In the news since the Thanksgiving holiday, we’ve had a fascinating bit of biomedical research from Internet guru Larry Smarr, a criminal conviction, and an extended Q&A with Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter. Your life sciences briefing begins now.

—Under fierce competition in the market for gene expression microarray tests, Santa Clara-based Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX) agreed to pay $330 million to acquire San Diego-based eBioscience, a maker of flow cytometer instruments and chemical reagents used in biomedical diagnostics. Affymetrix said it plans to keep eBioscience’s management team and operations in San Diego.

—Pfizer (NYSE: PFE), the New York pharmaceutical giant, agreed to buy Excaliard Pharmaceuticals, a Carlsbad, CA-spinoff from Isis Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ISIS). Isis said it’s getting $4.4 million upfront, and as much as $14 million over time for its stake in Excaliard, plus additional milestone and royalty payments. Excaliard was founded in 2006 to use Isis’ gene-silencing technology, known as antisense, to curb the activity of certain genes implicated in excessive skin scarring.

—A 23-page article offers an insightful glimpse into the converging future of personalized medicine, health IT, and wireless health. It is titled, “Quantified Health: Toward Digitally Enabled Genomic Medicine: A 10-Year Detective Story of Quantifying My Body.” I’m curious what other experts in these fields think about this bit of scientific research from Larry Smarr, founding director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2). I posted my question-and-answer session with Larry here.

—A San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin, a 61-year-old financial advisor, in the first-degree murder of John G. Watson, a retired life sciences CEO and local angel investor. Prosecutors argued that Keigwin killed Watson to steal millions of dollars from Watson’s accounts, by using Watson’s personal information to impersonate him. Keigwin is scheduled to be sentenced on Jan. 20.

—Amid the celebration of their success with Amira Biosciences (purchased earlier this year for $475 million by Bristol-Myers Squibb), Versant Ventures’ Brad Bolzon and Amira co-founder and CTO Peppi Prasit started a new company, Inception Sciences. Prasit and Bolzon plan to operate Inception Sciences as a holding company for spinning out individual drug development programs as separate corporate entities. I hope to get more details about the venture next week.

—In a ruling issued before Thanksgiving, a federal judge in San Diego declared that San Diego-based Histogen and its Histogen Aesthetics subsidiary are not infringing on a couple of key patents held by Carlsbad, CA-based SkinMedica. In a lawsuit filed in early 2009, SkinMedica alleged that Histogen was infringing on its proprietary “NouriCel” technology for culturing certain types of skin cells in growth media. Both companies use growth factors and other proteins derived from the cells to make skin care products.

—Luke devoted a two-part BioBeat column to his conversation with Eli Lilly CEO John Lechleiter about the pharma business generally, and Lilly (NYSE: LLY) in particular. In part 1, Luke talked mostly with Lechleiter about ways to get pharma out of its current rut. In part 2, Luke featured the Lilly CEO’s responses to questions that readers relayed to him via Twitter.

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Contrary to what you might expect, the pace of tech news out of San Diego didn’t slow down much before the Thanksgiving Holiday. We still managed to round it all up, though, and our briefing begins here.

—As director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), Larry Smarr is an Internet pioneer who frequently offers his perspective on the future of IT technologies. Lately, however, Smarr has been providing a glimpse at the future of “quantified health” and digitally enabled genomic medicine. In a Q&A with Smarr, he told me he found he had one chemical marker (out of 60 that he regularly tracks) that was five times higher than the recommended upper limit—triggering a kind of detective story that illustrates the potential revolution in health IT and wireless health.

—In the U.S. Navy’s largest demonstration of alternative fuels, a decommissioned Navy destroyer refitted as a kind of ocean-going test facility completed a 17-hour transit from San Diego to Port Hueneme. The Spruance-class destroyer used a 50-50 mixture of standard Navy diesel fuel and algae-based diesel produced by San Francisco-based Solazyme.

—Mellmo, the four-year-old startup based in Solana Beach, CA, has been moving into overseas markets in Europe and Asia with Roambi, its Web-based business intelligence graphics service. Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury also talked with me about Roambi Flow, a new service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce magazine-quality reports for the iPad.

—The case of the 2010 murder of San Diego angel investor and retired life sciences executive John G. Watson came to a close when a San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin of first-degree murder, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor argued that Keigwin, who was working as a financial advisor, used Watson’s personal information to transfer some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

—San Diego-based Next Autoworks, which was once known as V Vehicle, withdrew its … Next Page »

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We’ve got 10 years to debate what computers will look like, and how they’ll work, in the year 2021. But you’ve only got one day left to sign up for Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, Xconomy San Francisco’s big spring infotech event at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA.

I hope you won’t think I’m nuts if I confess that one of my inspirations as we planned this event on the long-term future of computing was Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense. In a now-legendary Pentagon press conference in 2002, Rumsfeld said: “There are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns–the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

To me, this was one of the few things Rumsfeld ever said that made perfect sense, and I think it has interesting applications to the evolution of technology. The point of tomorrow’s event is to step back from the habitual Silicon Valley focus on week-to-week, month-to-month product development questions and try to sort out ”known unknowns” from the “unknown unknowns.”

In other words, what are the the trends in computing where we know something important is already underway, such as mobile and cloud computing, but it’s simply not clear exactly how things will turn out? (Will we still be carrying mobile devices in 2021, or will more and more computing power simply fade into the background, in the form of “smart spaces” embedded with sensors and processors? Will virtually all computing move to the cloud, or as our mobile devices gain processing power, might there be a pendulum swing back toward distributed computing?) And conversely, what are the directions from which totally surprising developments might arrive? For example, can we imagine some kind of breakthrough in quantum computing, 3-D imaging, or artificial intelligence that could qualitatively change our experience of computing by 2021?

