerful Web-based apps that you can’t really deliver in cloud computing without having a browser that can support cloud apps.” Making Chrome work fast, maintaining a clean separation between applications running in different tabs or windows, and supporting the new HTML 5 standard “are central to making the apps model work,” Schmidt said. “And Chrome’s success is a necessary precondition to the success of Chrome OS,” he said, since the one is derived from the other. “We have a lot riding on Chrome.”

The first public version of Chrome OS will be coming out by the end of 2009, Schmidt said. But the operating system won’t be a serious competitor for Windows, Mac OS, Linux, or other operating systems until …Next Page »

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Seattle-based Movaya Wireless, a mobile software startup, has been acquired by Digby, a mobile commerce firm based in Austin, TX. Financial terms were not announced. Movaya was founded in 2006 by Phil Yerkes and Stanley Wang, and recently has been focused on making digital goods storefront applications for the iPhone, Android, and other mobile Web platforms. The company has a development team in China that will serve as the basis for Digby’s operations in Asia.

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San Diego’s tech sector got some money and glory during a week that was overshadowed by news from two life science conferences: TEDMED and the annual Biocom Investor Conference. Get your tech news now while it’s still hot.

—To stay connected with open-source development for smart phones, San Diego’s Qualcomm created a subsidiary, the Qualcomm Innovation Center, that is focused on making sure the chipmaker’s technology works smoothly with Android, Symbian, and other open-source wireless platforms. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) also joined the Symbian Foundation and is supporting the open source systems used by Nokia and others.

—One of the big selling points for algae-based fuels is that algae absorbs a lot of carbon dioxide before it gets harvested and turned into biofuels. Yet San Diego-based Sapphire Energy and other algae biofuel companies say they are having a hard time getting enough carbon dioxide at an affordable price to support their research and development efforts.

—Federal stimulus funds will help cover almost half the cost of a new $60 million wireless communications system that San Diego Gas & Electric is developing as part of its smart grid program. The $28.1 million grant is part of $3.4 billion to be allocated nationwide.

—Carlsbad CA-based Verdezyne, which is applying advanced biotechnology tools to the development of industrial chemicals and biofuels, raised nearly $3 million of a planned $15.2 million round of venture capital.

—JMI Equity, the venture firm based in San Diego and Baltimore, led a $5 million investment in Axeda, the Waltham, MA-based startup that makes a cloud-based system for wireless tracking of company assets. Axeda also raised $4 million in venture debt from MMV Financial of Toronto.

—TechAmerica San Diego, the local chapter of the industry group previously known as the AeA, issued nine awards at its 16th annual high tech awards luncheon. The group named winners in nine categories: MadCap Software (Software); InterKnowlogy (Internet); Verari Systems (Hardware); Quake Global (Communications); SeaBotix Inc. (Defense); Peregrine Semiconductor (Integrated Circuits); OneRecovery (Medical Device) IPS Group (Cleantech); Legend Films (Emerging Growth).

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San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) says it has established a separate wholly-owned subsidiary, Qualcomm Innovation Center, (QuIC), to ensure that certain open source software operates seamlessly with Qualcomm technology.

The company says it has transferred experienced software engineers to the innovation center, where they will focus on open source initiatives such as Linux and Webkit, and on open source operating systems like Symbian, Android, and Chrome. Job postings on the company’s website indicate the center is based in San Diego and Boulder, CO. In a statement released early today, Qualcomm did not say how many engineers its QuIC subsidiary will employ

The company’s initiative is aimed at consumer products that run open source software, enabling Qualcomm-based technologies to keep pace with shifting opportunities in open software as they emerge by optimizing the performance of mobile operating systems and the software applications that run on them.

The wireless technology giant said QuIC’s board of directors has named Rob Chandhok, senior vice president of software strategy at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, as QuIC president. Chandhok plans to address the Symbian open source community at a conference in London Wednesday.

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I can’t do justice to a comprehensive review of yesterday’s FiReGlobal (West Coast) conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Instead, I’ll just give a few of my key takeaways. The all-day event, organized by Strategic News Service, focused on how to solve some of the most pressing problems in technology, business, and society—in areas as diverse as broadband access, entrepreneurship, education, sustainability and the environment, political discourse, human health, and mobile devices.

