I was chatting with a couple of local investors at the TechStars (seed fund and mentorship program) event in Seattle on Wednesday. They thought the VC panel discussion of the startup climate and culture in different cities around the country was boring. If you’re an entrepreneur or investor, they said, that’s just where you are, and you deal with it.

But au contraire, mon frère—as a journalist and outside observer—I view those comparisons across different innovation clusters and their respective histories as a way to generate some good stories and insights. On the panel, there were certainly some constructive (and at times controversial) things said about the entrepreneurial climate in Seattle, Boston, and Boulder.

Here are a few edited highlights from the panelists, several of whom bring an outside perspective to their current cities:

Brad Feld of TechStars and Foundry Group gave a brief history of the startup scene in Boulder, CO—useful for any city with entrepreneurial aspirations. “When I showed up in ’95, what I found was on the software side you had a lot of smart engineering talent but you didn’t have much else. A handful of entrepreneurial companies in storage and cable infrastructure. Not much in the way of entrepreneurial executive leadership other than from these pockets. In the mid-90s, because of the counter-culture community—and the Internet was purpose-built for places like Boulder—you had a lot of people who were independent, very smart, doing their own things suddenly intersecting with a medium that allows you to be anywhere. It’s 100,000 people plus 25,000 college students. A pretty small town, but it has the largest percentage, per capita, in the United States of computer scientists and PhDs. Yet there wasn’t a broad wave of entrepreneurial experience,” Feld said.

“In the mid-to-late 90s, there was huge activity around the Internet. Anybody with a pulse could get a company started. The predictable thing eventually happened, there was a lot of wreckage. But from ‘95-2001, Boulder had imported a lot of executive talent—CEOs, VP sales, engineering leadership. We also had a lot of entrepreneurs who had one or two companies in that cycle. So by 2003, people were starting to come back and get re-engaged in entrepreneurial activity. There were probably 50-plus people that made $10 million or more, so there was enough of an angel community. There was critical mass around this. But what was missing was something that tied the community together. There was the endless cocktail party circuit of entrepreneurs. Eventually people got bored and stopped going.”

That led David Cohen, Feld, and others to form TechStars in Boulder. “It cemented this notion of first-time entrepreneurial activity is the core of the ecosystem. What was needed was fresh meat into the system. We got a lot of new, young people into the community,” Feld said. “The other thing was that one of the hardest things for first-time entrepreneurs is to have an engaged relationship with an experienced entrepreneur. We found we were creating this thing that integrated the whole value chain of entrepreneurs. It really energized the existing entrepreneurial activity around a thing.”

Chris Sheehan of CommonAngels then gave his thoughts on the Boston innovation scene. [Disclosure: Chris is on Xconomy’s board.] “In the IT ecosystem in Boston, there are a number of things going on,” Sheehan said. “It’s a wonderful place for universities and colleges. MIT has been the granddaddy in terms of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. But what I’m seeing is a fresh set of energy coming …Next Page »

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When people think of game companies in the Pacific Northwest, Seattle-area giants like Microsoft, Nintendo America, and RealNetworks tend to dominate—not to mention successful startups like Big Fish Games, PopCap, and WildTangent. But just 120 miles to the north lies another haven for makers of video games. Vancouver, BC, is noted for being like a big American city, only safer, and it is often the shooting location for movies that want to set a scene in any number of American cities, but more cheaply.

Although Vancouver has its own gaming culture and talent pool, it also has some notable connections to the Seattle gaming cluster, which we detailed last September. For example, Hothead Games in Vancouver makes a computer game based on the Seattle-made Web comic Penny Arcade. And just a couple of months ago, Big Fish Games (which has an office north of the border) acquired Vancouver-based Grubby Games.

So we thought it would be useful to provide a fairly complete list of the main players in the Vancouver video game industry. While the economic climate has slowed the expansion of the industry in Vancouver, as elsewhere, there remain dozens of companies in fields directly related to making games. The games coming out of Vancouver include those for personal computers and every type of console and handheld system, including mobile phones. The styles and genres are diverse—everything from serious, realistic World War II games to puppy simulations and boxing with characters from Popeye.

For our greater Vancouver gaming cluster, we listed 28 game companies that represent the many different types of studios, publishers, and games made in Vancouver. There are other companies that were not included because they are either too small or work mainly on peripheral aspects of games like music and sound effects. Vancouver game companies also have a long history of merging with or acquiring one another, and many have ended up as part of a multinational company, such as Black Box Games, a company acquired by Electronic Arts in 2001.

This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list—at least not yet. If there’s a company we missed that you think should be included, please leave a comment below, or e-mail us at editors@xconomy.com. All companies are based in Vancouver proper, unless otherwise specified:

Atomic Robot Games
Founded in 2006, still developing first game for PSP, PS3, and Wii.

Big Fish Games
Based in Seattle with an office in Vancouver, and acquired Grubby Games. Makes casual computer games.

Big Sandwich Games
Makers of Socom: Confrontation and Skypirates of Neo-terra. …Next Page »

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Seattle, the Washington D.C. area, and Orange County have moved up in Milken Institute’s ranking of top high-tech center areas in North America. From 2003 to 2007, Seattle passed Boston and became America’s second-ranking high-tech metro area. San Diego is at seventh place. (These are Xconomy’s network cities.) The number one spot belongs to Silicon Valley, which “continues to lead all other metropolitan regions in North America in the breadth and scope of economic activity it creates through technological innovation,” according to the study.