If you’ve been following these pages the last couple of weeks, you’ve seen my pre-event interviews on these questions with visionaries like Bill Mark, vice president of SRI’s Information and Computing Sciences Division, and Dan Reed, leader of Microsoft’s eXtreme Computing Group. The event tomorrow night (from 6:00 to 8:30 pm at 333 Ravenswood Avenue on the SRI  campus) will be your chance to meet Mark and Reed in person, along with Larry Smarr, the founding director of Calit2, and ask them your own questions.

The chat and audience Q&A with Mark, Reed, and Smarr will be the core of the event. That will be followed by short presentations from three more local technology leaders: TRUSTe CEO Chris Babel, who’ll talk about the future of privacy in cyberspace; DrChrono co-founder Michael Nusimow, on the way mobile applications are already changing the healthcare industry; and Anybots founder and CEO Trevor Blackwell on the future of robotics and remote communication in the home and the workplace.

I hope you’ll join me for this exciting event. Sign up online before the event to save $30 (regular registration through Eventbrite costs $95, but the walk-in rate will be $125). If you work for a startup that’s less than three years old and has fewer than 20 employees, we’ve got a special deal for you—a $30 Startup Special rate. And current students get in at a huge discount—the student rate is just $10.

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The big IT event we’re running this spring, Beyond Mobile, is now just two weeks away. We’ve got a trio of big thinkers from big organizations coming in to help us grapple with our big question—namely, what comes after the current wave of smartphones and tablets? What will our computers look like, and how will they act, in the year 2021?

Today, though, we want to announce some exciting additions to the program—the leaders of three Bay Area companies who’ll give us a look at what the future holds in the three specific areas of privacy, robotics, and healthcare. And we’re also kicking off a fun Twitter contest where you, dear reader, get to be the futurist. More details on that below.

First, just as a reminder, the main dish at Beyond Mobile will be an on-stage conversation with three leading thinkers from the West Coast information technology community, including Bill Mark, vice president of the Information and Computing Sciences Division at SRI International (which is hosting the event); Dan Reed, the leader of the eXtreme Computing Group at Microsoft Research and vice president of technology policy and strategy for Microsoft overall; and Larry Smarr, the director of the California Institute of Telecommunications and Information Techology, better known as Calit2.

The organizations that these distinguished speakers lead are each charged, in their own way, with mapping the way from today’s information environments to the smarter, faster, cheaper, more pervasive forms of computing that are surely over the horizon. I got just a taste of what may be coming in an interview last week with Bill Mark, whose own research focuses on “smart spaces” where embedded sensors and processors may take over many of the communications, information-retrieval, and advisory functions mobile devices now provide (and offer many more in addition). SRI is studying how government and military leaders, educators, and businesspeople might make use of such technology, and we’ll go deeper into that—as well as similar ideas being explored at Microsoft and Calit2—at the event.

Then, as a kind of dessert after that hearty meal, we’ll hear the following short “burst” presentations:

Chris Babel, CEO of San Francisco-based TRUSTe, will talk about his organization’s efforts to ensure that publishers, software makers, and advertisers respect consumer privacy on the Web—and about the mounting privacy concerns that will need to be addressed in an era of pervasive mobile and cloud-based computing.

Trevor Blackwell, the founder of Mountain View, CA-based Anybots (and a partner at the Y Combinator venture incubator), will share his vision of the role robots will play in remote presence, teleworking, and collaboration.

Michael Nusimow, CEO and co-founder of the Y Combinator-backed startup DrChrono, will demonstrate his company’s iPad-based electronic medical record platform system for doctors, and will talk about the ways our interactions with doctors may change in a future where most health information will be cloud-based and mobile-accessible.

And we’ll be sure to leave time—as we always do at Xconomy events—for lots of audience questions and networking.

We’re doing our best to make this event affordable for all. Students can register for $10, employees of startups under three years old can register for $30, and others can register at the early-bird rate for $60 (that rate expires tonight, so act fast). But starting today, there’s an even cheaper way to attend.

We’ll be giving away three pairs of tickets to Beyond Mobile to the winners of a special contest on Twitter. All you have to do is tweet your zaniest ideas about the future of computing over the next 10 years and append the hash tag #XconPredicts. For example:

“By 2021 even robots will be collecting unemployment #XconPredicts”

We’ll keep an eye on all of the predictions you share, and we’ll pick the best ones in three separate contest sessions ending Friday May 6, Tuesday May 10, and Friday May 13. Remember, the idea here is to have a little fun and come up with futuristic predictions that include a dose of humor or hilarity, sarcasm or schadenfreude. Have at it, good luck, and see you on May 17!

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If the future is here but unevenly distributed, as William Gibson said, then where is it concentrated?

One place, certainly, is the contract research giant SRI International. Created by Stanford University in 1946, it’s the organization we have to thank for inventions like automated check processing, the computer mouse, hypertext, the ARPANET (which evolved into the Internet), and ultrasound as a medical diagnostic tool. And SRI is still innovating today—one of its recent creations is Siri, the virtual-assistant iPhone app that was spun off as a startup last year and quickly snapped up by Apple for a reported $150 to $250 million.

SRI researchers like the legendary Douglas Engelbart have long had a knack for seeing how the rest of us will be using computers in the future. Eager to hear what SRI is cooking up these days, I talked yesterday with Bill Mark, the head of the institute’s Information and Computing Sciences Division. Aside from directing a staff of 250 scientists, Mark is a software systems designer who studies smart spaces—environments where embedded computers help people work, learn, or communicate more effectively.

