Xconomy didn’t score a ticket to President Obama’s speech on clean energy at MIT today, so we can’t bring you a first-hand report. But we’ve got something that’s arguably even better: perspectives from a range of local community members who were inside MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for the speech, which took place at about 12:45 p.m. today. We invited people from across the local energy ecosystem—including students, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy leaders—to contribute their reactions to the President’s remarks.

Click on a name to jump directly to comments from:

• Nick d’Arbeloff, New England Clean Energy Council
• Gregg Dixon, EnerNOC
• Forgan McIntosh, MIT Energy Club
• Furqan Nazeeri, Virdus
• Joel Rodriguez, Commonwealth Capital Ventures
• Bilal Zuberi, General Catalyst Partners

So, dig in. If you missed the President’s speech, MIT has posted the video here on the MIT World video portal. And if you were there, or you watched the video on the Internet, by all means share your thoughts in the comment section. (You may also want to check out this priceless CNN video of Hawaiian-shirt-clad Alex Slocum, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT, explaining his idea for undersea wind energy storage to President Obama, with MIT President Susan Hockfield, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, and Senator John Kerry looking on.)

Nick d’Arbeloff, president, New England Clean Energy Council

Man, that guy is a rock star. It is just incredibly refreshing to see the leader of this nation speak so eloquently and forcefully about clean energy, after the eight years prior. This morning he toured a couple of labs at MIT, including, I believe, one lab that is actually using viruses to grow batteries, as opposed to assembling them. So he was exuding enthusiasm about what he had seen and his positive impressions of the innovation culture that exists within MIT and the broader region.

Needless to say, Obama gets it, and he gets it in a big way. Also attending were, of course, Governor Patrick, and Secretary Bowles, but also John Kerry, who has emerged as a major leader on energy as the Kerry-Boxer bill has made its debut. It’s hard not to look at this event, combined with Kerry’s bill, as the beginning of a new chapter in America’s journey to real climate leadership.

There is a very tough path to tread between here and some type of cap-and-trade bill in Congress, but the President was incredibly upbeat, and he made it clear that difficult odds have been overcome on many many occasions in our nation’s history, and he was confident that we would overcome the odds this time around.

In front of him were roughly 800 clean energy leaders and students whose interests lie within the energy field, and I think they walked away believing that—well, every day is a mixture of optimism and pessimism with regard to Congress and the U.S. energy future, but we have a leader in the Oval Office who is really not going to rest until he makes this one of his legacies. And it’s really nice to know, speaking as one agent of the clean energy revolution, that we’ve got Barack Obama at our backs.

I think it was cheerleading—but it was well-directed, well-received cheerleading. I don’t think there’s a lot to announce here. There are a lot of moving parts in Washington right now, and he could have enumerated all those different parts and he could have made bets on which part is going to move first, but I don’t think that would have made sense. More important is simply to say this battle will be joined and the war will be won.

This is a president who is completely committed to the value that science brings to the table, to the proposition that science and the exploration of scientific truth and the innovations that are derived from it are fundamental ingredients in our way out of this crisis. And granted, it wasn’t a big, honkin’ announcement, but science is a really important thing to stress. Put it this way: if this President had arrived at MIT with a history over the past 10 months of less commitment to clean energy and less commitment to scientific research and less commitment to climate leadership and then made a major announcement, that would be only a fraction as important as what has transpired instead, namely that the administration has been completely committed to clean energy. The fact that no major initiatives were announced today is, in that context, not a huge disappointment at all.

Gregg Dixon, senior vice president of marketing, EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC)

My general impression is that President Obama is getting behind the promises he made on the campaign trail, and cleantech is certainly one of those promises. MIT is a great place to make a speech and to get people excited and to raise awareness. Very simply, it was an executive-level commercial for clean energy, to say ‘Let’s go.’ That can never hurt.

You want to go where you’ve got a friendly crowd if you’re going to push an issue, so that makes sense to me. But the proof is in the pudding. It’s a facade of a building that still needs to be built. You’ve got to build this clean energy economy. So simply throwing money at the problem and talking a great game doesn’t …Next Page »

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[Update, 12:05 p.m., 10/23/09: The time for President Obama's speech has been pushed back to 12:25 p.m., according to the White House. It appears that MIT's video servers are being overwhelmed by traffic; if you want to watch the speech online, we recommend trying the White House's own live video stream.]

When Air Force One touches down at Logan Airport at 11:30 a.m. today, there will already be a small crowd of students, faculty members, and local technology leaders waiting inside MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for President Barack Obama to arrive.

In his noontime speech at Kresge, announced just three days ago, Mr. Obama is expected to call for stronger U.S. leadership on clean energy research and press for passage of the Senate energy bill, S. 1733, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and California Senator Barbara Boxer.

Invitations to the MIT speech are the most coveted tickets in town today. While Kresge seats some 1,300 people, only about 60 students and 40 faculty members have been invited, according to estimates by The Tech, MIT’s student newspaper. The White House has also issued invitations to a hand-picked group of local leaders in energy entrepreneurship and investing.

The President will meet briefly before the speech with a select group of MIT energy researchers, according to the MIT News Office.

Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick will be on stage with the President, who is expected to attend a campaign fundraising luncheon for the governor at the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston before returning to Washington. In a video published on his campaign website this week, Governor Patrick said, “In many ways our agenda here in Massachusetts is very closely aligned with the agenda of the Obama Administration.” He included a reference to “our work to expand innovation industries that will create the opportunities for tomorrow, like IT and clean energy and biotech.”

If you weren’t one of the lucky few who won an invitation to attend the President’s speech in person, here are a few ways you can follow his visit:

—MIT will share a live webcast of the speech at http://amps-web.mit.edu/public/amps/webcast/2009/obama-2009oct23/

—The White House will also offer a live video stream at http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/, and CNN says it will stream the event live.

—If you can make it to Cambridge, MIT will be showing a closed-circuit broadcast of the speech in various rooms around campus (4-237, 1-190, 26-100, 32-141, 32-155, and E51-315) as well as the MIT Museum.

—Xconomy has recruited a posse of local students, investors, and technology leaders who scored tickets to the speech to write to us with their impressions of the event, and we’ll be compiling their contributions in a post early this afternoon.

—Organizers of the Fifth Conference on Clean Energy, to be held in Boston November 12-13, will be sharing real-time posts about the speech on Twitter using the hash tag #CCE-2009.

—Finally, MIT will post a recording of the speech late this afternoon on its video portal site, MIT World.

