I sat in on a good venture capital panel yesterday at Mobile Northwest 2009 in Seattle. No huge arguments or chair throwing to speak of (we’ll see what we can stir up at the next few Xconomy Forums). But some solid and useful observations from Geoff Entress of Voyager Capital, and also a prominent Seattle-based angel investor; Adrian Smith of Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA, an expert in telecom and wireless; and Puneet Tandon of Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA, who is looking to sign partnerships with top entrepreneurs in digital media and social networking. (You can also see some comments from mobile VC Tom Huseby’s keynote here.)

The panel was moderated by Tricia Duryee, the Seattle-based correspondent for mocoNews, a website that covers wireless telecommunications. Here are my quick “top three” takeaways from the discussion of the local mobile industry:

1. The panic may be over, but caution rules. Entress says he’s added nine companies to his portfolio this year, out of a total of 32 he’s involved in (and six mobile firms, including TravellingWave, Swype, Dashwire, and Treemo). “We’re definitely not out of the woods yet,” he said. “But 2010 might be a good year for selling companies.”

2. It’s not all about the iPhone. Entress and Smith pointed out that Apple has only 17 percent of the smartphone market, so there’s plenty of opportunity on other platforms, like the BlackBerry and devices that use Windows Mobile. “Apple has a huge amount of mindshare,” Smith said, “but the critical thing is the development environment around [mobile applications].” Tandon agreed, saying, “Barriers to doing business with us [carriers] perhaps have been lowered.” Entress stressed the importance, especially for startups, of trying to avoid “getting locked into any one carrier, handset, or operating system.”

3. Watch advertising, input technologies, and connected devices. Tandon pointed out that by sometime next year, there are projected to be 3.3 billion Web-connected devices, and 70 percent of them will be connected via wireless operators. That means carriers will be willing to pay to know “who are the social influencers in your subscriber base,” he said. Smith and Entress said Google’s $750 million acquisition of AdMob signifies that mobile advertising is here to stay—but that the deal was the “first one out” (like YouTube for video), so don’t look for anything near that sort of valuation again. Entress added that he’s working with a number of startups selling new ways of inputting text on mobile devices (using speech recognition, touch-screen methods, and so forth). For all our fancy gadgets, it seems we still struggle to communicate.

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Tom Huseby says he’s finally able to go home and not worry about seeing his family’s savings stuffed under his mattress. “The panic is over,” he says. “All of a sudden, things are getting a lot better. It doesn’t feel much better now, but it is.”

Huseby, a noted Seattle-based venture capitalist with SeaPoint Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Voyager Capital (and the Godfather of what we’ve been calling the “Qpass mafia”), was giving his 30,000-foot view of the economic landscape and VC market at today’s Mobile Northwest 2009 conference in Seattle. He also drilled down into some of the most pressing challenges in the mobile space, as well as what the startup opportunities are. Just a few highlights here:

“Unemployment is going to slow growth across any consumer business. If you’re in mobile, I hate to tell you, but you’re in the consumer business. I do think there will be liquidity in mobile startups,” Huseby says. “Most startups are going to have to earn it the old-fashioned way, they’ll have to grow over a long time. You’re going to have to survive during a roller coaster ride. Every single company will have to go rushing to the bottom, and then do the slow, clanking ride to the top.”

In terms of startup opportunities, it helps to think in terms of what wireless carriers need. Huseby calls himself “fairly carrier-centric.” As he puts it, they are big customers that are predictable (once you understand them) and they generate huge amounts of cash. He laid out the top three challenges for carriers today—absolutely critical to understand if you’re an entrepreneur trying to get their attention with a new product.

—Bandwidth. There’s “tremendous pressure on carriers” to provide more bandwidth to support people’s exploding need for data connectivity wherever they go, Huseby says.

—Costs of bandwidth. “Oh my God, how are you going to pay for it?” he asks. With such a competitive market, Huseby thinks costs for consumers will actually go down. “I think they’re not going to get the money from us, they’re going to have to get it from advertising. Advertising revenue will absolutely help pay for the bandwidth.” (The problem is that mobile advertising revenue is still relatively small and doesn’t usually go to carriers.)

—Holding onto consumers. “If they’re going to pay for it with advertising, they need to get a much firmer grip on their customers,” Huseby says. He sees this as a crucial issue for the coming decade. “The next viral social network has to work hard to make [ad revenues] accrue to them. Carriers have to be very conscious of the demographics of their customers. They have to get their customers anchored in.”

After his talk, I had a chance to ask Huseby about some other areas of interest, like mobile search. He says he’s generally staying out of that space, but is looking at location-based services from the perspective of retail stores and local advertising.

We’ll have more from the conference soon, so watch this space.

