It’s not just Wikipedia that’s throwing its weight today behind the movement to stop the controversial anti-piracy bills moving through the U.S. Congress.

While the English version of the world’s most-visited encyclopedia site has gone dark for the day to call attention to the perceived dangers of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, a number of other organizations are stepping into the spotlight, making their case that the laws—which, in their original form, would have given federal prosecutors and courts the power to block access to Internet domains deemed to be supporting “infringing” activities—would deter free speech and undermine the Internet’s technical infrastructure.

Given indications that markup of the bill is being delayed, as well as the Obama Administration’s recently declared opposition to SOPA (the House version of the bill) and PIPA (the Senate version), it’s doubtful that the anti-piracy bills will make it into law this year. But protesters and Internet entrepreneurs are saying today’s actions are necessary to forestall future Congressional action and call attention to the extent of popular opposition to the bills.

Here’s a quick survey of protest actions going on today around the San Francisco Bay Area and Xconomy’s other home cities.

—Hackers & Founders plans a live protest against PIPA and SOPA at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza at noon Pacific Time today. The group of programmer-entrepreneurs says it’s joining forces with other groups such as 106 Miles, SV NewTech, SF NewTech, Designers and Geeks, Hacks & Hackers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet Archive, and TechNet to stage similar events in New York, Seattle, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C. Speakers expected at today’s protest in San Francisco include angel investor Ron Conway, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, TechNet vice president Gideon Lett, and Hackers & Founders founder Jonathan Nelson.

—The Occupy Oakland website used by coordinators of grassroots protests in the East Bay has gone dark for the day—but features a nifty mouse-tracking spotlight that allows you to read a statement explaining the action.

—The 20,000-member New York Tech Meetup group has blacked out its site and is organizing an “Emergency NY Tech Meetup” today at 12:30 Eastern time at 780 Third Avenue in Manhattan, outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. Speakers will include Meetup.com CEO and NY Tech Meetup founder Scott Heiferman, NYU media studies scholar Clay Shirky, Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and Tumblr vice president Andrew McLaughlin. New York Tech Meetup chairman Andrew Rasiej said in a statement that the tech community in New York is “appalled” by Schumer and Gillibrand’s support for PIPA.

–A Seattle Against SOPA rally originally planned for 11:30 a.m. Pacific time today has been postponed due to the city’s poor weather, but organizers say they will reschedule the event.

—Google is censoring itself by placing a symbolic black square over its logo. The search and advertising giant has also posted a petition urging members of Congress to vote against PIPA and SOPA.

—Craigslist has interposed a black landing page protesting SOPA and PIPA before users can reach its online listings (which are still accessible).

—Flickr, the photo sharing site owned by Yahoo, offered users the ability to black out up to 10 photos each as a symbolic way to”deprive the web of the rich content that makes it thrive.”

… Next Page »

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President Barack Obama today announced that six Southeast Michigan-based companies would receive grants totaling approximately $45 million from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to develop technologies used to make vehicles more fuel efficient. He made the announcement during a tour of Johnson Controls‘ advanced battery manufacturing facility in Holland, MI.

The Michigan companies receiving funding are Ford ($2.7 million), General Motors ($14 million), Chrysler ($10 million), Denso ($2.6 million), Vehma International of America ($10 million), and United States Automotive Materials Partnership ($3 million).

The DOE is awarding a total of $175 million to 40 projects in 15 states, which builds on the President’s recent announcement of fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025.

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Ever since the invention of search engines, entrepreneur James Alexander has been frustrated. “I could never find myself on the Internet,” says Alexander, who gets lost on the Web because of his common name, or as he puts it, his “two first names.” So in 2009, he started playing around with the “advanced search” option on Google—a feature that only 5 percent of Googlers use, he says. He found that if he strung together 25 descriptive words about himself—voila—he appeared at the top of the 11 million search results for “James Alexander.”

That experiment inspired Alexander to launch Vizibility, a tool that lets anyone control how they appear on Google when someone searches for them. Sign up for Vizibility via its website (currently in beta form), and you can curate your Google results in a few easy steps—adding key words that you want to automatically be associated with your name, and ranking the results that you’d like to appear in the top five. And you get a SearchMe button, which you can add to any Web page. Anyone who clicks on it will get directly to your curated Google search results. “When people push that button they actually get me,” Alexander says. “Before, I didn’t show up anywhere in the first 15 pages.”

Vizibility recently revised its mobile version and started providing “QR Codes,” which are personalized barcodes you can add to business cards, resumes, and the like. That way, people who have barcode readers on their smartphones can scan you and get right to your Vizibility search results.

With the unusual name Arlene Weintraub, I don’t really have a problem getting confused with other people on the Web. But as a recently published author, I certainly recognize the value of linking my name with certain terms—i.e. the name of my book, Selling the Fountain of Youth. So I was intrigued enough to give Vizibility a try.

As soon as I signed onto Vizibility, the site informed me that if I did nothing to curate my Google results, 45 percent of the results for a search of “Arlene Weintraub” would end up being about me—not bad. But all I had to do to boost that number to 100 percent was add my place of employment, Xconomy, and the name of my book.

If I had a less common name, I could add up to 25 terms describing me—perhaps the names of former employers, or the address of my book’s Facebook page. (Yes, it does have its own Facebook page. Self-promotion is vital when you’re trying to sell a book.)