Mark argues that despite our culture’s current infatuation with iPhones, iPads, and the like, mobile devices are actually ill-suited for many tasks, especially those involving group interactions. In those situations, he says, it would make more sense to embed computing smarts in the environment, be it a conference room or a classroom.

I asked Mark to lay out some of those ideas as an appetizer for Xconomy’s May 17 forum Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021. At this evening event on the SRI campus in Menlo Park, CA, Mark will be on stage alongside Calit2 director Larry Smarr, Microsoft eXtreme Computing Group leader Dan Reed, and myself to talk about the current trends shaping the way computers will fit into our lives in 10 years’ time. The following outtakes from my conversation with Mark give a partial preview of the topics we’ll unpack at the event. To hear the rest, you’ll have to buy a ticket. (Disclosure: SRI is an Xconomy underwriter.)

Wade Roush: To build the Siri mobile app—which can help users do things like buy concert tickets or book a table at a local restaurant—your scientists drew on years of defense-funded research at SRI on natural language understanding and other aspects of artificial intelligence. But the app is still limited to fairly simple query-response situations. Will we be having full conversations with future versions of Siri?

Bill Mark: Yes, we view Siri as a first step in that direction. When you say something to Siri, it understands your intent and puts together a set of services that fulfill that intent. That is great—I really think Siri did a fantastic job, and we’ll see what Apple does with that core technology. But there is much more to the story than that. One thing is dialogue. In real life, we use dialogue all the time. It’s extremely rare that you say something and your assistant goes off and does it and that’s the entire interaction. Our research right now is pushing into systems that can do that.

Roush: That sounds an order of magnitude harder than just responding to a spoken search query.

Mark: It’s much harder. This sounds obvious, but one challenge is that the system needs to understand what it just told you. People in a dialogue assume that the other person, or in this case the piece of software, understood the previous utterance. Most systems don’t. There are also performance issues. The system has to come back with a reasonable response in a reasonable amount of time, otherwise it’s not dialogue. And the key piece is that the system has to … Next Page »

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In computing, it’s hazardous to try to peer more than a couple of years into the future, let alone a decade. After all, if microchip makers find ways to keep miniaturizing transistors at the rate we’ve seen since the 1960s, there’s time for five or six more doublings in computer power by the year 2021. Processors could run 30 to 60 times faster than today’s fastest chips, storage costs could plummet to virtually zero, and broadband wireless access is likely to grow faster and more ubiquitous. Under those conditions, you’d be a fool to try to anticipate all of the innovative ideas engineers will be inspired to explore on the hardware and software fronts.

But on May 17, we’re going to throw caution to the winds. At Beyond Mobile: Computing in 2021, Xconomy San Francisco is gathering leading thinkers from the West Coast computer science community to talk about the big questions that will define the shape of consumer-facing computing technology over the next 10 years. You can join us for this after-work event on Tuesday, May 17, at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA.

We’re modeling Beyond Mobile after a very successful series of Xconomy life sciences events examining the 20-year future of biotechnology and drug development. (Our March event in San Francisco, Bay Area Life Sciences 2031, was a sold-out hit.) But in the information technology world, the pace of change is so blistering that we figured speculation on the state of computing 20 years out would devolve into pure science fiction. So we cut the figure to 10 years, and we went out to find experts brave enough to predict how computing devices and computer networks will look and act in the year 2021. We found several, and I’ll tell you about them in a moment.

Clearly, we’re in the midst of a major transition right now, from a long period of desktop-centric computing to a new age of mobile-centric computing. Portable, touch-driven devices like smartphones and tablet computers are usurping many of the old functions of telephones, desktop and laptop PCs, game consoles, and TVs; indeed, data out just today from IDC showed that global PC shipments continue to shrink dramatically, perhaps bearing out Steve Jobs’ assertion that we’re already entering a Post-PC era. Enabling that whole transition is an equally important shift away from local processing and storage and toward a reliance on far-away cloud computing resources.

But we tend to obsess so much about “mobile” and “the cloud” that we don’t talk much about what comes after all that. The iPad, surely, is not the end of the line. Ten years from now, will we still be using devices that are recognizable as smartphones, tablets, and desktop or laptop computers? Or will computing power simply be embedded all around us in our homes, vehicles, offices, and other environments?

Our featured speakers at Beyond Mobile make their living thinking about such questions. First up we’ve got Bill Mark, vice president of the Information and Computing Sciences Division at SRI International, which is hosting the event. (SRI is an Xconomy underwriter.) Formerly with Lockheed Martin and manufacturing software house Savoir, Mark leads a team of researchers and developers thinking about how tomorrow’s computers will perceive, plan, reason, and communicate.

With its strong practical focus, SRI has a history of transforming this research into commercial spinoffs, including Siri, a virtual personal assistant app for smartphones that was acquired by Apple in 2010. Siri can listen to questions that you ask in natural language and frame answers based on your location or context at that moment. But as cool as it is, Siri offers just a taste of the sorts of assistance software might offer in the future. Why shouldn’t your car, your office, or your home be equipped with similar capabilities?

After all, “Most of us aren’t mobile most of the time,” as Mark says. “We’re at home, in an office or school, in a restaurant. And we’re not alone most of the time: we’re talking with other people or sharing an experience with them. We don’t want or need to be interacting through a mobile device. We want computation in the environment to enhance our experience as individuals and as … Next Page »

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With less than two weeks before we convene the Xconomy Forum on Health IT, I’m happy to report that our final arrangements have fallen into place. Lisa Suennen, a co-founder and managing member of the Psilos Group, is now officially in our lineup—which ensures that our consumer-centric discourse will be an insightful and entertaining evening. Lisa has extensive expertise in healthcare information technology and healthcare services sectors, (she also is a San Francisco Xconomist) and she writes a blog—Venture Valkyrie—that is both fun and informative.