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The DEMOfall 09 conference, billed as “the launchpad for emerging technology,” kicks off today in San Diego, with company presentations and new product launches officially starting tomorrow morning. The Seattle and Portland, OR, metro areas are well-represented in the mix, with three Seattle-area startups and one Portland company scheduled to present their stuff. That’s all according to VentureBeat, which co-produces the conference.

It’s a big deal in the tech industry, and a great opportunity for a select group of startups. Here’s a little bit about each Northwest company that will take the stage:

—Intelius, based in Bellevue, WA, provides background checks and identity theft protection for consumers and businesses. Back in May, we reported that the company acquired Spock, the Silicon Valley-based people search engine, for an undisclosed amount. Intelius was founded in 2003 and is led by CEO Naveen Jain, the founder of InfoSpace.

—Point of Wealth Systems, based in Portland, OR, has developed a method that allows employees who make their money in cash and tips (waitstaff at restaurants, for example) to deposit their earnings into a secure register for savings, retirement, or investment purposes. Point of Wealth was formed in March 2008 to bring financial services to this new market.

—Symform, based in Seattle, has been honing its cloud data-storage product in beta trials (and a pre-launch version) since the spring. We first profiled the company back in February, and in April, Symform announced it had raised a $1.5 million Series A round from OVP Venture Partners. Its basic idea is to offer cheap, efficient, and secure data storage and backup services to small and medium-sized businesses.

—Enroute, based in Bellevue, WA, is giving a sneak preview of its product—a unified system to help businesses find the most efficient way of shipping packages from A to B. Enroute is one of the finalists from the Zino Society investment forum, which took place last Thursday in Seattle. It is in the running for a $50,000 Zino investment prize, to be announced within the next few weeks.

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Casual games are a serious business.

Seattle-based PopCap Games’ Bejeweled and Big Fish Games’ Mystery Case Files were cheap to develop compared to most modern computer and console games, and the cost to buy them is similarly low, but games like these are played by millions of people around the world. Between the recession and the ever-rising development costs for new games, the so-called “casual” video game seems ripe for an extension of its already massive success. For developers, entrepreneurs, business strategists, and others, the place to network, show off products, and learn new techniques is in Seattle this week.

Casual Connect Seattle, a three-day conference combining seminar, lectures, and networking opportunities started today, filling Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle with a strange mixture of video game exhibitions and business meetings. While men in suits discussed adjusting costs to hang onto consumers, a woman dressed like a medieval princess took pictures with men wearing a crown to promote King.com, a games website. “This is a really important conference for your industry,” Washington Technology Industry Association president Ken Myer told a crowded auditorium this morning in his welcoming remarks. More than 2,000 people are expected to attend the event from companies all over the world.

Casual Connect occurs three times a year—in Seattle, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a rotating European location (this year Hamburg, Germany). Seattle is home to a large cluster of video game developers of all stripes, including divisions at Microsoft and RealGames devoted to casual games. “We’re very proud of our gaming industry here in Washington,” Myer said.

Xconomy wrote about the recognition of casual games as increasing sources of revenue at last year’s conference, and the surprising resilience of casual game profit margins despite the recession. Understanding that, the keynote talk given today by Big Fish Games president and CEO Jeremy Lewis focused on what he called “building value”—growing a casual game company into the best shape possible. Lewis talked about his own personal journey to his current position, using various artistic pictures as analogous illustrations. It’s easier said than done to grow value, he admitted, but he offered some lessons he had learned such as putting aside ego, making culture a priority, and looking for ways to expand the audience. For Big Fish, the audience “is what we call the chief household officer,” Lewis said.

What really drew the attention of the crowd, though, were the announcements Lewis made for the first time. He showed a brief preview of a new game called “Drawn: the Painted Tower,” and said it is the first “cinematic game”—a more graphically intensive story-based kind of game that Big Fish will be focusing on more. He also announced an exclusive deal with People.com to put games on their site, which, with 32.6 million unique visitors a month, should build value for Big Fish quite well. And 88 percent of those visitors are female. “That’s a lot of chief household officers,” Lewis remarked.

Tom Prata, senior director of project development at Redmond, WA-based Nintendo of America was the other main speaker this morning. He expanded somewhat on what Lewis said, focusing on what exactly creates avid gamers and retains them. The main area of development has expanded beyond just the linear improvement of graphics because of a combination of cost and complexity, he said. Ten years ago, “the cost of developing titles was increasing at an alarming rate,” Prata said, and games were becoming so complicated that many potential customers were dissuaded from buying them. Today, however, with the rise of casual games, the video game market has expanded enormously, with around 30 million new players in the last two and a half years. “There have never been more opportunities for game developers than right now,” Prata said.

