Santa Clara, CA-based Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT) said today it was buying Varian Semiconductor Equipment Associates (NASDAQ: VSEA), a Gloucester,MA-based provider of ion implantation products for semiconductor chips, in a definitive merger agreement, paying $63 per share in cash. The $4.9 billion transaction represents a 38 percent premium on Varian’s 30 day average closing stock price, and a 55 percent premium on yesterday’s closing price. Varian will remain in Gloucester and will become part of the silicon systems group of Applied Materials, which is focused on equipment, services, and software in the manufacturing of semiconductors, flat panel displays, and solar photovoltaic products.

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Washington state companies collected about $53 million in equity financing from venture capitalists and angels in March, led by an $11 million VC round for Vancouver, WA-based semiconductor laser manufacturer nLight Photonics, according to data compiled by research firm CB Insights.

nLight still had another $4 million left to sell from the offering, according to last month’s SEC filing. The investors in nLight’s March financing round weren’t disclosed, but the company website lists Mohr Davidow Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Menlo Ventures and Adams Capital Management as its backers. nLight has been around since 2000 and has manufacturing facilities in Hillsboro, OR, Finland, and China. Along with lasers, the company also supplies optical fiber products.

The second-largest investment in March went to Tier 3, the Seattle-based cloud-computing provider. It was the company’s first publicly announced investment round, with Ignition Capital and Madrona Venture Group supplying the money. Microsoft is among nearly 100 customers for the expanding company, which was founded in 2006.

Coming in third for large equity investments was $6.9 million for Physware, a Bellevue, WA-based provider of software for designing the circuitry in computer systems and other electronics. The company was founded by Vikram Jandhyala, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington. Physware also has an office in Mountain View, CA. Investors were not disclosed.

Another Bellevue company, Visible Technologies, was among the top investment hauls for March with a $6 million infusion from Investor Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, WPP Group, and In-Q-Tel, according to CB Insights’ data. Visible provides social media monitoring for businesses—a growing field that helps companies sort out what customers are saying about them online. Visible has offices in Seattle, London and New York, and relationships with companies like Microsoft, Xerox, and Boost Mobile.

Rounding out the top five equity investments was Powerit Solutions, a cleantech company that provides energy management and conservation for industry clients, which landed a $5 million investment led by Black Coral Capital. Powerit’s Seattle branch is part of a larger company, which includes an office in Sweden. Powerit also announced last month a new CEO for its North America and Northern Europe divisions— Matthew Schiltz, formerly of Seattle-based DocuSign.

You can check out the rest of the March financing data here, including several more deals less than $5 million and one debt financing.

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Designing a next generation computer chip can be a real pain in the…uh, hard drive.

Just ask Intel.

In January, the world’s largest maker of chips said it stopped shipments of chips that power its most advanced Sandy Bridge line of PC processors because of a design flaw, a recall Intel said would cost it about $1 billion.

“That’s kind of a bummer,” says Vimal Bhalodia, business development manager for Reveal Design Automation, a University of Michigan-bred startup.

One company’s bummer, however, is another company’s boon. Founded by recent U-M computer science graduate Zaher Andraus, Reveal has developed a way for chip designers to quickly check for bugs before manufacturers start shipping out defective devices.

Semiconductor chips essentially act as the brains of computers so any defect could cause a severe disruption in worldwide sales of PCs, video game consoles and mobile devices like smart phones and tablets.

Specifically, Andraus has created software that can greatly accelerate the process of “formal verification,” a mathematical way of proving that “chip always does what it’s supposed to do, guaranteeing there are no bugs,” Andraus says.

Reveal claims its technology is 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than any other formal verification method, allowing chip designers catch bugs within minutes and hours versus days and weeks.

“Their technology has the potential to disrupt” the industry, says Terry Cross, a prominent local technology investor, who’s interested in backing Reveal. “They are the last step in the verification food chain and they can turn cycle time from multiple weeks to days.”