According to the MIT News Office, today’s visit marks only the second time a sitting U.S. president has visited MIT. President Bill Clinton was MIT’s commencement speaker in 1998.

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The healthcare industry is facing a shakeup in the way it uses information technology, and this is creating all sorts of opportunities for entrepreneurs in New England. This was the take-home message from some of the top minds in the Health 2.0 field, who we gathered together last week for a jam-packed panel discussion at the XSITE event at Boston University.

We heard from expert panelists on the front lines of this transformation in healthcare—such as John Halamka, chief information officer of both CareGroup Health System/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, and Joseph Kvedar, the director of Partners HeathCare’s Center for Connected Health—about how their respective organizations are changing the way they use the Web and other technologies to improve the delivery of medical treatment, among other aspects of healthcare. And IBM’s Bruno Nardone, the company’s national segment leader for state and local healthcare, filled us in on how Big Blue is working in the Boston area on such initiatives as a virtual radiology theater to enable new ways for radiologists and their colleagues to interact online.

It’s no mistake that there was a big crowd of more than 100 people for the Health 2.0 panel; there’s a lot doing at the crossroads of IT and healthcare these days. For one, President Obama is calling for nationwide adoption of electronic health records to help control the rising costs of healthcare in the U.S., and his administration tucked $19 billion into the historic $787 billion stimulus package this year to cover some of the costs of the major undertaking. That’s a potential boon for Boston-area companies that provide electronic health records such as Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN). Locally, we’ve seen a recent surge in startup activity in the Health 2.0 arena, including the launches of young firms like Connected Health and Life Image. (For details on more startups in this field, Wade delineated Boston’s growing Health 2.0 cluster about a year ago.)

Here are some of the bigger themes covered during the Health 2.0 discussion:

—Leveraging technology to reach patients wherever they need care. At Partners’ Center for Connected Health, Kvedar says, his team of doctors and innovators are searching for ways to …Next Page »

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It’s no surprise that the president of RSA, the security division of Hopkinton, MA-based information management giant EMC (NYSE: EMC), has strong views about the need for better security practices within corporations and government agencies. But Art Coviello, who joined RSA in 1995 and helped engineer its 2006 acquisition by EMC, says the problem isn’t that companies aren’t aware of today’s cyber security challenges—it’s that they often aren’t doing the right things to address them.

Companies try too hard to protect the machines that data live on, rather than the data itself, Coviello told me during an interview earlier this month. They dive into faddish new technologies like cloud computing and social networking without investigating the new kinds of security risks they pose. And they focus too much on achieving technical compliance with government regulations, rather than on minimizing the risks those regulations are meant to address.

Coviello spoke with me shortly after RSA issued the latest report from the Security for Business Innovation Council, a group of 10 security executives from companies like Motorola, JP Morgan Chase, Time Warner, and Novartis. RSA assembled the council to draw attention to ways that businesses can continue to innovate—a process that often involves adopting untested new technologies—without exposing themselves to new waves of fraud, data breaches, and other cyber attacks.

Coviello was eager to share the recommendations in the report, which range from suggestions about specific security policies and technologies that companies can adopt to ideas for broad industry cooperation on ways to thwart cyber criminals. But I also asked him for his perspective on the recent increase in the number of New England-area companies offering so-called “governance, risk, and compliance” software, and for his views of the Obama Administration’s performance so far on cyber security issues. (See page 3. A preview: he’s reserved, but optimistic—and has some specific suggestions on who President Obama should name as the new cyber security czar.) A condensed version of our interview follows.

Xconomy: What’s the main purpose of this latest report from the Security for Business Innovation Council?

Art Coviello: One of the things we tried to establish early on is that security doesn’t have to be viewed as an inhibitor of innovation. It can be viewed as an enabler of innovation. This is the fourth in a series of reports that does just that. It gives tips and advice on how [security] can not only not get in the way, but how it should give people confidence to do more things online.

But one part of what we’re bringing out here is that when it comes to things like cloud computing and social networking, people are just jumping ahead, and saying we’ll take care of the security later. That’s a bad idea.

X: Forgive me if this question sounds cynical, but cloud computing and certain forms of social networking are among EMC’s services and software these days—and so, obviously, is security. Wouldn’t almost any report coming from a group convened by the security division of EMC be recommending more adoption of security software?

AC: I can see how you could be cynical about almost anything that gets produced by a technology company. But the guys who are part of this study are independent. We facilitate it, we don’t pay them for it. You’ve got people like Bill Boni from Motorola, Anish Bhimani from JP Morgan Chase, David Kent from Genzyme, Craig Shumard from Cigna. You have a cross section of people, and they’re not making any money from cloud computing or social networking.

Having said that, the fact is that the horse is out of the barn, and people are going to be adopting these technologies, because they improve productivity and communication. You are not going to slow it down, but you can expose yourself to risks that you would feel fairly sorry about if you don’t …Next Page »

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If you followed news articles mentioning Visible Measures, you might get the impression that the Boston startup’s technology is devoted entirely to tracking viral Web videos. An article in Sunday’s New York Times, for example, cited Visible Measures’ statistics on singing sensation Susan Boyle; it turns out that clips of her performances on “Britain’s Got Talent” are the fastest-spreading videos in the history of the Web, racking up more than 220 million views in the last month alone, according to the company’s Viral Reach database.

But in reality, “The viral statistics are actually a small part of our business,” CEO Brian Shin told me earlier this month. “It’s just what we talk about all the time, because we don’t want to talk about the other stuff we’re doing. When we do our pitch to VCs, the viral stuff has one slide.”

So what’s on all the other slides? Shin’s not joking—he doesn’t want to talk about it. All he’ll say is that the company’s developers are hard at work on a new product that will come out later this year and that will allow customers to see more of the information Visible Measures collects about the rapidly expanding world of online video. Listings like the Ad Age Viral Video Chart—a rundown of the week’s most-viewed videos, based on data provided by Visible Measures—represent only a tiny portion of the company’s picture of the video universe, he says. “We have gobs and gobs of information we’re not showing there.”

Whatever the new product does, though, it’s not likely to stray too far from Visible Measures’ core business proposition, which is that publishers and advertisers’ digital media efforts are more likely to pay off if they understand how their content is being used. General Web readership is notoriously difficult to measure, with analytics companies like Comscore and Quantcast producing wildly varying traffic estimates for major websites. But it’s a slightly easier problem to count how many people watched the latest Susan Boyle clips—assuming that you’ve figured out, as Visible Measures has, how to identify those clips once they’ve been virally shared and remixed.