What I found most useful about Vizibility was its ranking feature. The site allowed me to see how Google would normally order my results. I could then re-sort the first five so the most important stuff would end up at the top of my Vizibility-curated results. If I didn’t do that, the top five would be filled with … Next Page »

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Optimizely doesn’t put its most effective sales pitch on its website; it doesn’t have to. It boils down to this: If it was good enough for Barack Obama, it’s good enough for you.

“It,” in this case, is online A/B testing: the practice of altering live websites in small, controlled ways to see whether the alterations lead to higher response rates in the form of donations, purchases, newsletter signups, and the like. After Dan Siroker gave up a product manager position at Google to be director of analytics for the Obama presidential campaign during two stretches in 2007 and 2008, he became one of the first people to try A/B testing in the world of online campaign fundraising. His team identified design tweaks for the campaign website that ultimately helped Obama raise nearly half a billion dollars, much of it in the form of online donations of $200 or less.

After the campaign, Siroker left politics and joined up with another former Google product manager named Pete Koomen to build an online math game for elementary school kids. But the pair ultimately drifted back to A/B testing, convinced they could build better commercial testing tools than ones that had been available to the Obama campaign. That’s the concept they developed during the Winter 2010 term at the Y Combinator venture incubator in Mountain View, CA, and that’s the product that Optimizely is now providing to more than 5,000 registered users.

The fundamental philosophy behind A/B testing is that decisions should be based on data, not just instinct. Koomen jokes that when it comes to crucial choices about Web design, many organizations seem to guided by HiPPO—the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion. “Our overall mission is to make it much easier for companies to make data-driven decisions, because they are almost always better than HiPPO,” he says.

The Optimizely team. Left to right: Ricky Raykhenberg, Jeff Pickhardt, Dan Siroker, Pete Koomen, Eric Siroker, Ryan Myers, Dave Anderson, Elliot Kim, Camille Conrotto.

If that sounds like a Google-esque statement, that’s because Koomen and Siroker both learned their stuff at the search and advertising giant, working on products like Chrome, AdWords, and App Engine. “Google has this philosophy that no matter whether you are an engineer or a vice president, at the end of the day a decision comes down to ‘What does the data say?’” Siroker says. “When I came to the [Obama] campaign as an outsider, I was able to say, ‘Maybe I don’t know the best tagline or strategy to convince somebody to vote for him, but I can show you the data we collected in an experiment we did, and here is the proof that this is the decision we should make.’”

Of course, the stakes for most of Optimizely’s customers are somewhat lower than winning the White House. Most publishers and e-retailers use Optimizely’s Web-based A/B testing system to change elements on their Web pages—moving a “buy” button, for example, or changing its size or color—and then divert part of their incoming Web traffic to the alternative page. Optimizely’s back end tracks user behavior such as clicks or purchases and can measure whether the changes are producing the desired effect.

One attraction of Optimizely’s technology is that almost anyone in an organization can use it. As with Bo.lt, another marketing technology company I profiled recently, changing the look of a page on Optimizely and publishing an alternate version requires absolutely no programming, design, or database skills. “We spoke to a lot of companies and the majority of them are not doing A/B testing, even though it’s a tremendously valuable thing to be doing,” says Koomen. “They are not testing because it’s so difficult to do. Our idea was to remove all the unnecessary steps that we possibly could.”

Simplifying A/B testing software was an idea born on the campaign trail. “I spent the summer of 2007 on leave from Google, sleeping on the floor in the office in … Next Page »

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A chat with the nation’s first chief technology officer was one of the highlights of the past week in tech news. Aneesh Chopra, President Barack Obama’s CTO, is in town this week for a panel discussion at the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology luncheon. He had lunch with local corporate execs yesterday, and we published this interview that touched on just a couple of the administration’s main topics: Why innovation is primed to take off in healthcare, and how the new Startup America Partnership can help the private sector develop strong infrastructure for new companies.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech news from the past week or so:

—I profiled startup Pinpoint Pickup, a towncar-booking app that has bootstrapped its way to services in seven cities. This all comes as competitors like San Francisco-based Uber get tons of press and millions in investment, all without anything near the scope of expansion that Pinpoint has achieved.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang checked in with Charles River Ventures about the firm’s stake in Intellectual Ventures, the intellectual property machine founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Charles River Ventures has put a whopping $300 million into Intellectual Ventures. Partner Izhar Armony says more investors would get into the developing market if they weren’t convinced that IP is “a dirty world controlled by lawyers.”

—Like just about everybody in the local startup scene, I swung by the Seattle 2.0 Awards. It was an interesting mix of celebration and navel-gazing (the good kind), punctuated by an energetic keynote speech from California VC Mark Suster—lots of F-bombs, a Public Enemy reference, and even a bit of aggressive crowd control. Also featured: Rampaging mascots.

—There were a couple of acquisitions to report, both on the same day. BuzzLabs, a member of Seattle’s burgeoning social media cluster, was snapped up by CityGrid Media, a unit of Barry Diller-headed IAC. BuzzLabs works on social media monitoring, helping other companies sort through the tons of things people are saying about them online. The other deal involved Seattle’s Smashing Ideas, a 15-year-old digital media and marketing company. It was acquired by Random House, the publishing unit of Bertlesmann AG. Terms were not disclosed for either deal.

—Finally, two bits of Xconomy news. We have a recharged Facebook page, to which we’re adding photos, stories, and all the other goodies you’d expect—with more to come. And it comes with a promise: No spam. We’re selecting three of our best stories throughout the day to push through Facebook, so we won’t clog up your feed with every last tidbit. We’ve also added more horsepower to our upcoming event, “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels.” Kelly Ogilvie from Blue Marble Energy joins folks from Harvest Power, General Biodiesel and more as we sort through the opportunities for this industry in the years ahead.