According to Milken Institute, the Top Ten North America high-tech centers are:

2007 Ranking (2003 Ranking) Metro Area Total High Tech Score

1 (1) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA 100.0
2 (3) Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA 46.4
3 (2) Cambridge-Newton-Framingham, MA 45.2
4 (5) Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV 41.8
5 (4) Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale, CA 40.2
6 (6) Dallas-Plano-Irving, TX 21.8
7 (7) San Diego-Carlsbad-San Marcos, CA 19.3
8 (11) Santa Ana-Anaheim-Irvine, CA 17.7
9 (9) New York-White Plains-Wayne, NY-NJ 16.8
10 (8) San Francisco-San Mateo-Redwood City, CA 16.1

The study was done with 2007 benchmarking data. The report, called “North America’s High-Tech Economy: The Geography of Knowledge-Based Industries,” was presented by Milken Institute director Ross DeVol at the 2009 IEDC Technology-Led Economic Development Conference on Tuesday.

Metro areas were ranked by “their ability to grow and sustain thriving high-tech industries.” The study compares wages and employment in the metropolitan areas, and adds a location quotient, which measures the concentration of high-tech employment or wages in the area.

In the separate Life Sciences Small Business Vitality Index, the Top Five ranking was 1. Greater Los Angeles 2. Greater San Francisco 3. San Diego (tie) 3. Boston (tie) 5. Greater Raleigh-Durham, according to DeVol’s presentation.

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Last week, we published a series of three stories documenting the companies and organizations in the Pacific Northwest that are focused on alternative energy and cleantech. We organized the lists by geography, breaking out separate lists for companies in Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. Now we can take a step back, analyze the trends in each region, and—although the lists aren’t comprehensive—compare them to one another in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.

But first, some big-picture trends from the whole Northwest. We catalogued 160 organizations in total—27 of them working on alternative fuels (17 percent), 18 on solar power (11 percent), 16 on wind power (10 percent), and 19 on other alternative energy sources like geothermal, nuclear, and hydro (12 percent). Thirteen companies specialize in transportation technologies like hybrid vehicles and engines (8 percent), while nine are focused on fuel cells (6 percent). We counted 15 organizations focused on smart-grid technologies and electricity management (9 percent). And in total, 20 of the companies (13 percent) have a strong software component to their products, while seven are focused on energy storage or new materials (4 percent).

“We haven’t quite seen anything like what’s happening in the energy space,” says Rick LeFaivre, managing director at OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, WA, which has invested in several alternative energy companies on the West Coast. “There’s a huge drive for cleantech. We’ve hit an inflection point.”

Washington is the clear leader in software and alternative fuels, with about one-fifth of its 83 organizations focused on each of these areas. Its leaders in energy software include Optimum Energy, Powerit, and Verdiem, while a new generation of biofuels technology is emerging, led by the likes of Arzeda, Bionavitas, and Boeing. The state is also strong in smart grid and electricity management, with 11 companies in this emerging arena, including Itron and Areva T&D. For its cluster size and level of activity, however, Washington does not have many venture firms or angel networks with a focus on cleantech (we counted just three—Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, and Northwest Energy Angels).

Oregon is strong in solar, wind, and biofuels, with about one-fifth of its 36 cleantech organizations focused on each of these. SolarWorld and SpectraWatt are leaders in solar, …Next Page »

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An ambitious plan by Pasadena, CA-based Alexandria Real Estate Equities to create a 16-acre biotech park in East Cambridge, MA, moved one step closer to being realized last night. By an 8-1 vote, the Cambridge City Council approved a rezoning request from Alexandria that will allow it to build taller, denser buildings than those previously permitted along the Binney Street corridor, just north of Kendall Square.

Luke detailed Alexandria’s ten-year plan for the area back in June. Overall, the $1 billion project spans a six-block area along both sides of Binney Street between First Street and Sixth Street (a stone’s throw from Xconomy headquarters on Rogers Street). It would add five new buildings with 1.5 million square feet of “green” lab and office space for life-science tenants, as well as 220,000 square feet of housing, 30,000 square feet of ground-level retail space, underground parking, 2.3 acres of open parkland, and up to 52,000 square feet of community space (in the form of the “Foundry” building off Third Street, which Alexandria is donating to the city; the city itself will decide how the space is divided up between community and municipal uses).

To make the project viable, Alexandria (NYSE: ARE) needed a change in zoning ordinances to allow it to build mixed-use buildings as high as nine stories tall. Some area residents have opposed the change, saying the buildings will be too high, and raising concerns about construction noise and the risk of exposure to potential pathogens in the new labs. At last night’s city council meeting, almost a dozen East Cambridge residents spoke up against the proposal, some holding signs reading “Too Big, Too Close, Too Toxic,” according to a report today in the Harvard Crimson.

But other residents representing local construction workers’ unions urged the council to accommodate Alexandria, saying the project would bring much-needed jobs. And the Cambridge Planning Board, in a recommendation to the City Council last month, concluded that “there are many very positive aspects to the current scheme.”

“Alexandria is very pleased that the City Council approved the revised zoning in the Binney Street district,” Tom Andrews, Alexandria’s senior vice president and regional market director, told Xconomy. “Over the next several months we intend to prepare and submit a development plan for review and approval by various City and State agencies. We look forward to working closely throughout this process with the East Cambridge community, the Planning Board, and other City and State officials.”