Our forum is set for the evening of Nov. 17 at the Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical R&D Center atop Torrey Pines Mesa. (More information and online registration is available here.)

The Psilos Group, which has more than $577 million under management, is a healthcare-focused venture capital firm that believes successful healthcare innovation “must reduce cost, improve quality, and align incentives across payers, providers, and patients.”

Now there’s a novel concept! We’ll have to ask Lisa just how often those interests manage to get aligned under our current healthcare system. I also must express my gratitude, though, by noting that Lisa graciously agreed to fly in for our forum from the Psilos office in Corte Madera, CA. She is a director at several Psilos portfolio companies, including Fremont, CA-based AngioScore, Cambridge, MA-based OmniGuide, and San Diego’s PatientSafe Solutions.

I’m excited about the impressive lineup we’ve pulled together for this event, but I’m especially looking forward to a robust and provocative (dare I say even heterodoxical?) discussion about how innovations in health IT could benefit consumers. Consumerism is not a word often heard in the lexicon of healthcare payers and providers, but it should be. For example, does anyone think it’s conceivable to develop a healthcare application for consumers as compelling as Facebook?

One expert in a position to address that question is our leadoff speaker, Dr. Kevin Patrick, a preventive medicine specialist at UC San Diego and director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Dr. Patrick’s research focuses on using innovations in mobile communications, online social media, games, and other technologies to encourage … Next Page »

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Almost from the moment that Thomas Edison had the first filament of an idea, the light bulb has been a symbol of invention—and of the Eureka! moment that comes with innovation. But as public awareness of green and clean technologies has gained currency, the incandescent light bulb of yore might just as easily serve as a symbol of traditional energy sources, burdened with all sorts of hidden and not-so-hidden costs.

In other words, light bulbs are out. LEDs are in.

At Xconomy, we’re anticipating waves of similar innovations that incorporate smarter and more efficient ways of using energy to heat and light buildings, to transport people and goods, and in both supplying electricity and operating the power grid. And as Internet pioneer Larry Smarr pointed out Tuesday afternoon, there also are smarter ways of applying what he calls ICT, information and communications technology, to use less energy.

Calit2 Director Larry Smarr

“Energy is one of the remaining industries that has not been transformed by digital information technologies,” Smarr said. He cited a “Smart 2020″ report prepared by UCSD and UC Irvine that found “ICT’s largest influence will be by enabling energy efficiencies in other sectors, an opportunity that could deliver carbon savings five times larger than the total emissions from the entire ICT sector in 2020.”

Smarr provided an overview of what such innovations could look like as he kicked off the Xconomy Forum: The Rise of Smart Energy Tuesday afternoon. More than 125 people attended the afternoon conference at UC San Diego’s Calit2 (the California Institute for Information Technology and Telecommunications at UC San Diego), where Smarr has served as founding director since 2000. As several attendees told me afterward, his opening keynote talk laid out several prevailing themes that threaded through the presentations and discussions that followed.

Those themes unspooled in a panel discussion about the kind of innovations that will be needed in sensor networks, IT infrastructure, and software analytics as California utilities struggle to provide electricity to customers in 2020, when a third of the energy on the grid must come from solar panels, wind turbines, and other intermittent sources of renewable energy. Jan Kleissl, a UCSD assistant professor of engineering, explained how a sensor network that measures radiant sunlight in real time could help utility operators cope with precipitous drops in … Next Page »

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The emerging mobile health industry made a stronger showing last week than it has in past years at its annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit. Get the latest uptick in wireless health and other news now.

—San Diego’s Avalon Ventures founder Kevin Kinsella told me the firm’s investment in San Francisco-based Zynga, which develops multiplayer browser games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, might yield the best returns in Avalon’s 27-year history. Kinsella also told me Avalon Ventures has purchased the La Jolla office building that was previously the corporate headquarters for the Copley Press, the former longtime publisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune and other newspapers.

—A venture financing report released by the Cooley law firm (previously known as Cooley, Godward, Kronish) says there were more “up rounds” than flat or “down rounds” in the first quarter of 2010. That’s the first time that’s happened since the summer of 2008. An up round reflects the increased valuation of a venture-backed company, while a down round means the company is worth less than it was in the previous financing round.

—After gaining experience with its Sorenson 360 online video platform (OVP) with small and medium businesses, Carlsbad, CA-based Sorenson Media introduced an upgraded version of its OVP for big media and enterprise customers. CEO Peter Csathy told me Sorenson is … Next Page »

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Larry Smarr is one of the people who had a vision in the 1980s for a high-speed computer network that grew to become the Internet of today. So sharing data is important to him. Now he has found a new source of data that he believes has great potential if shared widely: information from his own body.

Actually, Smarr is just using himself as one example in the coming trend he sees in using information technology to regularly monitor wellness. I heard Smarr speak in Seattle last week when he joined a panel with biotech entrepreneur Leroy Hood and University of Washington computer science professor Ed Lazowska, at the OVP Tech Summit. This trio of visionaries all talked about how they see the healthcare system switching from a reactive mode that attempts to treat illness into a more data-driven science that is proactively geared toward keeping people healthy.