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As chief technology officer for the Obama administration, Aneesh Chopra has been heavily involved in efforts to expand access to huge amounts of government data, and encourage techies and entrepreneurs to help solve public policy problems using that data. Xconomy’s Wade Roush talked with Chopra last year, producing this in-depth Q&A that included discussions about healthcare innovation, the government’s role in baiting entrepreneurs with competitions, and big data feeding commercial solutions.

Since then, President Barack Obama announced a new initiative called Startup America, a public-private partnership that aims to boost the economy by improving the conditions for entrepreneurs. Chopra has been among the key evangelists of this effort, which he described as “the national call to arms, so to speak, around the opportunities to promote high-growth entrepreneurship.”

As a preview to his appearance tomorrow at the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology Luncheon, I spoke with Chopra about the administration’s efforts, the role of the private sector, and what it takes to produce results that last beyond the next State of the Union speech.

One of his big messages includes a strong dose of economic optimism: “It is my thesis that there’s never been a better time to be an innovator than today, especially when tackling the big challenges that are in front of us.” Specifically, he calls out the nation’s systems for healthcare, education, and energy.

In healthcare, the focus of Obama’s signature domestic policy initiative for his first term, Chopra says there are “three forces that are coming into play that we believe will act as rocket fuel for innovators.”

The first is changing the way society pays for health services.

“In this country, you get what you pay for. And if Medicare pays people more if they perform more procedures, schedule more visits, then what you see is a pretty healthy growth in both of those areas. If you incentivize value, which is making sure people stay healthy, we believe that shift in payments will open up a new market for a range of IT-enabled services that do not exist today,” Chopra says.

The second trend spurring healthcare innovation, he said, is the modernization of health records and information, allowing better sharing among providers and other actors in the system.

“We will have an unprecedented transformation in the healthcare sector to digitize healthcare information that today is locked up in a file cabinet. And we have put in place the technical foundation for that data to be liberated with full respect to patient privacy and security,” Chopra says. “It’s not just the fact that the information is now digital, it’s that it’s now more liquid and accessible.”

The third force boosting entrepreneurship in healthcare, Chopra says, is throwing open the doors to vast troves of government data. The Department of Health and Human Services, he says, … Next Page »

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The Startup America Partnership wants to make sure the little guy doesn’t get forgotten. That’s why San Francisco-based IndieGoGo turned up on a new list of companies contributing to the high-profile national job creation initiative last week. One of the first “crowdfunding” platforms, IndieGoGo helps individuals and organizations raise non-equity funding for their projects online. The company said it would contribute to the cause by cutting its fees in half to help these fledgling businesses get off the ground.

It’s an interesting tactic, given that when companies raise money through crowdfunding, they don’t usually think first about hiring people. Most crowdfunded organizations rarely collect more than $30,000 through this method—which makes it hard to hire people for anything other than occasional part-time work. I was curious about the jobs connection—so I contacted IndieGoGo CEO Slava Rubin and Startup America Partnership CEO Scott Case last week to get their perspective on crowdfunding’s role in creating jobs.

Slava Rubin

“It’s just a matter of time” before the first Facebook-scale company emerges from a crowdfunding platform, Rubin argues. “Three years ago, people used to say ‘No one will ever fund a small, for-profit business this way.’ Now, not only are they raising funding but you’re seeing it across every part of America, in many different industries.”

Building on the buzz over President Obama’s town hall meeting last week at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, the Startup America Partnership held a livestreamed panel at Facebook to announce it has obtained commitments from U.S. companies to provide an additional $400 million in services to American entrepreneurs. That’s on top of the roughly $360 million in commitments announced when the White House, the Kauffman Foundation, and the Case Foundation first unveiled the partnership in late January.

Case says the point of assembling these resources—which range from training programs to venture investments—is to increase the number of entrepreneurs who are able to take their businesses from the idea stage to the startup stage to the exponential growth stage, with the ultimate goal of creating more jobs. But when you look at the list of services being offered, most are geared toward established companies. Intuit (NASDAQ: INTU), for example, said it would pitch in $37 million in discounts on its financial software, while Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) offered free access to its cloud computing platform, and Silicon Valley Bank said it would hold an “exclusive event” designed to bring the “America’s most promising entrepreneurs” together with venture capitalists and business mentors.

That’s why IndieGoGo stood out on last week’s list. Anybody can join IndieGoGo to raise cash for an idea. It could be an attempt to commercialize an invention (like the AlphaSphere, a futuristic musical instrument with 48 tactile pads) or realize a dream (like a concert tour for the Bucky Walters String Band from rural Humbold County, CA) or sustain a small business (e.g., Atlantis Books, a bibliophile’s haven on the island of Santorini in economically distressed Greece).

Crowdfunding is a model that dozens of organizations, such as new New York-based Kickstarter, are now pursuing. But IndieGoGo, backed by New York-based Penny Black and a number of individual investors, says it is still the world’s largest open funding platform. And the startup says that for the next three years, it will … Next Page »

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President Barack Obama will participate in a live “town hall” event at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, on April 20, the company announced today in an event listing on its own site. Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg will host the event, in which Obama will answer questions submitted by Facebook members. The event will be live-streamed from the White House Facebook page at 1:45 pm Pacific time, 4:45 pm Eastern time. According to the event listing, the president “will connect with Americans across the country to discuss the tough choices we must all make in order to put our economy on a more responsible fiscal path, while still investing in areas like innovation that will help our economy grow and make America more competitive.”

