A dark day in Boston is a little darker now. Jerome Rubin, the publishing executive and inventor who co-founded the display company E Ink and helped commercialize the online database that became LexisNexis, died from a stroke on Monday in New York City, according to a report by the Associated Press. He was 86.

Rubin worked at the MIT Media Lab in the 1990s, where he helped spin out Massachusetts-based E Ink, the electronic-paper company that makes the display in the Amazon Kindle and other e-readers.

Before that, Rubin, a Harvard University alum trained in physics and law, helped launch an Ohio-based research database for lawyers in 1973. The database search and retrieval system eventually became LexisNexis, specializing in news, legal, and public records information. Harvard Magazine wrote about some of Rubin’s achievements back in 2000.

Rubin lived in Manhattan and is survived by his children, Richard Rubin and Alicia Yamin, according to the AP report.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Pixtronix, an Andover, MA-based maker of low-power displays, has been acquired by San Diego tech giant Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), according to Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog. Terms of the purchase weren’t disclosed, but the report cites a price range of $175-200 million, based on sources close to the deal. A source of mine confirmed the deal but couldn’t provide any details on the record.

Pixtronix started in 2005 and has raised a little more than $50 million in venture funding from Atlas Venture, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and other investors. The company reportedly has 45 employees, and they’ll stay in Andover. Pixtronix is led by CEO Anthony Zona.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Boston-to-Silicon Valley transplant E la Carte has raised $4 million in new funding, according to a report in TechCrunch. The round was led by Lightbank. The startup previously raised more than $1 million in angel capital from investors including John Landry, Roy Rodenstein, Dave Balter, Dave McClure, Joshua Schachter, and Paul Buchheit.

E la Carte, based in Palo Alto, CA, makes a tablet-based computer system for ordering and paying for food in restaurants. The seven-inch “Presto” tablet is custom-built for the restaurant environment and includes a built-in credit card reader.

The company, which started in 2008 and was a resident of Dogpatch Labs Cambridge before heading to Y Combinator last year, says it has more than 20 employees spread across offices in Silicon Valley, Boston, Chicago, and New York City.

E la Carte is led by co-founder Rajat Suri, a former MIT student who worked as a waiter at several restaurants in Cambridge, MA, as part of his product research. Suri told TechCrunch the company has signed up close to 100 eateries, including Pizzeria Venti and Umami Burger, with a waiting list of 150 more.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Palo Alto, CA-based DisplayLink, which makes software that allows desktop computer users to add more monitors via USB links, has raised $8 million in a new debt round that could go as high as $14 million, according to a regulatory filing. The company’s venture backers include Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital, DAG Ventures, and DFJ Esprit Capital.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based MOD Systems, which makes technology to deliver movie and music files through self-service kiosks, is putting some workers on unpaid furlough as it attempts to raise more money. The news comes via TechFlash, which says it confirmed the furloughs with CEO Anthony Bay today. TechFlash also notes this SEC filing from early last month that said MOD Systems had raised about $500,000 of a planned $8 million financing. MOD has been through rough waters recently: Co-founder and former CEO Mark Phillips was convicted of federal fraud and money laundering charges last month, and the company said late last year that it was cutting about a third of its workforce.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Mountain View, CA-based Plastic Logic, which last year quashed a planned tablet-sized e-reading device based on its plastic semiconductor technology after repeated delays, said today that it has inked a multi-year financing deal with the state-owned Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies, or RusNano. The Russian firm said it will put $150 million in equity-based financing into Plastic Logic immediately, and will provide another $100 million in debt guarantees. Previous Plastic Logic investor Oak Investment Partners will put in an additional $50 million, and the company will raise $400 million more in equity and debt “over the next few years,” for a total of $700 million, according to a joint Plastic Logic-RusNano announcement. As part of the agreement, Plastic Logic will build a display factory in Zelenograd, Russia. “Flexible plastic electronic displays will provide another major milestone in how people process information,” RusNano managing director Georgy Kolpachev said in a statement. “Entering this new disruptive segment at the stage of its inception gives Russia a chance to win a leading position in global market of future electronics.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Lots going on in the Northwest tech scene today (though not as much snow as in New England, let me tell you). Let’s get right to it:

—Concur (NASDAQ: CNCR), the Redmond, WA-based travel and expense management software company, said today it has agreed to buy TripIt, a mobile travel firm based in San Francisco, for $82 million in upfront cash and stock, plus subsequent adjustments that could bring the total value to as much as $120 million. Last July, Xconomy did a Q&A with Concur co-founder and chief operating officer Raj Singh about the company’s history—and where it’s headed.

