Recently I attended the Boston Smart Grid Forum, where some of the leading “smart grid” minds met to discuss the challenges and opportunities that currently exist. Ontario has been one of the investment leaders in smart grid technology, much of which is being developed through the University of Waterloo. There are a number of similarities between Ontario and the Boston-area energy ecosystem, as new technology developments come from close relationships between the universities and entrepreneurs to develop great technology in emerging markets. Here are some thoughts about the pilot programs currently running in Ontario and the opportunities that exist for similar programs in New England.

Through pilot programs and tests in communities in the Northeast U.S. and Canada, individual efficiency and renewable energy technologies continue to evolve, becoming more efficient and effective every day. Photovoltaic cells are getting more efficient, improving the value of solar panels. Wind turbines are transferring more energy from the blades to the electrical grid.

While significant investment has been focused in these areas, insufficient attention is being paid to the ways in which they can be operated to maximize the benefits across a broader “energy system.” For example, a lot of effort is being exerted in order to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells beyond the current levels. There is a big opportunity to increase the value of this existing technology if it were coupled with an energy storage technology so that energy could be stored now and discharged later, during peak demand times, reducing the strain on the overall system. In response to this need, the Province of Ontario, in conjunction with Energent, Hydro One, Ontario Power Authority, Milton Hydro, and the University of Waterloo, are developing the Energy Hub Management System (EHMS).

Energent has been working with utilities in Canada and the U.S. developing smart grid technology for consumers since 2007. In creating the backbone of EHMS, Energent has defined a “hub” as a single, static location, such as a home, manufacturing facility, farm, etc. The management system consists of three key elements. First, there are two-way controls on all energy-consuming and producing devices within the energy hub. These controls will have the capacity to record energy consumption/production, and to direct the operation of the individual device, such as a motor, compressor, or dishwasher.

The second element will be a central core module that consolidates the information from the devices, the external environment (weather, energy prices, etc.), and user-defined models to effectively manage energy.

Finally, the third element is a Web-based portal, which is the user-friendly interface between the energy hub’s managers and the core module technology. This information will also be available on mobile devices for the three major smartphone platforms. Using a local home network to connect the home to the grid, the EHMS provides an effective, integrated interface for both the energy consuming/producing devices within a single, static location. It will also receive, analyze, and act on system-wide information, not seen in most in-home technologies.

The transformational change that comes from this program is the … Next Page »

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For a company that’s all about helping people wander the Web and make serendipitous discoveries, San Francisco-based StumbleUpon has been on a remarkably straight path since 2002.

That’s not to say the venture-backed company hasn’t gone through big changes. It has: from tiny Firefox add-on maker in Calgary, Alberta, to angel-funded SoMa startup, to eBay subsidiary, and finally (in 2009) back to being independent.

But throughout those changes, StumbleUpon’s technology and business model have stayed remarkably simple and consistent. Turn on the company’s browser extension or Web bar, and you’ll see a “Stumble!” button that will take you to a semi-random website or video chosen to match your interests. You have the opportunity to give each site a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, share it with others, or write a review—information that helps StumbleUpon’s collaborative filtering algorithms improve future recommendations for you and people with interests similar to yours. Every 20th stumble will take you to a sponsored site; publishers pay StumbleUpon 5 cents per visitor.

That’s it—that’s StumbleUpon’s whole business, and always has been. Of course, the company has introduced variations such as StumbleThru—a way to discover content within specific sites like PBS.org or Wikipedia—and it’s got nifty iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for stumbling on the go. But the only dramatic change at StumbleUpon, apart from its short-lived fling with eBay, has been the growth of its audience.

Today the service has 12.3 million active users who stumble about 600 million times per month. As a source of social-media traffic to sites around the Web, StumbleUpon is second only to Facebook—it accounted for 33.4 percent of all visits from social-media sites in October, compared to Facebook’s 43.8 percent, according to statistics from Web analytics firm StatCounter. StumbleUpon far outranks Twitter and social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, Slashdot, or Y Combinator Hacker News. Yet for all that power, StumbleUpon is rarely mentioned in the same stories with media darlings like Facebook—which has led ReadWriteWeb’s Richard MacManus to call the startup “the silent social media success story.”