“Given the cost of [chip] designers, this can strip substantial cost from the equation,” he continued. “In a complex circuit design team, it is not unusual to have a team of up to a hundred or more engineers working together, so when you can take time out of the process through faster verification, the savings are huge.”

The startup is closely working with ARM Holdings in Cambridge, UK, the world’s top chip designer, which provides significant financial support to the U-M’s computer research program.

One of Reveal’s advisors is Randal Bryant, dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and a top expert on formal verification. For his work, Bryant recently received … Next Page »

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OK, this deal wins the award for clunkiest company names—but it’s an important exit for a Boston-area startup in a tough market. CHiL Semiconductor, based in Tewksbury, MA, confirmed today it is being acquired by International Rectifier (NYSE: IRF), based in the Los Angeles area, for $75 million in cash. The deal is expected to close before the end of March.

CHiL Semiconductor, which was founded in 2006, designs computer chips for power management in servers, PCs, and high-performance computing systems. The technology’s main applications are in graphics, gaming, and other high-volume industries.

In a statement, CHiL’s CEO, Ram Sudireddy, said International Rectifier is “an ideal partner for our customers and employees.” He added that the merger could help “create a higher performance and lower cost” technology that would enable end users to create more energy-efficient products.

The sale seems like a decent exit for CHiL’s investors, which include Flybridge Capital Partners, Highland Capital Partners, IdSoft Capital, and Panorama Capital. CHiL has raised a little more than $30 million since its founding. The most recent financing was a $16.7 million Series C round, led by Panorama, in 2008.

International Rectifier was founded in 1947. The venerable power-management firm has manufacturing facilities in Leominster, MA, among other places.

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Los Gatos, CA-based Tela Innovations has raised $4.75 million in an equity-based financing round that could go as high as $5.5 million, according to a regulatory filing. The company has developed techniques for compressing the chip layouts created during the lithography phase of semiconductor fabrication, saving space and reducing power leakage. Tela raised an undisclosed amount of Series B funding in a round led by Intel Capital in February 2008, and $5.5 million in Series C funding in a round involving Cadence Design Systems, KT Venture Group, and Qualcomm in December 2008.

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Interesting news from the video world today. Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies says it has been working with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) for the past year to make its video-processing software run on the chip giant’s new “Sandy Bridge” microprocessors, which blend traditional processing with graphics capabilities. The two companies are demoing the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas later today.

Financial details of the partnership weren’t given, but it’s a big deal for Elemental, whose software until now has run only on Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) graphics processors (GPUs). “We’ve got a viable second source for GPU-powered video processing. This will allow more flexibility and choice for our customers,” says Elemental co-founder and CEO Sam Blackman, in an e-mail.

If all goes well, it sounds like the Elemental-Intel partnership could improve the efficiency of delivering video to different kinds of devices. As Blackman sees it, the new technology “will continue to drive down the cost of creating the many different flavors of video streams required for adaptive bit rate delivery today.”

He adds, “At CES we are expecting to see the introduction of many new tablet, connected TVs, and mobile devices—if history is any guide, each will require additional resolutions, bit rates, and formats of video. To make delivering video to the ever-expanding universe of devices cost-effective for our customers, faster and more efficient architectures are critical.”

Elemental Technologies was founded in 2006 and is venture-backed by Voyager Capital, General Catalyst, and Steamboat Ventures. The company has raised $14.6 million in venture financing.

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Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures said today it has filed three patent infringement lawsuits against a total of nine companies in three different technology sectors—software security, memory, and integrated circuits. The suits were filed in federal court in Delaware, where Intellectual Ventures is a registered entity. The amount of monetary damages the company is seeking was not disclosed. According to the complaints (see links in the press release), IV sought to reach settlements with the companies before going to court.

These are the first patent infringement suits brought by Intellectual Ventures, which is in the business of developing, acquiring, and licensing intellectual property worldwide. The patents in question—16 in total—were all acquired by IV at various times. Critics have slammed IV for being a “patent troll” that buys up intellectual property, tries to squeeze true innovators into coughing up settlements, and doesn’t develop much valuable intellectual property of its own—and today’s news probably won’t do much to stem that criticism.