—Corensic, a software startup out of the University of Washington (originally called PetraVM), has secured $4.5 million in Series A-1 financing, led by Madrona Venture Group and WRF Capital. The news was reported by Dow Jones VentureWire. Corensic, which was co-founded by Luis Ceze and Mark Oskin, makes development tools to help companies fix bugs in software running on multi-core processors.

—Teradici, a Burnaby, BC-based developer of desktop virtualization and display technology, announced a strategic investment and development agreement from In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and U.S. intelligence community. Terms were not disclosed (duh). Teradici was founded in 2004 and takes advantage of graphics algorithms and high-performance computing to try to reinvent how PCs are used, deployed, and managed.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Prysm is trying to reinvent large video displays. American Eagle Outfitters is trying to reinvent the shopping experience in its retail stores. So it makes sense that first place you can see Prysm’s laser phosphor displays (LPDs) in public is the new American Eagle flagship store at Broadway and Houston in New York City’s Soho neighborhood.

American Eagle opened the location on November 9. One unmissable feature is the series of seven-feet-tall “video pillars,” each consisting of four Prysm LPDs stacked one atop another to form a continuous vertical image (see photos below). Strategically placed near the store’s escalators to provide a captive audience, the pillars show life-size, high-definition images of models dashing through the snow in their American Eagle winter coats.

Try using LCDs or other technologies to build a display that’s 20 inches wide and 60 inches high, and that runs on the power from a normal wall outlet. “The whole point was to go out and do something that can’t be done with other technology,” says Dana Corey, vice president of global sales at the San Jose, CA-based startup.

Video displays aren’t a new feature in retail environments—in fact, the fashion outlet right across the street from the new American Eagle has a huge wall of monitors in the front window. But those are conventional LCD panels, meaning each one has a thick rim holding lamps, electronics, and other components. All conventional video walls are marred by this network of bezels, which breaks up the image and creates what Corey calls “the jailbird look.”

One of the selling points of Prysm’s displays, by contrast, is that they have no bezels: the devices’ unique internal optics mean that the picture extends right to the edge of the glass. As a result, the individual 15-by-20-inch displays can be lined up in rows and columns to form a single image that’s as large as desired.

Member of the Xconomy community will get a special look at Prysm’s displays tonight at our Boston event 5×5: Five Cities, Five Big Tech Ideas. In a bonus presentation separate from the main talks, Corey will be on hand at Boston’s Fidelity Center for Applied Technology to explain how Prysm’s displays work and how the company’s technology promises to change the role of digital displays in retail stores, convention halls, airports and train stations, and many other environments.

I first wrote about Prysm in January, when the company unveiled its technology after five years in stealth mode. In June I got an extensive and illuminating tour of Prysm’s facility in Concord, MA, where the displays’ phosphor panels are manufactured. And now the startup has reached one of its first important milestones—putting actual units in the field. Installations like the one at American Eagle will give the company a chance to see how the displays perform technically and, just as important, whether they deliver on Prysm’s promise of increased impact for its customer’s visual branding and marketing messages. Prysm’s LPDs can be used to show any kind of information, but the company sees retail locations as one of its biggest initial markets.

To understand Prysm’s laser phosphor displays, think back to the old, nearly extinct technology of cathode ray tubes, once used inside all televisions and computer monitors. In these tubes, magnets guided electron beams, which swept rapidly across rows of … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

This is one of those weeks when it feels like we’ve been overrun by news. Nothing really major, but a lot of things to think about. To get caught up, here’s a sampling of what’s been going on in the Boston tech community today:

—E Ink, the technology maker behind many popular e-reader displays, said that Beijing-based Hanvon Technology will be the first company to sell a color display based on E Ink, starting in March. The New York Times and other media outlets reported the news. The color display, which E Ink told us about a few months ago, works by putting a color filter over E Ink’s standard black-and-white display. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and other big e-reader makers—not to mention Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)—aren’t using the technology yet, but are watching closely.

—Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) is losing Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) as a video-streaming customer (to competitors Level 3 and Limelight), according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com and Frost & Sullivan. Rayburn estimates that Netflix’s business is worth $10-15 million to Akamai, and that the change will occur over the coming months.

—Rob Go, the co-founder of NextView Ventures (formerly of Spark Capital), has posted a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community.” It’s a quick guide for new entrepreneurs in town. One highlight: Go gives his list of five “scaling companies to watch (i.e., probably hiring)”—Gemvara, CSN Stores, SCVNGR, HubSpot, and DataXu.

—Cambridge, MA-based Backupify, an online data management startup, has released a backup and archiving service for Facebook Fan Pages. The service is geared towards businesses and other organizations that need to keep records of all of their activity on Facebook and other social media sites.

—Boston-based Goby, an activity-based search engine startup, has hired Mike Bennett as its first chief revenue officer. Bennett is a social media entrepreneur and sales and marketing exec who has previously worked at Cheapflights.com, Healthetreatment.com, and Monster.com. (Revenue is a good thing, so hiring a chief revenue officer must be too.)

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, the nanotechnology startup that has struggled to regain altitude after a high-flying debut in 2001, is switching on the afterburners this week.

To finance a move to a larger facility where it will have more space to manufacture its nano-engineeered materials for lighting and digital displays, the company is about to close a $25 million Series E venture round, with $5 million more potentially to follow by October 1, CEO Jason Hartlove told Xconomy on Monday.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, is supplying $15 million of the new equity investment through its affiliate Samsung Venture Investment Corporation. The rest is from the company’s existing investors, and the $5 million second tranche is reserved for new investors. [Correction: In an earlier version of this paragraph, the second tranche amount was listed as $10 million.]

At the same time, Nanosys is announcing two other agreements with Samsung. There’s a multi-million-dollar licensing deal that will give Samsung access to Nanosys technology that could help it manufacture more efficent thin-film solar panels. And Samsung will also fund work at Nanosys to develop new quantum-dot crystals—the core of the startup’s technology for lighting enhancement—that don’t contain cadmium, a toxic element whose use is restricted in Europe and other regions.

The deals are critical ones for Nanosys, which wandered for years without a commercial product and brought in Hartlove as a turnaround CEO in 2008 (see this July 21 profile). The agreements give the startup more resources to expand into the two markets—displays and batteries—where Hartlove believes it can most quickly commercialize its own work, while at the same time allowing it to cash in on unexploited parts of its patent portfolio, particularly in solar technology. “This is a strategically important deal for us,” Hartlove says.

Gearing up to move to new quarters has been one of Hartlove’s highest priorities. The company has won a contract to supply the quantum dot phosphors inside the “QuantumRail,” a component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to Korea’s LG Innotek, and is pursuing additional customers. That means it now has to make the phosphors in industrial quantities. But in its current location—tucked into a Palo Alto office park with burgeoning Web and software companies such as Facebook a stone’s throw away—the startup is “basically out of capacity, really footprint-limited and fire code limited,” says Hartlove.

The company will use the growth capital round to open a new facility in a larger industrial park. “It’s here, still, within the Bay Area,” Hartlove says. “We haven’t announced a site yet, but that’s what the new capital is for, the capacity expansion to meet our 2011 revenue goals.”

The next problem is an environmental one. Manufacturers of smartphones and notebook computers can use the QuantumRail technology to tune the frequencies emitted by the LED backlights in their liquid crystal displays, resulting in a far richer range of colors. But there’s a downside—the quantum dots, which are actually nanocrystals made of cadmium selenide. Cadmium is a … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Ever feel like you can’t catch up to the endless stream of news and information bombarding you in the tech-business world? Well, today we’re going to get caught up, at least a little bit.

Having just landed back in Boston this week, I’ve been getting up to speed on all of our stories and sources here—and I’ve been thinking about ways to expand our coverage while focusing on what we do best. Along the way I’ve made a list of my 13 favorite stories of 2010 so far (see below). If you haven’t read them yet, please do.