Judging from the eager energy and purpose-filled stride of people in Benaroya, Prata is not alone in his belief. Dozens of companies have booths to talk about their latest products, and there are certain to be a number of deals between different companies and organizations in the works before the end of Thursday. And office workers everywhere can look forward to a new crop of games to absorb them. “Everyone enjoys video games,” Prata said.

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I met Simon Thompson at the center of the GIS world, which was set at least for several days this week at 32.7090 degrees North, 117.1644 degrees West. Those are the coordinates for the main exhibit hall of the San Diego Convention Center, where more than 12,000 people interested in GIS, or Geographic Information Systems, gathered to attend the 2009 ESRI International User Conference. The annual convention organized by ESRI, the Redlands, CA-based leader in GIS systems is the largest of its kind.

As I reported a few weeks ago, GIS modeling and mapping software is becoming an increasingly hot segment of the IT industry—and Thompson is doing everything he can to push adoption as ESRI’s director of commercial marketing. Thompson tells me that he was living in Sydney, Australia, when ESRI president Jack Dangermond began recruiting him in 2006. “I actually used ESRI tools to evaluate the move,” he said.

Comparing ESRI’s GIS databases for Sydney with Redlands, CA, a city of more than 64,000 in San Bernardino County, Thompson says he could see that he would be trading Sydney’s cosmopolitan city life, theaters, and soccer, rugby, and cricket matches for easy access to Southern California’s mountains and U.S. National Parks. When I mentioned that San Bernardino also is the unhappy recepient of air pollution blown inland from Los Angeles, Thompson says, “That’s why I chose to live in Yucaipa, which is at an elevation of 3,000 feet above sea level. I get to look down on the bad air.”

Thompson says big corporate retailers such as Walgreens, Petco, Starbucks, and Target use GIS technology to make similar assessments every time they consider locating another store. “One of the reasons I came to ESRI was that I’d seen ESRI tools and technologies mature to the point of reaching the enterprise,” Thompson says. (He worked for an unnamed competitor in Europe and Australia before joining ESRI) What it comes down to, he adds, is taking “geographic thinking and applying it to the business needs that different people have.”

The ability to apply GIS technologies to business problems has improved steadily over the past decade, Thompson says. In early 2000, ESRI launched an online product intended to help business users do market analytics and …Next Page »

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At the Nantucket Conference, an invitation-only gathering of New England-area CEOs, entrepreneurs, venture partners, and select others, first-time attendees get a single blue dot on their nametags. Alumni get another dot for every year they’ve attended, and veterans of five or more conferences get a gold starfish pin.

About a third of the participants at the tenth annual conference, held April 30 to May 2 on Nantucket Island, MA, had one blue dot, including myself (I was one of a handful of journalists invited by the conference organizer, Shayne Gilbert of Future Forward Events). But strikingly—despite the obsession among attendees with the economy’s drastic downturn and its effects on entrepreneurship—several of the starfish people said afterward that it was the best, most energetic edition of the conference they’d been to. It seems that the crisis has inflamed the classic innovator’s itch to get on with business—and to invent new ones.

In past years, the proceedings of the Nantucket Conference were off the record to journalists unless a source explicitly agreed to be quoted. This year, the organizers reversed the policy, so everything was on the record, unless a speaker indicated otherwise—which only happened once the entire weekend, to my knowledge. That meant attendees were free to indulge their social media passions, blogging and tweeting freely (you can see the whole conference Twitter stream here).

It also means I’m able to bring you a few of the main themes from the conference. Though the program included panels on topics as diverse as getting venture funding, robotics, gaming, energy, and the roots of the economic crisis, a few ideas seemed to frame the mood of the conference (and perhaps of the entrepreneurial set in general these days), a mindset I’d call pragmatic optimism. Some of the main elements:

Fundraising is getting harder—especially for new companies, but even for established ones. Michael Greeley, a general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, pointed to estimates that only 600 new startups will win venture funding nationwide this year, down from 1,171 in 2008. VC firms have become exceedingly cautious, keeping $5 in reserve for every $1 they invest, rather than the more traditional 2-to-1 ratio, Greeley said. Jana Eggers, CEO of Leipzig, Germany-based Spreadshirt, a T-shirt customization company whose North American headquarters are in Boston, said that even though her company is cash-flow-positive, it had a very difficult time raising its most recent round of growth capital. The terms offered by potential funders were “shocking” and were “clearly based on the economy, not on our fundamentals,” Eggers said.

