Turns out sonic-wave motors aren’t just good for cleaning your teeth or skin. Seattle startup Revel Body, newly backed by an array of Northwest angel investors, is using a similar motor technology to power a new line of sex toys.

Yep, that’s right—vibrators. Revel Body founder Robin Elenga says the resonant motors that power sonic cleaning products are vastly superior vibration producers when compared to old-fashioned rotary motors powering most adult toys these days, but they’re still not being implemented in the industry.

Revel Body plans to change that. The company, which has been quietly doing bootstrapped research and development for about five years, recently closed an $825,000 seed round from the Alliance of Angels, Puget Sound Venture Club, and Zino Society. The company is readying its first product for retail outlets, aimed at going on sale later this year.

The Seattle area has a prolific history with sonic-wave consumer health devices. A lot of that traces back to the team from Optiva and entrepreneur David Giuliani, who developed the Sonicare toothbrush and sold the company to Netherlands-based Philips in 2000.

Giuliani then took the sonic-wave-creating motor technology to a new venture, Pacific Bioscience Laboratories, which developed the ClariSonic skin-cleansing brush—a consumer hit that cracked $100 million in annual sales before being acquired by L’Oreal USA in November.

Revel Body isn’t related to those companies, but Elenga—a software guy and former consultant for Fortune 500 companies—says the startup is working with a similar type of resonant motor in its device. One major difference, which Revel Body is in the final stages of patenting, is the ability to run the vibrator in a range of speeds rather than at a fairly stable rate, such as with the Sonicare or ClariSonic, Elenga says.

Revel Body’s pitch is that the resonant motor technology allows the device to produce a more vigorous and pleasing vibration, something much more modern and advanced than the old-fashioned devices proliferating the adult market today.

“The big things that consumers don’t like about these products, pretty much the majority of them, come back to the motor,” Elenga says. “It seems like with a vibrator, you’d want to compete on vibration. But nobody is doing that. It’s kind of a head-slapper when you look at it that way.”

Not that consumers haven’t noticed the advantages on their own. “I’ve heard from multiple close sources within Sonicare that there were a lot of people out there in the world using the Sonicare toothbrush as a sexual vibrator,” he says.

Revel Body has been operating on a relatively small budget, spending around $150,000 over the past five years to develop and test the product. The first device, named the Orb, looks a lot different from what you might think for a product like this. Elenga says the resonant motor technology allows different forms for devices, and allows it to be battery powered yet still powerful. The company plans to assemble the products itself from third-party components, with relatively little labor.

Revel Body's Orb

As for the subject matter—this isn’t a mobile-social app we’re talking about, here—Elenga says it’s something that he had to take a little time getting used to at first when doing pitches. But “after about 100 conversations, you get kind of numb to it.”

As a guy, I wondered whether there was a particularly delicate way for him to proceed in pitching the product to investors, partners, or testers, since the target market is heavily female. Wouldn’t there be a creepiness factor to avoid?

Elenga says it’s actually been men who have blanched the most.

“At a couple of groups, virtually every woman in the crowd is smiling and nodding their head. The guys might have smirks on their faces—occasionally a guy would walk out of the room because he was so uncomfortable,” Elenga says. “People would apologize whenever that would happen, but I think it’s good because it shows that this industry is still transitioning into the mainstream. And I think that’s when you want to get into an industry.”

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The folks who put sonic wave technology in the Sonicare toothbrush have hit another homerun, and a major consumer brand couldn’t sit by and watch any longer. Pacific Bioscience Laboratories, the unassumingly named makers of the Clarisonic skin-cleansing brush, is being acquired by cosmetics powerhouse L’Oreal USA, the companies announced today.

Terms were not disclosed, but L’Oreal indicated that it will be keeping Clarisonic’s new Redmond headquarters and manufacturing facility—in a release, the company said it plans to “create in Redmond an outstanding center of innovation for L’Oreal.” The senior management team at Pacific Bioscience Laboratories also has committed to stay on board after the acquisition “to maintain the continuity of excellence,” L’Oreal said.

Clarisonic was founded in 2001 by electrical engineer David Giuliani and a team of people he’d worked with at Optiva, the company that developed the sonic-wave-powered Sonicare toothbrush before being sold to Royal Philips Electronics. The Clarisonic device works by employing the same kind of sonic-wave technology, but applying it to the face to gently but powerfully remove makeup, dirt, surface bacteria, dead skin cells, and oils.

It’s not hard to see why a major brand would want to snap up the Clarisonic device and its team. As Luke detailed in this story, Clarisonic topped $100 million in annual sales last year, more than doubling its performance from two years earlier.

