I wanted to meet with the founders of Seacoast Science since I learned in late October that the Carlsbad, CA, startup is part of a government-sponsored initiative to embed tiny chemical sensors in cell phones.

Seacoast’s technology is impressive: tiny microchips—about the size of the typeface on a postage stamp—each containing multiple individual sensors, or “chemical capacitors.”

A microelectromechanical system (MEMS) in each sensor is coated with a chemically sensitive polymer, which acts like a sponge to absorb gaseous chemicals from the atmosphere. Once a polymer has absorbed a chemical, the sensor’s ability to conduct electricity changes in a way that can be precisely measured and compared with the conductance of known toxic or hazardous chemicals. If there is a match, the microchip can trigger an alarm.

Microchip Sensor on Stamp

I wondered how a little startup develops such specialized capabilities.

Seacoast president Louis Haerle and the vice president of research, Sanjay Patel, told me they started Seacoast with a third co-founder six years ago, after all three had left Graviton, a wireless sensor company that was one of San Diego’s more spectacular failures. (Todd Mlsna, the third co-founder, continues to serve as Seacoast’s chairman after leaving in July to join Mississippi State University as an associate professor of analytical chemistry.) Graviton went bust in early 2003 (four years after it was founded) after burning through $66 million in venture capital from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Qualcomm Ventures, Siemens, Sun Microsystems, Mitsui USA, Omrom, Nanogen, Earlybird Venture Capital, and In-Q-Tel, the venture firm formed in 1999 by the CIA.

Three Sensor Array

Haerle and Patel tell me they learned a variety of lessons from their experience at Graviton. So far, for example, they have avoided venture capital funding—relying instead on government funding. They also are operating with a much narrower business focus and a relatively straightforward goal of commercializing their proprietary sensor technologies. “One of the things that didn’t work at Graviton was that they were trying to do everything,” Haerle says, “from the transducer to the customer interface and back-end development. We decided to focus just on the sensing.”

Haerle says they acquired the necessary rights from Graviton, which had licensed the underlying sensor technologies from the Naval Research Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. What Graviton found at the beginning of the decade, Haerle says, “was that the chemical sensors were not ready as a commercial off-the-shelf technology.” After founding Seacoast Science, Haerle and Patel say they figured it still would take another five to seven years to develop the sensing technology, and they tell me, “we’re still pretty much on schedule with that plan.”

Haerle says Seacoast funded its … Next Page »

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It was a busy week for local technology news.

—Two teams from San Diego and a third from Northern California demonstrated their development of advanced chemical sensor prototypes that are tiny enough to be found inside ordinary cell phones. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is funding the Cell-All program, with a goal of basically creating an anti-terrorism app for cell phones that would enable authorities to crowd-source chemical detection.

—MaxLinear has filed for its initial public stock offering. The Carlsbad, CA-based fabless chipmaker, which specializes in designing semiconductor-based television receivers, intends to raise about $100 million through its IPO. The market may be de-frosting a bit, with 47 IPOs so far in 2009, compared with 45 last year, and 272 in 2007.

—ProQuo, a San Diego-based Web 2.0 company that was founded in 2007, was quietly shut down after taking in a total of $15 million in venture capital from Menlo Park, CA-based Draper Fisher Jurvetson and San Diego-based Mission Ventures. ProQuo was never able to validate its business model; its website offered consumers a way to remove their names from mass-mailing lists for free, and the company planned to sell its optimized lists back to mass marketing companies.

—San Diego’s wireless industry group, CommNexus, celebrated the opening of EvoNexus, its free high-tech incubator, by announcing the selection of three more startup companies: EcoATM, MicroPower Technologies, and TetraVue. CommNexus CEO Rory Moore says EvoNexus is believed to be the first incubator that is completely free for startups—that is, it doesn’t even require an equity stake in participating companies, as most incubuators do.

—Jitterbug, the San Diego wireless provider that puts an emphasis on simplicity, has acquired MobiWatch, a Waltham, MA-based startup developing mobile personal emergency response services. A regulatory filing shows that Jitterbug’s parent, GreatCall, provided 630,000 shares of common stock to MobiWatch and its shareholders in a deal valued at $107,100.

—San Diego-based Networkfleet is using its technology to help companies that operate fleets of vehicles go green by monitoring engine emissions and ensuring that vehicles are operating efficiently. Co-founder Diego Borrego told me the company also expects to be a player as consolidations sweep through the fleet tracking industry.

—EcoDog, a Vista, CA, cleantech startup that has developed a device that helps homeowners sniff out savings in their electric utility bill, was named best of show at GadgetFest, the annual fall competition sponsored by CommNexus, the San Diego wireless industry group. EcoDog founding CEO Ron Pitt won over the crowd when he declared, “My product is the only product up here tonight that saves you more money than it costs.”

—San Diego-based cleantech startup EESG is looking to raise $1.2 million to expand the 10-employee company’s sales staff, purchase inventory, and ramp up public relations and marketing. The company’s founders told me they have raised about half so far, including $300,000 from Longboard Capital Advisors, a green investment firm based in Santa Monica, CA.