Garrett Camp

Part of the reason for the company’s relatively low media profile may be that few journalists (at least among the ones I know) have time for undirected skimming. StumbleUpon is definitely not the tool to use if you’re in goal-directed research mode—you stumble when you’re in the mood for something new or unexpected. “It’s not a replacement for search engines,” says StumbleUpon co-founder and CEO Garrett Camp. “It’s for when you want to explore and see what’s out there.”

True, you could always turn to Google or other search engines for this purpose. If you’re daydreaming about where to go on your next vacation, for example, you could try a vague search query like “cool places to go.” But if you do that, Camp argues, there’s roughly a one-third chance that the sites you find will be blogspam, whereas every site in StumbleUpon’s database is either filtered by other users or sponsored. (Even sponsors’ sites get filtered out if enough users give them a thumbs-down.)

You can also lean on Facebook friends as a kind of proxy discovery engine, and many people do, as StatCounter’s statistics show. But link sharing isn’t what social networks were really designed for, Camp argues. “On Facebook, people share stuff and … Next Page »

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ExtendMedia, a video software company based in Newton, MA, is being acquired by Cisco Systems, the San Jose, CA-based networking giant. The news was announced in a press release this morning. Financial terms of the deal were not given, but the acquisition is expected to be complete by early 2011.

It’s an important move for Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO), which views online video as a top priority across many areas of its business. That’s because consumer demand for watching video anywhere, anytime on all kinds of different devices—TVs, laptops, tablets, smartphones—is booming. And the deal is obviously an important next step for ExtendMedia, which provides content management systems that help service providers deliver Internet video to different kinds of consumer devices—and make money through subscriptions and advertising.

ExtendMedia’s main business is to provide hosted or turnkey video delivery systems to companies that want to get into the Internet video market. Back in May 2008, my colleague Wade wrote about the company’s efforts to help telecom companies deliver same-day movie downloads, starting in Canada. Later that year, ExtendMedia raised a $10 million Series C venture round from existing investors Atlas Venture, Venrock Associates, and TVM Capital. The company is a member in good standing of what we call the greater Boston Internet video cluster. (It’s hard to know how big a win this Cisco deal is for ExtendMedia’s investors, but it’s a pretty quick turnaround; the company had raised about $33 million since 2006.)

The majority of ExtendMedia’s 52 employees are based in Toronto, Canada. Most of the team will join Cisco’s Service Provider Video Technology Group, while the sales and professional services staff will join Cisco’s Sales and Advanced Services organizations. Cisco said in a statement that ExtendMedia’s software will integrate with Cisco’s current Internet video products, and will be a “core component of Cisco’s next-generation video architecture.” A Cisco spokesperson said the Newton office “will remain,” and that all of ExtendMedia’s staff will be joining Cisco.

ExtendMedia is led by president and founder Keith Kocho, chief executive Tom MacIsaac, and chief operating officer Marty Meyer, all of whom are based in the Boston area. The company was founded in Toronto in 1991, and relatively recently transitioned from a services firm to a products firm.

Cisco’s most recent acquisition for its service provider business was another Massachusetts company, Tewksbury, MA-based Starent Networks, in October 2009. That deal, which extended Cisco’s reach in the mobile sector, was worth a whopping $2.9 billion.

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Last week the Northwest Energy Angels—a group of over 45 private investors who have banded together to invest exclusively in cleantech and energy companies located here in the Pacific Northwest—held its annual Summer Showcase at Tesla Motors’ South Lake Union showroom. Founded by Seattle entrepreneur Martin Tobias and state lawmaker Jeff Morris in 2006, the angels provide early-stage capital to cleantech entrepreneurs and connect promising companies with potential investors.

So far, the group has invested more than $3 million in 17 local companies, a sign that it is active and growing—along with the Pacific Northwest cleantech sector. Back in March the Angels hired on local tech veteran Margo Shiroyama as the new executive director, and the group is recruiting new angels, hoping to bring the membership up to 60 by the end of the year.