And that makes Visible Measures a key part of the Boston area’s growing digital entertainment cluster, which spans production, distribution, marketing, and, now, measurement.

“In this economy, advertisers can’t put their money somewhere where they can’t measure it,” says Shin. “They have to know what they’re getting. And publishers, in order to maintain high rates [for ads], have to be able to offer transparency.” (Shin will speak more about many of these themes during the “Entertainment Economy” breakout session at the June 24 Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship.)

Visible Measures’ top-secret new product is the main preoccupation for a big chunk of its 38 employees, who work, Being John Malkovich-style, in a space that spans both the fifth and the fourth-and-a-half floors of an old office building in the increasingly startup-heavy neighborhood near Boston’s South Station. The office’s exposed-brick walls are decorated mostly with big posters for newly released movies, courtesy of the Hollywood studios who are some of the startup’s biggest customers (movie trailers being one of the biggest genres of viral Web videos).

Founded in 2005, Visible Measures has raised just shy of $30 million in venture funding from General Catalyst Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and a group of angel investors, including a $10 million Series C round that closed just two months ago.

For the moment, it has only two main products. The first, called VisibleCampaign, is built around the Viral Reach database, which is the Web video equivalent of Google’s vast search index. Matt Cutler, Visible Measures’ vice president of marketing and analytics, says the database consists of information on over 100 million videos culled from more than 150 video sharing websites such as YouTube, MySpace, AOL, and dozens of lesser-known sites. The company uses it to give advertisers and marketers a better sense of who’s watching their videos and who’s making copies, remixes, and parodies.

“As far as we know, it’s the largest collection of viral video in the world,” Cutler says. “It allows us to have really broad coverage of what’s going on in the world of viral video, so that we can track not just specific companies but their peers and competitors and how videos have performed, going back in time several years.”

That’s very useful information for advertisers and publishers, who can spend hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars producing an Internet video campaign for their own sites, only to find that …Next Page »

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In a ceremony attended by the state secretary of energy and environmental affairs, the director of energy initiatives at Google, and the CEO of NSTAR, the state’s largest utility, the $200,000 MIT Clean Energy Prize was awarded yesterday to a Michigan startup, Husk Insulation, whose innovations could help make refrigerators far more efficient—and roomier to boot.

Funded by NSTAR and the U.S. Department of Energy, the grand prize honors the student team with the most convincing and promising business plan for a successful energy or clean technology startup. It was part of over $500,000 in cash and in-kind prizes handed out to five student-led startups yesterday, including Husk and the winners in four subcategories of this year’s competition.

The Obama Administration has made the push for higher efficiency standards for household appliances, including refrigerators, a key part of its energy policy. In a three-minute “rocket pitch” for Husk before the prize announcement yesterday, Husk vice president of sales and marketing Erica Graham said the company’s patented technology—in which rice husk ash is converted into the core material for vacuum-sealed insulating panels—could increase refrigerator efficiency by up to 50 percent. Moreover, the superior thermal properties of this agricultural byproduct mean that a 1-inch-thick panel containing rice husk ash provides as much insulation as a 4-inch-thick panel filled with polystyrene. So refrigerators made with the new material could have 20 percent more interior space on the same footprint.

If every refrigerator in the United States were replaced with a model containing Husk Insulation’s material, the country could reduce its annual electricity consumption by 57 billion kilowatt hours—the equivalent of closing 31 coal-fired power plants, Graham said. Such a reduction would cut the nation’s overall carbon-dioxide emissions by 1.5 percent. And that’s not even counting the reductions in petroleum consumption that would come from avoiding polystyrene.

Walking away from the competition with a $200,000 check was “exhilarating,” Graham told Xconomy after the announcement. “There were so many teams that were very qualified. We’re very excited.”

Graham said the money would be a key part of the seed round for Husk, which advanced to the finals of the clean energy competition by winning in the biomass category—an achievement that itself carried a $10,000 prize, sponsored by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s Renewable Energy Trust. The money “will help us get to a market-ready prototype,” Graham said.

Husk has been making the rounds of the cleantech business-plan competitions. In March, the startup won second prize in the Cleantech Venture Challenge hosted by the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. The same month, it won the $21,000 second-place award in a clean energy prize competition in Ann Arbor, MI, sponsored by Detroit-based utility DTE Energy.

The other finalists competing for the $200,000 grand prize included three startups led by MIT students and one led by students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. Bob talked with students from several of the teams at last Friday’s reception for MIT-affiliated finalists in the Clean Energy Prize Competition and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.

Levant Power, as winner of the transportation category, collected a $10,000 prize sponsored by Sandia National Laboratory’s Combustion Research Facilities. The company is developing an energy-recovering shock absorber for military vehicles, large trucks, and hybrid gas-electric cars. Founder Shakeel Avadhany, an MIT undergraduate, says the device can increase vehicle fuel economy by …Next Page »

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Ember, the Boston-based maker of wireless mesh-networking chipsets for communications between devices such as utility meters and thermostats, will announce today that it has topped off its coffers with an $8 million funding round from a group of venture firms and strategic partners. CEO Robert LeFort says that if government stimulus spending on energy efficiency measures translates into solid demand for Ember’s equipment, as expected, the new round (which brings the total the company has raised to $89 million) should be its last.

Many of the funds Ember has turned to in the past participated in the current round, including Polaris Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, and WestLB Mellon Asset Management, along with strategic partners Chevron Technology Ventures and Stata Venture Partners. In the past, Ember has also raised money from STMicroelectronics, Hitachi Corporation, and MIT. LeFort (whom I interviewed at length in January) tells Xconomy that the company has been working to assemble the round since late last summer, but that the global economic slowdown delayed negotiations.

But now investors see the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus package, which includes $17 billion for improvements to the U.S. electrical grid, as a strong plus for the company. Part of the stimulus money will go toward so-called advanced metering initiatives, in which utilities are equipping customers’ homes with new electrical meters that communicate wirelessly with utility control centers and in-home thermostats.

The devices will help utilities by allowing them dial back home electrical usage during peak hours remotely, and they will help customers by showing them exactly how much money they’re saving by conserving energy and switching to more efficient appliances, and the like. Inside almost every smart meter is a radio that uses ZigBee, the industry standard for short-range, low-data-rate radio communications—and the leading maker of ZigBee chipsets is Ember.

So far, California and Texas are the two states with the most smart-metering pilot tests underway. “I’ve heard about up to 20 different pilots going on around the country…of anywhere from 500 to 5,000 homes apiece,” says LeFort. “It’s very encouraging that people are spending real money, either to deploy or to do detailed investigations, with statistically significant samples, of how the technology will work.”