Smarr, the founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, is an early adopter of a lifestyle that attempts to create a “quantified self.” Every few months, he gives blood and has it analyzed for 30 or 40 measurements, which are stored in a spreadsheet to provide “biofeedback” on his state of wellness. This is still time-consuming and cumbersome, and nowhere near more futuristic visions of people giving daily pinpricks of blood that send their daily wellness data into a database stored in the cloud.

While many people are afraid that insurers will use genetic data to discriminate against them, Smarr is hopeful that people will want to openly share data on the quantified state of their wellness. This information could spread and create a positive form of peer pressure, as people will compete with their friends and family to improve their heart rate, blood pressure, triglycerides, etc. to a healthy balance. The data will be shared widely via social networking sites, and people will carry it around with them everywhere on their smartphones, Smarr predicts. (It should be noted that Smarr’s group at Calit2 gets federal research grants to study how people’s behavior changes in the new era of quantitative health.)

“The counter-revolution to obesity is centered here. People will be able to tune their bodies,” Smarr said.

I followed up directly with Smarr after the panel to ask him some more about his personal experience with becoming a “quantified self.” By looking at the data, and adjusting his diet and exercise accordingly, he’s already put together some impressive wellness statistics. Without going too deep into his medical file, here are some health statistics he volunteered:

Here’s what he had to say about how he achieved those goals.

Xconomy: You talked about these early adopters who are taking deep quantitative measurements on their health, much more so than standing on a bathroom scale every day.

Larry Smarr: Although that’s not a bad start.

X: OK, but can you explain what you see happening with this group of scientists. What are they looking for?

LS: Well, it is a much larger group than just scientists. And it’s not just San Diego, but in Silicon Valley, too. There’s this whole site, the Quantified Self, which is the more extreme version.

For instance, I’m going in tomorrow to get the latest readouts from my last blood test that I’ll talk about with my doctor. The problem is we find that very few doctors are really knowledgeable enough … Next Page »

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New industries like cleantech and mobile health are changing the face of San Diego’s innovation scene. Better catch up on all that’s happening before you don’t recognize it anymore.

—The wind power industry is now in the doldrums, after soaring last year to a record number of wind turbine installations. The industry’s boom and bust cycles are so jarring that the American Wind Energy Association is calling on Congress to enact policies to bring more stability to the market. The latest lull in new orders has prompted the Knight & Carver Wind Group of National City, CA, to lay off a third of its workforce at a wind turbine blade manufacturing plant near Sioux Falls, S.D.

—San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, which has embarked on raising between $150 million and $200 million for its ninth venture fund, gets a lot of attention for its investments in life sciences startups. But Avalon invests about half of its funds in Web and wireless deals like E-Band Communications, Cloudkick, and Nabbr.

—Google Ventures stepped out of the shadows to talk with reporters about the corporate venture fund and its investing strategy. In San Diego, Google Ventures has sunk money into V-Vehicle and OpenCandy. In a Q&A transcript, Bill Maris, the fund’s managing partner, said the fund’s goal is to invest roughly $100 million in startups each year.

—San Diego’s Envision Solar International, which specializes in architectural and project planning of renewable energy projects, began trading on the over-the-counter bulletin board market. The company’s shares trade under the symbol EVSI.

—The mobile health industry will meet in La Jolla tomorrow for the 5th Annual Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit. While a survey by TripleTree, a Minnesota banking firm, shows the industry is still emerging; the WLSA itself became a full-time, member-supported trade group earlier this year.

—Some of the proceeds from a $53 million deal the J. Craig Venter Institute did in Maryland could help the research institute move ahead with its plans for a laboratory on the UC San Diego campus. The Venter Institute sold its five-building campus in Rockville, MD, and then leased it back.

—Larry Smarr, who heads the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at UC San Diego was among the featured speakers at a health IT conference that OVP Venture Partners hosted at its headquarters in Kirkland, WA. Smarr said biologists, physicians, and computer scientists rarely pool their brainpower in productive ways to tackle problems as hard as health IT.

—At a time when the Pentagon is pushing unmanned aircraft makers to develop a new generation of relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles, a startup near Seattle called LaserMotive has outlined a way to use a laser to beam power to unmanned aircraft. That way, they won’t have to land to refuel.

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Engineers are not salespeople. They are certainly not sound-bite machines either. If they were either of the above, there would have been a flurry of media stories coming out of Seattle this week centered around the National Academy of Engineering’s “grand challenges” summit held here on Sunday and Monday. Maybe that’s why it took me longer than usual to synthesize what I heard into a coherent wrap-up.

Alas, the meeting was probably disappointing to most journalists. But if you are a scientist or a savvy businessperson interested in the future of technology, you should have been there. Its goal was to inspire students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to solve some of society’s most important problems—and it did. But it did so in a unique way—with some very high-level, thought-provoking talks and discussions that went far beyond what I was expecting as a casual observer. (OK, I’ll admit I’m an engineer by training, and still think like an engineer in many ways.)

It’s not exaggerating to say engineers have created the world we live in, and that they hold the future of the planet in their hands. They can also make you a lot of money if you work with them in the right way. A lot of tech entrepreneurs have other ideas, but I think the gap between technology researchers and startups needs to be bridged, for the good of society. This week, local summit organizers Matt O’Donnell, Ed Lazowska, and Bonnie Dunbar took a step in that direction, and got a lot of people buzzing about the future of technology and society.

Without further ado, here is my top 10 countdown of highlights from the summit, which focused on engineering better medicines and advancing tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace:

10. Eat broccoli.

During the medicine panel, Buddy Ratner, a University of Washington professor of bioengineering, raised an issue from the audience. “What’s the business model for preventive medicine?” he asked. His point was that companies pour billions of dollars into new drugs, but some of the advances that have had the most impact on improving overall health in society are low-tech things like washing hands before doing surgery, providing people with clean drinking water, and eating broccoli to help prevent cancer.