In areas such as robotics where New England has clear strengths, venture capital is largely absent, pointed out MIT roboticist Rod Brooks, a co-founder of iRobot who now leads stealth-mode startup Heartland Robotics. In the energy and cleantech space, according to General Catalyst’s Hemant Tenaja, money from hedge funds and strategic investors has largely dried up, and the spigots will stay off until Congress and the Obama Administration work out energy and climate bills. And heaven help the startups that need cash quick: Each of Boston-Power’s three funding rounds took a year to negotiate, according to CEO Christina Lampe-Onnerud. “The best time to raise capital is when you don’t need it,” said Andy Palmer, co-founder of Vertica Systems, former CIO at Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a veteran of Bowstreet (acquired by IBM).

On the other hand, companies need less money—and should probably be lowering their sights anyway. John Landry, a software industry veteran who is managing director at Wayland, MA-based Lead Dog Ventures, used his pulpit as moderator of a panel on “Getting and Staying Funded” to argue that infotech startups “don’t really need a lot of money” these days thanks to technologies like …Next Page »

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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Late last fall, after discussion with some board members, I decided to apply to show some new features from Evri at DEMO 09, which we were about to start active development on. We got accepted, so now we really did have to get the stuff ready to ship. In fact, one of the great reasons to do something like appearing at DEMO is the motivation it provides to get more done, in less time, than you think you can. Well, we got our new Collections feature done, and a Firefox and IE toolbar to boot, so that part worked out! Here’s how our experience went on the ground at DEMO.

Day 1

I flew down to Palm Desert, CA, early Sunday morning to get to a mandatory noon presenters meeting. This was a good intro—the DEMO team was all there, including outgoing chief Chris Shipley, and incoming one Matt Marshall. They really did a good job making everyone feel that they would do whatever it takes to make this successful for the presenters. After that we (me, our CTO Deep Dhillon, and product manager Keith Williams) tried to do our equipment check and rehearsal. Now, understand that we hadn’t actually pushed our new code to production yet—I was waiting until closer to Monday morning, when the show opened, to deploy. We fought with our VPN and the DEMO network for a long time to try and do our walkthrough with our behind-the-firewall version. After a grueling hour-and-a-half, we finally just launched the stuff live—about 6 hours early—and had a good run-through. This is when it was particularly nice to have a kick-ass team covering us back in Seattle. (Thanks Mark, Ryan, and the rest!)

That night was a CEO dinner, with a panel discussion on public technology policy. I missed most of the discussion, but had a good conversation with James Joaquin, from Xmarks, Raman Khanna, a VC from Onset, and Michael Wheatley from Ensembli. Not yet having looked closely at the DEMO schedule, I didn’t quite realize that James, Michael, and I were presenting in the same “Smarter Internet” group on Tuesday morning, but figured that out soon enough. After more wine than food, I went back to my room to catch up on work, and make sure everything was working in preparation for our first full day at the “booth.”

Day 2

Monday was mostly spent on one thing: talking about the product, over and over. Either we were at the booth giving demos, or I was talking to press, or I was rehearsing my two minutes of our six-minute presentation scheduled for Tuesday morning. But the day went well. Deep was off pitching to a potential partner, so Keith and I handled the booth, with ace PR guy Lane Buschel helping out. Some of the first DEMO stories came out later that day. The first I saw pitted Evri vs Ensembli as competitors. I don’t see it that way, but all press is good, right?

Some good companies that day. I really want to get my hands on a Touchbook when it comes out, and Skout is funny, if nothing else. Fellow Northwest startup Ontier, from Portland, also showed well with Pixetell. The panel that ended the day—with VCs ranging from angel Eric Tilenius to First Round’s Christine Herron to August’s David Hornik—was a bit grim, but interesting. …Next Page »

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Northwest software startups Evri (Seattle), Ontier (Portland, OR), and Kutano (Burnaby, BC) will be presenting at the DEMO technology conference in Palm Desert, CA, March 1-3. They are among 39 companies that each will give six-minute stage demonstrations of their new products.

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Last night’s 20th meeting of the Web Innovators Group at Cambridge’s Royal Sonesta Hotel was possibly the largest ever, spilling from the usual ballroom into the adjacent conference rooms and attracting a crowd so thick that it was difficult to see the demo tables. Perhaps the high attendance was to be expected, given the layoffs rolling through the local tech community and the fact that more entrepreneurs and software developers these days are looking for their next gigs. But what was unexpected was the spotlight role assumed by Local Motors, a Wareham, MA-based startup with dangerously disruptive ideas about automobile manufacturing.