On Friday afternoon many of the angels joined representatives from local cleantech companies, and green-minded community members at Tesla to mingle, connect, and hear updates from 11 companies that had presented at a prior NW Energy Angels event. Drinks were served in 100 percent compostable plant polymer Greenware. I would be lying if I said a few in the crowd weren’t eyeing Tesla’s bright red Roadster on display in the front of the room. (After the presentations, many signed up for test drives around the neighborhood, though I was not so lucky.) But the combination of compostable cups and fully electric cars sure did set the scene for an event on cleantech business ideas.

One of the more high profile attendees included U.S. Rep Jay Inslee, the Democrat who represents Washington’s first congressional district. Energy Angel Bill Lemon introduced Inslee as our “tireless advocate in the promotion of clean energies.” In his introductory remarks, Inslee urged the companies to develop new clean technologies and move the country and world forward toward renewable energies.

“The future of the U.S. economy is not determined at the Fed, or the White House, or the Congress. It is determined by people like you,” he said. “It is a system that is broken because it is rife with subsidies that support old technologies that have been around for the past hundred years.”

Inslee then outlined his five pillars for the future of clean energy, which he termed his “vision for America.” The steps included creating demand for new technology, increasing energy standards for machinery (including cars, buildings, and gadgets), changing the tax code to provide clean energy incentives for small businesses, increasing federal energy R&D, and leveling the playing field between clean energy businesses and industry old timers like oil and coal.

“These five pillars, I think, have the capability to get us into the international game. And it needs to happen this year—next year is a year too late,” Inslee said. “This is the most exciting thing technologically since we went to the moon,” adding that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest are poised to be cleantech leaders based on our booming regional tech industry. “When there’s a technological transition, Washington shines!” he said.

The remainder of the event was dedicated to a series of short company updates and networking among cleantechies. The presenting companies included a few more established startup success stories, as well as a handful of brand new companies fresh on the scene. Though all of the companies had been represented at prior NW Energy Angel events, many of them have escaped our radar until now. But whether you’ve heard of these startups before or not, if you’re interested in what’s up-and-coming in the Pacific Northwest cleantech sector, take a look at these highlights:

—EMME (Beaverton, OR)

Standing for Energy Management Made Easy, EMME develops energy management devices. These are monitoring gadgets for everything from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, to wireless power monitors, and power meter breaker boxes—that helps consumers keep track of their home’s carbon footprint, and save money and energy. “It will tell you how much you’re spending on heating, cooling, your refrigerator is spending, your big screen TV,” said Jon Brodeur, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “And it will give you recommendations on what to do to save energy costs,” without having to change out any appliances.

—EnerG2 (Seattle, WA)

You’ve probably heard of EnerG2, a nanomaterials startup focused on energy storage. The company, which develops ultra-high performance synthetic carbon material for use in double layer capacitors, has had such success in the last few years that Lemon kicked himself for passing up an opportunity to invest. “Boy do I really, really regret it!” he said. Since that missed opportunity, EnerG2 has brought in $8.5 million in its Series A venture investment—which chief operating and financial officer Chris Wheaton joked happened during in the fall of 2008, “nearly financial Armageddon.” Later on, EnerG2 secured another $21.3 million in federal stimulus money. “It completely blew the doors off for us,” Wheaton added. “There’s nothing like success to create more success.”

—EnergySavvy (Seattle, WA)

This energy-efficiency focused startup works to help homeowners understand the “miles per gallon” of their homes by helping consumers calculate their energy use and find places they can cut back, make changes, and save both energy and money. Only an eight-person operation, according to Scott Case, the vice president of product management, EnergySavvy has had so much interest from prospective customers they have been struggling to grow fast enough to keep up. The company makes its money … Next Page »

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[Updated 1:00 p.m. May 26, 2010] Waltham, MA-based Xkoto, which makes database virtualization software for businesses, has been acquired by Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the Dayton, OH-based data warehousing and business intelligence giant, PE Hub first reported this morning. In an e-mail to Xconomy, Teradata public relations director Dan Conway confirmed the acquisition, and said the companies have no plans to disclose the financial terms of the deal. We first covered Xkoto back in 2007, when Boston-based GrandBanks Capital arranged to transplant the company’s headquarters from Toronto to Boston. Xkoto raised a $7.5 million Series B round in 2007 and a $3 million Series C round in 2009 from GrandBanks and GrowthWorks Canadian Fund.