The sweeping conference had the tagline, “Global technology driving local solutions.” Interesting, as that’s sort of the reverse of Xconomy’s mantra, which is reporting about local stories with global impact. But I think they’re two sides of the same innovation coin.

So, in “ESPN plays of the day” style, here’s my top 10 list from the conference (if only I had the video to go with it):

10. Setting up entrepreneurial zones. A panel led by Ty Carlson of Microsoft proposed denoting special “R&D zones” from Oregon to British Columbia geared toward supporting startups in fields like renewable energy, sustainable farming, and biotech. The idea would be to offer tax credits and other incentives to create a more entrepreneurial culture in the Northwest, especially in rural areas.

9. What government should and shouldn’t do. Investor and entrepreneur Martin Tobias of Seattle-based Kashless said, “Startups and investors can’t make a 10-year bet when you have a two-year tax credit.” Those conditions freeze out small companies, especially in costly ventures like energy. So government should create open markets and set minimum market sizes for new technologies, Tobias said. But it shouldn’t pick the technology winners themselves.

8. Northwest tech startups do the Olympics. Tom Guthrie, CEO of Seattle-based Twisted Pair Solutions, said his company has helped numerous agencies on the Olympic Peninsula inter-operate their radios—a key problem in disaster response and other scenarios. Twisted Pair, which is backed by Ignition Partners and other investors, is also working on a laser system to deliver broadband signals. Meanwhile, Paul Manson, CEO of Vancouver, BC-based Sea Breeze, talked about his company’s project to build a high-voltage, direct-current undersea cable between Victoria, BC, and Port Angeles, WA. This would be a fast, controllable power transmission component of a smart grid; it should be under construction by mid-2010, he said.

7. The world according to Dell. In a chat with Mark Anderson of Strategic News Service, Michael Dell said he is excited about China and the rest of Asia as fast-growing economies. He anticipates a U.S. recovery from the recession, but says, “I don’t think you’ll see an immediate snap-back.” And he likes South America as an emerging market (Dell does sales of more than $1 billion in Brazil alone). But Europe, not so much—he sees a lot of uncertainty in the workforce there.

6. Get ready for Dell smartphones. “Mobility is absolutely the theme,” Dell said. He was talking about the relative importance of desktop computers, laptops, netbooks, and mobile devices to …Next Page »

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The world of traditional mobile games can be tough for small studios and publishers to navigate. Having to work around all the different wireless carriers, handsets, and operating systems can severely limit the distribution of their games. Which is why the iPhone and other app stores attract so many developers. Now, Seattle-based RealNetworks is trying to make the process of mobile game publishing faster, cheaper, and more efficient on a much broader range of mobile devices—all while advancing its own business in the sector.

RealGames, the gaming division of RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), is announcing today a new mobile publishing program, called Federation of Studios, that lets game developers quickly and cheaply port their games across 1,700 mobile handsets, 130 carriers, and eight different operating systems (J2ME, BREW, iPhone, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Android, Nintendo DSi, and Flash) worldwide. Real is offering game studios a development platform—plus distribution, marketing, and customer service, with no upfront cost—in exchange for a split of the game revenues. The first studio partner Real has announced is New York-based Sonic Boom, maker of games like Puzzlings and Kill All Bugs for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

“We’ll give you the emerging technology to develop in, we will train you in it, support you in the development process, and once the game is finished, we’ll take it and run it through the handset creation process,” says Charles Harper, general manager of business development for RealGames. “The ideal partner is someone currently creating great, innovative, and compelling content without a direct route to get onto traditional mobile.”

The technology originates from Real’s 2005 acquisition of Mr. Goodliving, a mobile game studio in Helsinki, Finland. It makes the process of developing, porting, and testing mobile games for different platforms and handsets more efficient, by automatically adjusting for technical issues like the screen size and user input scheme. Real says it will also handle the localization of mobile games for other countries, as it has expertise in 10 languages (primarily European).

RealGames employs roughly 400 people, and is known for developing and publishing games in-house (including popular games for the iPhone, Facebook, and personal computers). This is Real’s first dedicated program for working with outside game developers. The program is non-exclusive, so developers can use Real to reach a broader range of handsets and carriers while still submitting an iPhone version, say, on their own.