“These are companies incorporating our inventions [and intellectual property assets], and they don’t have a license,” says Melissa Finocchio, Intellectual Ventures’ chief litigation counsel. She says that in some cases there were discussions with the companies before filing suit, but that others named in the complaints would not engage IV in discussions.

The first lawsuit is against Redwood City, CA-based Check Point Software Technologies (NASDAQ: CHKP), Santa Clara, CA-based McAfee (NYSE: MFE), Mountain View, CA-based Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), and Tokyo-based Trend Micro, and concerns four patents that IV says are used in “many products including anti-virus and security software.”

The second lawsuit is against Tokyo-based Elpida Memory and Seoul, South Korea-based Hynix Semiconductor, and concerns seven patents around computer memory technologies, including certain types of synchronous dynamic random access memory (widely used in computers, servers, and workstation) and flash memory (used in cameras, media players, cellphones, and USB drives).

The third lawsuit is against San Jose, CA-based Altera (NASDAQ: ALTR), Hillsboro, OR-based Lattice Semiconductor (NASDAQ: LSCC), and Irvine, CA-based Microsemi (NASDAQ: MSCC). This one concerns five patents used in field programmable gate array (FPGA—a common type of customizable chip) devices for telecom, wireless, defense, broadcast, and networking industries.

It’s all part of an increasing trend towards patent litigation in the high-tech industry. Last week, we had a story about the University of Washington suing industrial giant General Electric for infringing on an ultrasound patent. “We believe this [trend] is a recognition of the value of invention and the value of intellectual property,” says IV’s Finocchio.

How will Intellectual Ventures respond to the patent troll criticism now? “We can’t control how people want to label us,” Finocchio says. “We are no different from any other company in the high-tech space that owns intellectual property.” She adds that although IV primarily acquires patents versus filing its own, in many cases it improves the claims and makes them stronger and more relevant to various industries.

An Intellectual Ventures spokesperson added that the company expects people to use the “patent troll” term, but “this is simply our company protecting its assets.” She says IV prefers to follow its licensing model, whereby companies pay for patent protection and access to IV’s extensive portfolio, which includes more than 30,000 “IP assets.” Recent examples include licensing deals with Samsung and HTC in the past month.

In any case, don’t expect to see much significant activity in the court cases over the next few months. “Litigation is a long road,” Finocchio says.

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Ember is one of those companies that defies a quick explanation. For starters, it has been around for nine years. And if all goes well, 2010 will be its first profitable one.

It has been a long climb for the Boston-based firm, which makes wireless networking technologies that help consumers and utility companies manage home energy consumption. Specifically, Ember focuses on making chips and software for low-power, low-bandwidth radio networks used for two-way communications. That sounds pretty tech-y, but as I learned when I caught up with the company last month, the technology is getting much closer to mainstream use.

Ember works with utilities, but sells its products primarily to companies like Itron (NASDAQ: ITRI) and Landis+Gyr, which make “smart meters” and other cutting-edge equipment for the electric grid. Smart meters are devices that let utilities predict peak energy usage times and adjust homes’ electricity use so as to conserve energy. Coupled with a smart display or thermostat, the devices also let consumers track how much electricity they’re using in their homes so they can save on their individual energy bills (and live greener lifestyles). What Ember provides, essentially, is the secure communication link between these homes and utilities.

The company was founded in 2001 by MIT alums Rob Poor and Andy Wheeler. Their original vision was to develop software for wirelessly networked sensors and control systems for supply-chain management, commercial buildings, and industrial applications like detecting temperature and fluid flow in oil pipes. (You can read my 2003 interview with Poor in Technology Review here.)