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Burnaby, BC-based Delta-Q Technologies has raised $17 million in growth capital from Canadian firm Tandem Expansion, the company said yesterday. Delta-Q makes power conversion and power management systems for electric vehicles.

Delta-Q was founded in 1999 to develop battery charging technologies for electric-drive vehicles. The company has since expanded its products to include power electronics technologies for golf cars, aerial work platforms, industrial floor-cleaning machines, and low-speed neighborhood vehicles. The company says the new money will be used “to fund Delta-Q’s aggressive product development and overall corporate growth plans.”

Chief executive and co-founder Ken Fielding elaborated a bit in a company statement. “This capital will help fuel our growth plans in our existing electric vehicle markets, targeted industrial markets and automotive industries,” he said. “We chose Tandem because we share the goal of building a great Canadian company with durable competitive advantage.”

Tandem Expansion, which has offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal, is a growth capital firm that is looking to invest in Canadian companies in information technology (software and hardware), cleantech, energy, materials, and tech innovations in traditional industries and life sciences. The firm announced a first close of a $300 million fund in December.

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When you hear the phrase “cleantech,” you generally think of green hills studded with wind turbines, or buildings sheathed in shiny solar panels. The oil sands of Alberta—where mining companies foul vast amounts of freshwater while extracting crude oil from surface deposits, leaving behind huge, toxic tailings ponds—don’t usually come to mind.

But the way inventor/entrepreneur David Soane sees it, the global economy is going to stay hooked on petroleum for quite some time. So the more scientists can do to make oil extraction cleaner, the less damage we’ll do to the planet during the transition to a post-fossil-fuel future.

At his latest startup, Cambridge, MA-based Soane Energy, the former U.C. Berkeley professor is applying his knowledge of polymer chemistry to do exactly that. The company’s “ATA” technology—for “activation, tethering, and anchoring”—uses custom polymers that efficiently remove oil-bearing particles from the water used in oil extraction. The technology works great in Soane’s lab, and now the startup is collaborating with several operators to see whether it will work on the huge scale required in Canada.

“I believe that in the distant future, ideally, all energy should be renewable,” Soane says. “I’m a firm believer that we should continue to invest in solar, geothermal, and wind. But there is a transition period that may last 50 to 100 years. Meanwhile, we can’t blindly continue to do things they way they’ve been practiced. This technology is one little example, hopefully Soane Energy’s contribution, toward managing this transition period.”

Soane is probably most famous for founding Nano-tex, the Oakland, CA, company that supplies polymers used by clothing makers such as L.L. Bean and Eddie Bauer to render textiles water- and stain-resistant. It is interfaces—in Nano-tex’s case, the interface between the polymer-protected cloth and water—that really fascinate Soane, and believe it or not, there’s a direct connection between the textile technology and the idea of cleaning up tailings ponds.

Polymers, which are basically chains of repeating chemical units, are useful at interfaces because chemists can splice together chains from two halves with different chemical properties. One end of such a chain might be tailored to attached to a substrate, such as a piece of cloth, while the other might be designed to be … Next Page »

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Twenty-two-year-old Fan Bi is the mastermind behind Blank Label, an online clothier where fashion-conscious young men can use sophisticated “configurator” software to design their own dress shirts from a variety of fabrics and collar, cuff, and pocket styles. Tailors in Shanghai assemble shirts from the designs and ship the finished articles back to the U.S., all for under $100 per shirt. His Boston-based startup is part of a “mass customization” movement that could alter the economics of the fashion industry, empower clothing buyers, and give rise to a new generation of e-commerce success stories.

Too bad, then, that the young entrepreneur is about to be kicked out of the United States.

Bi is a citizen of Australia and a student at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who has spent the last year in a study-abroad program at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. He says that even before his fourth month at Babson, he had fallen in love with the high-energy entrepreneurial culture at the institution (and around Boston in general) and had decided, like most of his Babson peers, to start a business. Blank Label went live on October 31. But now that the startup founder’s studies are ending, his student visa is about to expire—meaning, come January 4, he’ll have to get on a plane for Sydney.

