Some interesting news tidbits in Boston-area mobile and marketing/ad tech today.

—Zmags, the Boston-based mobile and social commerce company, has raised $7 million from Square 1 Bank and existing investors OpenView Venture Partners and Northcap Partners. Zmags makes a software platform to help brands and retailers design marketing and merchandising campaigns across mobile devices, tablets, and Web. The new money roughly doubles the amount Zmags has raised to date; the company expects to close an additional growth equity round this year. Last May, CEO Michael Schreck spoke with me about the firm’s transition from digital publishing to commerce, and about mobile marketing trends over the past decade.

—Jumptap, the Cambridge, MA-based mobile advertising firm, has been working with Mitt Romney to create and run targeted campaign ads (at the zipcode level) for the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire primaries. The company says Romney is the first candidate to run mobile ads in both sites. We’ll be watching to see how mobile technologies influence the upcoming presidential election.

—Apperian, the Boston maker of a mobile-app platform for businesses, is powering AT&T’s new mobile application management product. The software helps companies and other organizations create, distribute, and manage secure mobile apps. Apperian has worked with AT&T for the past several years, but the new announcement could be an important validation of where Apperian stands in the market.

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Abbott Laboratories will pay Neurocrine Biosciences (NASDAQ:NBIX) of San Diego up to $575 million for exclusive worldwide rights to develop and commercialize Neurocrine’s experimental oral drug for endometriosis, a painful condition in which uterine tissue grows outside the womb. Neurocrine will receive $75 million upfront, up to $500 million in milestone payments, and royalty payments on product sales. Neurocrine has completed mid-stage trials of the drug, called elagolix. The companies expect to begin late-stage trials this year.

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San Diego-based Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: HALO) received some good news today. Its partner Roche announced plans to invest $182 million in two European factories that will produce a device designed to deliver a drug formulated with Halozyme’s enzyme technology.

The Roche drug is trastuzumab (Herceptin), which is used to treat women with an aggressive form of breast cancer that overproduces a protein called HER2. The drug, which had 2009 sales of about $4.8 billion, is currently administered by infusion in a hospital.

Halozyme’s technology would allow trastuzumab to be administered by subcutaneous injection. This means patients could receive the drug in a doctor’s office or even self-administer the anti-cancer drug at home. Roche says it takes five minutes to administer an injection compared to 60 minutes for an infusion.

The reformulated trastuzumab contains Halozyme’s recombinant PH20 (Enhanze), an enzyme that temporarily breaks down hyaluronic acid, a gel-like substance found in skin and cartilage. The companies believe PH20′s ability to clear out the space-filling gel will enhance the penetration and diffusion of trastuzumab.

Roche (OTCQX: RHHBY), which is based in Basel, Switzerland, says in its announcement today that its factories would produce what it described as “patient-friendly” devices to supply clinical studies and commercialization.

A late-stage clinical study that compares injections with the experimental formulation to infusions of the original drug in 552 breast cancer patients is underway. Patients in the trial are receiving medication every three weeks for one year and will be tracked for two years after the study ends. Roche has said it expects to file for approval to sell injectible trastuzumab in the EU in 2012.

In its press release, Roche said that injectible trastuzumab would simplify patients’ lives and enable more efficient use of hospital resources. If the trial succeeds, Halyzyme’s PH20 could have a substantial impact on the treatment of cancer-and who gets paid to provide the treatment.

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Last week, the University of Washington’s Computer Science and Engineering department hosted a special workshop sponsored by Google and the National Science Foundation. The goal of the three-day program was to instruct professors on how to teach Google-style computing—which includes harnessing huge amounts of digital data and doing “cluster computing” over large-scale, networked servers. The weekend before that, Google also sponsored a workshop at UW to teach high-school math and science teachers about computer science—everything from programming and robotics to cryptography and security.

It’s an example of Google ramping up its local outreach as the search giant builds a larger presence in the area. Google Seattle, located in the Fremont neighborhood, has grown from 0 to 180 employees since opening last October, while on the east side of Lake Washington, Google Kirkland boasts some 400 workers. “Having Google in the Seattle area—and particularly having them in the city of Seattle—is huge,” says Ed Lazowska, chair of computer science and engineering at UW (and an Xconomist). He adds that he worked “very hard over several years” to encourage Google to open an office in Seattle proper.

Not that Google’s relationship with Seattle is anything new. Lazowska’s department has 150-plus alumni working for Google—many based at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, CA, but an increasing number in Kirkland and Seattle. “We have dozens of undergraduate students doing summer internships at Google, many graduate students carrying out their research at Google, and two faculty members spending the year there on sabbatical [Gaetano Borriello and Steve Gribble],” says Lazowska. And Brian Bershad, director of Google’s Seattle site, is a UW computer science professor on leave.

Some would say Google’s main mission in Seattle is to compete for talent against a certain home-grown software giant that has done more than its share of outreach in computer-science education over the years. So while Google’s latest efforts are highly welcomed, it will probably take some time for the search company to become as deeply established in the community.

“Despite all this, Microsoft is [still] the University of Washington’s #1 corporate partner,” explains Lazowska. “Google is fantastic, but they have a lot of ground to cover to catch up.”

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