Along the way, Poor and Wheeler left the company to pursue other projects. But over the years, Ember hasn’t made so much of a radical change as some minor shifts in its priorities. First, it evolved into a chipmaker as well as a software maker, and has invested heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for wireless networking technology. And in 2006, around the time that Bob LeFort came on as CEO, Ember started to focus on energy management as its main commercial application.

Now that approach finally seems to be paying off, in terms of adoption—and revenue. “It’s the first time we’ve heard people talk seriously beyond small pilots of putting things inside the home,” LeFort says. “It’s not mainstream yet, not millions [of homes], but it’s beyond hundreds and a few thousand.”

Ember had its first profitable quarter in the first three months of 2010, and has followed that up with strong enough growth that LeFort predicts it will be profitable for the year. The company’s quarterly revenues have been in the $8-10 million range, he says, and it expects to have total sales of … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Amazon Web Services announced today it has introduced a new cloud-computing service based on graphics processing units (GPUs). Portland, OR-based Elemental Technologies is the first company to offer cloud-based services for video transcoding on top of Amazon Web Services.

Elemental is going after broadcast and online video customers in its push to become the go-to supplier of technologies that help people watch high-quality video on any device, anytime.

The target customers of Amazon’s new service, more broadly, are developers and businesses that need high-performance computing on demand. GPUs are powerful graphics chips that provide unique parallel-processing capabilities. Amazon Web Services is using chips made by Nvidia.

GigaOm reported more details and context around Elemental and Amazon last month, well ahead of any announcement.

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As a reporter, you can tell when the innovation economy tide is turning, when a particular sector is rebounding, or when certain companies have turned the corner. How? Because all of a sudden CEOs want to talk on the record, PR people are your best friends, and marketing and real estate guys chat you up about the field at random events.

That’s the feeling I’m getting about radio frequency identification (RFID) these days—and I’m getting it from both coasts. The field of RFID comprises tags, readers, and software that, together, enable wireless communication via tiny embedded chips so people can gather information about everything from the location and status of product inventory on shelves to runners in a marathon. A couple of months ago, I profiled ThingMagic, a 10-year-old Boston-area RFID company founded by MIT Media Lab alums, whose time appears to have come, thanks to fortuitous changes in the market.

ThingMagic’s sister company in the Northwest is Impinj, a 10-year-old Seattle RFID tech firm founded by University of Washington professor Chris Diorio. Impinj is a bigger company than ThingMagic—and has raised much more venture capital—but both startups survived the RFID-for-retail-supply-chain-tracking hype around 2003-2004 (and the ensuing crash) and lived to tell the tale. The firms have worked together on RFID reader technologies, with Impinj selling its reader chips to ThingMagic. Now they and a few other survivors and competitors, including San Francisco Bay Area-based Alien Technology, are poised to make some bold moves.

I spoke with Impinj CEO Bill Colleran by phone last week to hear about the company’s progress, and some interesting new challenges ahead. One thing that grabbed me was how much the competitive landscape in RFID was decimated by the early hype and glacial adoption of the technology—plus the economic recession. That now leaves Impinj with relatively few competitors. “There’s been a shakeout along the way,” Colleran says. “We’re in a great position to grow as this industry takes off.”

And take off it apparently will, across sectors like consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, and apparel and other retail applications—finally. “RFID has experienced a resurgence in the last year or so,” says Colleran. “The common theme is the technology has continued to move along—performance is dramatically better, and cost has come down…It’s a maturing of the technology and ecosystem. We’re seeing wholesale adoption.”

That’s easy to say, of course, but here are some stats to back it up. Impinj says it will ship as many RFID tag chips in the second half of 2010 as it has in the previous five years … Next Page »

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Earlier this year, Salem, NH-based semiconductor company AmberWave Systems Corp quietly shut its doors, and a new company called AmberWave, Inc. has been formed with its assets, according to multiple sources close to the companies.