Alexandria, which brands itself as the “Landlord of Choice to the Life Science Industry,” already manages nearly 2 million square feet of lab and office space in Cambridge, including Technology Square area near Kendall Square and the Science Hotel on Memorial Drive.

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Yesterday morning in Redmond, WA, Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts sat down with Ray Ozzie, the chief software architect of Microsoft. They talked about high-tech innovation in the Boston area, how Microsoft views its own global future, and how the company could work together with Massachusetts to help drive the local economy.

“I was talking with Ray about what we have to offer in Massachusetts,” Gov. Patrick said afterward, “and how he is thinking about a distributed organization—not entirely focused on Redmond, but centers of gravity around the world.”

Patrick clearly would like to pull more of Microsoft into orbit around Boston’s technology cluster. His agenda on this West Coast trip—which also includes visits to Portland, OR, and to Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, and Electronic Arts—is to promote Massachusetts as a cutting-edge leader in technology, and to build relationships that could lead to new high-tech jobs and economic growth in his home state. The governor briefed a group of reporters by phone while rushing off to the airport to catch a flight to Portland.

In their meeting with Ozzie, Gov. Patrick’s team spoke of Boston’s innovation strengths in e-health (including electronic medical records), Internet video, gaming, and mobile communications. Ozzie pointed out the strong high-tech talent pool in the Boston area, as well as the high quality of education in Massachusetts, from K-12 public schools to elite universities. They discussed Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA, which officially opened last September, as being part of the company’s efforts to tap the best local talent in computer science and mathematics.

That point came to the fore during a Q&A session Patrick took part in with Microsoft employees. “There were an awful lot of people from Massachusetts working at Microsoft,” said the governor. “They’re here in some cases because in order to move up in Microsoft, it was perceived that you had to be in Redmond. Ray and others are trying to move to another model. Their lab in East Cambridge is a step in that direction.”

It was interesting to hear how Patrick portrayed Microsoft as an innovation leader—a view not everyone in the tech industry would share. “Microsoft is unique, or uncommon, among American companies in terms of their consistent focus on what’s next, looking out five, 10 years,” he said. “It’s not just about jobs today, but how to prepare ourselves for future growth…It’s about branding our tech sector in a fresh way, both as a platform for all the other innovation industries we’re trying to drive, and also as a source of innovation on its own.”

As for what progress had been made on any partnerships with Microsoft, Patrick wasn’t specific. “These are first meetings, or second conversations. We’re not expecting commitments so early in the relationship,” he said. “We want to build a strong foundation, we want to be in play. We want the relationship to deepen. It’s a step in that direction.”

And then it was off to a different tech sector for Patrick. In Portland, the Massachusetts Democrat was slated to meet with Vestas, the world’s largest maker of wind turbines. “We’ll talk about a testing facility and the opportunity to partner with them on that,” he said. “I’m interested in alternative energy and the creation of jobs around manufacturing turbines.”

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Though we in Boston can’t claim to host a major handset maker like Nokia or Motorola or a major wireless carrier like Verizon or AT&T, the New England area is nonetheless one of the world capitals of the mobile business. As Xconomy’s lead infotech writer for the East Coast, I spend at least a quarter of my time writing about mobile technology. And even after a year and a half on the job, I’ve only scratched the surface of the mobile ecosystem around town, which boasts more than 150 companies, from mobile advertising and marketing firms to applications developers to hard-core infrastructure technology companies.

We figured it was high time that we assembled a list of local mobile companies, similar to our previous cluster stories like Boston: The Hidden Hub of Music and Technology, the Greater Boston Internet Video Cluster, We, Robot: The Greater Boston Robotics Cluster, the Boston Health 2.0 Cluster, the Boston and Seattle iPhone Apps Catalog, and the Greater Boston Innovation Map.

Many thanks to Kate Imbach of Skyhook Wireless and Mobile Monday Boston, who generously shared the Mobile Monday membership spreadsheet on which we based our own list. We’ve played around liberally with the categories in the Mobile Monday rundown. Of course, any errors and omissions in the lists below are our responsibility, not Kate’s or Mobile Monday’s.

We’ve enhanced the list with links to previous Xconomy stories about each company, where available. We restricted the list to companies verifiably based in New England (meaning we left out companies whose websites didn’t list an address), and we didn’t include companies that are still in stealth mode. In some cases we included companies whose main business relates to land-line networking or telephony but which have mobile technologies or operations.

As always, our industry cluster lists are works in progress. If you spot a mistake in this list or you know of a company that should be added, please write to us at editors@xconomy.com.

To browse the list, continue to the next page, or pick a category:

Advertising

Applications and Content

Enterprise

Hardware and Infrastructure

Location-Based Services

Mobile Marketing

Mobile Search

…Next Page »

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A week ago, Xconomy Seattle published a list and an interactive map of the coffee hotspots around town where entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators like to gather. It generated a fair bit of attention and a really great response from our readers. So I thought we should post an updated list here with a bunch of new additions for the Seattle area. There are 50 coffee spots and counting—and yes, Eastside and West Seattle, we heard you, and you are certainly not devoid of coffee-based innovation. Let us know if there are other spots we’ve missed.

Now, a few more coffee tidbits I’ve picked up from the community:

—On finding a prospective Yahoo buyer: In the past few months, there have been reported sightings of Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer at the Overlake Village Starbucks in Redmond, and at the Clyde Hill Tully’s.