At that time, president Jack Gallagher said the company was “very profitable” and had added about 100 employees in the previous 18 months, bringing its staff up to about 300 people. The device, which retails in three versions at prices ranging from $149 to $225, has picked up a long list of celebrity fans, including Oprah and Lady Gaga.

Early investor Dan Rosen, chairman of Seattle’s Alliance of Angels, even predicted that “Clarisonic will be one of the great success stories of Seattle entrepreneurship.”

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Professional athletes marketing their mugs in endorsements is nothing new. But the explosion of digital goods and micro-entrepreneurs has opened up a ton of new ways for sports stars to make their mark, such as the mobile apps and games from the likes of Chad Ochocinco and Mike Tyson.

Seattle startup Playmark is hoping to be a broker for even more innovation in the sector by setting up an easy-to-use online marketplace for licensing rights. The startup’s first major licensing partner is a big one: the NFL Players Association, which is also a strategic investor in the company.

“We think it’s a really tough thing to crack, and we feel we have arrived maybe at a way to crack the code by partnering with the Players Association,” says Playmark co-founder and CEO George Aposporos, a former early VP of business development at Amazon.com.

What makes the sports-licensing game so tough, Aposporos explains, are all the overlapping rights held by different entities over different parts of the overall sports experience. Playmark’s deal with the players’ union, for example, allows it to license the name, number, likeness, and autograph of some 2,000 NFL players. The rights to the games themselves are held by the league, and the individual owners control all the assets associated with their teams.

Playmark says it can help make navigating that thicket seamless for entrepreneurs who want to make sports-related products. The company wants to add leagues, teams, and other sports as time goes on—and its technology can sort out all of the various rights-holders on the back end, figuring out each rights-holder’s share of any given collection of material.

The players’ union also continues to have the final say on uses of its member’s likenesses. Playmark’s guidelines lay out some of the cases that are unlikely to be approved, such as “demeaning portrayal of athletes,” “distasteful humor and language,” or “adult content and illegal gambling.” Interestingly, the union also apparently only wants games that pit a user against one athlete, not multiple players at once.

“Maybe it’s my Amazon days, but one of my favorite quotations is ‘Making something easy is hard,’” Aposporos says. “You have to democratize access across different kinds of situations and essentially unify a lot of fragmentation.”

One early example of a licensing customer is ESPN’s Sports Bar Facebook game. That game already had some licensing rights, Aposporos says, but Playmark’s broader access to the players allowed ESPN’s game to offer even more digital goods. “Now, they’re adding autograph graphics from our system to build customizable social jerseys within the game,” he says.

Another interesting case involves Electronic Arts games, which owns the Madden NFL video game franchise. Part of making that game inclues digital 3D head scans of all the players—but that asset was locked up for use in the game until now. With Playmark brokering the rights, those head scans could be used in any number of applications, including physical goods like bobblehead dolls, for instance.

The market for licensed sports merchandise is huge—Aposporos says some estimates show it at around $18 billion worldwide. At those levels, “even a high single-digit share would be not insignificant,” he says.

It’s certainly a forward-looking deal for the players’ union to cut. But they surely understand better than anyone how short-lived a pro career can be, no matter how big those paychecks look at the time. “Our players can’t wait to see what today’s creative designers and developers can dream up,” said Keith Gordon, president of the union’s for-profit licensing arm.

Playmark currently has nine people on its team and is backed by angels from the Seattle area and beyond, along with the NFL players’ union investment, Aposporos says.

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Updated 11 am Pacific
The tech world is going into hype-tastic overdrive today with the release of Amazon’s new tablet computer. If the predictions and previews are correct, the new device could be a big competitor to the market-defining Apple iPad and cement Amazon as a major player in the computing game.

But this isn’t really about the chunk of hardware that Amazon will be showing off. The reason Amazon’s entry into the tablet market is such a big deal has much more to do with all the merchandise and media that Amazon can put in your hands, without having to pay Apple some pretty hefty tolls for the privilege.

I’m not saying that competition with Apple in the tablet market isn’t a major piece of this story. Plenty of others have come out with me-too devices to follow the iPad, just as millions of people own smartphones from some other company. But none of those tablets has done much to dent the iPad’s hold on the market. Amazon’s move into tablets, however, is the only effort so far to fundamentally copy the Apple playbook, bringing a unified software, hardware, and application experience to the user.