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It lives! Now that Xconomy Seattle has a full-time tech writer again (yours truly), we’re bringing back a weekly roundup to help our far-too-busy readers catch up with what’s been on our minds and percolating in the Seattle-area scene lately.

Highlights from the past week or so:

—Tippr, the Seattle-based group-deals site that emphasizes its intellectual property portfolio, made news for a pair of lawsuits it has going against competitors. A federal patent-infringement claim against both DealOn and BuyWithMe garnered focus, but there was more cloak-and-dagger in the state-court lawsuit against BuyWithMe and a former employee.

In a nutshell, Tippr’s parent company claims BuyWithMe’s founder solicited a bunch of proprietary information from a now-departed Tippr salesman who was job-hunting. A King County Superior Court judge agreed there was enough evidence on hand this month to issue an injunction against BuyWithMe to secure the information at issue. BuyWithMe answered by demanding a jury trial.

—Xconomy San Francisco’s Wade Roush weighed in with the second installment of his Seven Questions about the future of mobile. It’s a good read that gets you thinking, and is a great preview for our big Mobile Madness event next Wednesday at Microsoft’s NERD center in Cambridge, MA. Seattle-area folks from Clearwire, Swype and Ground Truth are participating in the program—keep an eye out for some interesting reports from what everyone there has to say.

— I unloaded some lingering government knowledge from my previous job at The Associated Press in a story that dissected how President Obama’s threatened ban on earmarked spending in the federal budget could affect innovation in Washington state. I was frankly impressed by the tons of cool-sounding projects and programs that were on the list of earmark requests for this fiscal year, but I had to narrow it down to 25 big items just to make it all fit.

—On the fun side, the Washington Technology Industry Association braved another threatened snowstorm to put on its annual Industry Achievement Awards. It was well-attended and a bunch of fun, even though I spent too much time hunched over my laptop. DocuSign and Isilon split Commercial Product or Service of the Year, and Swype nabbed Consumer Product or Service.

—A pair of companies with strong Seattle DNA were among the many making noise at the DEMO conference this week. Pioneer Square-headquartered PhotoRocket, helmed by Amazon and aQuantive alum Scott Lipsky, wants to be the indispensible utility for pushing photos to websites or e-mail contacts. San Francisco-based SocialEyes, with leadership from a pair of former RealNetworks Robs, is aiming for a higher-quality video chat service by blending it with the social graph on Facebook.

—On the cleantech side of things, we dropped by a Washington Clean Technology Alliance briefing with three companies focused on water: Hydrovolts, WaterTectonics, and Halosource. It was kind of a small-medium-large arrangement: Hydrovolts is a kinetic hydropower startup that’s still testing its technology and looking for big buyers, WaterTectonics is an established commercial water-cleaning company making moves in the oil sector, and Halosource is coming off last fall’s $80 million IPO

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It’s been an unforgettable seven days for tech entrepreneurs—as if somebody poured startup juice into the nation’s water supply.

First President Obama dedicates a good chunk of his State of the Union address to the virtues of high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Then Russian investor Yuri Milner and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway pair up to offer $150,000 investments, on very attractive terms, to every startup taking part in the Y Combinator venture incubator program, now and in the future. Then yesterday, the White House unveils its Startup America initiative, including $2 billion in matching capital for early-stage startups, as well as separate mentorship and incubator programs for cleantech startups and veterans. And then TechStars founder David Cohen announces that he’s basically open-sourcing the four-city TechStars operation—including its legal documents and mentorship and investor network—to independent startup accelerators in 12 more cities in the U.S., plus five in other countries.

And that’s only the highlight reel.

It’s like America has gone startup-crazy. To an extent that would have been inconceivable during the post-dot-com haze of 2002-2005 or the economic crisis of 2008-2009, entrepreneurs—obsessive visionaries who take enormous risks, often with other people’s money—are suddenly the new culture heroes, and the organizations that fund them are being showered with new (or redirected) resources.

Maybe it’s impatience with a sluggish economic recovery that isn’t translating into more jobs. Maybe it’s an awareness of the accumulating impact that Google, Facebook, Twitter, mobile gadgets, and other products of the innovation machine are having on culture and communication. Or maybe policymakers are finally listening to the stories we journalists have been telling for years about the power of private funding to spur the entrepreneurship that fuels high-growth companies.

Whatever the case, the last week has witnessed a series of private announcements and public policy changes that magnify the opportunities—and potentially the risks—for budding entrepreneurs. As a society, we have placed a much bigger bet this week on early-stage startups, in both real financial terms and in the more gossamer realm of hopes and expectations. The outcomes are bound to be both energizing and occasionally discouraging.

Amidst all this, it seemed only appropriate to see Jesse Eisenberg, who played the creator of the world’s most valuable startup in The Social Network, hosting last weekend’s edition of Saturday Night Live—with help from the real Mark Zuckerberg. (Whose company, by the way, yesterday announced that as part of the Startup America program, it will host 12 “startup days” in 2011 to give engineering support to early-stage companies.)

The State of the Startup Union

The Obama Administration has directed much of the last week’s media narrative on entrepreneurship, starting with the president’s State of the Union address on January 25. Viewed live by 43 million people, the speech introduced a new tag line—”winning the future”—and made the case that the country’s greatest asset in an increasingly competitive global economy will be its tradition of free-enterprise-driven innovation, supported by taxpayer-funded technology R&D and education. “What America does better than anyone else is spark the creativity and imagination of our people,” Obama said.