—On the stalking of wireless carriers: Dan Shapiro of Ontela says he used to have meetings with his advisory board at Victor’s in Redmond. He adds that it’s where Microsoft and AT&T folks go to “have meetings away from prying eyes.” But the “best place to catch AT&T people in their core habitat” is the Starbucks in Redmond Town Center, he says. “Some wireless startups will nurse a cup of drip there for hours, waiting for the right person to come through.”

—On rags to riches: Ken Myer of the Washington Technology Industry Association says he used to work in the Uptown Espresso on 4th Ave. in Belltown when he was a consultant, before he moved into his current WTIA office on Alaskan Way. That was about two and a half years ago.

—On coffee-shop IP protection: Martin Tobias of Kashless says he has interviewed all his employees at Caffe Fiore in Queen Anne, and “can tell a lot about someone by the coffee shop they ask to meet at.” When asked to elaborate, Tobias said, “I consider my coffee shop/personality trait matrix to be proprietary information.” He added, “Suffice it to say that certain coffee shops are ‘cooler’ than others.”

—On a little-known fact of local coffee innovation: Not only is Caffe Fiore beloved by entrepreneurs and VCs alike (with branches in Queen Anne, Ballard, and Sunset Hill), but it’s also owned by Michelle Maclise of the Robot Co-op, makers of the popular social sites 43 Things, 43 Places, and 43 People.

Other notable additions to our list and map were contributed in the past week by Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Scott Darling of Frazier Technology Ventures, Rebecca Lovell of Alliance of Angels, Matt Hulett of WidgetBucks, Max Ciccotosto of Wishpot, Dave Schappell of TeachStreet, Jeff Lawson of Twilio, Ethan Lowry of Urbanspoon, and others.

So please check out the updated list here, and leave a comment or send further anecdotes to me at gthuang@xconomy.com. In the meantime, hope to see all of you out there enjoying your coffee (or other beverage of choice), and working on the next big thing.

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Map and list updated Dec. 19: Want to know where your favorite VC gets his or her morning latte? How about where tech and life sciences entrepreneurs gather to network and discuss ideas? If you’re looking to rub shoulders with the technological elite—or if you’re just looking for a quiet cafe to have a meeting or get some work done—you’ve come to the right place.

Here at Xconomy Seattle, we’ve been keeping track of the coffee hotspots around town favored by the tech-business leaders we talk to and write about every day. We thought it would be fun to share what we’ve found, both as a list and as an interactive map you can click around on (see below). In many cases, we’ve met the innovators or investors in their favorite haunts and sampled the local beverages. In other cases, we’ve gone by what they told us. But this is in no way a comprehensive list. We’d love to hear from you about where you like to go, where plans get hatched, and where tomorrow’s deals are being discussed. We’ll update the list as we go.

It may be cliché to say the Seattle innovation scene runs on coffee, but it seems to be true. One of the amazing things about the region is the sheer number of great cafes and places to gather, talk, refuel, and recharge. There’s something for everyone, from the quiet elegance of Caffe Fiore on Queen Anne Hill to the casual charm of Louisa’s on Eastlake to the hustle and bustle of Espresso Vivace near downtown. Not to mention the old reliables, Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Tully’s (especially on the Eastside—what’s with the dearth of independent cafes over there?).

View Larger Map

And behind every great cafe is a great story. Take Trabant Coffee & Chai, known for its strong espresso, tasty drip coffee, and spicy teas. The Pioneer Square branch is a personal favorite of Dan Shapiro, the co-founder and CEO of Ontela—and there’s an interesting reason why. In early 2006, Shapiro says, he was one of several entrepreneurs pitching their companies at a Keiretsu Forum angel investor meeting downtown. “We were singing for our supper,” he says. The guy in front of him was pitching a $12,000 drip-coffee maker, and he had coffee samples for everyone (Shapiro was too wired to try any). The panel asked the coffee guy questions like, Aren’t you just going to compete with Starbucks? Why wouldn’t Starbucks just do this? He replied that Starbucks’ leaders were too set in their ways, and the only way they’d do it is if they saw it in action.

The guy was Zander Nosler of the Ballard-based Coffee Equipment Company. His machine was called the Clover, and sure enough, he was right. His 11-person startup was bought last March by Starbucks, which now has Clover machines in several-dozen stores in the Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Boston metro areas. So what does this have to do with Trabant? The local coffee shop was a key early customer of the Clover, buying the machine in the spring of 2007. “Every time I go there, I feel like I’m supporting the local startup scene,” says Shapiro.

There are many more stories, but we won’t get to them today. Instead, we present our first pass of the Greater Seattle Coffee Cluster: an alphabetical list of cafes (50 and counting), and some of the notable people you might run into there. If you’ve got a favorite spot, or a story to pass along, please do comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com. Then again, you might want to keep your local treasures to yourself…

Belle Epicurean
1206 4th Ave, Seattle, WA
Recommended by Megan Muir of DLA Piper for its pastries, good coffee, and confidentiality.

Caffe Fiore
224 W. Galer St, Seattle, WA
Martin Tobias of Kashless is known to arrive for meetings here on his Segway. Also the favorite of Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games and Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

Caffe Ladro
600 Queen Anne Ave North, Seattle, WA
Paul Thelen of Big Fish Games also lists this institution as one of his likes. …Next Page »

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If it seems as if San Diego sprang to sudden prominence as a global capital for innovation, at least part of the explanation can be found atop the oceanside bluff known as Torrey Pines Mesa.