John “Jay” Rogers—a Harvard MBA and former Marine who is the president, CEO, and co-founder of Local Motors—explained during one of the meeting’s three “main dish” presentations that the company intends to drastically reduce the time and expense that goes into developing new car models, by building a nationwide network of “micro-factories” where car buyers themselves would be involved in the design and construction of their vehicles. The Web will play a key role in the process, as the company hosts online competitions where amateur car designers from around the world can submit concept sketches and other community members can vote on their favorite designs. The company plans to purchase the licensing rights to the winning designs and make them into working prototype cars, Rogers said.

One car that won a contest on the site, the Rally Fighter, will become Local Motors’ first production vehicle; the company recently brought the car’s designer, Sangho Kim, to its Wareham facility for a week of full-immersion development work. “Where GM would spent $100 million to get this far, we’ve spent $10,000 on a website, a prize, and a plane ticket,” Rogers said.

The company, which beat out its two competitors in the traditional audience-favorite text message voting at the Web Inno meeting, says it plans to build its cars around a standard chassis and sell them for about $50,000—not exactly an affordable price, but one that may attract a certain class of buyers who want to see their car being built. Don’t ask me right now how Local Motors plans to build low-production-quantity cars efficiently, certify their safety, or provide for serviceability—but I’ll get to the bottom of it in a future story.

The other two main-dish presenters were Cambridge, MA-based Web analytics startup Crimson Hexagon (which I profiled last month and therefore won’t describe here), and Stratham, NH-based Skyward Innovations, which rolled out a free travel assistance service earlier this year called TripChill. Built to work with mobile phones, the beta-stage service is designed to supply business travelers with the real-time information they need to manage their trips while they’re en route.

The way Alex Shore, Skyward’s co-founder and CEO, explained it during an entertaining on-stage sketch, the TripChill system is at its best when travelers are coping with unexpected changes, such as a flight cancellation that leaves them stranded overnight in an unfamiliar airport. Once users have submitted their flight itineraries and hotel reservations to TripChill, the system can monitor online sources for schedule changes and send text-message updates. Say a traveler gets stuck overnight at Chicago’s O’Hare International: TripChill reasons that the user probably needs a hotel room for the night, and automatically sends …Next Page »

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The Mobile Internet World trade show, produced in Boston in 2007 and 2008 by the Trendsmedia events division of Boston-based market research firm Yankee Group, will be transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2009 and revamped as a “more intimate” conference focused on networking and education, according to a Trendsmedia announcement.

The announcement, e-mailed to 2008 conference attendees today, said the decision to move the convention from the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center to the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport Hotel and drop the exhibit-hall showcase aspect of the event was “based on popular demand,” but that it would also allow Yankee Group to avoid “supporting major trade show costs and resources.”

One mobile executive recently told Xconomy that the program, the size of the crowd, and the volume of business-development opportunities at Mobile Internet World 2008 were disappointingly slim. So the move to the Bay Area could well represent an attempt to repackage the conference—which is aimed at executives from wireless operators, application developers, and other companies involved in delivering services and information via mobile Web browsers—to have a bigger payoff for attendees.

In the Bay Area, the conference will also be closer to two new centers of power in the mobile applications business: Cupertino, CA-based Apple, whose decision to open up the iPhone to third-party application developers has created a huge new market for mobile software, and Mountain View, CA-based Google, whose open-source Android mobile operating system is expected to further disrupt the industry.

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San Diego, which ranks among the premier regions in the country for innovations in the life sciences, has landed a conference to match. After a five-year hiatus, TEDMED is making a comeback, and the exclusive three-day conference on big ideas in healthcare and medicine, may be settling here permanently.

The revived TEDMED conference will be held at The Hotel Del Coronado from Oct. 27-30, 2009, jubliant San Diego officials said last week. The last TEDMED event was held in Charleston, S.C. in 2004. Organizers had been considering establishing the conference anew in Newport, R.I., home of the event’s founder, Richard Saul Wurman.

“Newport is great, but we could not find a venue as grand as San Diego and the Hotel Del,” said TEDMED president Marc Hodosh, a Boston entrepreneur (and Xconomist) who acquired rights to TEDMED earlier this year. He is organizing the event with Wurman, who is serving as chairman emeritus. “Ultimately, it was the support we were getting from San Diego and especially Qualcomm,” Hodosh said.

The fifth annual TEDMED event is intended to serve as the same sort of forum for mesmerizing, rapid-fire presentations about medicine, health care and life sciences that Wurman created with the original TED event in 1984. TED refers to the conferences’ focus on big ideas in Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and features brief presentations by such luminaries as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, former president Bill Clinton and U2 vocalist Bono.

Wurman sold rights to the TED business in 2001 to Chris Anderson, who is organizing TED’s 25th anniversary conference in Long Beach, beginning Feb. 3.

“We are a completely separate organization now from TED, but we do share the same brand and founder,” Hodosh says. “We operate with the same philosophy and style. Every speaker gives a talk that is typically 15 to 20 minutes.”