But, as Harper puts it, the iPhone has 30 to 40 million users, while the size of the overall mobile market is something like 2 billion people. “If you look at iTunes now, there are amazing games that are not making it onto mobile, [except for] a limited number of handsets,” he says. “We’re trying to kick the doors open and throw it out to everybody.”

Today’s news fits into RealNetworks’ broader strategy of investing in mobile as an increasing focus of its business. “We are obviously trying to expand into marketplaces as best we can,” says Harper, a two-time Real employee who has also worked at Seattle-area gaming firms WildTangent and Screenlife. “Mobile is an extremely fast-growing area for us. Because we have this unique technology, this is the best methodology we can bring in to publish out to carriers. It is the next big step for our mobile strategy.”

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Like many metropolitan areas, the Portland, OR, startup scene has had its share of ups and downs this summer. Some folks started new ventures, some won new customers and garnered funding, and some closed up shop. All in all, it was fairly balanced—especially given the economy.

But win or lose, there are still lessons to be learned—for startups everywhere. So we thought it would be wise to take some time to walk through some of the high points and low points.

Sure, Dave Chappelle inspired a gigantic Twitter flash mob, and Portland was named one of the most entrepreneurial cities. But if I had to tag the summer with one word, it would be this: mobile. Mobile development—be it iPhone apps, Android apps, or geolocation apps that span multiple platforms—has been on a tear in Portland, as of late. Fueled by early successes like Fieldrunners, the work of Spotlight Mobile, and iPhone-agency Small Society, we’ve seen more and more folks diving into the mobile space.

One of the most promising mobile companies isn’t a sexy app; it’s a company working to provide infrastructure that makes those apps run. Founded in June 2009, Urban Airship makes integrating Apple push notifications and in-app purchases easier on mobile developers by handling the heavy lifting and integration with Apple services. They’ve had some early wins with products like Tap Tap Revenge, Yowza!!, and Where—and they continue to gain traction in the development community.

Around here, iPhone development remains the dominant platform—at least as far as noise and interest goes—but there’s still a great deal of Android experimentation happening through Mobile Portland and some Android specific user groups.

Some more themes from the summer:

—Newer startups continue to gain traction

Mobile isn’t the only space that’s doing well. We’re still seeing a number of companies gaining traction.

Reductive Labs—the guys behind the open source configuration management solution, Puppet—garnered $2 million in Series A and promptly announced they were moving to Portland. …Next Page »

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Rhapsody, the online music service run by Seattle-based RealNetworks, is now available as an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It is the first time Apple has allowed on-demand music streaming on its mobile devices in the U.S. Rhapsody customers will have access to some 8 million songs for a monthly fee of about $15. RealNetworks is also working to bring Rhapsody to other mobile devices, such as Google Android phones.

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Amazon.com, the Seattle-based colossus of online retail, announced in a press release today that it has launched an application for Android, Google’s mobile operating system. The application allows users to shop on their Android smartphone, as well as take pictures or scan barcodes of products and search for them on Amazon’s website. Taking a photo and matching it with a product was the main technology acquired by Amazon when it purchased Palo Alto, CA-based Snaptell last month.

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After just a couple of weeks, Ryan Morel was hooked on Bumper Stars, a free game on Facebook. He and his co-workers were but a few of the tens of thousands of people playing the game, a mixture of ping-pong, pool, and shufflepuck, every month. Morel only wished someone would make a mobile version of the game so he could play it even more. Then he remembered that, as vice president of business development at PressOK Entertainment, based in Seattle, he could make that happen. After a few months of negotiation and six months of development, PressOK and Large Animal Games, the game’s original developer, rolled out Bumper Stars Mobile for the iPhone last week.

Translating games from one format to another is not new, but in the rapidly changing world of smartphone applications, it is an emerging trend. PressOK is one of the first mobile gaming companies to import a game in this manner, although it is rapidly becoming popular among game developers. “Developing a new game is much more difficult than translating a game,” Morel explained.

PressOK was born last September in a merger between mobile game makers Mobliss and Reaxion. Reaxion still exists as a development company based mainly in Russia and Belarus. PressOK is a publishing unit, with the combined game catalog and intellectual property of both companies before the merger, Morel said. Bumper Stars was created by New York-based Large Animal in 2007.