The news comes to light after an SEC filing on Thursday revealed that AmberWave, Inc., incorporated this year, had raised $800,000 in equity-based funding from one unnamed investor. When I called to follow up that lead, multiple sources noted that AmberWave Systems, whose technology involved “strained silicon” that makes silicon chips faster and more efficient, had closed several months ago. One source then indicated that a group that included at least some employees from the defunct company had purchased the assets of the original firm and used them to reincorporate AmberWave, Inc.

If this is true, it is a likely a significant write off for the original company’s venture backers. The AmberWave Systems website says it raised $91 million and that its investors include 3i, Adams Capital Management, Arch Venture Partners, The Hillman Company and TeleSoft Partners. Our sources did not reveal how much the new owners paid for the assets of AmberWave Systems—but if the new funding amount is any indication, it was likely a tremendous markdown on previous valuations.

While none of these details were immediately confirmed on the record by company leadership or one of its venture backers that we tried to contact, the SEC filing for the newest AmberWave funding lists the same address in Salem as AmberWave Systems, which was started in 1998 by MIT professor Eugene Fitzgerald. The only website I can find on the company still lists the firm name as AmberWave Systems Corp.

Leadership changes have also occurred at AmberWave in the past months. Mass High Tech first observed that the regulatory filing for the new funding lists Anthony Lochtefeld as AmberWave’s president and CEO and Richard Faubert as a director. Lochtefeld was previously vice president of research of AmberWave Systems, while Faubert served as president and CEO—titles still on the company’s website. MHT says Lochtefeld confirmed both the name and leadership changes, but he did not comment further on the state of the company.

I could not immediately reach Lochtefeld for comment, but I’ll be sure to report more on this story if I learn anything new.

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What do you get when you cross an MIT startup, a longtime public tech company, and three of the Boston area’s top VC firms? That sounds like a joke, but I’d argue that you get the makings of an interesting trend. The trend is that hardware—the actual machinery that powers our computers, phones, and other devices—is making a bit of a comeback around town.

OK, so maybe this region never really lost its hardware prowess. But it sure seems that software, cloud computing, and “virtual” this and that have ruled the tech innovation discussion as of late. For example, Sim Simeonov, the investor and founder of FastIgnite, argued in an Xconomy post in January that, in everything from mobile devices to corporate servers, software would dominate as an economic driver over hardware, which will become more commoditized over the next decade.

But maybe there’s more to the story. Although it’s anecdotal, I’m starting to see a micro trend toward hardware across different levels of the business community—usually a sign that something real is going on. Here are three examples of what I’m seeing:

—A high-powered Boston-area VC syndicate announced this week it has invested in a $48 million financing round for Smooth-Stone, a chip startup in Austin, TX. Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners are all betting on Smooth-Stone, which is looking to modify low-power semiconductor chips from the mobile-phone industry and put them into servers and data centers run by giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. ARM, the UK-based smartphone chip designer, is another investor in the company.

The idea is to develop chips that use less power and emit less heat than traditional Intel server chips—thereby saving big, IT-heavy companies tons of money. If the startup succeeds, look for the competition with the world’s biggest chip maker to reach biblical proportions. Smooth-Stone, after all, refers to the rock that David used to slay Goliath. (I guess its slingshot would be ARM.)

—Lyric Semiconductor is an MIT startup bent on overturning the world of computer chips—at least for certain applications that involve probabilities. I’ve been hearing things about this company, but haven’t had a chance to dive into the details yet. The New York Times ran a story yesterday about Lyric and its new probability chip (my term, not the company’s).

Lyric’s website says it is redesigning its circuits, chip architecture, and programming language to “natively process probabilities” (presumably this is not something like the hype over “fuzzy logic” all over again). The idea is that such chips could potentially use much fewer transistors than conventional chips to do the heavy lifting of computing—especially for tasks like finding patterns in data. Lyric has raised some $20 million in government funding and venture capital. Its lead investor and chairman is Ray Stata, the founder of Analog Devices.