The president went on to set specific innovation goals, such as extending 4G wireless coverage to 98 percent of Americans by 2016, building high-speed rail lines that serve … Next Page »

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It’s the beginning of the year—an opportune time to forecast how 2011 will unfold in healthcare. We are likely to see some surprises, such as the sharply rising importance of primary care physicians.

Here are some predictions about the new year:

• More consolidation is on its way in healthcare under Obamacare, which heightens the pressure to improve the efficiency of healthcare delivery. As part of this, more and more healthcare provider groups, even the small ones, will feel compelled to go electronic once and for all.

• Valuable new, cost-effective medical tools will begin to be widely embraced. One is telemedicine. Just imagine how much more effective doctors can be if they interact with patients remotely via cameras. The technology exists now, has been successfully used in a number of situations, and is not expensive. Soon insurance reimbursement models will permit and remunerate physicians for telemedicine “visits,” and then this will take off.

• The use of genetic testing to segment patient populations and better target therapies will be one of the fastest growing segments of healthcare as a new wave of accurate, clinically actionable tests hits the market.

• As health reform increasingly kicks in, there will be heightened emphasis on the importance of primary care physicians—a sharp contrast to the elevated importance of specialists for so many years. They will become the lynchpins of health care and make more pivotal care decisions as more than 30 million more people enter the healthcare system and require access to them.

• Time-saving technologies that lead to measurably better outcomes—such as shorter hospital stays, faster surgeries, and fewer complications—will fare well in 2011.

• Contrary to the opinion of countless skeptics, new California Governor Jerry Brown will be surprisingly effective and will fix many of the state’s woes. Under Brown, taxes will rise and spending will be far more controlled, and much of the crisis will finally be resolved. Why? Brown has been governor before and knows the ropes. And at the age of 72, he cares primarily about his legacy. What better legacy could he leave than being the man who fixed California’s seemingly insurmountable problems?

• I gleaned additional insight into Jerry Brown shortly after he was elected mayor of Oakland. He came to a reception hosted by Nat Goldhaber and to celebrate the IPO of startup Cybergold. Nat is another founder of Claremont Creek Ventures. I brought one of my children, then a baby, and asked Brown to pose with him for a picture. “I don’t do babies,” he responded. That was telling, and in a very good way. Brown is iron-willed man who does what he wants and what he thinks is best, not what he is told. He won’t be dissuaded from fixing California.

[Editor's Note: This is part of a series of posts from Xconomists and other technology and life sciences leaders from around the U.S. who are weighing in with the top surprises they've seen in their respective fields in the past year, or the major things to watch for in 2011.]

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Thanks to the long Columbus Day weekend (observed at Xconomy’s Massachusetts headquarters, if not by many Californians), last week seems like it was ages ago. But not so long ago that I couldn’t scrape up our main business and technology headlines.

—I scored an interview with Aneesh Chopra, the chief technology officer of the United States, who advises President Obama on efforts to use IT to make government more transparent and efficient. We talked about healthcare IT policy, how entrepreneurs can benefit from government data sharing, and the role of prizes and challenges in stimulating innovation.

—My colleague Bob Buderi broke the news that Santa Clara, CA-based semiconductor maker Marvell has supplied the One Laptop Per Child Foundation with a $5.6 million grant to develop the XO 3, a future tablet version of the foundation’s low-cost computer for children in developing countries.

—I wrote a column about how I was feeling sorry for Mark Zuckerberg after seeing The Social Network, but then got mad all over again over Facebook’s mishandling of its new Groups feature, which allows users to add friends to groups without their advance permission.

—Viewdle, a San Jose, CA, startup commercializing facial recognition software first developed by Ukrainian computer scientists for the Soviet military, said that it had raised $10 million in new funding and that it plans to bring consumer-oriented products to market in the next few months.

—I profiled LookSmart, a San Francisco survivor from the dot-com era that now specializes in helping advertisers safely distribute pay-per-click ads to second-tier search sites—everything smaller than Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

—In a piece on Sunnyvale, CA-based startup Innovalight, I explained how a one percent improvement in the efficiency of solar panels—enabled by the company’s “silicon ink” technology—could translate into a big win for solar manufacturers, and for Innovalight and its investors.

—On the deals and acquisitions front, ClairMail raised $13.8 million, Threatmetrix raised $12.1 million, SocialShield raised $10 million, Eventbrite raised $20 million, and Involver raised $8 million. Meanwhile, Omnicell bought Pandora Data Systems, Yahoo bought Dapper, and Zynga bought Bonfire Studios. And two startups changed their names: Offerpal became Tapjoy, and Snaptic became Catch.com.

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“In the Obama Administration, entrepreneurs are welcome.” So said Aneesh Chopra, chief technology officer of the United States, in a keynote speech yesterday at “DC to VC,” a summit on healthcare IT investing organized by Morgenthaler Ventures partner Rebecca Lynn in San Francisco and co-sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank and Venrock. Speaking to a group of venture capital partners, entrepreneurs, and media representatives at the posh St. Francis Yacht Club, Chopra argued that under Barack Obama’s leadership, the federal government is doing more than ever before to adopt the latest infotech innovations coming out of Silicon Valley, and to shape federal regulation to encourage entrepreneurial solutions to big challenges like improving public health and nutrition.