Research firm In-Stat predicts that sales of ZigBee-enabled devices will increase from their 2007 level of 7 million units to nearly 300 million units by 2012. The stimulus money won’t necessarily boost of Ember’s chipsets above the levels already expected, since “the utilities are saying they’re already going as fast as they can go,” says LeFort. “But we’re getting added emotional support, if you will, from the stimulus. The administration is saying, ‘keep on the path you are on, and if there are areas to accelerate, let’s leverage those.’”

Since a radio is needed on both ends of a wireless message, Ember is able to sell its chipsets both to manufacturers of wireless meters and to makers of programmable thermostats—essentially home energy control panels that display how much energy consumers are spending or saving. Later on, the company also expects to supply radios for smart plugs, devices that fit into electrical sockets and communicate with the control panels to conserve energy.

All of that prospective business reassured investors enough to make it possible to raise the latest $8 million. The money will be used “to support volume customer deployments and take us into maturity, meaning financial sustainability,” says LeFort.

It’s been a long road for Ember, which got its start in 2001 selling wireless temperature sensors to factory and refinery owners. “One of the questions has always been, is there a killer app out there” for wireless mesh networking, LeFort says. “It was always a fragmented market, and it was always a question of are you going to be able to get the volume up there. And then about two years ago, the utilities got behind ZigBee as the technology of choice for getting information into the home. Our investors see that it’s not a matter of if anymore, it’s a matter of when. Of course, if you’re a startup, when is an important question, because you have to have enough oxygen to get to the promised land. But we are finally past the point of asking whether there is a big enough market.”

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Most doctors in the U.S. have never heard of Athenahealth, the Watertown, MA-based firm offering Web-based software for managing billing, electronic medical records (EMRs), and other functions in physician practices. But the federal government plans to invest $19 billion to make funds available for doctors to switch from the usual paper-based systems to electronic medical records, giving them a new reason to learn more about Athenahealth (NASDAQ:ATHN) and its offerings. I caught up last week with Jonathan Bush, the outspoken CEO of Athenahealth, to get the lowdown on how the company is seizing this multibillion-dollar opportunity.

Bush, the first cousin of former President George W. Bush, has his doubts about the program. For one thing, the $19 billion isn’t a lot of money for its ambitious purpose, and for another he says that he wants to know what specific standards doctors will be held to in their use of federally subsidized electronic medical records. The $19 billion is part of the broader, $787 billion stimulus package passed in Congress last month. Some of the details such as a murky requirement that doctors will have to show “meaningful use” of electronic records to get the federal dollars have yet to be fully explained. Athenahealth is hoping that the requirement means doctors will have to actually use the electronic records and integrate them into their practices, playing into the company’s strengths in providing software and online services that touch multiple aspects of medical practices.

In any case, doctors are going to get a bigger dose of Athenahealth and its chief executive. The firm revealed during its earnings call last month that it plans to increase its investment in sales and marketing this year. And here’s a link to Bush’s colorful TV appearance two weeks ago on CNBC.

The interview below captures Bush’s thoughts about the $19 billion that the government plans to inject into his industry and its likely impact on Athenahealth. (And if you can’t tell from the interview, Bush hints that he has some obvious philosophical differences with the stimulus package.)

Xconomy: Do you think the government’s spending on EMRs will be effective?

Bush: Obviously, the standards are still up in air …Next Page »

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Rather than sending President Obama’s weekly Web video address to YouTube for hosting, as it has in past weeks, the White House published last Saturday’s video on its own website, Whitehouse.gov, which is hosted by Akamai. But an Akamai official says the company can’t comment on whether the widely discussed decision signals a permanent turn away from YouTube, which has been criticized for its use of cookies to track viewing patterns.

Cambridge, MA-based Akamai owns one of the world’s largest Web content distribution networks, and specializes in delivering broadband content such as video. As ReadWriteWeb and other blogs have noted, a simple “whois” search shows that it’s the host for the Whitehouse.gov domain.

The president’s webcasts had come to be known informally as the “the weekly YouTube address.” But YouTube uses persistent cookies, small files stored on users’ hard drives, to track who’s watching its videos, and federal policy forbids such persistent cookies on government sites. To the dismay of privacy advocates, the administration carved out an exemption to the rules for YouTube shortly after the inauguration, and observers such as Chris Soghoian, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, interpreted Saturday’s change as a response to the privacy concerns.

But according to a White House statement quoted last night in the New York Times Bits Blog, the administration hasn’t changed its policy on YouTube videos. Saturday’s switch was merely an experiment, White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said. Google itself weighed in later on its public policy blog, saying that the reports that the White House had ditched YouTube were wrong. The company added that it has now created an embeddable video player that handles cookies in a way that’s more consistent with federal privacy policies.

Curious about Akamai’s role in all this, I wrote today to Jeff Young, the company’s director of corporate communications. I asked him whether Akamai had worked directly with the White House to embed Saturday’s address, whether Akamai’s video player technology sidesteps the concern over cookies, and whether the company has any insight into the White House’s Web video plans. Young was unable to provide any answers. “I can’t comment on any of this, at this time,” he said in an e-mail reply.

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Last week President Obama tapped Melissa Hathaway, a former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant and top aide to President Bush, to undertake a sweeping 60-day review of the country’s computer security posture. Once that review is complete, the 40-year-old Hathaway could be in line to be named the nation’s first assistant to the president for cyberspace—or, in short, the cyber czar. Her main job would be to battle cyberattacks against government computer networks, which are on the rise. Attempts to penetrate government systems increased by 40 percent in 2008, according to data released yesterday by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team.

Creating the organization Hathaway may head, the National Office for Cyberspace, is just one of several ways in which the Obama Administration is implementing the recommendations of the Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. Before Obama even announced his run for the White House, this nonpartisan roundtable was formed at Congress’s behest by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. One member of that commission—and the chair of its Threats Working Group—was Tom Kellermann, vice president of security awareness at Boston-based Core Security Technologies.

Essentially, Kellermann is Core Security’s man in Washington. I met with him yesterday during one of his brief visits to Boston, and we had a long conversation about Hathaway and the challenges she and the broader security community face.

The picture that Kellermann painted is, in many ways, frightening. If terrorists or other enemies exploited existing vulnerabilities in the nation’s energy, financial, or telecommunications infrastructure, they could deal out physical destruction and economic damage on a scale that would make the fictional Fox TV show “24″ look tame, Kellermann says. But at the same time, Kellermann says he is encouraged for the first time in many years about the prospects for improvement in the nation’s readiness for such attacks. Whereas the Bush Administration wanted to rely on free-market solutions to the problem, Kellermann says, the Obama Administration understands the need for broad regulatory changes that would impose much stricter computer security standards on both government agencies and private companies.