This perch has one of the most prestigious zip codes in the world, 92037, used by the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, The Scripps Research Institute, and The Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Across the street from the Salk is the University of California, San Diego, with its own zip code, 92093. Just down the road are General Atomics and the San Diego headquarters of SAIC, Science Applications International Corp., both government contractors that operate as R&D conglomerates.

Torrey Pines Mesa also may be the most stunningly scenic vista in a city renowned for its Mediterranean-like views of coastal cliffs and beaches, sun-splashed bays, and urban skyline.

The mesa encompasses a 2,000-acre wildlands park, with trails that drop 300 feet through deep ravines to the Pacific Ocean. Coastal fog and rain occasionally sweep through the partly wooded bluff, which is usually bathed in sunshine. The zip code includes the Torrey Pines Golf Course, which hosted the U.S. Open earlier this year, and parts of fabled La Jolla, the affluent seaside resort. As it turns, 92037 also includes the latest office for Xconomy, on North Torrey Pines Road.

Leading researchers who relocate to San Diego often cite the combined allure of this scenic landscape and scientific firepower as a major reason for making the move.

It was part of the reason why K. Barry Sharpless, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in chemistry, moved to San Diego from MIT 17 years ago. Sharpless told me years ago he particularly enjoyed the ocean swim from La Jolla shores to La Jolla Cove, a roundtrip distance of roughly 2 miles.

Ron Evans, a professor in the gene expression lab at Salk (and a San Diego Xconomist), described the research institute where he works as “an architectural masterpiece” designed by Louis Kahn on a bluff selected personally by Jonas Salk, best known for his development of a killed-virus polio vaccine.

“It was meant to be symbolic of the movement of Americans from East to West,” Evans told me last week. “This is the last West Coast outpost overlooking the Pacific, constructed by Salk at the peak of his fame. Not only does it have magnificent views of the ocean and cliffs, but it is an uncluttered landscape. One never gets tired of that.”

Still, the emergence of Torrey Pines Mesa as a scientific powerhouse did not happen by chance, says Mary Walshok, a UCSD Associate Vice Chancellor and sociologist who has studied Silicon Valley and other technology clusters.

San Diego has a 100-year history of courting the U.S. Navy and relying on the military for its economic development, Walshok says. The Navy and Marine Corps continue to maintain major military bases in the region today.

Yet Walshok credits John J. Hopkins, president of General Dynamics Corp. …Next Page »

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The Seattle area is known for many things. But right up there with the coffee, the weather, and the music scene would have to be the gaming community. If you’ve ever played a video game like Halo on an Xbox console, or a multiplayer online game like World of Warcraft, or an online “casual” game like Bejeweled, then you’ve almost certainly got a Seattle company (or connection) to thank. Everyone knows Microsoft and RealNetworks are here; lots of people know about Nintendo of America, Sony Online Entertainment, and PopCap; but there are also dozens of smaller, indie studios cranking out all manner of computer games and development tools.

In just the last two months, downtown Seattle has hosted two of the gaming industry’s largest expos, which we’ve covered: Casual Connect, a conference around casual games as opposed to traditional “core” games that tend to be more time and cost-intensive; and the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), which drew an estimated 50,000 people in a celebration of all the latest in gaming tech, business, and culture. It’s the kind of trend we at Xconomy pay close attention to, because it says something about how innovation happens and its impact on society and the economy—on both a local and a global scale.

According to a report by enterpriseSeattle, an economic-development research organization, there are some 150 game-technology and interactive-media companies in Washington state, which employ 15,000 workers and contribute $4.6 billion in direct revenue to the state. Those are the hard stats, but there’s also something intangible about Seattle’s unique blend of artsy creative types, storytellers, hackers, and software developers—not to mention a fierce competitive spirit—that has made it one of the world’s top centers for gaming.

Not that it’s all growing without limits. Just yesterday, Seattle mobile-gaming startups Mobliss and Reaxion announced they are merging into a new company called PressOK Entertainment—a sign of the consolidation that’s been occurring in the mobile-game industry. And I haven’t been hearing of as many new core gaming studios being formed lately. At the same time, though, casual game development costs are falling, Web-based tools are more plentiful, and it has become easier for small, dedicated teams to build games and distribute them to a sizeable audience.

So we wanted to provide a definitive guide to the gaming companies that are making it all happen. Following in the footsteps of our Xconomy Boston site, which has highlighted clusters of innovation there in music technology, Internet video, robotics, and Health 2.0, we now bring you the greater Seattle gaming cluster— the top companies, big or small, based locally or having significant local operations, that are pushing the state of the art in game technology, development, and business.

For this list, we looked specifically at game companies, not organizations. So no Penny Arcade (gaming website and comic), University of Washington (with its huge computer science program), or Digipen Institute of Technology (which offers courses in game design), though such entities play important roles in the gaming community. We drew the line at companies focused on game development and publishing—so we didn’t include software companies that fall more on the graphics, simulation, animation, or visualization side of things. And geographically, we focused on the immediate Seattle area—in part because Portland, OR, and Vancouver, BC, have their own clusters of gaming companies that number in the dozens.

Looking at the list, a few trends are apparent. Out of the 45 companies in our initial list, I would classify 24 of them—roughly half—as focusing more on core games, and 21 as casual. (This distinction is getting blurrier every day, however, as most companies—and players—are doing both.) Many of the core-game studios were formed in the 1990s, while the casual and mobile startups, not surprisingly, tend to be from the past five years or so. In terms of geography, nearly two-thirds of the companies (29) are based on the Eastside versus Seattle proper, which is probably influenced by the locations of Microsoft and Nintendo. All of that said, this is not a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed somebody, please leave us a comment or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

Without further ado, here’s our fine 45:

5th Cell (Bellevue, WA)
Developer of casual games for mobile devices (Full Spectrum Warrior) and Nintendo platforms (Lock’s Quest).