I had a chance to delve into the specifics of the administration’s pro-entrepreneurship policies with Chopra in a one-on-one interview after his speech (see below). But the big picture, for the charismatic New Jersey-born son of Indian immigrants, is that the government sorely needs the ideas of its citizens—especially programmers—and that it can best stimulate those ideas by making the government’s vast troves of data more accessible to outside developers, and then getting out of the way to see what they build.

As a case in point, he cited the story of Dave Augustine, Bob Burbach, and Andrew Carpenter, three developers from San Francisco-based non-profit WestEd Interactive who came up with a new way to search the antiquated Federal Register as part of the Sunlight Foundation’s “Apps for America” contest. “The Archivist of the United States found out about Bob and Dave and Andrew in March, and said, ‘You guys have built the best killer app I’ve seen, can you rebuild the Federal Register website?’ and they said, ‘Sure,’” Chopra recounted. The new FederalRegister.gov, launched this summer, makes it easy to browse the once-impenetrable collection of government notices, rules, procedures, and documents by topic or date. “These were just random dudes who didn’t have lobbyists or procurement departments, but just smart ideas—’cognitive surplus,’ as Clay Shirky would say.’”

President Obama named Chopra as the nation’s first CTO in April 2009. As an associate director within the Office of Science & Technology Policy, Chopra’s formal assignment was to work with chief information officer Vivek Kundra to set federal technology policies that would make government more efficient and more transparent. “The goal is to give all Americans a voice in their government and ensure that they know exactly how we’re spending their money,” the President said when he appointed Chopra.

But Chopra has gone far beyond that initial charge, becoming known as an outspoken advocate for making government databases more accessible to developers of consumer software applications, using open source software more widely within government, and spurring innovation through prize-based competitions. Obviously, those are all causes dear to the hearts of most private-sector innovators and entrepreneurs, and Chopra has become a popular figure in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs. Even before joining the Obama Administration, Chopra, the former secretary of technology for former Virginia Governor Tim Kaine, had been labeled a “venture governmentalist” for his efforts to invest in high-risk internal technology projects. Bay Area technology guru Tim O’Reilly has gone so far as to call Chopra a “rock star,” saying that he “understands that government technologists need to act more like their counterparts in Silicon Valley.”

In his speech at the Morgenthaler summit, Chopra gave numerous examples of the way the Obama Administration is opening government data to entrepreneurial uses. One was the Apps for Healthy Kids competition, a part of First Lady Michelle Obama’s campaign to reduce childhood obesity; the winners of the contest, which challenged entrants to create computer games or tools that make “fun and engaging” use of USDA nutrition data on 1,000 commonly eaten foods, were announced by the White House last month. Chopra said the developer of “Smash Your Food,” one of the winners of the $60,000 competition, got so excited about the power of software to help people eat better that he … Next Page »

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Yesterday we published Part 1 of a Q&A with Danny Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist and administrator who founded Oakland, CA-based Sungevity in 2007. The company’s mission is to make it easier and more affordable for homeowners to reduce their monthly utility bills by installing rooftop photovoltaic panels. The main strategy: computerize as much of the solar installation process as possible. For example, Sungevity has developed Google Earth-like tools that allow it to generate accurate cost estimates without having to send technicians to customers’ homes. Homeowners can apply for low-cost leases online, and the company manages the local permitting and other red tape involved in solar installation behind the scenes.

Sungevity thinks of itself as the “Amazon of solar electricity,” Kennedy says. By that he means the company has designed its systems to accommodate millions of customers while keeping the company’s own overhead low and profits high.

The focus on profits may be new for Kennedy, the former Greenpeace activist, who once led a campaign that helped to bring key solar installation rebates to the state of California. But to him, it’s all just another form of social entrepreneurship. While he’s working hard to make the 90-employee company succeed, he says his bigger goal is to help more homeowners bypass the fossil-fuel-powered electrical grid, make a real dent in carbon emissions, and blunt the impact of global climate change.

“Sometime in the next century or two we will make [the] transition from this dumb experiment from digging up sunlight and burning it to using fresh sunlight,” Kennedy says. “I am trying to usher in that transition faster than the current economy would have it happen.”

In the second part of our conversation, transcribed below, Kennedy and I talked about his history at Greenpeace, his transition to the startup world, how Sungevity stands apart from its competitors, and (for a bit of dessert) what he thinks about Bill McKibben’s latest book Earrth and President Obama’s record so far on energy.

Xconomy: What motivated you to leave Greenpeace and become an energy entrepreneur?

Danny Kennedy: I have been passionate about global warming and climate change for 20 years or more. I felt like we had turned the corner in 2005, where we had finally convinced the majority that there was a problem, and then there was Gore’s Nobel Prize and all these other things. Suddenly we were no longer arguing that there was a problem, but what are the solutions. In my theory of social change, it is actually incumbent on social movements to start demonstrating that there are solutions. Groups like Greenpeace are great at knowing what they are against, but not as good at knowing what they are for.

I had done a bunch of renewable energy campaigning, for Gray Davis’s Renewable Power Authority, and solar bonds in San Francisco, and other things in Europe and Australia and China. But I wanted to get more involved and roll up my sleeves and build a business that was leading by example. Deeds, not words. Then I partnered with these two great entrepreneurs, Andrew Birch [Sungevity's CEO] and Alec Guettel [senior vice president of corporate development]. Andrew is a serial entrepreneur and Alec was an old friend from 20 years ago when he was a student activist.