—Speaking of which, Analog Devices (NYSE: ADI), the Norwood, MA-based semiconductor and electronics company, posted some notable financial results this week. Analog, which has been a New England institution since 1965, said its profits from the most recent quarter, ending July 31, had tripled (to $199.5 million) as compared to the same period last year ($65.5 million). The performance was partly driven by increased revenues (up 46 percent to $720 million). Analog has had its ups and downs over the past decade, but this year has looked strong so far.

Maybe there’s just more demand for electronics in general these days—which would bode well for all of these hardware-focused companies.

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Three Boston-area venture capital firms have led a new $48 million financing round for Smooth-Stone, a chip startup based in Austin, TX. Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Highland Capital Partners were joined in the investment deal by ARM, Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), and Texas Instruments. The financing news was announced in a press release this morning. As part of the deal, Battery’s Ken Lawler, Flybridge’s David Aronoff, and Highland’s Sean Dalton have joined Smooth-Stone’s board of directors. Smooth-Stone was founded in early 2008, and is focused on developing and adapting low-power semiconductor chips from the mobile-phone industry for use in servers and data centers.

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IO Semiconductor, a San Diego fabless chip design startup, has raised $1 million in debt and equity-based funding, out of a $14 million planned offering, according to an SEC filing. The money comes as part of a multi-stage funding agreement with a private investor, said business development VP Pete Fowler, who said that the funding is mostly equity based, but did not disclose any additional details about the deal. In September, IO was accepted to EvoNexus, the nonprofit incubator from the industry group CommNexus.

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Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, the venture firm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has participated in a $15 million Series E round for Audience, a Mountain View, CA-based voice processing semiconductor company. New Enterprise Associates, Tallwood Venture Capital, and VentureTech Alliance also participated in the funding, which was all raised from existing investors. Audience designs chips, for mobile phones and telecommunications applications, that suppress background noise and improve the audibility of speech. The company has raised $75 million in total.

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The past week has been pretty busy in the Northwest, with a number of deals in software, Internet, electronics, and cleantech. And the activity wasn’t limited to Seattle—there’s a fair bit of news from Vancouver and Portland as well.

—Tantalus, a Burnaby, BC-based company that develops wireless networks for smart-grid applications, raised $14 million in equity financing led by Redpoint Ventures. It’s one of the bigger cleantech-related deals as of late.

—Cloudvox, a Seattle-based service that connects Web applications with phone services, was acquired by Chicago-based Ifbyphone, an Internet telephony firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.

—Beaverton, OR-based Avnera closed its $10 million Series D financing round, from new investor Onkyo and existing investors. Avnera develops technology for wireless audio chips and other consumer electronics applications.

—Seattle-based Gist, a startup focused on integrating information from the Web into people’s e-mail inboxes, announced that its software now works with IBM’s Lotus Notes communication and collaboration software, in limited release. It’s part of Gist’s strategy to push relevant information and updates to business people in order to make their meetings more efficient.

—Arch Venture Partners and Polaris Venture Partners, which both have Boston and Seattle operations, are paying $14 million for the assets of Iceland-based genomics firm deCode Genetics, as Ryan reported. DeCode (NASDAQ: DCGN) filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in November.

—Portland, OR-based AboutUs acquired Jyte.com, a social website that uses RPX, the flagship product from Portland startup JanRain. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. AboutUs is building a collaborative guide to the Web, and is backed by Seattle-based Voyager Capital.

—Bellevue, WA-based Visible Technologies landed $22 million in new funding, led by Investor Growth Capital, a new investor. Previous investors Ignition Partners, Centurion Holdings, In-Q-Tel, and WPP also participated in the round. Visible Technologies, which makes software to help companies and brands manage their online reputations, will use the funds to accelerate its global expansion, particularly in Europe.

—Seattle-based Big Fish Games expanded its partnership with Playfirst, based in San Francisco. Financial details of the multi-year deal weren’t given, but Big Fish will provide e-commerce and customer support services for PlayFirst’s game distribution portal, and PlayFirst gets access to the Big Fish game catalog.

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Just when I thought venture deals, especially for software and tech companies, had headed south for the winter (or longer), the Northwest erupted with a slew of financings in the past week.