When I first talked with Bi back in October, there was still some prospect that his visa would be extended. That fell through. Speaking with him again yesterday, I didn’t hear anger in his voice about having to leave, just disappointment. “I’m not screaming and saying ‘This is ridiculous’ or ‘This is absurd,’” Bi says. “This is far bigger than myself; I’m one of the fortunate ones.”

But Sydney, he confesses, just doesn’t have the kind of startup culture where, he now realizes, he will thrive best. Even in Canada—to which Bi is considering emigrating, so he can be closer to the rest of his team here in Boston—he wouldn’t be surrounded every day by a community of successful serial entrepreneurs and investors who could offer him guidance, feedback, and support (not to mention employees and capital), he says.

At bottom, there really is something absurd about banishing a promising entrepreneur like Bi, who could be building his ideas into a valuable business right here in Boston—creating jobs and aiding the region’s, and the nation’s, economic recovery. That’s why there’s so much talk these days about the idea of a startup visa, a new class of immigration document that would allow graduating students and other non-U.S. citizens who become startup founders to stay in the country indefinitely.

Brad Feld, the co-founder of Boulder, CO, venture firm Foundry Group and startup incubator TechStars, has been blogging for months about the need for what he calls a “founders visa,” picking up on an idea from Y Combinator’s Paul Graham. In October, Feld published a first-hand-account by an anonymous foreign-born student entrepreneur who said he was dreading his departure from Babson; Bi now acknowledges that he was the post’s author.

“Being in Boston…I mourn the fact my visa expires in December, the conclusion of my studies,” Bi wrote. “Why is it so good here? How is it so different to back home? It’s not about the number of venture dollars, or the size of the business plan competitions, it’s not even the size of the market. It’s about an intangible in the ether. It’s about culture. For a first-time, young entrepreneur, environment is so fundamentally key. The couple of web tech, social media, or general startup networking events I go to every week act as shots in the arm. I always come back that much more energetic; that much more inspired.”

The inspiration for Blank Label, Bi says, came when his parents, who emigrated from China to Australia and run a successful grocery business, visited Shanghai in mid-2008. The city is home to a bustling garment district. “I thought maybe there would be a way to … Next Page »

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Beverly, MA-based Hamilton Thorne, which makes laser equipment used in stem-cell research labs and fertility clinics, has raised $2.2 million in a private stock placement and debt conversion deal, according to an announcement released last week. A the same time, the company, which recently completed a merger with Ottawa, Ontario-based Calotto Capital, will soon be listed on the TSX Venture Exchange, a Canadian stock exchanged headquartered in Calgary, Alberta. Meg Spencer, Hamilton Thorne’s CEO, said in a press release that joining the TSX will give the company—which had previously raised about $13 million in venture backing from Brook Venture Partners and StarLake Capital—access to “a larger pool of capital to further advance our commercialization strategy.”

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Tech manufacturing exports from Washington state grew for the sixth straight year in 2008, up to $3.5 billion (15th out of 50 states), according to a TechAmerica Foundation report highlighted today by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). Washington ranked fifth nationwide in consumer electronics exports, which totaled $320 million. The top three tech export destinations for the state were Canada, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. The report did not include software exports.

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Toronto-based iloverewards.com, which runs an online product catalog that offers corporate employees rewards as performance incentives, has closed a Series B venture funding round led by GrandBanks Capital of Newton Center, MA. There are conflicting reports about the amount of the round: a press release from iloverewards.com put it at $6.9 million, while a GrandBanks e-mail newsletter circulated this morning put it at $5.7 million. Existing investors JLA Ventures and Laurence Capital joined the round. Investing in Canadian technology startups is something of a specialty for GrandBanks—this is the firm’s fifth such investment and its sixth transaction in Canada overall.

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In a major acquisition that expands its reach across North America, Norwell, MA-based waste management company Clean Harbors (NYSE: CLH) said today that it has agreed to acquire Edmonton, Alberta-based Eveready Inc. The Canadian firm provides maintenance, lodging, and exploration services to a range of companies in the oil and gas, chemicals, paper, manufacturing, and power generation businesses. Clean Harbors said it will pay $387 million for Eveready using a combination of cash, stock, and assumed debt.