In 2006 and 2007, as we were coalescing around the plan, our common sense was that the industry was too fixated on the hardware. There were a bunch of geeks engrossed in their gadgets, but the gadgets were commoditizing before the market had matured. The customer is what matters. So we decided to build a business not on the hardware side but downstream, focusing on … Next Page »

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It’s a big day for U.S. innovation strategy. The National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship is holding its first official meeting at the Department of Commerce in Washington, DC, today—and Xconomy has some exclusive details.

The council, made up of 26 national leaders in business, technology, and academia, is charged with helping the Obama administration “develop a broader strategy to spur innovation and enable entrepreneurs to develop breakthrough technologies and dynamic companies, and to create jobs all across America,” according to a statement made earlier this summer by U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke.

In July, Locke, the former Governor of Washington, announced the members of the advisory council at a forum held at the University of Michigan. They include Tom Alberg, co-founder of Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group; Curt Carlson, CEO of SRI International; Steve Case, chairman and CEO of Revolution and co-founder of AOL; Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and GoLoco; Mary Sue Coleman, president of the University of Michigan; Desh Deshpande, chairman of A123Systems, Sycamore Networks, and Tejas Networks; Ken Morse, former head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center; Carl Schramm, president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and former president of MIT; and Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo. (Carlson, Chase, Morse, and Vest are “Xconomists,” informal editorial advisors to Xconomy.)

Group members reported that Steve Case, co-chair of the council (along with Coleman and Deshpande), hosted a dinner for the group at an area restaurant last night. Xconomy also has it on good authority that Case went to high school with President Barack Obama at the Punahou School in Honolulu, HI, back in the day.

Robin Chase, who’s based in Cambridge, MA, says she recently took part in a small pre-meeting of council members from her region to discuss ideas they might bring to the meeting today. Some ideas that came up included: having a program where university students who want to start a company could have an advisor and get credit for it; and giving students work-study pay for working on their startup ideas.

“As I think about my recommendations, the things that have come up, they’re almost all about reducing impediments,” says Chase. Some people, she says, feel that the best way to help entrepreneurs is to provide more money. Her view is different. “Those that will be successful are the ones who will have to scramble. It’s evolution. It’s Darwinian,” she says. “Money isn’t the impediment, but there are other impediments.”

Curt Carlson of SRI wrote in an e-mail: “Major improvements in innovation outcomes are possible…Innovation is an essential element of the solution, if we are to address our debt and job creation problems. Many/most areas of America must be improved: taxes, regulations, R&D, government services, university education, K-12, etc.” Asked what he hoped would be discussed or accomplished at the council meeting, Carlson wrote, “I always point to treating new companies differently—and better—than big ones. That is where the jobs are created.”

Today’s meeting wasn’t a secret, but it doesn’t seem to have been promoted in any way. To help prepare for it, members of the council received a copy of President Obama’s September 2009 whitepaper on national innovation policy, which talks about promoting competition, strengthening the entrepreneurship ecosystem, and pushing such areas as clean energy, advanced vehicles, and healthcare, among other things. We might have more to report after the meeting, so watch this space.

Robert Buderi contributed reporting to this story.

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Last week’s federal district court ruling ordering an immediate halt in federal funding for stem cell research has thrown academic research circles into a state of confusion. This has caught the attention of the VC community, as the venture-backed biotech world is largely dependent on technology developed in academic institutions, and the cutting-edge research produced by universities is crucially dependent on federal grant funding.

“Frankly, I was stunned, as was virtually everyone else at the NIH yesterday, at the judicial decision,” NIH Director Francis Collins told the Washington Post (August 25, 2010). “This decision has the potential to do serious harm to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research.” The National Institutes of Health pumped $143 million into academic stem cell research last year and was on the verge of providing an additional $74 million in fresh R&D funding before the injunction. In addition, about $250 million in private funding has been injected into stem cell startups. The future of both types of funding is now in serious jeopardy.

What impact will the ruling have on biotech businesses in the stem cell area? Executives at established biotechnology companies and startups say that it won’t immediately affect them, as they do not depend on government funding. However, they uniformly see negative implications for growth in the stem-cell industry. This is because forward-looking venture capital firms closely follow government funding policies, the key driver of early-stage academic research, as an important early indicator for new scientific developments.

Stem cells are the precursors of all of the cells in the body’s tissues and organs. Those derived from in vitro fertilized embryos can be manipulated in the laboratory to develop into any type of tissue, and are considered especially promising for research into diseases such as diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease. However, some citizens believe that destroying an embryo to obtain stem cells is tantamount to murder; Congress passed a law in 1996 forbidding the government from funding research in which human embryos are destroyed.

President George W. Bush carved out an exception for research on 21 lines of stem cells that had been created before the funding ban, and last year President Obama expanded the types of research that could be funded under this exception. But last week’s ruling invalidated both administrations’ policies, saying they violated the intent of the 1996 law.

Even if the changed climate for federal funding doesn’t have any near-term effects on venture-funded companies, it will foster uncertainty among investors, likely leading to a decline in the number of university spinouts in the stem cell area.

It seems clear that NIH was attempting to operate within the bounds of the Bush and Obama administration exceptions, but stem cell research opponents claimed the government was willfully ignoring the 1996 law. The legal system and historians will have to decide. But the episode illustrates that the federal government continues to be an engine of unintended consequences. In this case, depending on NIH funding turned out to be a risky financing strategy for university research departments. This fact will surely alter the calculations of venture firms and biotech industry executives, for whom risk assessment is a constant chore. Investors hate uncertainty—and the questions created by the constantly shifting legal landscape surrounding stem cell research pervade the medical technology industries today.