Of course, Core Security wouldn’t station someone like Kellermann in Washington unless the company had a big stake in how those changes play out. The company’s main product is an automated “penetration testing” package called Core Impact. Penetration testing is the practice of attacking networks and software from the outside, just as hackers do, but with the goal of seeing which attacks sneak past defenses, then closing the gaps. And as it turns out, the commission’s report is full of calls for “performance-based measurements” and “risk-based standards” for security.

Those are code words for learning how to prove that the nation’s networks are secure against attackers—which means, in part, conducting proactive penetration testing, or what Kellermann calls “red-team exercises.”

It’s clear that Kellermann himself is not in this for the money—he has unimpeachable white-hat credentials, as a former security official at the World Bank, chair of the Technology Working Group for the Financial Coalition Against Child Pornography, and a member of the American Bar Association’s working group on Cyber-crime. But his employer could certainly benefit from a new emphasis on proactive defense in cybersecurity. As he puts it, “I don’t think you need to convince people to buy a sword on the battlefield, if you can convince them that the battlefield is real.”

Hathaway is the right general for that battlefield, Kellermann believes. Like the revered Chinese military strategist Sun-Tzu, she “respects the adversary,” he says. “The way she grasps this problem, she sees it as a long-term game of chess. I’m confident that if, after her 60-day review, they give her the position of cyber czar, she will make huge inroads into stemming the tide that we’re dealing with.”

An edited version of my conversation with Kellermann follows.

Xconomy: What brought you to Core Security, and what’s your job here?

Tom Kellermann: At the World Bank, I was deputy security officer for the Treasury Security Team. I was there for almost eight years and I became very familiar with the need for penetration testing, because of the various networks I’m connected with. I have a very Sun Tzu approach to cybersecurity: continually scrimmage your defenses; “know yourself, know your enemy, win 1,000 battles.” I was tired of the bureaucracy of the World Bank and I was told there was a fantastic outfit in Boston that didn’t have any real representation in Washington, that truly believed in the attackers’ perspective and in being cutting-edge when it came to developing that perspective for organizations that are serious about protecting their assets.

In my role at Core, I wear four hats, not in any order. I do advisory services to the intelligence community. I participate in things like the CSIS Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency. I do strategic partnerships. And I do a lot of public affairs and public relations, mostly as it relates to going to events, trade shows, and various industry groups such as the American Bankers Association, building awareness of how you manage risk in a digital landscape.

X: How did the CSIS commission report come together?

TK: Congress created a commission on cybersecurity after hearings held two and half years ago on homeland security and why the Department of Commerce, the State Department, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Homeland Security were breached hundreds of times, in part by organized Chinese hackers. After the hearings, Congress said, let’s create a commission—because that’s what they like to do—and bring together some of the world’s authorities and analyze what we should be doing to protect economic and national security as it relates to cyberspace. So we sat around and pontificated for two years and came up with this report.

X: You sound a little jaded about the process. What about the product?

TK: No, the process was good. The product is great. The Obama Administration, from its first day in office, declared they were going to champion six out of the eight principles established in the report. The commission was a typical Washington roundtable discussion that became very politicized, but we operated on majority rule, not consensus, which was unique, because the standard in these groups that talk about security is to want to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” The final result was on the cutting edge on many tough decisions.

Some of the notable things that came out of the commission’s report were, first and foremost, an acknowledgement that this is an economic, not just a national security, issue, and that to deal with it we need to …Next Page »

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The battle is over and the final economic recovery and stimulus bill preserves $15 billion for basic science and over $50 billion for upgrading America’s technology infrastructure. These expenditures will put people to work immediately, provide a foundation for steady economic growth, and set the stage for discoveries that address longstanding human problems.

As a technologist also concerned about the state of society I should be happy. Most of my colleagues in high tech, biotech, and academia are ecstatic. But for me something important is missing.

If we are not only to survive but also thrive in the years ahead, basic science and infrastructure upgrades alone are not enough. We must also invest in radical innovations that deliver venture-capital type returns for both the economy and society. By this I mean returns on investment of up to a thousand to one in less than seven years—in dollars and human good.

To illuminate the kind of possibilities I have in mind, consider a huge segment of society: the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed.

For all the wonders of the digital age, these people remain at the tail end of the technology adoption cycle. Amazing advances at the intersection of the biological, information and social sciences could change this. Soon all technologies—from nanochips to mobile devices to robots—will learn from people, understand them and augment their physical and cognitive abilities.

At the MIT Media Lab, as at many other academic and industrial research organizations, we are exploring how this human/technology collaboration will enable the less fortunate overcome their challenges in ways previously thought impossible. In the course of this research we have discovered that many of our innovations intended for the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed of society have the potential to benefit virtually everyone, simultaneously creating huge economic growth opportunities and vast human good.

This phenomenon is rooted in history. Some of the most pervasive technologies in the world emerged from inquiries into human deficits. The first typewriter proven to work was built by Pelligrino Turri to enable his blind friend to write. The invention of the telephone originated with Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to assimilate his deaf mother into the world of sound.

Here are three examples of research at the Media Lab today which illustrate this:

* There are approximately 10 million amputees in the world today. Professor Hugh Herr and his team aspire to enable each of them to return to complete mobility by inventing smart robotic limbs that mimic human motion. What if we could leverage their innovations to equip every elderly person with an inexpensive and simple exoskeleton that prevents falls? Herr believes this is possible. Falls among people over 65 are projected to account for direct costs of $55 billion a year by 2020 and untold suffering of victims and their families. Eliminating them would provide enormous economic and societal benefit.

* One of every 150 individuals in the US today is diagnosed with autism. Professor Rosalind Picard and her team are inventing novel ways for people with autism to communicate emotion and cognition with others using simple wearable sensors. What if we could adapt these sensors to help businesses truly understand and empathize with customers? Picard is working with many companies to do just that. This is the Holy Grail of commerce and could catalyze huge economic growth and create millions of jobs.

* Patients with rare diseases number 25 million in the US today, but these diseases receive little attention from the biomedical establishment. PhD candidate Ian Eslick is inventing new ways to empower patients to self-organize into communities that discover therapies based on their “everyday experiments” of living with their rare diseases. What if we could extend this model to accelerate discovery for mainstream diseases such as cancer? Eslick’s collaborators in the biomedical world are optimistic. The benefits would be enormous – bringing new medicines to market takes ten years and costs $1 billion today.