Amaze Entertainment (Kirkland, WA)
A division of Foundation9 Entertainment, founded in 1996. Develops mainstream casual and core games like those based on Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars.

ArenaNet (Bellevue, WA)
Online game network formed in 2000. Makes role-playing fantasy games like Guild Wars.

Big Fish Games (Seattle, WA)
Founded in 2002 by Paul Thelen from RealNetworks. Develops and publishes casual and online games for PCs, mobile devices, and consoles (Mystery Case Files, Hidden Expedition).

Boomzap (Seattle, WA)
Publisher of casual games headquartered in Singapore, but has had a Seattle office for U.S. distribution and marketing since 2006.

Bungie (Kirkland, WA)
Developer of the bestselling Halo franchise, bought by Microsoft in 2000, and divested by Microsoft in …Next Page »

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Tired of city rankings yet? OK, I’ll be brief. So the July/August issue of Men’s Health, out this week, ranks Seattle #1 in “most environmentally conscious” drivers. Not that surprisingly, the Northwest did well in the survey overall: Portland, OR, and Spokane, WA, also made the top 10. The analysis of 100 American cities took into account gas consumption, annual mileage, vehicle efficiency, air quality, and mass-transit usage.

My colleague Luke and I have certainly done our part—we both recently ditched our cars. But how are local companies doing on greening up transportation, energy, and other technologies?

Startup activity in the cleantech space is certainly one good measure. According to DowJones VentureSource data for 2007, Washington state came in third in VC investments in cleantech (behind California and Massachusetts), with $175 million. It was dominated by a few big Seattle-based company deals: biodiesel maker Imperium Renewables raised $117 million in equity, but canceled its IPO at the end of the year; Targeted Growth, an agricultural biotech company, raised $22 million; Powerit Holdings landed $7 million; and Propel Biofuels raised $4.75 million.

(For a sense of what a larger cleantech cluster looks like, see the MIT Entrepreneurship Center’s energy map of New England here. Of course, it takes a lot of driving to visit all those companies.)

There is also some anecdotal evidence that local employers have contributed to the greening of Seattle. Microsoft and a few other companies run employee shuttles throughout the area. And roughly 70 percent of biotech giant Amgen’s staff in Seattle use something other than a single-occupancy vehicle to commute, says company spokesperson Carol Pawlak. Amgen runs a shuttle service from downtown, subsidizes bus and ferry transportation, and arranges van pools.

Xconomy doesn’t do that yet, but at least Luke and I will be getting our exercise.

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For the better part of a decade, advocates of computing in healthcare have fixated on the dream of paperless medicine—a new era in which every patient’s medical records would be stored digitally and every hospital, physician’s practice, pharmacy, and insurer would have access to these records, reducing paperwork costs and medical errors. But for all of the time stakeholders have spent squabbling over standards for electronic medical records, and all of the money providers have spent rolling out costly and controversial proprietary medical-database systems, these dreams haven’t gotten very far. More than 80 percent of medical practices still keep paper records, according to a study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Meanhile, the Internet has given birth to a totally new way of doing business and interacting with consumers: Web 2.0. And in a rush of Web-based health initiatives that has picked up significant steam just in the last few weeks, entrepreneurs and programmers are leapfrogging over the problem of electronic medical records to tackle much broader (and ultimately more important) issues such as how to use the Internet to track people’s health, how to use the power of social networking to improve standards of treatment, and how to deliver medical advice over the Web.

And it’s not surprising—given the Boston area’s dense concentration of high-tech hospitals, leading universities and medical schools, computing hardware and software companies, and Web startups—that much of this “Health 2.0″ revolution is happening right here in the Bay State. Last week’s launch of Boston-based American Well is only the most recent local example, and it’s sure to be followed by more.

The area’s Health 2.0 cluster may not be quite as big as the New England clean energy cluster, but it’s larger and more varied than some other clusters we’ve covered, such as the music and technology cluster and the Internet video cluster. It’s also growing fast, with new companies being launched every month. And it has all the hallmarks of success, including buy-in from big outside players like Microsoft (which is partnering with American Well to roll out its HealthVault service) and Google (which recently signed up Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts as its first partners for its Google Health project in the hospital and insurance industries, respectively).

What qualifies a company as a Health 2.0 venture? In this list, we’re including any New England-based company that uses the Web or other digital media to deliver software or services intended to help people manage their own health or to help providers manage healthcare delivery. That means we’ve left out a number of local firms, such as Health Dialog, D2Hawkeye, MedAptus, MedVentive, and mTuitive, that could be classified as “e-health” companies, since they are in the business of collecting or analyzing data that’s used to improve patient health or healthcare administration. But if a company doesn’t tap into Web 2.0 technologies and/or use digital media to communicate with consumers, we didn’t include them here.

As always, we invite you to send comments and additions to editors@xconomy.com.

American Well
Boston, MA

A 24/7 online network that matches consumers seeking medical care with doctors for live consultations via Webcam, instant message, or telephone (profiled in Xconomy last week).

Athenahealth
Watertown, MA

Subscription, Web-based software aimed at helping individual clinics and provider networks manage billing and electronic medical records. (Athena shelved plans for a secondary public offering in February 2008.)