Medical products goliath Johnson & Johnson is TEDMED’s lead sponsor, Hodosh said, and Qualcomm is serving as an underwriter. With a registration fee of $4,000 per person, the resurrected TEDMED continues to target the well-heeled corporate elite. If all goes well, Hodosh said he hopes to make San Diego TEDMED’s permanent home.

“It’s just such a beautiful environment,” Hodosh says. “Everybody loves the lectures, but it’s really the networking events, the mingling on the beach around the firepits that make it special.”

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This afternoon, I’ve been attending the second annual Algae Biomass Summit at the Bell Harbor Conference Center down by the waterfront in Seattle. This year’s conference has drawn 600 participants—who knew the algae community was this big already? Here at Xconomy, we’ve covered some algae biofuel startups with local connections, including AXI out of the University of Washington, and San Diego-based Sapphire Energy, whose investors include Arch Venture Partners and Bill Gates’s firm, Cascade Investment.

After a fascinating panel discussion on algae-based biofuels (more on that soon), it was time for the keynote address, by Vinod Khosla. Khosla is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, a venture partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and founder of Khosla Ventures. A Silicon Valley celebrity, Khosla has invested in a number of cleantech and energy startups, mostly in ethanol and next-generation fuels (Gevo, KiOR, Amyris, LS9) and fuel-efficiency technologies (Transonic Combustion, Ecomotors).

Khosla is an interesting guy to be speaking here, because he hasn’t invested in algae—at least not yet. There has been some speculation that he’s looking into it more seriously these days. “I’m here because I believe in the potential of algae,” Khosla told the packed room. “We’ve looked at maybe 100 different plans on algae in the last few years.” One topic he wanted to cover was what factors would make him invest in algae as an alternative fuel technology.

He set the stage with some energy context. “It’s not cleantech that’s interesting, it’s ‘main tech,’” he said. By this he meant the huge, billion-dollar markets provided by traditional industries such as engines, lighting, applicances, batteries, cement, water, glass, gasoline, diesel, and power generation. To address these markets, whether you’re looking at algae biofuels or other technologies, he said, you need …Next Page »

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“One banker says to the other—wait, what other banker?” says Tom Huseby. The Seattle venture capitalist and wireless guru slipped in a joke about the thinning ranks of financiers during his keynote talk at today’s second annual Mobile Northwest Conference. I had a chance to stop by and see this morning’s session at the convention center in downtown Seattle. Just a quick recap here.

Huseby, the co-founder of SeaPoint Ventures and chairman of several local mobile-company boards, spoke about deals, markets, and what he likes to focus on in the wireless space. But first, he addressed the economy. “Who thought we’d end up where early-stage venture capital would look like one of the safer investments?” he said. “It’s better because nobody expects to get any money out of it for a long time, that’s it! Venture funds are supposed to last 8-10 years. It’s a long investment cycle.”

“So the venture community is pretty good,” he continued, pointing out there’s still a large number of investments being made in startups. “Compression of market cycles is enormous. The real economy is going to lag, the markets aren’t.” When it comes to startups, he said, “Hope is diminished, no question…Venture capitalists are marginally connecting the dots, and now they don’t even see the next dot. But one thing hasn’t stopped at all, and it’s the great American startup machine. Barring restaurants, America starts a huge percentage of companies in the world. The miracle is a totally undeserved sense of self-confidence. We revere new wealth, and people who’ve started companies…We compete on how humble our origins are.”

Huseby went on to describe the big trends he’s seeing in the mobile sector—”superphones” like the iPhone that are connected to the Internet all the time, and “Superusers” who “walk around doing things [on the devices] we never thought they’d do.” Then there are “all-you-can-eat” data plans. “Mobile this year became embedded in everything. Everything is wireless. We all of a sudden can get viral with it. It didn’t used to be that way—not enough users had the right phones,” he said. “That to me is the big sea change.”

So what does he look for in new deals and companies? “‘Winner-take-all Switzerland’ plays,” he says. This is where a small company comes in and solves a problem that the big guys (the Samsungs and Verizons, say) are in a standoff over. So a small company—like a Tegic or a SnapIn Software (both bought by Nuance)—can enter as a neutral party and own the space, providing a simple but necessary technology to handle things like text messaging or customer support.

Huseby took the time to answer several questions from the audience. One was about what he thinks of new business models like mobile advertising, in the context of the economy. “The downturn is not good for anything. I don’t think people will spend more on their phones, or buy more games. They’re going to do less,” he says. “The key to mobile advertising is to get out of the ‘new stuff’ budget…You have to turn it into media, and remove all obstacles.”