—But first, some serious biotech. Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners led a $30 million Series B round for Fate Therapeutics, a San Diego-based stem cell company with ties to the University of Washington, as Luke reported. Existing investors Arch Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, and Venrock Associates also participated in the funding, as well as three strategic corporate investors—Astellas Venture Management and Genzyme Ventures were named.

—Seattle-based DocuSign, a maker of software to automate and control the process of electronic signatures, received a strategic investment from Second Century Ventures, the VC fund of the National Association of Realtors. The funding amount was undisclosed, but the money will be used to accelerate and extend DocuSign’s efforts with real estate customers.

—Beaverton, OR-based Avnera pulled in an $8 million equity round from undisclosed investors, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s previous investors include Bessemer Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Jafco Ventures, Intel Capital, and DAG Ventures. Avnera was founded in 2004, and designs novel chips for wireless audio applications.

—Seattle stealth startup Doxo raised $5.25 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing and media reports. The investors were not disclosed, but David Feinleib of Mohr Davidow Ventures was listed on the SEC form as a director.

—Bellevue, WA-based Enroute Systems, a developer of software that helps companies manage their parcel-shipping logistics, closed a Series A funding round worth $810,000 from Keiretsu Forum, Zino Society, Puget Sound Venture Club, and angel investors. Next up, Enroute is looking … Next Page »

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Do you ever sit down with a friend who wants to show you all their latest vacation pictures? (Maybe not as much since photo-sharing sites took off.) Well, yesterday’s kickoff of the Distinguished Lecturer Series at the University of Washington’s department of computer science and engineering was just like that—if your friend were Charles Simonyi, a software billionaire, showing you videos from a $35 million vacation in space.

Simonyi, the father of Microsoft Word and Excel, and now head of Bellevue, WA-based Intentional Software, regaled the crowd of a couple hundred students, faculty, and guests with stories and videos from his second trip to space last March. Simonyi rode a Russian Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS), docked and spent some time there, and returned safely to Earth, looking none the worse for wear. He is an outspoken proponent of space tourism, and he pointed out that Guy Laliberté, the founder of Cirque du Soleil, is currently making his way aboard the space station as “the first clown in space” (and the seventh space tourist ever).

Just a few interesting tidbits that stood out to me:

—Seattle and Mercer Island look very pretty from space. “You can’t see the Great Wall or the Pyramids, but you can see Sea-Tac,” Simonyi said. You can also see clouds, lightning storms, and jet contrails, the latter especially over North America. Watching the sunrise from orbit is spectacular.

—The instruments on the spacecraft look refreshingly antique. You think they’d be slick and modern-looking, but the inside of the Soyuz and space station look like they’re out of a 1970s sci-fi movie. In fact, some instruments date back to 19th century designs (“tried and true”), and software on the rocket runs on an Intel 386 processor from the ’80s. “Older chips are more resistant to radiation,” Simonyi explained.

—Bodily functions are funny in space. You wear a lightly applied tourniquet to keep blood flowing in your legs; you get a puffy face from lack of circulation; the toilet is an engineering marvel … Next Page »

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Yesterday afternoon I stopped by Intel Labs Seattle, the research lab run by the chip-making giant near the University of Washington campus, for the lab’s annual open house. It’s an extravaganza that always draws a big crowd from the local tech community. Besides the huge variety of lab demos, one of the most interesting things going on was a changing of the guard.

Dieter Fox, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at the UW, succeeded David Wetherall as director of the lab two weeks ago, when Wetherall’s three-year term officially finished (see photo below). Fox is the fourth director of the Seattle lab, formerly called Intel Research Seattle; all have been UW computer science professors. While Wetherall’s expertise is in wireless networks, mobile devices, and Internet protocols, Fox’s strengths are in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. (He is the co-author of the 2005 advanced textbook, Probabilistic Robotics, with Sebastian Thrun of Stanford University and Wolfram Burgard from the University of Freiburg.)