That’s hugely significant as a piece of business strategy, because it signals that one of the more innovative companies around is truly dumping the old Microsoft view of the world, where companies specialize in one area (like software, or retail) and get others to build around that brand. It’s another vote—a big one—for Apple’s approach, and if it catches on, you’re going to see more movement in that direction. That’s surely part of the reason why Google would pay billions for Motorola.

But something much more basic is going on here. Amazon isn’t putting out tablet computers because it wants to be a computer-maker. It’s doing so because Amazon is fundamentally a retailer, and the tablet is the new digital store.

“People leaning back on their sofas, buying things from Amazon, is another tailwind for our business that I’m very excited about,” CEO Jeff Bezos said during this June’s shareholder’s meeting.

Let’s look at some of the offerings that Amazon has in its quiver, either already announced or pretty solidly reported by journalists covering the beat, which would make sense to consume over a tablet:

—Movies and TV: Amazon already has a Netflix competitor, Amazon Instant Video, that beams programs to your computer. Significantly, this has been offered as essentially a loss-leader for Amazon’s Prime membership program, which previously was mostly about free shipping. That seems … Next Page »

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If you’re a startup working on mobile, cloud, data analytics, or social technologies and you want to get noticed by consumer-financial-tools giant Intuit, you’ve got three days to apply to join a day of “speed dating” sessions coming up at Intuit headquarters in Mountain View, CA, on October 6.

Intuit says its annual Entrepreneur Day will bring together about 30 startups for meetings and demos with business leaders at Intuit, including founder Scott Cook, CEO Brad Smith, and chief technology officer Tayloe Stansbury. Basically, the company is looking for the next Mint.com or PayCycle to partner with and/or acquire, according to company representatives.

“Entrepreneurs with mobile, cloud computing, data analytics and social technology should find a number of interesting ways to connect with Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, Quicken and TurboTax,” the company said in a statement. “The opportunity to collaborate with Intuit could help startups get to that next step on their way to becoming a high growth company.”

If you’re interested, you’ll have to move fast: applications are due this Thursday, September 15. Helpfully, Intuit has published five tips for creating a successful Entrepreneur Day submission.

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Andrew Trader, an early executive at social-game juggernaut Zynga, has been promoted to venture partner at Maveron, the consumer-focused venture capital firm of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Trader started working with Maveron as an entrepreneur in residence since last fall.

Trader was part of what’s been called the founding team at Zynga, where he focused on the business side. He left the fast-growing company, which produces Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, in spring 2010, as reported at TechCrunch. In a news release announcing the promotion, Maveron also pointed to Trader’s previous stints as CEO of Utah Street Networks (which sold some assets to Cisco) and co-founder of Coremetrics (acquired by IBM).

Maveron has offices in Seattle and San Francisco, which is where Trader is based. The firm, co-founded by Dan Levitan, focuses on consumer web, retail, education and health-related companies. Some notable portfolio companies include big names like eBay and Groupon, and up-and-comers like Seattle startups Zulily and Decide, along with more  Starbucks-like consumer product firms like Potbelly Sandwich Works and Pinkberry.

In the release, Maveron partner Amy Errett said Trader (known as A.T.) has helped the VC firm “by identifying investment opportunities and working with our portfolio companies.” I’ve reached out to Maveron to see if there’s any more detail on the companies or investment areas where Trader has made an impact, and I’ll update if I hear more. Trader has stayed involved in gaming companies, joining the board of Kixeye earlier this month.

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San Jose, CA-based BVI Networks, a maker of business intelligence visualization software for consumer retailers, said today that it has raised $8 million in a Series B funding round. New investor August Capital led the round, which was joined by the startup’s existing investors. “While physical stores generate over 95% of all retail business in the US, the existing analytics and business intelligence tools are woefully inadequate compared to e-commerce,” said August Capital partner Vivek Mehra in a statement. “We were impressed with BVI Networks’ technology and customer traction and are excited to lead their round of financing.”

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San Rafael, CA-based Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK), whose 3D design, graphics, and engineering software is used by more than 10 million design professionals around the world, has just made a small but interesting purchase. It has acquired Instructables, a San Francisco-based community site for DIY enthusiasts started almost six years ago by Squid Labs co-founder Eric Wilhelm.

Just last week, I published a long profile of Instructables, which is home to more than 55,000 how-to articles contributed by more than 20,000 volunteer authors, on everything from electric cars to cookie recipes. So I jumped on the phone with Wilhelm early this morning to find out more.

Turns out Autodesk plans to build up the profile of its consumer group, and they’ve been looking for a company that knows how to create online communities to jumpstart the outreach effort. “They want to build tools and services for creative folks as well as design professionals,” Wilhelm says. “They are realizing the power of really engaged communities around services and products, and we are going to help them build those communities.”