Bumper Stars, which is available for $2.99 in the Apple app store, “is the first real PressOK release,” Morel said. Mobliss had focused on games distributed by AT&T and Verizon to traditional cellphones. The new focus of PressOK is on games for smartphones like the iPhone and the Android, which will be getting its own version of Bumper Stars Mobile soon. Some of the games will be original, and some will be new versions of games in the PressOK catalog. About 80 percent of PressOK’s focus will be on smartphone games from now on, Morel said, including ports, original games, and translations of games in other formats. Morel said there is a revenue-sharing plan with Large Animal, although he could not provide any details.

Morel isn’t concerned that people might hesitate to buy a game that can be played for free online. The company plans on doing advertising and marketing for the next few months, at least, to boost the popularity and sales of the game even as they start working on the next one.

PressOK is one of many companies that sees new opportunities in smartphone games, where possibilities are not available to more old-fashioned mobile games. “In traditional mobile games, there’s a little bit of a sink or swim mentality,” Morel said. If a game does not succeed immediately, it tends to disappear from easily accessible options for games to play on the phone. In contrast, he said, there’s a lot that can be done to boost the profile and sales of iPhone and other smartphone games.

Success would be to get Bumper Stars into the top 25 of paid apps, but it doesn’t have to happen overnight. “The good news is that your success can be built over time,” Morel said. “Once it’s developed, it costs us really nothing to keep it in the app stores.” An existing Facebook version of the game helps, as there are only a few phone games with online versions. “It already has a substantial user base. We can tap into the existing group of people who enjoy the game,” Morel said.

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Not surprisingly, given the rush among handset makers and software developers to cash in on the mobile-software explosion, there’s a been a big uptick in the availability of mobile apps that make use of location information, according to a report published today by Boston’s Skyhook Wireless. That’s true not just for the Apple iPhone, but for Android, Blackberry, Palm, and Nokia phones as well, the company found. But a big chunk of the applications are what Skyhook is calling “bulk apps”—identical templates that publishers fill with varying information, such as travel guides to hundreds of world cities.

As many as a third of all of the location-aware apps in Apple’s iTunes App Store, the company’s catalog of iPhone applications, are mass-produced in this way, Skyhook found. A single developer, Molinker, sells more than 850 travel-related bulk apps. The cornucopia of apps piling up in the various application stores, in other words, may not be quite as rich as it looks.

“There are over 50,000 [Apple] App Store apps, and this massive number is often referenced as a sign of the tremendous growth of the App Store,” Skyhook said in a press release accompanying the report. “But, it is important to understand that bulk apps make up much of this volume.”

Skyhook posted the survey of location-based applications today on its blog Location Revolution. The company studies the spread of location-aware mobile applications because it makes the underlying location-finding software built into many mobile devices, including the iPhone.

Skyhook surveyed both the numbers and prices of applications emerging in the iTunes App Store, the Android marketplace, Blackberry App World, Nokia’s Ovi Store, and the Palm App Catalog. A handful of apps are priced at $6 to $9, with navigation or sports-related apps sometimes selling for even more. But the most common price for location-enabled apps is $0.99, the company found—and hundreds of new apps were released at this price in the first half of 2009, thanks to the bulk app phenomenon.

“The release of bulk apps is a monetization strategy,” Kate Imbach, Skyhook’s director of marketing and developer programs, said in the company’s release. As developers look for various ways to make money on mobile applications, creating hundreds of variations on a single low-cost app may be an alternative to hitting the jackpot with a single killer app, Imbach observed. “As developers experiment with these strategies, it will be interesting to see if bulk apps gain traction,” she said.

Here are a few of the Skyhook report’s other interesting tidbits, broken down by device type:

Android

There are 4,000 apps in the Android Marketplace, and about 400 of them are location-aware. One-quarter of the apps are paid, with an average price of $1. Travel and shopping apps are the most popular varieties of location-enabled applications.

Apple iPhone/iPod Touch

Of the 50,000 applications in the iTunes App Store, 2,800 are location-aware. About 77 percent of these apps are paid, with the average price being $3.47. Navigation and news-and-weather apps are the fastest-growing categories of location-based applications in the App Store.

Blackberry

The Blackberry App World, which debuted in April, offers 79 location-aware applications, 57 percent of which are paid, with the average price at a surprisingly high $11.70. Travel and navigation apps are the most popular categories of location-aware apps among Blackbery users.