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[Updated---6/25/10, 4 pm Eastern time] This is sort of a coincidence. Partners HealthCare chief information officer John Glaser, who three days ago was featured on this site, is resigning from his long-time post to take over as CEO of the hospital software division of the Germany-based conglomerate Siemens, according to the HIStalk blog. (Glaser has written several posts for HIStalk.)

A Partners spokesman has not yet returned a call for comment, and we haven’t received a reply to an e-mail sent to Glaser this afternoon. Siemens confirmed the report this afternoon. [Editor's note: Siemens confirmed that Glaser has accepted the job in the firm's health services unit in this press release this afternoon, after this story was initially published.]

Glaser, 55, has had one of the biggest hospital IT jobs in the country as CIO of Partners, which is the Boston-based health system that includes Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and several other medical centers in the Bay State. He took the job in 1995, having previously led IT operations at Brigham and Women’s. And he has recently been advising President Barack Obama’s administration on its $19 billion effort to boost adoption of electronic health records across the country.

The HIStalk blog reports today that an internal communication at Partners says Glaser would be leaving the organization in mid-August to take the chief executive job at Siemens Health Services. While he’s now got about 1,500 employees and a $270 million annual budget at Partners, he’s going to be heading a much larger organization at Siemens—one of the world’s largest providers of healthcare technology.

There has been turnover at the top of Siemens’s Malvern, PA-based health services unit recently. Janet Dillione held the job as CEO of Siemens Health Services until several months ago. In April, Dillione joined the Burlington, MA-based communications and imaging software firm Nuance as head of its healthcare division. According to Nuance, Dillione was responsible for 5,500 employees in her previous post at Siemens.

We’ll update this story as we learn more about Glaser’s big career move.

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John Glaser, chief information officer of Partners HealthCare, sits atop one of the largest health IT organizations in New England. Yet beneath his corporate shell lives a scorching wit and perhaps a somewhat reformed hell-raiser. He was kicked out of his Jesuit high school in the Bay Area during his junior year for his part in an underground newspaper that, in his words, was “all about drinking beer and [dating] 16-year-old girls.” (Read on for his stories about answering to a Jesuit tribunal at his school and hitchhiking to the Panama Canal.)

Glaser, 55, has been part of the brain trust of hospital IT experts that has advised President Barack Obama’s administration on its plan to pump $19 billion over the next several years to speed the country’s transition from paper-based health records to electronic health records (EHRs). But Glaser is not afraid to point out the failings as well as the merits of the President’s plan.

Glaser (pronounced Glass-er) understands the huge challenges of Obama’s health IT plan. Only about 6 percent of U.S. doctors actually use electronic health records for their practices today, he says. And the President has set a very bold goal of having full electronic health record adoption in this country by 2014. The vision is to eventually have networks in place so that hospitals and physician practices can access and share every American’s electronic health record.

People listen to Glaser about these big topics in health IT because he’s been thinking about them at a high level for a long time. He took over as chief information officer of Partners in 1995. The health information systems group he leads includes seven CIOs who report to him, a total of 1,500 people, and an annual budget of about $270 million, according to Glaser. (To put the size of that organization in perspective, consider that one of the largest public health IT companies in Massachusetts, Phase Forward (NASDAQ: PFWD), had a total of 939 employees at the end of last year.)

So I was thrilled to listen to Glaser’s views on the torrent of change across the health IT landscape during our brief interview at the Convergence Forum on Cape Cod earlier this month. Here are some excerpts from that interview:

Xconomy: What are the big business opportunities in health IT, in your opinion?

John Glaser: I don’t know how well they are being exploited. There are a couple of threads here. One is that there is incentive federal money that will be amplified by other money for EHR adoption, particularly in the small- and medium-sized physician practices and hospitals. The bigger places like Kaiser Permanente, Partners, and Boston Medical Center have already made lots of … Next Page »

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PatientKeeper has worked fast to make its physician software available on whichever smartphones or mobile devices doctors like to use. So it makes sense for the Newton, MA-based firm to expand its menu of mobile applications this month to the iPad, Apple’s hot new tablet computing device.

The company develops software that automates a physician’s duties, such as viewing patient data from electronic records systems, ordering prescriptions or lab tests, and recording charges for services. Some 23,000 clinicians use the software, which they can access on smartphones, laptops, PCs, and now the iPad, says company CEO Paul Brient.

The company, founded as Virtmed in 1996, was renamed in 2001 after the mobile app called “Patient Keeper” that a Texas physician developed for Palm Pilots, Brient says. The firm purchased that Palm app, which he says had an early “cult following,” about a decade ago. The firm has since gone on to support apps for smartphones such as BlackBerry devices, Windows Mobile phones, and the iPhone.

When developing software, PatientKeeper targets areas that make a physician’s workday easier and more productive, Brient says. This physician-centric product strategy sets PatientKeeper’s programs apart from most healthcare software systems, which are usually designed to automate tasks for a specific unit of a hospital such as a radiology lab, emergency room, or billing department. The firm’s unique approach in healthcare, which has changed and evolved over its 14-year history, has attracted about $84 million in venture investments.

Traditional healthcare software—including electronic health records (EHR) and computerized physician order entry (CPOE)—have failed to gain mainstream adoption among U.S. physicians. Many complain that the software makes them less productive than standard paper-based systems, and that doctors themselves don’t get rewarded for spending the time and money to adopt the technology. Brient says PatientKeeper has focused on software that not only makes doctors more productive but also improves their use of healthcare IT systems like CPOE.

“Our approach has been that if you want to get someone to adopt technology, you have to … Next Page »

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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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