That doesn’t mean the existing Instructables site is going away—far from it. “We’ll now have the resources to make some improvements to the site I know our authors and community will love,” Wilhelm said in a blog post announcing the acquisition this morning. All 24 employees of Instructables are joining Autodesk, and the company will remain in its 2nd Street digs in SoMa (only blocks from Autodesk’s San Francisco location).

The companies aren’t sharing the financial details of the acquisition, but Wilhelm says that “everybody is very happy” with the terms. Instructables had raised almost $2 million in venture financing from San Francisco-based O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, the investment fund started by O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly, and Baseline Ventures, an early stage investing firm founded by former Kleiner Perkins partner and Microsoft exec Steve Anderson.

Wilhelm says that when he spoke with me for my original profile on July 15, he wasn’t able to share the fact that an acquisition was in the works. But I could tell that the question was on his mind—and in particular, that he’d been thinking about what would make Instructables an attractive purchase. “At the size we’re at, the actual revenue and earnings are not really that interesting to people who might buy us,” he said then. “The most interesting thing is … Next Page »

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Seattle stealth startup Decide.com, which says it’s working on a consumer electronics shopping service, announced a $6 million Series B financing round today. The latest investment was led by Maveron—Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz’s outfit—along with Madrona Venture Group and angel investors. Decide, led by CEO Mike Fridgen, is also adding some notable names: Dan Levitan of Maveron and former Farecast Chief Executive Hugh Crean are on the board, while founding Google board member Ram Shriram is lined up as an adviser and investor. Former Expedia CEO Erik Blachford also is an investor. Decide previously raised about $2.5 million in venture financing. University of Washington professor and Internet search expert Oren Etzioni is a co-founder. Fridgen said in a news release that Decide “puts the power of shopping for electronics back in consumers’ hands,” whatever that means. It sounds like a possible competitor to Sparkbuy, the Seattle startup led by Ontela (now Photobucket) founder Dan Shapiro.

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Seattle-based Swype, a maker of touchscreen text-input technology for mobile devices, has landed a $3.5 million investment from Bellevue’s Ignition Partners, according to GeekWire. Swype’s technology allows touchscreen users to enter text by dragging their finger across an onscreen keyboard, rather than tapping out messages letter-by-letter. The company recently took top consumer product honors at the Washington Technolgy Industry Association awards. Previous investors include Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, and Docomo Capital. The GeekWire report quotes CEO Mike McSherry as saying the investment is part of a larger round expected to close soon.

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Jon Carson describes the newest offering on his website, BiddingForGood.com, as the idea he is most proud of in his “entire startup life.”

“It solves a real problem. It makes something efficient,” says Carson, whose previous entrepreneurial efforts include a keg delivery startup he ran while at Babson College, and FamilyEducation Network, a Web portal he sold to Pearson Education.

The “something” Carson aims to make more efficient is the process of requesting items from businesses for charity auctions or fundraising events. Both sides have complaints about the process, he says. Most merchants—typically restaurants and hotels—solicited for donations to charity auctions have no way of efficiently organizing and responding to the myriad requests they get for things like gift certificates and complimentary stays. Charities often submit their requests with missing information and in turn complain that they never hear back on their queries, Carson says

Cambridge, MA-based BiddingForGood, which Carson describes as an eBay for charity auctions, is trying to improve this situation with the release of its Auction Item Request System (AIRS). The system creates forms that a charity seeking a donation can fill out on a business’ website, detailing specifically what it wants for its auction, and all of its contact information. The AIRS system responds immediately with an automated e-mail confirming the company’s receipt of the donation request, and later on with an e-mail either approving or denying the solicitation. It’s being used by businesses such as Boston’s Liberty Hotel, The Four Seasons, retailer Brooks Brothers, and San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay.

If the BiddingForGood website is the eBay of charity auctions, then the AIRS segment of the business is the OpenTable of donation requests, Carson says, transforming what was previously a loose leaf tracking process to a centralized database. Donors can track the groups they’ve aided, the dollar value of their donations, and the exposure of their products at the auctions.

BiddingForGood is giving its AIRS product to businesses for free, because it’s solving a problem for BiddingForGood, too, Carson says. It helps the startup consolidate the list of nonprofits and auction donors out there, a pool it depends on for its revenue stream (more on that in a moment). “The market is very fragmented,” Carson says, explaining that most charity auctions are run by volunteers with high turnover. His sales team can chase after potential customers when they request an item using the AIRS system, which also advertises BiddingForGood’s other services and allows users to directly request information on the company.