9. The new drug pipeline is broken—except when it’s not.

This was a point of contention on the panel. Lonnie Edelheit, former senior vice president of R&D at General Electric, argued that “if we don’t worry about cost, it’ll stay confusing until the system breaks completely.” Nicholas Peppas, chair of biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin, countered, “I don’t think the system is broken. It is still an excellent system, it works relatively well. This country has produced most of the great drugs and made them available at relatively low cost.”

8. Not everyone loves Dendreon.

Seattle’s biotech darling, which just made history by winning FDA approval for a new kind of prostate cancer drug, has its share of detractors. In discussing how to fix the drug pipeline, Bruce Montgomery, senior vice president at Gilead Sciences, said, “The problem is the reward system for … Next Page »

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Engineering has an image problem. Sure, it’s the technical backbone of many things people use every day, from airplanes, cars, and buildings to new medicines, mobile devices, and the Internet. But it doesn’t always attract the best and brightest young people interested in solving society’s biggest problems or changing the world. That’s because people often have a narrow view of what engineering entails, or think it’s too boring, geeky, or technically difficult to pursue.

Enter the “grand challenges summit” organized by the National Academy of Engineering, which is coming to Seattle next week on May 2-3. This is part of an ongoing series of six NAE events around the U.S. this year that are meant to inspire students and rally faculty, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors around some of society’s most important problems. The plan is to concentrate on big ideas like improving healthcare, producing clean energy, providing access to clean water, restoring urban infrastructure, preventing nuclear terror, and making computer systems secure.

The Seattle event features an all-star cast of speakers, including Bruce Montgomery from Gilead Sciences, Larry Smarr from Calit2 and UC San Diego, Ed Crawley from MIT, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (now at the University of Alabama), and former NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar (now CEO of the Museum of Flight). They will be joined by engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and General Electric, as well as prominent scholars from the UW, including Matt O’Donnell, dean of engineering, Ed Lazowska from computer science & engineering, and Suzie Pun from bioengineering. The sessions will focus on how engineers can make better medicines, as well as better tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace.

O’Donnell, who helped bring the summit to Seattle, says the number of students interested in engineering has been declining for the past couple of decades—in particular, the percentage of U.S. students (compared with international students) enrolled in the nation’s graduate programs. “Engineering ain’t too sexy in society,” says O’Donnell, a biomedical engineer with expertise in ultrasound and other diagnostic imaging technologies. “A lot of folks in engineering are worried.”

He says the idea behind the grand challenges is, “Let’s excite people about what engineering can do for society. It’s not just about having your startup and making money—which is cool, and we all love that. But it’s not just the next PDA or iPhone app.” The goal, he says, is to “sexify” engineering and show that “it’s a way of thinking and analyzing systems, integrating quantitative [methods] with real-world concerns. You can build a bridge or PDA, but you can also think about sustainable systems, urban development, or how you put markets together.” (The NAE summits strike me as an adult complement to the FIRST Robotics competitions for middle-school and high-school kids, which are also about inspiring a new generation of engineers and changing the popular culture around engineering.)

The first grand challenges summit took place in early 2009 and was the brainchild of Tom Katsouleas, the dean of engineering at Duke University. O’Donnell was invited to moderate a panel on engineering new medicines. “It was absolutely a blast,” he says. “But then the kids and professionals in … Next Page »

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Today is the 40th anniversary of Earth Day in the United States, an occasion that is now observed by just about every country on the planet. Within the past four decades, we have witnessed the price of crude oil careen from about $3 a barrel in the early 1970s to almost $148 a barrel in the summer of 2008. Yeah, prices have fallen since then. But the experience of paying more than $4 for each gallon of gasoline had a widespread and galvanizing effect on all of us. We all know which way this trend is headed, regardless of political wrangling over the science underlying projections of global warming.

That’s why I am excited to announce our next Xconomy event in San Diego, an afternoon forum on “smart energy” set for Tuesday, June 8. What is smart energy? It begins, in the broadest and most pragmatic sense, with the realization that we can be smarter—we must be smarter—in the way we use energy. For us at Xconomy, smart energy is especially about technology innovation, and we have pulled together a group of energy visionaries, industry veterans, startup CEOs, and other experts to help explain the innovations that are already underway—and also will be needed—in every sector of our energy economy.

Along with incisive keynote talks and case studies, we have organized a discussion focused on the future power grid. That will include Terry Mohn, the chief innovation officer at Balance Energy, a micro grid energy business started in San Diego by the British aerospace contractor BAE Systems; Jan Kleissl, assistant professor of environmental engineering at UCSD; and Michael Zeller, the CEO and co-founder of San Diego-based Zementis, a startup developing software analytics for the grid. Brian Kremer, the cleantech and energy analyst at Roth Capital Partners, will moderate.

The stage for this afternoon session is the 200-seat auditorium in Atkinson Hall, home of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, where we held our successful forum on biotech innovation in December. Calit2, which is an event co-sponsor, also has graciously lent us its founding director, Internet pioneer (and San Diego Xconomist) Larry Smarr, to serve as a keynote speaker. Among other things, Smarr is a co-principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s GreenLight project, which is intended to develop new green energy strategies for an IT industry that is estimated to consume as much energy as the airline industry.

As it turns out, many of the technological advances that are needed to make us smarter about using energy—including new capabilities in our IT infrastructure, sensors, wireless communications, data warehousing, and software analytics—represent new market opportunities for many of San Diego’s renowned innovation clusters.