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Bingen, WA-based Insitu, a developer of unmanned aircraft systems, announced today it has received a one-year, $30 million contract from the Canadian government to provide technologies to support Canadian forces’ operations in Afghanistan. The contract, which includes two additional one-year options, specifically calls for small unmanned aerial vehicles for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Insitu was acquired by Boeing (NYSE: BA) for about $400 million last summer.

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Burlington, MA-based Nuance Communications is wrapping up its long and sometimes contentious crusade to acquire Zi, a Canadian competitor in the market for text messaging software, which has agreed to Nuance’s $35 million buyout offer.

The deal, announced today, provides shareholders of Calgary-based Zi (NASDAQ:ZICA) with 34 cents in cash and 0.4 shares of Nuance (NASDAQ:NUAN) stock for every share of Zi stock. That values the company at 69 cents per share—or a 73-percent premium over the closing price of the stock on its last day of trading before Nuance began its tender offer to acquire Zi shares on November 25. (Hindsight is 20-20, but the Nuance offer that Zi rejected back in August was worth $40 million, or 80 cents per share.)

Zi’s board has unanimously accepted the offer; now it needs to be approved by Zi’s shareholders, at a meeting scheduled for April. Zi offers Nuance its line of products that speed entry of text messages, correct typos, among other features. The acquisition would also eliminate a competitor to Nuance’s speech-to-text technology.

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After its last bid to acquire Calgary, Alberta-based Zi Corporation (NASDAQ: ZICA) for $0.40 per share expired on Friday, Burlington, MA-based speech technology giant Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN) now says Zi has until February 13 to respond to its offer. The board at Zi, which makes software for quickly typing text into mobile devices that competes with Nuance’s speech-to-text systems, has repeatedly rejected Nuance’s takeover offers, as we reported in August and November. In its Friday announcement, Nuance emphasized that its current offer represented a 25 percent premium over Zi’s closing price on August 13, prior to Nuance’s first acquisition bid—but the offer is actually below Zi’s current market price (the company was trading at around $0.41 per share this morning). After Zi rejected Nuance’s August bid, Nuance filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the Canadian firm.

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Waltham, MA-based Xkoto, a database virtualization company that relocated from Ontario, Canada, to Massachusetts in 2007, announced today that it has raised $3 million from existing investors GrandBanks Capital and GrowthWorks Canadian Fund. The infusion brings the four-year-old company’s total venture pot to $13 million. Xkoto was named InformationWeek’s “Startup of the Year” in 2008 and reports a major expansion in its customer base and revenue for the year.

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Seattle-based Pelago, maker of the Whrrl mobile-networking application, announced it has partnered with Norwich, VT-based Maponics to provide the location-aware service to customers in more than 50,000 neighborhoods in 2,000 cities across the U.S. and Canada. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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Burnaby, BC-based NxtGen Emission Controls announced today it has closed a $15.4 million Series B round, led by Denver, CO-based Altira Group. Other investors included Itochu, an undisclosed Japanese auto maker, and return investors Yaletown Venture Partners, GrowthWorks Capital, BC Advantage Funds, and Polygon Financial Investments. NxtGen Emission specializes in “syngas” technology for reducing emissions and optimizing combustion of diesel, biodiesel, natural gas, and gasoline.

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Yaletown Venture Partners, a Vancouver, BC-based venture firm, said today it has raised $65 million in the initial closing of its second fund, which it estimates will grow into a $100 million fund over the next 12 months. The new pot of money will be used for cleantech and information technology investing in Western Canada, and some select cleantech deals in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and across other parts of Canada, the company said. Yaletown noted that it raised its first fund, worth $42 million, during “challenging market conditions” of 2003.

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Waltham, MA-based Commonwealth Capital Partners is the lead investor in a $5 million Series A venture round for Tungle, a maker of free Web-based calendar groupware, the Montreal-based startup announced today. Existing investors JLA Ventures and Desjardins Venture Capital also contributed to the round, which will be used to—you guessed it—”accelerate the company’s marketing and engineering activities.”

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