Originally named cMarket and backed by Canaan Partners and Morningside Technology Ventures, the company started in 2003 as a way to more efficiently execute silent auctions for charities. It originally hosted online versions of real-world silent auctions, often a week or so before the actual charity event in order to open them to a wider pool of bidders. The startup eventually noticed … Next Page »

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I met recently with Bob Nascenzi, the software industry executive who stepped in last May as the CEO of ProQuo, the San Diego startup that was created to help consumers control their personal information and reduce their junk mail.

I didn’t realize, however, that ProQuo had shut down. The last I heard about the company’s status was just over six months ago, when ProQuo founder Steven Gal sent out a mass e-mail to thousands of his contacts (including me) announcing Nascenzi’s appointment and his own departure to teach at Cornell University’s business school as a visiting professor. It seemed at the time like a straightforward change in CEOs.

Turns out it wasn’t. Nascenzi tells me he’s constrained in what he can say. But he says he worked with ProQuo’s chief creditor, San Jose, CA-based venture lender Western Technology Investment, to sell off the company’s assets and dissolve the corporation. Nascenzi says he shut ProQuo down at the end of July, and laid off the last six employees.

Gal, a veteran who worked at San Diego’s HNC Software and was a co-founder of ID Analytics, started ProQuo in 2007 as a way to enable consumers to review mass-market mailing lists and decide what junk mail they really wanted to receive. The service was free to consumers and the business concept was to make money by selling the customized lists of users to mass-marketing companies. ProQuo took in a total $15 million in venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson of Menlo Park, CA, and San Diego’s Mission Ventures.

Mission Ventures’ Leo Spiegel confirms that ProQuo was the startup he was referring to during a San Diego Venture Group panel discussion a couple of weeks ago, when he said his firm has only shut down one portfolio company during the economic downturn. In an e-mail to me, Spiegel says “It was difficult to execute the plan given the economic [downturn] and the competitive landscape.”

I gleaned a little more insight from a recommendation for Nascenzi that Andre Durand, a ProQuo co-founder and board member, wrote on the professional networking site LinkedIn: “Bob was brought in at a very difficult time for ProQuo. The company had not yet validated it’s business model, was consuming its remaining cash quickly, and with the funding climate changed significantly for the worse, was being forced to shut down… During this period, Bob regularly communicated his progress to the board, and managed the company through a number of tricky and delicate negotiations with creditors and purchasers of the ProQuo assets. While it was unfortunate that after so much time and money, we ended dissolving ProQuo, we were very fortunate to have found Bob when we did.”

In response to my query, Gal sent me an e-mail that says, “I ceased any involvement with ProQuo as of the beginning of May, I was neither employed by the company nor on the Board when it ceased operations, and am under a confidentiality agreement with the company (as is Bob) which prevents me from divulging any information.”

The topic apparently remains sensitive. Gal also called me, saying, “In 15 years of doing these kinds of startups, this is my first failure. It was truly a painful experience, and I’m still not over it.”

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What the Sam Hill (as my grandpa used to say) is a Daily Grommet? The answer comes in two parts. “Grommet” is the word industrial designer and entrepreneur Jules Pieri has appropriated for the kind of bewitching product that you might discover in an upscale shop in Puerto Vallarta or Tuscany or Vermont—something that’s so unique or beautiful or inventive that you just have to buy one and tell all your friends about it.

And the Daily Grommet is an e-commerce startup in Lexington, MA, that features one new grommet on its website every weekday. Through videos and short articles, Daily Grommet staffers—often Pieri herself—explain what’s so cool about the products they’ve chosen and the companies that make them. They also sell the products, on consignment from their makers. This week’s finds, for example, include an energy bar with ingredients picked by customers, a solar-powered flashlight (no, that’s not a contradiction in terms), and a garlic shredder that looks a little like a little two-wheeled Popemobile.

If you’re thinking that the Daily Grommet sounds like Hammacher Schlemmer meets RocketBoom meets VeryShortList, maybe with a dash of Martha Stewart, you’re not completely wrong. But there’s something stylish, original, and earnest about Pieri’s business that isn’t captured by any of these comparisons.

For one thing, as I can relate after visiting the startup’s office/studio in a quaint clapboard house just off Lexington’s main drag last week, the women who run the company (and they’re all women) are, like Pieri herself, genuinely nice people. They have a visible passion for uncovering little-known new products, testing and investigating them, and telling their stories to the world.

Left to right: Joanne Domeniconi, Jules Pieri, Jen Lockwood, Barbara Gordon, Patti Purcell, Wendy Chandor.