So, to round out the agenda, we have scheduled case study presentations about … Next Page »

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One notion that emerged at Xconomy’s event in San Diego last week was that biomedical informatics might have a promising role to play in the region’s economic future. There is no consensus on this as yet, as Luke discovered when he talked with Illumina CEO Jay Flatley.

Among the true believers is UC San Diego’s Lucila Ohno-Machado. No surprises there—since last year, she has been director of biomedical informatics at the medical school. Before arriving in San Diego, she was director of the Harvard-MIT-Tufts-Boston University biomedical informatics training program.

We caught up with her this week via e-mail to find out more about the technology, what it means for the U.S. health care system, and the role she sees for San Diego’s innovation community.

Xconomy: What is biomedical informatics?

Lucila Ohno-Machado: Biomedical informatics is a scientific discipline focused on the development of new algorithms and/or new approaches to organize, visualize, and interpret health-related data in order to promote health and alleviate the burden of disease. The discipline is placed at the intersection of health sciences, biology, computer science, and statistics.

San Diego is in a unique position due to the accumulation of human talent, high-tech companies, and a collective interest in improving healthcare for all. It has all the ingredients to become the number one biomedical informatics center in the country.

X: How is it different from computational biology, which we’ve also been hearing a lot about?

LOM: Computational biology usually relates to the development and application of algorithms and computational strategies to analyze biological data at the molecular level. In biomedical informatics, we develop new algorithms and systems that relate to the full spectrum of data: from molecular to individual to population levels. We often refer to bio-, clinical- or public health-informatics for algorithmic developments and strategies targeting … Next Page »

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With all the froth around big tech company earnings, device announcements, and mobile app stores, it’s refreshing to see some long-term research in computing being funded. Google announced today it has awarded $1.35 million ($900,000 up front) to the University of Washington for work on mobile data collection for public health and environmental monitoring, and $100,000 to UC San Diego, for research on energy efficiency.

The awards are part of $5.7 million in the first Google Focused Awards Grants being given to a dozen projects led by 31 professors at 10 universities in the U.S. and U.K. The areas of research also include machine learning and privacy. The grants are for two to three years, and give the recipients “access to Google tools, technologies and expertise,” according to a blog post by Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research and special initiatives.

The UW grant is to computer science professor (and former Intel Research Seattle director) Gaetano Borriello, in collaboration with Deborah Estrin at UCLA. (Wade and I have previously reported on the work of these two professors in wireless sensor networks.) The new grant is for researching the use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environmental monitoring applications.

“Here at Google Seattle, we deeply appreciate our strong relationship with the University of Washington,” said Brian Bershad, Google Seattle’s engineering director (and former UW computer science professor), in a statement. “With this focused research award, we see an example of how that collaboration and recognition extends broadly across Google.”

Meanwhile, the UCSD grant to computer scientists Tajana Simunic Rosing, Steven Swanson, and Amin Vahdat, is for studying energy efficiency in computing. Energy efficiency has been among the topics of interest at the UC San Diego campus of Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology. Calit2 director Larry Smarr views global warming as a serious environmental threat, and has highlighted efforts at UCSD and elsewhere to make data centers and other IT operations more energy-efficient.

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Cyber Monday’s online shopping trends provided much of the electronic grist for our Xconomy news mill last week. Get your news here while it’s hot.

—The Department of Energy awarded San Diego’s Sapphire Energy a $50 million grant and the Department of Agriculture provided the company with $54.5 million in federal loan guarantees for construction of an algae biofuel refinery in Southern New Mexico. Sapphire plans to begin construction of the pre-commercial demonstration plant late next year in Columbus, near Las Cruces.

—Internet guru Larry Smarr is encouraging the widespread use of sensors to monitor energy use in buildings. Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, told a UCSD forum on green innovation last week, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

—Stylefeeder is an online shopping website with a proprietary recommendation engine that makes personalized product suggestions for users. Because Stylefeeder’s customized learning program is based on shoppers’ preferences and actual purchases, the Cambridge, MA, company is gradually assembling insights into online shopping preferences in different parts of the country. For example Stylefeeder found San Diego shoppers are losing their fervor for Hurley, Volcom, and Kenneth Cole. But they’re excited about Puma, Oakley, and Charlotte Russe.

—Michael Robertson, who sold San Diego-based Gizmo5 to Google a few weeks ago, says the online world has changed since he founded MP3.com and sold it eight years ago to Vivendi for $372 million. “If you’re one of the big guys like eBay, Facebook, or MP3.com, you get that network effect going,” Robertson told me. “But if you’re an also-ran, you have to be more strategic. If you’re not that leader, it’s a totally different business dynamic. You have to source the business opportunities, chase the partners, and work for every deal.”

—Noah Auerhahn and Jeff Nobbs moved to San Diego last year to re-launch an online shopping portal called Extrabux, based on the business plan that won a campus-wide $25,000 business plan competition at USC. Extrabux got a boost from a segment about Cyber Monday online shopping tricks on the ABC-TV news show Good Morning America that prompted 83,000 hits in one day, including 63,000 unique visitors.

—Based on information provided by aspiring technology entrepreneurs and company founders who enroll in the Founder Institute’s business incubator and mentoring program, Seattle ranks highest and San Diego lowest in likelihood for entrepreneurial success. The Seattle program begins today. The San Diego program, which began in November, has enrolled 22 students and has scheduled its graduation for Feb. 23.

—Connect, the San Diego non-profit group that supports technology and entrepreneurship, gave its 2009 William W. Otterson Award to the Predator, the unmanned surveillance aircraft developed for the military by San Diego-based General Atomics. The Otterson award is based on technologies or product developed in San Diego that have demonstrated a significan positive impact on society or on quality of life.