In this spirit, I propose we now devote just $1 billion out of the basic science and infrastructure budgets to technologies like those above that offer both innovative approaches to the challenges of the less fortunate and also the potential to translate rapidly to commercial opportunities of scale. Awards ranging from $50,000 to $1 million would go to anyone with the desire to address pressing human needs and the determination to turn concepts into reality.

I realize a proposal like this, coming from the director of the MIT Media Lab, could appear like a bid for a share of the stimulus cash. But the Media Lab derives the vast majority of our funding from private industry (less than 10 percent from government), and our researchers would have to compete on an even footing with everyone.

My point is this. The kind of passion and ingenuity that drove Alexander Graham Bell to find a way to communicate with his deaf mother resides in the hearts and minds of millions of people today—from ordinary citizens to entrepreneurs to academic and industrial researchers—waiting to be unleashed.

Invoking the words of President Obama, this is not a Democrat solution nor a Republican solution, but an American solution.

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One intriguing idea getting shuttled around President Obama’s inner circle could end up pouring significant cash into the innovation hubs of Seattle and Boston. This idea, hatched at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., calls for building a national network of two dozen or more centers of excellence in cleantech R&D, with annual budgets of as much as $200 million from competitive research grants, to jumpstart innovation in alternative energy.

Several regional leaders in Seattle, including Boeing’s Billy Glover, the company’s managing director of environmental strategy, Washington State University vice president for economic development John Gardner, and the Technology Alliance’s executive director Susannah Malarkey, and are “all over this” idea, says Mark Muro, a fellow and policy director at Brookings. Leading the charge from the New England contingent is Howard Berke, co-founder of Lowell, MA-based Konarka Technologies, a maker of material that converts solar light to electricity on flexible plastic.

The basic outline of the proposal goes like this. The world gets about 85 percent of its energy from fossil fuels now, and worldwide demand for energy is on track to climb by 50 percent over the next two decades. The U.S. government currently spends less than 1 percent of its R&D budget on energy, which is about one-fifth of what the nation spent in the ’70s and ’80s. The existing network of national labs spawned in the World War II era, like the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA, and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, aren’t really set up to spin off innovative new technologies to businesses that can turn them into practical real-world products. And, importantly, there’s public support to do something about it. About two-thirds of Americans say it’s time to get serious about tackling global warming—and energy innovation is a big part of that effort.

So, after 18 months of spadework in meetings with university and industry officials, Brookings is proposing this new network of Energy Discovery Innovation Institutes. The vision is to form a network of the nation’s top scientists, engineers and facilities, in a massive collaboration with industry, state government, universities, and investors. This effort would cost $6 billion a year, representing about one-fourth of the nation’s total energy R&D budget.

“This isn’t solely for university research, we see these places as having more of an applied or commercial bent,” Muro says. “We think the complexity of the energy situation, and the compelling need for transformative solutions means that over time, this will be a huge job creator and creator of innovation.”

This idea “has gotten a lot of attention” from Obama’s transition team, …Next Page »

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Boston, Tuesday, January 20–I have been back from India for about two weeks and have had time to reflect on my trip and to view my hometown of Boston with a fresh pair of eyes. The front page news in India was about Satyam Computer Services’ $1 billion fraud and India’s impotence in stopping Pakistani-supported terrorism. Back in Boston the headlines have been been about Madoff’s $50 billion fraud and Israel’s Gaza war. The flat world indeed!

Satyam’s fraud is being compared to Enron, though it is likely that Satyam, with hundreds of Global 1000 customers, will survive. Ramalinga Raju, the former chairman of Satyam, and his brother are being held in jail; Madoff remains in his $7M apartment on bail. As I think about these two events, I am struck by one commonality: the ability of smart people to fleece others in their close communities.

In the case of Madoff, the global Jewish community is shocked at how he defrauded several Jewish philanthropies and individuals of billions of dollars. Raju comes from a tight community of Rajputs (the warrior class who are predominantly in northern India) who came to Hyderabad to serve the Nizam, or King, in pre-colonial times. Raju comes from a landowning farming family with strong connections to the state of Andhara Pradesh (AP), whose capital is Hyderabad. He has a web of connections to the business and political elite in AP, who will find it difficult to distance themselves. Likewise, I imagine the Jewish community is concerned about the negative image of the community as a result of Madoff’s misdeeds.

As is evident from all the strife around the world, humans are still drawn to their communities. The U.S. is increasingly settling into like-minded communities who overwhelmingly vote Democrat or Republican. Having just watched President Obama’s inauguration speech along with a couple of hundred people in the cradle of American democracy, the town library in Lexington, I am hopeful that the divide-and-conquer colonial era is drawing to a close. We have the first brown-skinned leader of a predominantly white-skinned country, son of a citizen of Kenya, a former British colony. In his inaugural speech Obama said “our patchwork heritage is strength not weakness,” and I truly believe that both the U.S. and India share this patchwork heritage. The Indian peninsula has seen inward migration from the first humans to leave Africa 60,000 years ago to Aryans from Central Asia, Muslims from Turkey, Jews from Spain, Zorastrians from Persia, and Christians from Europe. In spite of these migrations, or perhaps because of the relatively peaceful integration of these immigrants, for hundreds of years India was the richest region on the planet. The U.S. is now the richest country in the world, and the citizens of the U.S., in choosing Obama as President, have astonished people around the world, many of whom live in former European colonies.

Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to lead the U.S. and the world into a new transnational era, jumpstart a post-carbon economy, bring about free trade in goods, and solve major post-colonial border disputes (Kashmir, Palestine, several in Africa) that will go a long way to weakening the foundation of Muslim terrorists. Just as he energized a new U.S. generation by using the new person-to-person medium of the Internet to transmit his message, perhaps he will directly communicate to hundreds of millions opted-in cell phone users across the globe with a new message: “Let us build, not destroy.”

Boston and Massachusetts are at the center of this new transnational era. Many of Obama’s close advisors hail from universities and public institutions in the Boston area. The children of the political and business elite from many countries around the world come here to study, and whether they stay or return form bonds with native-born Americans that last a lifetime. A formal social network of Boston-area alumni would certainly span the world and keep Boston relevant in the 21st century…calling all entrepreneurs!

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This morning, we gave you a guide to online outlets with live streaming video of President Obama’s swearing-in. This afternoon, we can report that record-breaking audiences accessed these streams, at least as far as Cambridge, MA-based networking leader Akamai was able to measure.