Nokia

Nokia’s Ovi store, launched in May, contains 23 location-aware apps, 43 percent of which are paid, with an average price of $3.11. “Nokia’s Ovi Store has the smallest ratio of [location-based] apps to total apps,” Skyhook noted in the report. “Only 2 percent of Ovi apps use location. This is surprising considering Nokia’s demonstrated interest and massive financial commitment to the location space, including the $8.1 billion acquisition of Navteq.”

Palm

The Palm App Catalog, launched in June with the release of the Palm Pre smartphone, includes nine location-aware applications, all free, with entertainment apps and lifestyle apps as the most popular.

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Tired of hearing your airline seatmates blab on their cellphones just to tell people “I’m on the plane,” or “I’ve just landed”? Sick of texting “Where are you?” when you’re trying to meet up with friends, or when a family member is stuck in traffic? Then Bryan Trussel, an ex-Microsoft veteran turned entrepreneur, has a service for you.

It’s called Glympse, and it debuts today as a downloadable application on T-Mobile G1 phones with the Google Android operating system—with iPhone, BlackBerry, and Windows Mobile versions to come soon. The mobile software lets you share your location automatically with whoever you want (as long as they have Internet access on their phone or laptop), for however long you want. You click on an e-mail or phone number in your contact list, and that person can then click on a URL to open up a dynamic map that traces your location in real-time and gives your speed and estimated arrival time, if you specify a destination. The person on the receiving end does not need to sign up for Glympse (though the service is enhanced if they do), and can view the map on their phone, laptop, or desktop.

Trussel, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, says Glympse is meant to help business associates and acquaintances meet up, as well as friends and families—so it has a potentially huge user base. Not surprisingly, the location-based services field is pretty crowded, with competition from big players like Google Latitude and overlap with location-aware startups like Seattle-based Pelago (maker of Whrrl), Silicon Valley-based Loopt and Brightkite, and Boston-based uLocate. But Janis Machala of UW Tech Transfer, who watches the mobile space, says Glympse is “much more user-friendly” than its closest competitors.

I’ve talked with Trussel at length a couple of times in the past few months, while his Redmond, WA-based startup has been in stealth mode. Trussel previously spent 16 years at Microsoft, working on everything from the Windows operating system to interactive TV to casual games. He was most recently the manager of Xbox Live Arcade, Microsoft’s game distribution network that is popular among gamers and developers alike. He left in March 2008 and decided to start a company with two other Microsoft friends, Steve Miller and Jeremy Mercer.

“We wanted to take advantage of something we saw as an integration point of a lot of new things: smarter cellphones, GPS technology, and flat-rate data plans,” Trussel told me. What this seemed to open up was “location sharing between cellphones—something we see being ubiquitous,” he said.

At first, people laughed at their goal. Their primary competition was text messaging and phone calls, after all, and who’s going to stop texting or calling? Also, the Glympse team didn’t have much direct experience in the mobile space. (Perhaps to make up for this, Trussel says he owns six different phones.) “People were saying you can’t do a consumer mobile app without deep carrier relationships,” Trussel says. “It used to be that carriers were the only distribution channel.” But now there are ways around …Next Page »

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A standing-room-only crowd gathered yesterday for Xconomy’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England, hosted by Microsoft at its gorgeous new New England Research and Development Center (or NERD, as Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant called it). Google’s Rich Miner, MIT’s Sandy Pentland, and two panels’ worth of mobile entrepreneurs were on hand to share their latest thinking about the best ways for startups to gain and maintain a foothold in the mobile industry.

If there was a single takeaway message from the event, I’d say it was this: It’s a time of great ferment in the mobile industry, with carrier restrictions on the distribution of consumer-oriented mobile applications finally breaking down. But it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business around a single application or a single mobile platform—so companies need to think flexibly about the audiences and platforms they develop for, the amount of capital they really need (and the sources from which they’ll raise it), and the combinations of revenue opportunities they’ll pursue.

Next week we plan to post some video outtakes from the event, but today we’ll round up some of the highlights:

—Xconomist Mark Lowenstein, the managing director at consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem, set the scene with a few statistics and observations. Mobile companies raised $500 million from New England venture investors last year, and have raised $5 billion cumulatively, he noted. The traditional barriers to entry in the mobile industry—the wireless carriers’ traditional protectiveness about giving access to cell phone “decks” or top-level menus to third-party application developers, for example—are falling fast. New England companies, with their longtime focus on good user interface design, are well positioned to take advantage of this change, Lowenstein said.

—Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, said his company has just added the 100 millionth access point to its global database of Wi-Fi network locations, part of its WPS location finding system. He said getting WPS onto the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms was the key moment in Skyhook’s progress—but that, ironically, he dismissed Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ first call about the deal back in 2007 as a prank.

—Jamie Hall, the president of MocoSpace, said the mobile social network has grown to 6 million members, who view 2 billion pages every month. The key to MocoSpace’s success in mobile social networking—a business in which several other companies have dabbled without much success—was circumventing the carriers by doing everything “off-deck,” creating room for constant innovation and upgrades.

—Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, said that even though Microsoft is the mobile device provisioning company’s sole investor, “If it’s a debate between Microsoft and the customer, the customer wins.” While the company specializes in deploying Windows Mobile devices into enterprises, it also works with other platforms, because customers demand it. And while the fragmentation of mobile technology across dozens of major devices from several large carriers is a bugaboo for most mobile companies, it’s actually what Enterprise Mobile thrives on. “An enterprise does not want a free-for-all,” Rosenthal said. “We [give them] one throat to choke.”

—Dave Grannan, CEO of vlingo, said his company realized early on that the mobile ecosystem wasn’t yet open enough to get vlingo’s mobile speech recognition system out to lots of users without a major strategic partner with existing carrier relationships. That partner turned out to be Yahoo—and while Grannan called landing the deal to get vlingo’s voice-driven interface built into Yahoo’s mobile platform “luck,” he also said it took persistence. It wasn’t until the fourth meeting with Yahoo that vlingo was able to convince the company to take a look at its technology. (And then Yahoo suddenly wanted to buy vlingo—but the startup was “not for sale,” Grannan said.)

—Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper, said there have been 300,000 downloads of his startup’s RunKeeper GPS fitness application for the iPhone 3G, with a surprisingly high percentage of users (he intimated 4 or 5 percent or more) of the free app converting to the paid “RunKeeper Pro” app. That’s creating enough revenue to cover the company’s current burn rate—which is low, because many of the FitnessKeeper team members are being paid in equity and the only full-time employee is Jacobs himself. The trick for FitnessKeeper, Jacobs said, will be to …Next Page »

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It’s official: Google has launched a venture investing wing called Google Ventures, and Rich Miner, who is based at the company’s Cambridge, MA, office and is the former leader of its Android mobile operating system project, is one of the managing partners.

A sharp-eyed reporter for Reuters broke the news about Miner’s new job on March 20, after spying a nametag at a Silicon Valley investing event that identified the Android guru as part of Google Ventures. At the time, the company would only tell Reuters that Google Ventures was “a project we’re working on,” with no further details forthcoming.

Last night, though, Google went public with the project, in a company blog post written by Miner and his co-managing partner, Bill Maris, an entrepreneur and former neuroscientist hired by Google to start the fund. Miner and Maris said Google Ventures will make early-stage investments in a range of industries; they mentioned the consumer Internet, software, cleantech, biotech, and healthcare by name, but that added the firm would also invest in “other areas we haven’t thought of yet.”

Coincidentally, I’ve been in touch with Miner recently about next week’s Xconomy Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England, where he’ll be participating in a fireside chat that I’m moderating. So this morning, I had a chance to ask him a couple of questions by e-mail.

I asked him first whether he will be staying in Boston, and whether he will function, in effect, as Google Ventures’ eyes and ears on the East Coast. Related to that, I asked whether he’s optimistic that the New England area is a fertile place to hunt for young, investment-worthy startups.

“I am staying in Boston as an East Coast partner,” Miner replied. “We think New England is a great place to be. It’s a fertile ecosystem with the right combination of top universities, seasoned entrepreneurs and experienced management.”

I also asked Miner about Google Venture’s areas of emphasis. According to a FAQ published as part of the new Google Ventures website, the fund will not be a strategic vehicle for future acquisitions by Google. But I wondered whether Google Ventures will be putting any special emphasis on investing in companies whose technologies are allied in some way with Google’s oft-stated mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

“I would not say special emphasis,” said Miner, “but we are able to look at startups with the domain knowledge of Google and we leverage that to help guide our thinking about possible investments.”