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Those of us who are lucky enough to work as journalists (and who get to write the first draft of history) often remember the dates when the important and even not-so-important events went down. After 30 years in the news business, it’s become almost second nature for me. Today marks a special day, both personally and professionally, because it’s been exactly one year since we officially launched Xconomy’s San Diego website.

My Xconomy debut began with “San Diego 92037,” a curtain-raiser that sought to explain why the prestigious La Jolla zip code that encompasses Torrey Pines Mesa represents the epicenter of technology innovation here—and it’s been more-or-less non-stop ever since. In the past year, we’ve published close to 1,415 news stories, briefs, and commentaries about the innovation leaders, businesses, technologies, and trends that make up the “exponential” part of the San Diego economy.

With the launch of our San Diego website last year, Xconomy founder and editor-in-chief Bob Buderi wrote: “Smart, in-depth local coverage of an innovation community is, we think, central to the health and vitality of that community. But we also believe that good local stories—the ones we aim to tell in each of the three cities we now cover—can yield important insights into national and global trends.” Bob likes to say that the focus of our coverage is on local stories that have a global impact.

Hindsight isn’t always 20-20, but looking back over the past year certainly can add some perspective to the stories where the impact has become more apparent.

This week, for example, the Algal Biomass Association will convene in San Diego for its annual biomass summit at least partly because this region has become a global hub for algae-based research, technologies, and industries. For Xconomy readers, this became clear as we got an exclusive interview with the CEO of San Diego’s Sapphire Energy, charted the formation of the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology, and chronicled the partnership that San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics struck with ExxonMobil, which plans to spend $600 million to develop algae biofuels.

A few other stories from our first year also exemplify Xconomy’s mission of pursuing local stories with global impact:

—The ouster last week of Sequenom (NASDAQ: SQNM) CEO Harry Stylli, along with several other top executives and employees, followed a five-month internal inquiry that has left … Next Page »

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San Diego’s biztech news was tilted heavily toward the Internet last week, anchored by two in-depth stories about the Internet and Larry Smarr, the director of the California Institute for Information Technology and Communications. You can get that and more below—and you don’t need to listen for the Internet dial tone to get it either.

—Larry Smarr’s career has led him from astrophysics to supercomputing and protocols—Internet protocols, that is. Smarr told me, “I didn’t invent anything to do with the World Wide Web, but I did create an environment in which it could flourish.” He estimates that a trillion dollars’ worth of technology innovation came out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign during the 1990s while he was director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.  Smarr, who in 2000 was named director of the Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, also talked with me about four big ideas for the future of the Internet.

—You could say it’s a marriage made in the heavens: Carlsbad, CA-based satellite equipment maker ViaSat announced an agreement to acquire the satellite-based Internet service provider WildBlue Communications of Greenwood Village, CO; the deal is valued at $568 million. WildBlue sells its high-speed broadband service to about 400,000 mostly rural households, which gives ViaSat customers for the satellite it plans to launch in 2011.

—SAIC’s retired founder, J. Robert Beyster, told me the government contractor’s recent decision to move its headquarters to Washington D.C. from San Diego was probably “inevitable.” Beyster, 85, remains active in San Diego, and is writing a three-part series on his blog about the nation’s energy future.

—San Clemente, CA-based LifeModeler’s founding CEO Shawn McGuan told me he adapted the company’s visualization software to help scientists understand how to assemble the puzzle pieces of a fossilized hominid that lived 4.4 million years ago. The seven-year-old startup’s software is used mostly by orthopedic surgeons to plan and practice surgeries that replace knees, hips, and other joints.

—San Diego entrepreneur and investor Neil Senturia, who heads local online news venture San Diego News Network, told Forbes he plans to raise $40 million and to launch 40 similar websites throughout the U.S. and Canada over the next 30 months. Senturia told Paid Content he expects the SDNN website to start breaking even by this time next year.

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When California Gov. Gray Davis created the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in 2000, it was part of a broad state initiative that spawned four new centers for science and innovation with a shared mission “to invent the future.” The specific mission for the institute known as Calit2 (Cal IT²), which is based at UC San Diego and UC Irvine, was to “radically expand the capacities of communications and information infrastructures.”

In the nine years that he has served as Calit2’s director, Larry Smarr has done all that and more. He describes the institute as a “collaboration framework” that enables researchers throughout the University of California to take a multi-disciplinary and systems-based approach to complex problems. As a result, Smarr says Calit2 has engaged hundreds of UC researchers, formed affiliations with over 300 federal agencies, and worked with more than 200 industry partners. “I have to say we’re pleased with the progress we’ve made,” he says. (Smarr talks about the origins of the Internet in Part 1 of my story here.)

But Smarr also is looking at the path forward. He tells me he’s spent the past six months “on a vision quest” to identify the large societal challenges that he anticipates the next decade will bring. And if there is a thread that runs through his vision, it is to harness the power of Calit2’s expanding resources—“to build across the successes that we’ve had”—to tackle four over-arching problems of the next decade. These are Smarr’s big ideas for what he calls the digital transformation of healthcare, energy, the environment, and of our culture itself:

—Healthcare. Smarr sees healthcare moving increasingly to “a prevention and wellness model” that relies on innovations in the emerging field of “wireless health” technologies and the digital transformation of medical care. In our conversation, Smarr compares the way it will work to an automobile maintenance schedule:

“I just bought a new car, a hybrid,” Smarr says. “It has 30 computers in it. It probably has another 60 or 70 sensors, actuators, and memory chips. So my car will easily run … Next Page »

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