For another, the Daily Grommet has a common-sense business model that blends old-fashioned retailing with the best of Web 2.0-style interactivity. In addition to the daily videos, which are an easily digested two to three minutes in length, the startup is utilizing the full complement of social media channels, including a Twitter stream, an RSS feed, an e-mail newsletter, a Facebook page, and badges and widgets that fans can embed in their own websites. And every grommet gets its own permanent page on the site where readers can leave comments and even interact with the people who make the products. (The company often singles out companies that are so small or new that a feature on the Daily Grommet can be their first big break.)

It all amounts to a human-centered, high-touch approach that might just help to redefine what consumers expect from e-commerce sites. Whether such a business can be scaled up efficiently is an open question. But clearly, if you had the courage in this age of cloud-based software startups to start from scratch with a business that sells actual stuff, you’d want to take advantage of the media that people are using today for word-of-mouth exchanges, namely Twitter, blogs, online video, and the like.

And ideally, you wouldn’t just dilute these media with empty marketing messages, but you’d tell real stories about the people who make the stuff and what motivated them.

This is the kind of stuff Pieri thinks about. “Social media is not commerce media,” she says. “What travels in social media is news—whether it’s personal or national or just funny videos. I know that the stories around products have that same power, and the potential that people would want to … Next Page »

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Today Bedford, MA-based Zink unveiled the winning designs in a $25,000 contest called “Zero Boundaries,” launched to elicit creative ideas about how Zink’s inkless printing technology might be built into devices that young people and future mobile consumers could use to capture, modify, and share digital photos.

We’ve told you the story of Zink, the Bedford, MA, startup whose pocket-sized printers can make instant, 3-by-4-inch prints from any digital image without using ink. In essence, the company reimagined a thermal printing technique that was invented but never commercialized at Polaroid. In a contest announcement earlier this year, Zink (whose name stands for “Zero Ink”) asked designers and design students around the world to reimagine Zink’s own products.

The winning ideas hail from designers in the U.S., China, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Romania. They vary from an iPhone accessory to a little robot that crawls around on a giant piece of Zink paper, printing as it goes. The company has published slide shows and descriptions of the winning entries on its contest website.

Zink’s basic technology involves a thermal print head that applies precise pulses of heat to special paper impregnated with crystals that turn various colors when they melt. Contest entrants had to build their designs—whether physical models or 3-D CAD renderings—around the basic mechanical and electronic elements of the Zink printer.

“The designs were incredibly well thought-through and truly showcase the breadth and disruptive nature of the future of printing that only Zink can enable,” said CEO Wendy Caswell in today’s announcement.

In the “Youth” category, the company’s challenge to designers was to “make today’s youth crave Zink products in the context of their digital and mobile world.” The winner, Zink Mix, consists of an iPhone application that searches a user’s photo albums and social networks for pictures they might want to print, along with a fancy iPhone docking station with numerous sliders and dials for photo editing that give it the appearance of an audio mixer. Patrick Schuur, of design firm Maketropolis in the Netherlands, won a $10,000 cash prize for the design.

In the “Future” category, Zink wanted designers to reimagine printing altogether. The winning design certainly does that: called the Mini Giant, it’s a self-propelled, large-format poster printer that rolls across a piece of Zink paper the way a farm combine traverses a wheat field. A thermal head on the Mini Giant’s undercarriage exposes paper as it goes. The design came from Paula Adina Sumalan, a recently graduated design student from Romania, who also won $10,000.

The company also handed out $1,000 second prizes in each category and $500 third prizes, along with a $500 “People’s Choice” award, with the winner determined by voting at the contest website. Brazilian Arthur Ditlef’s design for a portable business card printer, called the SmartBC, won the popular vote.

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Seattle-based Alliance of Angels, a network of individual investors focused on the Northwest, announced today it invested a total of $6.4 million in 36 companies in 2008—the second-highest amount in the organization’s 11-year history. Nineteen of the investments were new, in startups spanning Web 2.0, software and services, mobile, gaming, nanotech, and consumer/retail. Five portfolio companies had exits last year: CleverSet, Coffee Equipment Company, Insitu, Shelfari, and SnapIn.

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If you were watching the Superbowl yesterday, you may have seen the tongue-in-cheek ad in which down-on-their luck celebrities Ed McMahon and MC Hammer hawked Cash4Gold, a Pompano Beach, FL-based metal refinery that sends customers checks for mailing in their unwanted gold, silver, or platinum jewelry. An e-mail about the ad circulated this weekend by a partner at General Catalyst provides the first public acknowledgement that GC is an investor in Cash4Gold, confirming—at least in part—a report earlier this month from Dan Primack at Private Equity Hub.