Someone else asked for Huseby’s thoughts on Google’s Android phone. He joked that because of its high weight-to-surface-area ratio, it could do well in the annual Swedish phone-throwing contest (apparently there have been at least nine of these “international” events so far). “They overkilled on …Next Page »

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Luke Timmerman wrote:

Washington state doesn’t do much Texas-style boasting, and the state’s economic development promoters have never tossed around big bucks to crow about the biotechnology cluster here. Case in point: how many of you know that the world’s top-selling biotechnology drug, and fifth-biggest pharmaceutical product in 2007 (Amgen and Wyeth’s Enbrel) was developed in Seattle?

As more than 20,000 people gather in San Diego for the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s annual four-day extravaganza, which starts today, Washington is sticking with the modest approach. Yet this time it is doing a little more to stand out from the crowd of states and countries that seemingly spend (and waste) millions of dollars trying to convince people they will become the next Boston or San Francisco.

After at least three years without offering any evidence Seattle exists on the busy trade show floor, biotech boosters from around the state have pooled $40,000 for a booth this year, said Susan St. Germain, senior business development manager for the state’s Department of Community, Trade and Economic Development. The booth (#401) will tout the Northwest’s quality of life, featuring mini Evergreen trees, mountain bikes, and landscape photos like one of Mt. Baker shot from the San Juan Islands, said Jack Faris, the president of the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.

“We want the booth itself to be distinctive and more attractive than a lot of stuff you see that tends to be high-tech and plastic,” Faris says. “We want to play up the fact that this is a wonderful place to live, and build a career and grow a company.”

There’s a reason the state wants to focus on that message. Northwest biotech companies often complain it’s hard to recruit talented scientists to the far upper left corner of the U.S., because candidates believe that if their company fails, or even succeeds and gets acquired, they could lose their job and not be able to find another one in town. Recruits to Boston know if their company goes belly-up, they can probably score another comparable gig in the same area code.

To counter the perception of slim pickings in the Northwest, Washington’s booth will be staffed by human-resources reps from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, discussing jobs to advance health in the developing world. Gilead Sciences, the world’s largest maker of AIDS drugs, will also be there, talking about opportunities as it diversifies into lung diseases at its Seattle research center.

Now if the biotech boosters could just clone another Genentech or Biogen Idec for the Northwest, they’d have a sure-fire way of changing perceptions about Seattle.

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Everybody can relax. Bono and Angelina Jolie won’t be here. At least not this year. But some of the biggest names in science, global health, and business will gather in Seattle today for the Pacific Health Summit, to brainstorm about the world’s thorniest emerging health problems.

Key decision makers from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Health Organization, and the U.K.’s Wellcome Trust (the world’s second-biggest health philanthropy behind you-know-who) will mingle with executives from Microsoft, Merck, and GE Healthcare, among others.

The summit’s founders, Nobel Laureate Lee Hartwell of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and George Russell, the chairman emeritus of Russell Investments and creator of the Russell 2000 stock index, will be there too.

The conference, in its fourth year, is invitation-only and limited to about 250 people. Like the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, it’s located in a setting with beautiful views of mountains and water, at the Bell Harbor Conference Center at Pier 66. The agenda is sprinkled with plenary sessions, small group talks, and time for one-on-one conversations.

It isn’t just all talk or wishful thinking. Last year, WHO director Margaret Chan outlined the threat of an avian flu pandemic, and London-based GlaxoSmithKline (the world’s second-largest drugmaker after Pfizer) listened, donating 50 million doses of vaccine for an emergency stockpile.

This year’s theme is about global malnutrition, basically what happens to public health when people eat too much cheap junk food with few nutrients, or not enough food with nutrients they need. As market forces lift millions out of poverty in places like China and India (a positive thing, obviously), many people are adopting the more sedentary Western lifestyle that leads to obesity and diabetes (a negative and very expensive problem).

If current economic growth trends continue in India, a country with more than 1 billion people, the demand for insulin for diabetics alone could be enough to swallow up the nation’s entire healthcare budget in 20 years, said Michael Birt, the summit’s executive director. Attendees want to brainstorm ways to harness market forces to prevent that from happening. They don’t want to be in the position of begging Eli Lilly or Novo Nordisk to donate insulin for needy diabetics. Summit attendees would rather find ways to invest in early childhood nutrition to prevent the problem in the first place, Birt said.

“We’re not just talking about sending a plane full of food over and thinking that will solve the problem,” Birt says. “Having a sustainable business is important. We want this to happen over decades.”

By getting the right people in the same room together—in a relaxed atmosphere, and at a moment in time when food prices are rising—the summit might just generate a few bright ideas.