I take that to mean that as Googlers, Miner and Maris will be looking at companies through a Google lens—which could mean that startups with ideas about how to improve people’s access to information will have a leg up in the vetting process. But Google also has an increasing range of other interests—including, for example, green initiatives to reduce the company’s carbon footprint, and, through the non-profit Google.org, global health and citizen empowerment.

Numerous press reports, including one today in the Wall Street Journal, have said that Google plans to commit $100 million to the new venture fund. However, last night’s announcement named no specific figures. The Google Ventures FAQ says the company is “able to invest amounts ranging from seed funding to tens of millions of dollars, depending on the stage of the opportunity and the company’s need for capital.”

Why would Google start a venture operation—especially considering, as Bob pointed out last week, that corporate venture wings have a generally mixed record of success? Well, venture investing, with the right dose of skill and good fortune, is still one of the best ways to make lots of money—and the Google Ventures FAQ makes it clear that the fund will be looking for companies with “the potential for significant financial return.”

But as with most Google projects, there seems to be something more at work here—call it a spirit of irreverent inventiveness. “First and foremost, we’re looking for entrepreneurs who are tackling problems in creative and innovative ways,” the FAQ says. And the company clearly believes that its internal intellectual resources in areas like search, advertising, marketing, networking, user-interface design, and fundamental computer science—what Miner calls the company’s domain knowledge—put it in a unique position to scout out and support innovative young companies in similar areas. The fund’s tactical approach, Miner and Maris wrote in last night’s blog post, will be to marry “the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms” with “Google’s unique technical expertise and brand.”

The state of the economy may also have been a factor in the founding of Google Ventures. As Miner and Maris wrote in the Google blog, “Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the ‘next big thing,’ and we’ll be working hard to find them.”

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It was another relatively slow week for deals in the Northwest—with a very notable exception being the largest venture capital deal of the year to date (see below).

—Xconomy broke the news of the Northwest’s biggest venture deal of 2009 so far: Kirkland, WA-based Pathway Medical Technologies’ $40 million financing led by Amsterdam-based Forbion Capital Partners, and joined by HLM Venture Partners, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Latterell Capital Management, Cooperative AAC, and Giza Venture Fund. As Luke reported, Pathway CEO Paul Buckman said the financing is the first part of an ongoing $55 million fundraising round. Pathway makes a novel device that clears out blockages in clogged leg arteries.

—Bellevue, WA-based Bsquare (NASDAQ: BSQR), which provides software and services to help companies develop mobile and embedded devices, said it is porting Adobe’s Flash technology onto Google’s Android mobile platform for a top-tier wireless carrier. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Thanks to Bsquare, Android may get Flash before the iPhone does, enabling all sorts of new mobile applications.

—Bothell, WA-based Vioguard, maker of germ-zapping computer keyboards (using ultraviolet radiation), told Xconomy the story of its $1 million first-round angel financing round, and its ongoing effort to raise another $2.5 million to $3 million by June. Vioguard CEO Larry Ranta explained how the startup is going after the growing hospital market, where containing the spread of deadly bacteria like MRSA is a crucial issue.

—The Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, a Seattle-based nonprofit that supports science education, received a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the National Science Foundation, as Luke reported. The funds will be used to help high school teachers and students understand how information technology is used in biomedical research.

—Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Paul Allen’s venture firm, invested in a $15 million Series D round of financing for Audience, a voice-processing software firm based in Mountain View, CA. Vulcan was an existing investor, together with New Enterprise Associates, Tallwood Venture Capital, and VentureTech Alliance, all of whom participated in the round. Audience is going after the mobile market, where it aims to reduce noise for people talking on their cell phones.

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Bellevue, WA-based Bsquare (NASDAQ: BSQR), a maker of software for embedded devices, has announced it will port Adobe’s Flash technology onto Google’s Android operating system for a top-tier wireless carrier. More specifics and financial terms were not disclosed. The news is significant because, with Bsquare’s work, Android may get Flash before the iPhone does.