At the height of Internet traffic at approximately 12:15 p.m. Eastern time (during Obama’s inauguration speech), more than 7 million simultaneous data streams were being delivered over Akamai’s network, according to the company. Most of these streams carried live video, with total traffic peaking at a vertiginous 2 terabits per second. That makes today Akamai’s busiest day ever—and by extension, probably one of the highest-volume days in the history of the Internet, since Akamai handles about one-fifth of all Internet traffic globally, giving the company a representative view of network activity worldwide.

Akamai publishes a fascinating real-time visualization of traffic over its EdgePlatform here. The platform is used by a number of large media outlets to speed delivery of broadband video and other digital content to consumers, including CNET, NBC, Thomson Reuters, USA Today, and Yahoo. The New York Times, Ustream, Viacom, and the Wall Street Journal all broadcast live Adobe Flash video of the inauguration today over Akamai’s network.

Measured by individual Web page requests, traffic around the hours of the inauguration was high but not record-setting: the peak of just over 5.4 million requests per minute, as measured by Akamai’s Net Usage Index for News, came in at fifth place historically, behind election night in the U.S. last November and three sports-related events (a World Cup soccer playoff and two NCAA basketball playoff games).

“It’s really a day about streaming,” says Jeff Young, Akamai’s director of corporate communications. “It was a very high news day in terms of visitors per minute, but the thing to point out about our Net Usage Index is that when you go and access a live video stream and stay on that stream, you’re counted as just one visit. On a day like today, you really want to watch streaming video. So the news today was that the Internet has now matured to the point that people can watch live news for an extended period of time.”

Traffic at streaming media news sites was so high during the inauguration ceremonies, in fact, that Akamai detected a simultaneous drop in traffic to other kinds of websites, including e-commerce sites. “If you do a comparison of our commerce index against our news index, you are able to see less people are shopping during the inauguration, because they are tuned in,” says Young. “There is a pool of Internet users, and while they are doing one thing, they are not doing something else.” (It seems likely, however, that the brief hit to the economy from lower e-commerce traffic was more than offset by sales of Obama memorabilia, or “Obamabilia,” as the New York Times has called it.)

Of course, there’s another big thing that many people probably weren’t doing around noon today: working. Most Web traffic records, says Young, are set during working hours, for the simple reason that people aren’t at home, and therefore aren’t able to tune in for crucial events using their old-fashioned televisions. “That’s exactly why events such as March Madness, where the first 64 games occur during the workday, drive such huge traffic,” Young says. “An inauguration would probably be a big event anyway, but if it were on a weekend, you’d find more people accessing it from their televisions.”

Akamai was prepared for the onslaught, Young says. “Our platform is architected to handle events like this, and our services performed as expected. Certain news sites had planned capacity with us, and in most cases we delivered [at speeds] well above what the plan called for.”

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Let’s face it, the country is not going to get much work done today between, oh, 11:14 a.m. (when the Obama family will be seated on the Capitol platform) and 12:36 p.m. (when by-then-former-President Bush’s helicopter lifts off). But if you’re at the office and you can’t catch history being made in Washington on network TV, there are plenty of sites offering live streaming coverage.

West Coast tech blog GigaOm has a great roundup today of broadband and mobile outlets covering Barack Obama’s inauguration. These include Hulu, Joost, Comcast, C-SPAN, the New York Times, and the websites of all of the major TV networks. The official Presidential Inauguration Committee will also broadcast a live video stream, with help from Microsoft (as Greg reported last week). Verizon and AT&T mobile subscribers can watch on their cell phones if they subscribe to their carriers’ video services, and iPhone owners can watch via the Ustream app.

In Boston’s local media, the CBS affiliate, WBZ-TV, has created a special high-definition Inauguration Player offering a choice of seven views. The local ABC affiliate, WCVB-TV, will also have a live video stream from Washington, as will Fox 25 News. Boston.com has an extensive multimedia package on the inauguration, including an interactive guide to today’s schedule of events.

And it promises to be a banner day for social media. CNN and Facebook are partnering to allow users to update their Facebook status messages and send comments to friends on the same page where CNN will be showing its live video stream. New York-based blogging service Tumblr is running a public blog for the Presidential Inauguration Committee where people attending the event can send pictures and comments. And thousands of people are tweeting about the inauguration on Twitter. If you want to get in on the action there, search for tags like #inaug09, #obamainaug, and #inauguration, or just check out Tweet The Inauguration, where all tweets with those tags are being aggregated.

Epilogue, 3:40 p.m., January 20, 2009: Turns out Web users smashed records for streaming-video consumption today, at least according to Cambridge, MA-based Akamai. Social-media sites also reported striking amounts of inauguration-related activity. Facebook announced that as of 1:15 p.m. Eastern time, users had posted 600,000 status updates through the CNN.com Facebook feed, averaging 4,000 updates per minute during the broadcast and peaking at 8,500 updates per minute when President Obama began his speech.

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Posting will be light between now and Tuesday as we’ll be observing Monday’s King Day of Service in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who would have turned 80 yesterday.

If you’d like to do some volunteering to mark the occasion, or if you’re hosting a service event and need volunteers, President-elect Obama has provided a handy-dandy database of service opportunities at the recently launched USAservice.org. The database is searchable by location and date, and includes events this weekend as well as ones on Monday. And MLKday.gov is hosting a similar database as well, although you have to do a little digging to find the advanced search option that lets you refine your query by zip code, interest, and so forth.

So have a great long weekend, however you spend it. We’ll be up to our usual tricks starting Tuesday morning.

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Yesterday, we ran highlights from interviews with Alnylam CEO John Maraganore and Vertex Pharmaceuticals CEO Josh Boger, who were asked the same five standard questions about the future of the industry. Today, I’m sharing a second installment from conversations with Sirtris CEO Christoph Westphal, who responded via email, and Alkermes chairman Richard Pops and Jim Frates, whom I interviewed over breakfast at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Here are the highlights:

Christoph Westphal, CEO of Cambridge, MA-based Sirtris, a unit of GlaxoSmithKline (via email)

Xconomy: What was the single most valuable lesson you learned from the last big biotech bust (the genomics-driven crash of 2001 and 2002), and how will having those battle wounds help you carry on today?

Christoph Westphal: The most valuable lesson from the last big bust is that biotech will rebound. The strongest companies will continue to thrive, and in the long term this will be good for the biotech industry. The biotech sector is on a cycle, and will be poised to become an even more important sector in our economy. One thing to keep in mind is how quickly economic circumstances can change, not only with downturns, but with unexpected upswings as well.