Body1
Cambridge, MA

Creates online, interactive multimedia training courses for healthcare executives and clinicians as well as consumer-oriented, advertising-supported health information portals such as Heart1.com.

…Next Page »

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As if its sports teams’ bragging rights weren’t enough, Massachusetts has now topped the state rankings in science and technology prowess. Meanwhile, Washington placed a respectable #5.

That’s the word today from the California-based Milken Institute’s 2008 State Technology and Science Index. The rankings are based on 77 indicators across five broad categories: R&D inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science work force, and tech concentration and dynamism. (You can get the full state list here, and the full report here.)

A whopping four New England states placed in the top 10, with Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island also represented—and all three have improved their positions from 2004, the year of Milken’s last state survey. Washington is up one spot from sixth place, while Massachusetts maintained its dominance at the #1 position.

The report notes that Massachusetts scores “well ahead” of the competition, and attributes this to its world-class research institutions, cutting-edge firms, and ability to attract and retain a highly skilled work force.

Everyone loves a Top 10 list, so here it is, with notable changes in parentheses. The release said these states are “in the best position to succeed in the technology-led information age.”

1. Massachusetts (held position since 2004)
2. Maryland (up 2 spots)
3. Colorado
4. California (down 2)
5. Washington (up 1)
6. Virginia
7. Connecticut (up 3)
8. Utah
9. New Hampshire (up 3)
10. Rhode Island (up 1)

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Young biomedical scientists don’t want to sit in traffic for hours every week, burning gasoline for more than $4 a gallon.

That’s part of the equation for Alexandria Real Estate Equities as it plans to bet $1 billion over the next decade that it can build, and fill up, new laboratory space that’s a short bike ride from MIT or a quick walk from the subway stop. Its idea—still in the planning stages but described last month in the Boston Globe—is to build a sprawling complex with six buildings spanning 1.5 million square feet of lab and office space in East Cambridge, integrated with four acres of open space, underground parking, and room for restaurants. If it passes muster with city officials, the complex would turn the once purely industrial hub into more of a 24-hour urban place where people live and work.

“A lot of the workforce in the innovation economy is younger people, who may still be a bit tethered to their academic institutions and live in communities like Cambridge or Somerville,” says Tom Andrews, a senior vice president and regional director in Massachusetts for Alexandria (which also has properties in the Seattle area). “They don’t really want to get in a car and drive to Waltham.”

Biotech companies have always wanted to settle near the intellectual vibrancy of great universities, hoping some would rub off and foster innovation at work. Biogen Idec, the world’s largest maker of multiple-sclerosis medicines, grew up near its founders’ labs at MIT and Harvard. Genentech, the world’s biggest maker of cancer drugs, followed the same path near UC-San Francisco and Stanford.

No doubt that’s partly why Alexandria thinks it can attract an emerging crop of younger companies to fill up more space than the Prudential Tower has in Boston. Some of the factors working in Cambridge’s favor are the same as they were in the ’70s and ’80s, when Biogen and Genentech were growing. For instance, Alexandria subscribes to the ideas articulated by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter about industry clustering, Andrews says. Simply put, innovative companies like to cluster together to take advantage of informal interactions that can speed up technological development. Not surprisingly, about half of the 4 million square feet Alexandria has acquired in the Bay State since the mid-’90s is in Cambridge, Andrews says.

The property for Alexandria’s expansion, located between Kendall Square and the CambridgeSide Galleria (very much in the neighborhood of Xconomy’s headquarters at 10 Rogers Street), is “from a location standpoint, in the absolute sweet spot,” for new biotech development, says Greg Lucas, a principal at CBRE/Lynch Murphy Walsh Advisors. Since Alexandria is planning to introduce the space in phases, Lucas says he doesn’t think the firm runs the risk of flooding the market with surplus space.

Alexandria emphasizes that the idea is still far from becoming reality. The company has submitted proposals to the city but still needs to get approval, Andrews says. Alexandria hasn’t signed up any anchor tenants, either. But aside from being close to Biogen, Genzyme, and MIT, part of what makes Alexandria bullish about Cambridge …Next Page »

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OK, we’re big on robots around here. From iRobot’s landmark court case to Kiva’s shuffling warehouse bots, from the FIRST (For Inspiration & Recognition of Science & Technology) high-school robot competition to Hydroid’s Navy contract for robot submarines, we’ve been covering the business of bots in depth and on the ground since our inception. And why’s that?

Well, for one thing, robots are just cool. They capture our imagination like few other technologies do. Robots are R2-D2 saving the day, the Terminator delivering one-liners in an Austrian accent, and Iron Man flying through the air, guns ablaze. It’s why anyone ever got into the business in the first place.

What’s more, the greater Boston area has clearly established itself as one of the world’s leading centers for robotics. There are more than 150 companies, institutions, and research labs that deal in robots or robot components here. That adds up to more than 1,500 workers, $150 million in government contracts, and $250 million in annual sales, according to the official state organization presiding over it all—the Massachusetts Robotics Cluster, which is a subgroup of the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council, a non-profit that fosters entrepreneurship and promotes tech companies.

Not that it’s necessarily a boom time for robotics firms. Everywhere you look, budgets are tight. “It’s a bit tough for early stage companies,” says Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan who watches iRobot. “Very few have viable business models.” To be successful in today’s climate, he adds, it’s becoming more important “to roll up and come to market with a proven model.”