So, will Intel Labs Seattle now be doing all robotics, all the time? Will the first general-purpose household helper robot come out of Intel (NASDAQ: INTC)? One can always hope—but Fox seems to have a broader and more practical outlook on the lab’s role in shaping the future of computing.

“Our role with respect to Intel is performing what they call disrupting research that is off-roadmap, but essentially our task is also to surprise Intel,” Fox says. “If we show what can be done with future computing systems, then we are serving our purpose. And beyond surprising Intel, we also want to surprise consumers by what can be done. It’s becoming more and more important that these computational systems are going to be observing the environment, using sensors. Today’s smartphones all have GPS, accelerometers, and all that. The key question is, how can we extract relevant information to make it more interesting for users?”

Seeing as robots are computing systems that sense and manipulate their environment, they will certainly figure prominently in the lab’s work—perhaps more than ever before. “For Intel, it’s clear the future of robotics is going to become extremely relevant. We need to see what are the key questions from a computational perspective, what kind of processing is needed for these systems,” Fox says. “Our key agenda is to inform Intel on what the future of computing looks like, especially computing connected to everyday scenarios.”

The idea is that if and when the market for intelligent household robots takes off, it’ll be Intel that provides their brains (in the form of microprocessor chips). But even beyond that, Fox says, “Intel could provide the processing that’s adapted to the specific needs of those systems, and along the way maybe also provide the computational toolset I need. So it’s not only the hardware, but it’s also a better understanding of how you extract information from these sensors. That’s also a theme for Intel—they want to go beyond just building the hardware, and show the whole user experience you can get if you have good computational power.”

Lastly, I got some closing thoughts on the lab’s evolution from its outgoing director. “The trajectory of the lab is, we’ve always done perception and sensing, starting with location, and we’re moving now to richer systems” like computer vision and robotic manipulation of objects, says Wetherall, who is going back to full-time teaching and research at UW this month (though he’ll stay involved with Intel Labs). “It’s quite a natural progression for the lab,” he notes. “That’s what leads to intelligent systems.”

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One of MIT’s leading business professors, Richard Locke, came to Seattle yesterday to talk about the “S” word. Yes, we’ve been hearing a lot about sustainability lately, in the context of technology and business. Big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing are talking seriously about the issue. Smaller Seattle-area companies like Verdiem, Powerit Solutions, and R.W. Beck have been making progress in important areas like energy efficiency and water management. To Locke, and many others, sustainability is much more than a corporate buzzword.

Locke is deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a professor of entrepreneurship and political science at MIT, based in Cambridge, MA. His research specialties include labor standards and practices, global entrepreneurship, and sustainable businesses. I sat down with him at the Westin Hotel downtown to get his perspective on Northwest companies’ green initiatives, and their possible partnerships with MIT. Locke was coming from meetings with Intel in the Portland area the previous day (the Santa Clara, CA-based chipmaker has manufacturing and development facilities in Hillsboro, OR). His other meetings in Seattle included a stop at Amazon to speak to Sloan School alums about the changing face of MBA education, and about sustainability in the corporate realm.

Locke defines sustainability broadly as “using resources today in a way that permits future generations to use them as well.” By this he means not just natural resources—energy, materials, water—but also social resources like people, jobs, and standards. “Let’s redefine sustainability in such a way that we can show the opportunities available, not just the constraints,” he says. “Once you broaden the definition, you expand the scope for individuals and organizations to try to do something about it.” (As I understand it, this definition of sustainability could include managing employees so they don’t burn out, creating jobs that last, and establishing fair labor standards that endure.)

Take Intel, for instance. Locke says the company is pursuing a series of initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, improve its supply chain efficiency, and reshape the way it uses energy, water, and people. “Are there ways they can make, for example, new chips that might require less energy? They’re having a very interesting internal discussion about chip speed versus energy consumption. I find it fascinating that a large company in an extremely competitive sector, that still does manufacturing in … Next Page »

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