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Note to self: Next time you give a keynote speech in Second Life, tickle your avatar every once in a while to keep it awake.

I was slightly embarrassed yesterday at Life 2.0, a virtual conference organized inside the virtual world Second Life by multimedia publisher CMP, when I realized that I’d been lecturing for 10 or 15 minutes but my avatar was slumped over the podium like a narcoleptic. It’s one of the unintentionally hilarious features of Second Life that when a user is “afk” or away from the keyboard for more than about 10 minutes, their avatar falls asleep. I wasn’t technically afk, but I was gabbing away over an audio link without remembering to nudge my avatar.

Hopefully, my disrespectful posture didn’t sour the hundred or so people in the audience on my speech, which was about the current-day technologies giving rise to the “Metaverse.” That term is a product of the cyberpunk fiction of Neal Stephenson, but it’s being used today to connote the sum product (and the future shape) of immersive 3-D computer environments as diverse as Second Life, Google Earth, Microsoft Virtual Earth, and World of Warcraft. I basically spent the first third of 2007 writing a massive cover story about the Metaverse for MIT’s Technology Review magazine—a story that, I’m pleased to say, a lot of people have ended up pointing to as a useful, centralized explanation of the current moment in the evolution of virtual-worlds technology. A few weeks ago John Jainschigg, the director of online technology and new business for the CMP Metaverse division of publishing giant CMP, invited me to give a talk about the article as the opening session for the fall Life 2.0, a quarterly event that attracts software developers and businesspeople interested in using Second Life and other immersive environments to engage with customers. Despite a few qualms about being able to translate the article into a decent talk, I accepted, and yesterday I was forced to make good on my commitment.

I mainly repeated the argument from my article that anyone who has spent time in both Google Earth (the most popular map world or “geobrowser”) and Second Life (the leading social virtual world, created and operated by San Francisco-based Linden Lab) should appreciate how powerful it would be to mash up the two technologies, or at least the driving ideas behind them. Wandering around Second Life demonstrates how natural it can be to build and explore 3-D structures and environments through the medium of a human-shaped, human-acting avatar. Browsing Google Earth demonstrates what a sense of freedom and mastery comes from having tip-of-your-fingers access to an entire globe’s worth of geographical data at multiple levels of resolution.

The next step—either bringing avatars into map worlds, or making social virtual worlds more map-like—is so obvious that someone will figure out how to do it, whether or not there’s money in it. And from there, it’s not too many more steps to a full Metaverse—a 24/7 immersive simulation of the real world, as ubiquitous and accessible as the Web and used for everything from recreation and virtual tourism to city management, logistics and supply chain management, military training, environmental monitoring.

I wasn’t arguing in my piece that privately controlled platforms like Google Earth and Second Life themselves will become the cornerstones of the Metaverse (although several rudimentary attempts are underway to make avatars work in Google Earth and to make giant maps work in Second Life, as I detailed in my article). Rather, I think these two programs are serving as testbeds and training grounds for the developers who will soon go out and build a new Metaverse infrastructure that’s much more Web-like (in the sense that it will be based on open standards, so that anyone can add to it).

That’s not to say that Google and Linden Lab won’t be there as participants. Linden Lab, where the programmers and executives are smart enough to know they can’t build the Metaverse on their own, has already released an open source version of its client viewer program and says it will eventually contribute the underlying simulation software to the open source community. And Google recently contributed KML, the formatting language that allows users to create data overlays in Google Earth, to the Open Geospatial Consortium for consideration as an industry-wide, open source geographical markup standard.

After I shut up, audience members posed several nice questions, such as (my paraphrases): “What business models will drive the Metaverse?” “Will there be wide enough access to the broadband Internet to make the Metaverse work for everyone?” “What critical mass of participation must be reached before Metaverse construction really takes off?” I won’t bore you by recounting my answers. But as at any well-run technology event (which—hats off to John Jainschigg—this one definitely was), there were far too many good questions at the end and too little time to talk about them.

I made sure to plug Xconomy and to tell people what we’re doing here to analyze, and hopefully cultivate, the innovation scene in greater Boston. In that connection, it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Google both have growing presences in Boston, and that several Boston-area companies are working on various aspects of the Metaverse, including the Cambridge outpost of Linden Lab, Quincy game studio 2K Boston, Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s MMORPG development house 38 Studios, and stealth-mode social-virtual-world developer Conduit Labs. There’s also a project underway at Emerson College to create a virtual version of Boston, or at least its major landmarks, inside Second Life.

Life 2.0, which is being sponsored by Sun Microsystems and IBM, continues until September 21. You can register for free here to attend the remainder of the conference. I’m told that a videotape of my keynote and other sessions will be available at some point in the future.

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