EvoNexus, the non-profit incubator launched in San Diego three months ago, has selected its inaugural group of new technology companies to be hatched.

Cathy Pucher, the incubator’s executive director, tells me the first clutch of startups getting support from EvoNexus were culled from about 45 applicants. The contenders came from a surprisingly diverse number of industries, including software, cleantech, wireless health, semiconductor, communications, and other technologies. “We really didn’t know how many applications or what kind of applications we would get,” Pucher says. Most of the applications came from “brand new” startups, she adds, including several started by individuals who had taken early retirement offers or had been laid off in the recession.

EvoNexus, which plans to move by the end of this month into commercial office space recently vacated by San Diego-based Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP), also has begun reviewing its second round of applications. (More on that below). Pucher says the three startups are:

—San Diego-based Medipacs is commercializing non-mechanical intravenous infusion technology that uses polymer pumps instead of electric motors and pump mechanisms. The company is initially targeting delivery of pain medications and already has developed wearable, programmable, and disposable infusion technology. It is looking for wireless industry expertise to add remote monitoring capabilities (and expand into the wireless health market).

CEO Mark McWilliams has extensive experience in the medical devices industry and in early stage companies. He has worked previously at Beckman Coulter, Q3DM, and Baxter Healthcare.

—IO Semiconductor is a fabless semiconductor startup that is focused on applying new technologies to RF (radio frequency) devices for the cellular industry. “They don’t give out a lot of detail about what they’re doing because …Next Page »

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Lee Corkran has spent most of his life working in photography, graphic design, and online media. He’s participated in changes that have transformed his industry as he moved from jobs at the former Sigma photo agency, a news photo provider, to Kodak, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard’s San Diego-based Imaging and Printing Group.

Based on the insights he collected along the way, Corkran told me he concluded a few years ago “that no real innovation” had been applied to the way stock photographs are provided online. So he started BrightQube, a Web site with a proprietary method of displaying stock photos and other images as if they were arranged on a photographer’s light table. Corkran launched BrightQube early last, before the teeth of the recession really took hold, in a fiercely competitive market of Web-based stock photo providers. Yet the number of BrightQube users has grown, and the business is generating enough revenue for Corkran to begin looking for venture capital.

Lee Corkran

Stock photos and images have long been the meat-and-potatoes staple of advertising agencies, graphic artists, and the publishing industry. Agencies typically license images on a photographer’s behalf, and the image catalogs they once published on glossy paper to display their inventory are now increasingly available online at sites such as GettyImages.com, iStockphoto.com, and fotosearch.com.

Corkran contends, however, “going to a digital stock photography site is like going through a Google search, with 300 pages of results.” Users have to click through pages of images, which can make it difficult to select and compare photos.

“This paginated approach becomes kind of an obstacle,” Corkran says. “The existing stock photography sites have pretty much taken a print catalog and put it online. It’s not necessarily what the buyer is looking for. It’s more about what the seller wants to promote,” because favored images tend to be placed on the Web site’s first few pages.

BrightQube offers a different approach by providing …Next Page »

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Waltham, MA- and San Mateo, CA-based Greylock Partners is the leader in a $250,000 Series A financing round for Refocus Imaging, according to regulatory filings cited today by PE Week Wire. The Mountain View, CA, startup is pursuing “computational photography” techniques developed by Stanford researcher Ren Ng that, among other things, allow photographers to adjust the focus of a digital image after it’s been taken. The technology is similar in spirit to techniques developed by Ramesh Raskar, a former researcher at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory in Cambridge, MA, who is now at the MIT Media Lab.

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