Primack reported in the January 6 edition of PE Hub’s daily e-mail newsletter, PE Week Wire, that GC and Lexington, MA-based Highland Capital Partners had just put more than $40 million into the company. Primack didn’t reveal his sources, and neither GC nor Highland would confirm or comment on their involvement.

But in a general e-mail this weekend, Bilal Zuberi at General Catalyst wrote: “If you are watching the Superbowl, look out for ads in the pregame and 3q for our portfolio company ‘Cash4Gold’ :) …And pull out your baggy pants in anticipation of MC Hammer on the screen.” Below, I’ve embedded the YouTube version of the ad—which earned an “A” from Time Magazine in its round up of the best and worst Superbowl ads of 2009.

When I contacted Zuberi today, he said he wouldn’t call his note an official confirmation that General Catalyst was in on the Cash4Gold deal. “It was kind of a joke e-mail,” he said. “It’s one of those investments where everybody talks about it. I don’t know anything about that area [of GC's business]. It was just a note to my friends saying you’ve got to check it out.”

I’ve got a call in to Michelle Daubar, GC’s communications director, requesting the firm’s official word about the investment. I’ve also requested comment from Dan Nova at Highland, whom Primack identified as that firm’s lead partner on the Cash4Gold deal.

Offering consumers cash for their precious-metal objects, especially at a time when gold prices are relatively high, may be a canny way to make money during a downturn. But one obvious question is whether partners at GC and Highland were aware of, and/or signed off on, Cash4Gold’s decision to put its own money into Superbowl advertising. According to a story on ESPN.com last week, NBC charged advertisers $3 million for each 30-second spot during the big game. That’s almost twice as much as companies paid back in 1998-1999, when so many dot-com companies were accused of profligacy for buying Superbowl spots.

I’ll let you know if I hear back from anyone.

Update, February 3, 2009: VentureBeat has picked up the Cash4Gold story, reporting on consumer complaints about the company, which apparently center on payment delays and “misplaced” packages that result in insurance payments below the value of the enclosed jewelry.

Update, February 6, 2009: The Economist‘s Free Xchange blog reported this week that Cash4Gold has attempted to buy off a blogger who was critical of the company. If you search for “Cash4Gold” on Google, this blogger’s post claiming that the company pays customers for mailed-in gold at rates far below the market price appears at or near the top of the results. According to The Economist, he got a letter offering him cash to take down the post or “de-optimize” it for the search engines.

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After raising $70 million in venture funding and spending more than three years on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries, Westborough, MA-based Boston-Power has won its first big customer: It’s the supplier behind a new line of replacement laptop batteries from Hewlett-Packard. Branded as the “HP Enviro Series” but based entirely on Boston-Power’s Sonata technology, the batteries incorporate advances in design and chemistry that will allow them to be recharged much faster than conventional laptop batteries—and that will keep them from losing their capacity to store power over time, the way older lithium-ion cells do.

The Enviro batteries be available from HP early next year, and will have the same form factor as current HP laptop batteries, meaning they can be slipped directly into existing HP laptops. That will make Boston-Power the first U.S.-based company ever to enter the laptop battery market, a space wholly dominated up to now by Japanese and South Korean companies such as Sony, Sanyo, LG, Samsung, and Panasonic.

Boston-Power—which is funded by Oak Investment Partners, Venrock, GGV Capital, and Gabriel Venture Partners—has long been promoting its battery technology as a smarter alternative to conventional lithium-ion cells. Most lithium-ion batteries suffer from chemical buildups that cut their capacity in half after only one year of use, meaning that they usually have to be replaced several times over a typical laptop’s three-year lifespan. That’s not only an expensive proposition for consumers, since replacement packs usually cost $80 to $120, but also uses up precious resources during manufacturing and leads to greater shipping costs and carbon emissions.

A single Enviro replacement battery, by contrast, is designed to retain 80 percent of its charging capacity over three years—meaning, in theory, that the replacement will never have to be replaced. Christina Lampe-Onnerud, a research chemist and Swedish native who founded Boston-Power in 2005, calls the company’s deal with HP “a celebration of cleantech” and of innovation in general. “The number-one laptop and notebook computer maker has prioritized the environment and created a whole new brand to give consumers a choice,” says Lampe-Onnerud (who participated in an Xconomy panel discussion on energy innovation last week). “I’m very proud that Boston-Power is the enabling technology for their first offering, and I’m extremely happy that we can be part of the solution for climate change instead of the problem.”