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[Updated at 4:45 pm 11/2/09 to clarify size of NASA Ames sensing device] The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has taken the wraps off a program to develop miniaturized sensor technologies for detecting deadly chemicals—sensors tiny enough to be installed inside ordinary cell phones.

DHS officials meeting in San Diego last week say they have provided total funding of roughly $3 million over the past year for what they call their “Cell-All” program. The funding went to three different R&D groups—including two teams based in San Diego—who successfully demonstrated their prototypes Oct. 27 at San Diego State University’s Regional Technology Center for about 40 government and industry representatives. Among other things, the center serves as a technology clearinghouse and homeland security test bed for public safety agencies in the region.

While implementing such technology is still years away, DHS officials say the concept would make it possible to deploy millions of chemical sensors in the pockets, purses, and belt holsters of cell phone users throughout the United States. Their goal is to integrate miniaturized “sniffer” technology with the mobile handset’s operating system so that a sensor that detects certain volatile chemical compounds would trigger a warning alarm on the user’s phone. At the same time, data about the chemical would be transmitted to first responders and federal emergency operations centers.

“It’s almost like crowd-sourcing the chemical detection problem,” said Stephen Dennis, who is overseeing the Cell-All program for the DHS Science and Technology Directorate in Washington D.C.

Whether a cell phone owner would still be alive after his phone helped to detect, say, a nerve gas attack is another question. But the arguments cut both ways. Japanese emergency services and hospitals were heavily criticized for their slow and uncoordinated response to the 1995 gas attack in Tokyo’s subways. Doctors at many hospitals did not realize they were dealing with cases of sarin nerve gas poisoning until a professor at Shinshu University’s school of medicine recognized the symptoms from television news accounts and mobilized a team to send diagnosis and treatment information by fax. The sarin killed 12 people and sickened thousands.

If such cell phone sensor technology is eventually deployed, Dennis emphasized the system would use an “opt-in” network that would require each cell phone user to activate the sensor in their handset. “We’re very mindful of privacy issues,” Dennis said. “Even though it’s very early in development, we want to send the message that people will control whether or not they want this technology.”

It stands to reason, though, that enough people would participate so that conceivably hundreds, or even thousands, of sensor-equipped cell phones would be present at any given time in shopping malls, airports, public transit systems, and other places where people congregate.

“Instead of large stationary [sensor] systems, you’d have numerous, ubiquitous sensors throughout a region,” Dennis said. “Putting the sensors where people are is a big goal.”

The sensor technology under … Next Page »

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One understandable reaction to Daylight Solutions, a 23-employee startup that has developed a breakthrough in semiconductor-based, mid-infrared laser technology, might be to ask, “Where did this company come from?”

The suburban San Diego company says its high-power lasers, about the size of a small box of matches, can be used in medical diagnostics, in environmental and industrial monitoring, and even to thwart anti-aircraft missiles targeting a commercial jetliner or military aircraft. Its technology was impressive enough to garner a Prism Award for innovation earlier this year from SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

One clue to the company’s genealogy is hanging on the wall behind the receptionist’s counter at Daylight Solutions’ modest headquarters in Poway, CA. It is a lithograph of the San Diego State University campus, where founding CEO Timothy Day received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in physics—and where his father, Tom Day, was university president from 1978 to 1996. Tim Day completed his academic studies at Stanford University, where he got a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering, before joining a San Jose, CA-based startup called New Focus in 1990.

New Focus represents the other half of Daylight Solutions’ origins. In addition to Day, New Focus was founded by Milton Chang, a renowned Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Robert Marsland, and Frank Luecke to provide “simply better” photonic tools. New Focus introduced its first tunable laser in 1992, and became a leading supplier of lasers used in fiber optics test-and-measurement work for the telecom industry and in non-telecom research. After New Focus raised about $555 million through two stock offerings in 2000, Chang, the founding CEO, left to start Incubic, the Menlo Park, CA, venture capital firm.

Tim Day

Day told me he decided to return to San Diego after San Jose, CA-based Bookham, now known as Oclaro, acquired New Focus in 2004 for $338 million. He joined forces with Paul Larson, who had directed ASIC programs for Qualcomm, to develop a new type of laser, based on semiconductor-based lasers that had been developed for fiber optic networks in the telecom industry. “We pulled together our own investors among friends and family and started operations in January 2005,” Day said.

The opportunity they saw was in developing a laser that operates at mid-infrared wavelengths, from 3 um to 12 um—a part of the spectrum previously untapped by laser technology. In lay terms, Day says Daylight Solutions’ lasers operate at wavelengths beyond visible light that are “the color of heat. It’s the color that snakes can see.” It became clear to them within months that the technology was technically feasible. And by mid-2006, using a semiconductor composed of hundreds of layers of Indium gallium arsenide—with each layer only about 10 atoms thick—they created ECqcL, the company’s patented “External Cavity quantum cascade Laser.”

Daylight Solutions can manufacture the laser to emit … Next Page »

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