X: Every year, bankers like to say acquisitions and partnerships between biotech and pharma companies are going to pick up because pharma needs innovative new drugs, and biotechs need cash to develop them. Do you see this trend truly accelerating this year, and if so, why?

CW: In this economic climate, the trend of acquisitions and partnerships between biotech and pharma companies will indeed pick up. Big pharma is in an exciting position—they have the resources to help biotechs expedite their platforms and they need to bring innovation into their pipeline. It’s truly a win-win for both parties. At Sirtris, which now operates as an autonomous business unit of GSK, our budget is significantly more than what it would have been as an independent company.

I believe that collaborative initiatives that leverage expertise of biotech and pharma companies will grow in importance and impact. In addition to being the CEO of Sirtris, I just accepted a new role as head of GSK’s Centre of Excellence for External Drug Discovery (CEEDD), where we’re specifically working to build a network of alliances between GSK and biotech companies. We’re looking for new, world-class science to bolster GSK’s pipeline.

X: What kind of companies, technologies, and people will be resilient enough to survive this downturn?

CW: In tight economic times, it’s more challenging to raise capital because there’s less cash to go around so competition is even greater. Companies with only good ideas will probably dissipate. Companies that couple truly remarkable science with smart, experienced leadership will be the ones to survive.

X: Who would make a good FDA commissioner, and why?

CW: I have full confidence that whomever President Elect Barack Obama selects will be well equipped to make the revolutionary changes that are needed at the FDA.

X: What’s the most surprising impact of the past year’s economic turmoil on your plans for this year?

CW: What strikes me now is how fortuitous the timing of the GSK acquisition of Sirtris in June of last year was, in light of the current financing environment. The biggest challenge for any biotech or pharma company in R&D is one of resources. As an independent discovery unit of GSK, we’re fortunate at Sirtris to have extensive, additional resources to accelerate our current and planned discovery programs and clinical trials of our proprietary sirtuin activators.

Alkermes CFO Jim Frates, and chairman Richard Pops

Xconomy: What was the single most valuable lesson you learned from the last big biotech bust (the genomics-driven crash of 2001 and 2002), and how will having those battle wounds help you carry on today?

Jim Frates: Alkermes has been through a lot of ups and downs. One of the things important about our business model is that it’s diversified. We’ve been using our technologies and development expertise to develop a number of products. What we like is that we have a base business that’s profitable, driven by a product called Risperdal Consta, a commercial opportunity with Vivitrol, and a Phase III opportunity with exenatide once-weekly. If you have a diversified business, and you have capital as we’re in a position to have, those ups and downs provide opportunities to stand out as a more diversified company. You can’t avoid the storm, …Next Page »

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The list of donors to Barack Obama’s presidential inaugural committee includes some Seattle-area luminaries. The families of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer each contributed $100,000, while several other Microsofties, including Craig Mundie, also made donations. Rob Glaser of RealNetworks and John Vechey of PopCap Games contributed $50,000 each, and Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners donated $25,000.

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Seattle-based 3Tier Group has raised $10 million in venture financing to drive its quest to help developers and financiers spot the best places in the world to build renewable energy facilities. Good Energies led the venture round, which will be used to establish offices in Europe and Asia, as first reported this morning by John Cook at TechFlash.

3Tier’s star has been on the rise this year as the price of oil surged over the summer, rekindling interest in alternatives. Even with oil dropping to less than $40 a barrel, this company clearly has something the world still wants. 3Tier Group is all about using high-powered computers to crunch data that can help governments and energy companies find the most efficient place to put a wind farm, solar panels, or hydropower turbines, as I wrote in a company profile of 3Tier Group last month.

The company, founded in 1999, has grown to about 85 employees based at the Westin Building in Seattle. About one-third bring expertise in atmospheric science, one-third are software programmers, and the rest are in business, said CEO Kenneth Westrick. Their task is to use computing models to forecast the ebbs and flows of wind, solar, and hydro at different times of day and different seasons, for example. This is supposed to give investors more confidence in the reliability of the source of renewable power, over decades, that is needed before they will plunk down hundreds of millions of dollars for a new facility, Westrick said.

Some of 3Tier’s growth has been driven by big customers like General Electric, the Spanish utility Iberdola, Houston, TX-based Horizon Wind Energy, and Seattle City Light. Westrick told TechFlash that the dropping price of oil has “taken a little bit of the wind out of the sails in the short-term,” but he believes that will be offset by a new push for renewables from President-elect Obama.

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It’s cold outside, so I was a little bummed there was no actual fire at an event last night billed as a “fireside chat.” This get-together actually took some time to warm up (pun intended). But once it got rolling, three of the most experienced life sciences entrepreneurs in the region shed some light on inspiration that makes them do what they do (and some lucky breaks they got on the way).

This trio of executives—Bruce Carter, Bruce Montgomery, and Stewart Parker—offered lots of insight for entrepreneurs in all industries, not just those trying to develop new drugs.

These people know more than most about taking on big challenges. Biotech and pharmaceuticals is just about one of the riskiest, most expensive propositions in all of global business. The pharmaceutical industry pumped about $45 billion into the effort last year, and it yielded just 19 new drugs, the worst output in 24 years. So a little inspiration can’t hurt.

Here are the highlights of the speakers’ comments, at the event at the Rainier Club in Seattle, organized by the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association.

Bruce Carter, CEO of ZymoGenetics

On the role of serendipity in biotech: “You’ve got to have curiosity and an open mind.” He pointed to the example of Paul Janssen, a Belgian chemist who had an extraordinary run in the mid-20th century in which he discovered 40 drugs in 30 years. He did all sorts of off-the-wall experiments, and tried to learn from them when the results were hard to explain. In one case, he was looking for anti-parasitic drugs, and found one worked in chickens. When he tried it in mice and rats, it didn’t work. “Instead of throwing it away, he said, ‘How curious,’” Carter related. When he took the chicken’s feces and fed it to mice, the drug worked. That showed that something about the chicken’s system broke down a metabolite of the drug into an active agent. It was later isolated and turned into a drug. “It’s about curiosity when facing an unexpected finding, and then following it,” Carter said.

On why the United States is the undisputed leader in biotechnology: “Europeans always want to focus on the 100 reasons why something won’t work. Americans are willing to look at the one reason why it will work.”

On how biotech is such a tough business: “Last spring, I was talking with the CEO of Merck KGaA. I told him that if I was 20 again, I’m not sure I would go into biotech again. It takes too long, it’s too difficult, and takes too much money.” The other CEO’s response? …Next Page »

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