But if the Enviro batteries are so great, why aren’t they being included in new HP laptops, rather than sold only as replacements? That will probably happen down the road, Lampe-Onnerud suggests. Offering the Enviro as a replacement battery first “was the quickest, best way, in HP’s mind, to deploy this battery to as many people as possible,” she says. “I think you should expect to see other opportunities for collaboration [between Boston-Power and HP] in 2009.”

In fact, the market for laptop batteries is so commoditized—with no particular product standing out from any other—that it’s hard to imagine that HP would not eventually put the new Enviro batteries directly into its Presario and Pavilion laptops and turn them into a sales point (or at least market them as an option, the same way it offers buyers of new laptops a choice of graphics cards or hard drives).

“We will see during a 2009 a very interesting opportunity for our early adopters to get rewarded for working with us, because … Next Page »

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Who couldn’t use a robot or two to help with household chores? To make finding that robo-helper easier (and to boost holiday sales) Bedford, MA-based iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT) announced last week it was opening a kiosk in the Burlington Mall that will show off its Roomba robot vacuum cleaners and other bots for gutter cleaning, floor washing. The kiosk opened on Saturday and will close in mid-January.

A kiosk opening isn’t something we normally cover in Xconomy. But especially since the head of iRobot’s home robots division left last May–in what seemed to signal a shake up in the company’s consumer business—I wanted to know more about what the mall outpost portends for the future of home robots, both at iRobot and more broadly. To that end, I spoke with iRobot CEO Colin Angle, who sketched a vision of robots transforming household drudgery in much the same way (although he didn’t draw the exact parallel) that electric appliances revolutionized things like dishwashing and laundry a few generations ago.

“As we roll the clock forward you’re going to see more and more home robots…and the concept of a robot store is going to be something that every mall is going to want to have,” Angle says. IRobot’s kiosk, he says, is “one of the first practical robot stores ever to be in existence that wasn’t focused on meeting the needs of the hobbyist. I think it is an important milestone in our industry.”

In Angle’s world, there are two types of people: “those who own Roombas and believe, and those who don’t own Roombas.” On the home side of the business (the company also has a big military division), iRobot’s challenge has always been reaching that second group, and convincing people that “practical robots are here, and they can be saving you time and giving you more control over your home.”

Enter the kiosk. As Angle puts it, “nothing can convert a skeptic into a believer like a live demonstration.” The company has been thinking about a retail presence for quite a while, he says, “and felt like we now have a broad enough array of products that we could at least justify a kiosk.” Staffers will experiment with direct sales of a few items, but will mainly demonstrate products and help customers order online as the company tests its messaging, training, and so forth. And while the kiosk will shut down in mid-January, says Angle, “Certainly if it goes well then you have not seen the last of kiosks for iRobot.”

But what about the bigger picture? IRobot recently released positive third-quarter numbers that showed sales up 45 percent over the same period last year, with the home division driving the revenue increase. But margins can be tight in consumer products, and it’s not clear how much of the third quarter’s small ($3.9 million) profits, if any, came from the home division. In any case, the division seems to be in the midst of an overhaul. In May, the company announced the departure of home division president Sandra Lawrence. Since then, the home business has been led by interim general manager Jon Elordi, who previously ran the firm’s international business. IRobot also hired an operations chief from Gillette to improve supply chain efficiency and gross margins. But the company is still running in the red for the year, and Angle acknowledges the economy isn’t helping the overall picture. “Right now we’re in a period of great uncertainty in the economy, and it’s impacting consumer-facing businesses in other industries throughout the country and throughout the world. So there’s a lot of wait and see,” he says.

Despite my best efforts, I don’t feel like I got a detailed picture from Angle of what is going on right now in the consumer division. But the iRobot CEO seemed generally positive about the longer-term future—and especially the growing consumer presence of robots. “The Roomba has shown that there is a very interesting and exciting market for robots that can deliver the goods,” he says. “This is here to stay.”

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Atlas Venture of Waltham, MA, has taken the lead in a €10 million venture round for Inspirational Stores, the Paris-based online marketing firm said today. Inspirational Stores creates and manages e-commerce sites for luxury European consumer brands such as Laduree, Delvaux and Caviar Kaspia. Existing investor OTC Asset Management also participated in the round.

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Highland Capital Partners’ consumer fund led a $6 million Series D financing round for Cambridge, MA-based O Beverages, according to peHUB. Bob wrote about the fund’s earlier investment in the maker of nutrient-and flavor-infused waters (founded by Tom First of Nantucket Nectars fame), as well as the other firms in its consumer-oriented portfolio, back in December.

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