With this state of the robotics union firmly in mind, we wanted to provide the definitive local guide. Following our stories on the greater Boston Internet video cluster and the hidden hub of music and technology, we wanted to track down every commercial outfit doing significant work in robotics—everything from mobile to medical robots, software to hardware, electromechanics to exoskeletons. We drew the line if the company made sensors, electronics, or energy sources that could be used by robots, but did not focus primarily on robot products.

Looking at the list, a few things leapt out at us. The majority of firms (at least 13 out of 24) get substantial support from defense contracts, while most others serve niche markets. Local companies are strong in mobile robots and vehicles, growing in medical robots, and not as strong in industrial applications. We’ve also included a couple of non-companies—organizations that we feel are making a direct impact on the industry. But this is by no means a comprehensive list. If we’ve missed something, please leave us a comment below or drop us a note at editors@xconomy.com.

We’re also working on putting together a networking event to bring the local robotics community together to talk about the pressing issues, and maybe raise a few of our own—like what are the potentially transformative applications for robots in society that nobody is thinking of? In the meantime, enjoy our guide…

Aurora Flight Sciences
Cambridge, MA
Vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicles for defense and aerospace applications. The company is headquartered in Manassas, VA, but established an R&D center in Kendall Square in 2005.

Barrett Technology
Cambridge, MA
Best known for its WAM (Whole-Arm Manipulation), a state-of-the-art robotic arm, used for rehabilitation and manufacturing applications such as spray-painting. It might even be used to help repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Barrett began in 1990 as a spinoff of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.

Black-I Robotics
Tyngsborough, MA
Incorporated in 2006, Black-I develops unmanned ground vehicles for security and defense. Its robots have been tested by the Massachusetts State Police bomb squad at Logan Airport for detecting and disrupting car bombs.

Bluefin
Cambridge, MA
Autonomous underwater vehicles for detecting surface mines, and other defense applications using sonar and hydrophones. The company was spun out of MIT in 1997, and became a subsidiary of Battelle Memorial Institute in 2005.

Boston Dynamics
Cambridge, MA
Founded in 1992 out of MIT, Boston Dynamics focuses on human movement simulations and legged robots that can walk and run over rough terrain. A recent YouTube video of the company’s remarkable Big Dog quadruped robot has attracted millions of viewers—and generated a hilarious parody. …Next Page »

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Boston may take a back seat to Los Angeles and New York as a locus for TV, film, and video production, but it’s front and center when it comes to the array of technologies that go into publishing and monetizing video content on the Internet.

Not so long ago, video lovers were pretty much limited to what was being shown live on broadcast or cable TV, what they recorded on their VCRs or DVRs, or what they could buy, rent, or borrow at Blockbuster or Netflix. But now an increasing fraction of traditional TV and movie content—along with a huge tidal wave of brand-new content, much of it generated by consumers themselves—is available over the Internet. The basic enabling technology here, of course, is the spread of broadband Internet connectivity to homes and offices. But we don’t just have Comcast and Verizon to thank: there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes technology involved in Internet video distribution, from the servers that host the content to the players that show it on your computer to the software that inserts the (inevitable) ads. And it turns out that a lot of the companies building this technology are right here in Boston.

Because it’s so central to the future of media, this is an industry cluster that deserves to be spotlighted. So, paralleling our earlier roundup of the area’s music-and-technology companies, we’ve assembled a preliminary list of Boston-area online video companies below, with links to our most relevant coverage. These are all companies whose primary businesses relate to video accessed or delivered over the Internet or mobile networks, or to some other aspect of the deepening marriage between TV and the Internet.

When we publish these technology-cluster stories, we realize that our lists aren’t definitive. In fact, we’re counting on you to help us make them more complete. So if you know of an Internet video company based somewhere in New England that we missed, leave a comment below or write to us at editors@xconomy.com.

And one more thing. While many Boston-area video production companies, advertising and marketing agencies, Web design companies, and broadcast TV stations are aggressively exploring Internet video, they aren’t on this list. If they were, it would be a lot longer. It’s also worth noting that Boston’s influence in the Internet video arena extends far beyond New England; we have not dipped into the long list of online video startups funded by Boston-area venture firms but headquartered in other regions (e.g. Palo Alto’s Metacafe, funded by Highland Capital Partners, or Seattle’s thePlatform, which is now part of Comcast but was originally funded by Spark Capital).

Without further ado:

Aerva Cambridge, MA
Web-accessible interactive digital displays, allowing audience interaction via SMS text messaging. (News item)

Akamai Cambridge, MA
Global content distribution network for video and other high-bandwidth content. (News item)

Avid Tewksbury, MA
Software and equipment for digital post-production video editing and storage. (Profile)

Backchannelmedia Boston, MA
Software allowing cable operators to show interactive pop-up ads during cable TV shows that lead consumers to related Web content. (Profile)

Blackwave Acton, MA
Internet video storage for more efficient and cost-effective content delivery. (News item)

Boston.TV Boston, MA
Locally produced, Internet-only food, arts, entertainment, sports, business, and lifestyle coverage. (Video)

Brightcove Cambridge, MA
Professional Internet video publishing platform, including customized Web-based video players preconfigured to deliver various types of advertising.

Buzzwire Bedford, MA
Streaming video, audio, and radio for mobile phones. (Profile)

ChoiceStream Cambridge, MA
Software that delivers personalized DVD, Internet video, and TV schedule recommendations based on user preferences.

…Next Page »

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