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Boston’s Skyhook Wireless and two forty four a.m., the startup behind the Locale location-awareness application for the Google Android mobile operating system, announced today that Locale now includes Skyhook’s XPS hybrid location-finding software. Carter Jernigan of two forty four a.m. says Locale originally tapped into the native GPS and Wi-Fi-based location finding capabilities of Android phones such as the T-Mobile G1, but Google’s database of the locations of Wi-Fi networks was not nearly as extensive as Skyhook’s—hence the switch. “Often times I’ll walk into a building and Google’s service might give me a location within a 1-mile range, but Skyhook will be within 100 feet or less,” says Jernigan. Locale, originally developed by Jernigan and fellow MIT students as part of a class project for MIT professor Hal Abelson, was the winner of the $275,000 top prize in Google’s Android Developer Challenge in September, 2008. It’s available free at the Android Market, the mobile-accessible database of Android apps.

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Seattle mobile startup Ontela is announcing today that its photo-sending service for camera phones is now available through T-Mobile, via a partnership with the photo-sharing website Photobucket. The news comes on the heels of Ontela’s software going live on Verizon Wireless phones in November (also through Photobucket), as well as being pre-installed on four of the top five handset manufacturers—Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, and LG—as of last month.

Together, these deals could represent a tipping point for Ontela, which in the past year has been signing up wireless carriers and social websites en masse in an effort to become a mainstream service for sending and uploading pictures from mobile devices. Its software automatically sends photos from your camera phone to your e-mail inbox, computer, or photo-sharing site. Ontela sells its software to wireless carriers, who in turn bundle and sell the service to subscribers as part of a monthly package. The company was formed in 2005 and is backed by some $15 million in venture funding from Steamboat Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, Voyager Capital, and Eastven Venture Partners.

To get the story behind the T-Mobile deal, I visited Ontela CEO Dan Shapiro at his company’s digs in the historic Smith Tower in Pioneer Square. We strolled up to the famed “Chinese Room” on the 35th floor, which is filled with intricately carved decorations and wood furniture, a gift from the Empress of China to tycoon L.C. Smith. The outdoor deck gave us a great view of downtown Seattle, Elliott Bay, and the surrounding mountains (that day was a bit drizzly, though). Back in the office, Shapiro gave me a demo in which he installed the photo-uploading software on a random phone in about a minute, took a picture, and e-mailed it to me. Most other mobile applications are “freaking impossible to install,” he pointed out.

The T-Mobile deal brings the total number of carriers offering Ontela’s software to 30, Shapiro said. All the top handset manufacturers except for Apple now offer the service, and this is the first time it’s available on smartphones and BlackBerries. No Android G1 yet, though—and apparently the iPhone is not a very good fit for Ontela. Nevertheless, Shapiro said, “We’re really excited. About half of U.S. subscribers can get our service now.” He added that T-Mobile’s subscriber demographics are a really good match with Ontela. “T-Mobile users take a lot of pictures,” he said. “With the launch of their new applications store, they’re poised to do amazing things with this product.”

Shapiro also told me about how the latest deal came about. “It took two and a half years of having thoughtful conversations with carriers about what’s important to them,” he said. “‘Here’s what we think you’re doing, and here’s how we think we can help move the needle on your business.’” Whether it’s reducing costs or providing a service that customers really want, Shapiro said, a deep understanding of the carriers’ needs is crucial. “Listening as well as telling—that’s important. ‘Here’s how we can help you build your business.’ That takes a long time.”

Lastly, I asked Shapiro whether the close proximity of T-Mobile’s headquarters (Bellevue, WA) played any role in the deal-making. He replied that the key meetings actually took place outside the Seattle area—typically at big wireless conferences in places like Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Barcelona.

It reminded him of how he originally met venture capitalist Tom Huseby, the mobile guru who is chairman of Ontela’s board. It was February 2006, and they were all in Barcelona for a 3GSM World Congress meeting. Just milling around, Shapiro happened to spot Huseby’s nametag on his shirt and introduced himself. The two hit it off, and Shapiro ended up giving Huseby a photo-uploading demo. Having their first meeting in Barcelona was kind of funny, seeing as Huseby’s office was just a couple blocks away from Ontela. But it fits with the notion that in the mobile world, it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as you have a connection.

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Boston-based uLocate announced today that its Where platform, a collection of “widgets” allowing access to location-based services and information on mobile devices, will be available for T-Mobile’s G1 phone, the first mass-market phone that runs the Google Android operating system. Where, which is already available for the Apple iPhone, Blackberry smartphones, and other devices, is  available free to G1 owners through the online Android Market starting today, the company said. (Video here.)

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