Why am I doing this? Because I’m the new editor of Xconomy Boston and I feel like it, that’s why. But seriously, I want to highlight the quality of work we’re doing here, and I want to make sure our best stories keep getting read, even if they didn’t pass through the Twitter stream two seconds ago. And no, none of the following stories were written by me.

So here’s a rundown of some of the best stuff we’ve done in Boston this year, in reverse chronological order. They span startups and well-established companies; up-and-coming business leaders as well as household names; news, features, and Q&As; healthcare, software, and hardware—and, of course, the iPad. Enjoy:

John Glaser, Boston’s Top Hospital Geek, Talks About Obama’s Health IT Plan and Getting Booted from Catholic School

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Can this device take on the iPad? Last night, Seattle-based Amazon.com announced its new version of the Kindle DX (its larger e-reader device), which it touts as having “50 percent better contrast for the clearest text and sharpest images,” as well as a slew of other features including long battery life, 3G wireless connectivity, and a reduced price of $379. Its new screen comes courtesy of E Ink, the longtime Boston-area company now based in Taiwan, which today is officially announcing the availability of its “Pearl” display technology.

E Ink is all about making electronic displays that look like ink on paper. The company was founded back in 1997 by MIT Media Lab researchers, and it has endured a long road to widespread adoption in millions of devices worldwide—not just the Kindle, but most of the top e-readers including those from Sony and Barnes & Noble.

The new Pearl display uses E Ink’s core technology of microcapsules filled with white and black particles that respond to electrode charges. The key advance now is chemical engineering that has made the whites whiter and the darks darker. The company says this means the contrast between the words and the background has gone from the look of a typical newspaper to that of a paperback book. And, unlike the backlit LCD screens of laptops and tablet computers, the E Ink display is readable outdoors in direct sunlight (something we haven’t had to worry about in Seattle yet this year).

It sounds simple, but it’s the kind of incremental advance that takes years of reformulating the “overall chemical stack,” and developing and testing new pigment systems that are robust and reliable, says Lawrence Schwartz, the product director at E Ink responsible for its e-reader business. A key part of the development is making sure the new systems work with large-scale manufacturing processes, and integrating correctly with device partners like Amazon’s Kindle.

OK, so everyone is wondering how the new DX stacks up against Apple’s iPad. (The DX is the Kindle with the larger screen, 9.7 inches diagonally—the same size as the iPad.) Well, the DX is now $120 cheaper than the iPad, and it certainly works well for reading books, newspapers, and magazines. But it doesn’t play video or render full-color pictures, for example. They’re very different devices with different use cases.

What about future versions of e-reader displays? Back in February, Amazon acquired Touchco, a touchscreen technology startup in New York. This raised questions about whether future Kindle devices might offer a touchscreen, full-color display, or some sort of hybrid of a touchscreen and an E Ink display.

E Ink certainly has been working on ways to integrate its technology with different kinds of resistive, capacitive, and inductive touchscreen displays. Schwartz couldn’t go into detail about any particular partners, though. “We’re trying to support all the options out there,” he says.

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Prime View International, the Hsinchu, Taiwan-based display manufacturer that acquired Cambridge, MA-based E Ink last year for a price that eventually amounted to $450 million, announced today that its entire operation will now go by the name E Ink Holdings Incorporated. Along with the electrophoretic screens developed by E Ink over the last 13 years—which are now found in the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and many other portable e-readers—the combined company manufactures wide-view LCD screens used in televisions, phones, gaming pads, and other devices. “The E Ink name is synonymous with the ePaper industry that we pioneered and in which we enjoy a leadership position,” said Scott Liu, the company’s chairman and CEO, in a statement. “We are now a globally recognized brand name and aim to have our displays on every smart surface.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

When you think of Concord, MA, you’re more likely to visualize Revolutionary War skirmishes or Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond than factories full of complex machinery. But in fact, Concord was once a major hub of the clockmaking industry—in 1800 there were at least seven well-known clockmakers in the city, along with a network of suppliers including brass foundries, iron forges, wire mills, and cabinet builders. And as I learned during a recent visit to display maker Prysm, whose facility sits just across an abandoned railroad right-of-way from the Massachusetts Correctional Institute, the manufacturing spirit is alive and well in Concord.

At the core of Prysm’s plant—in a clean room that I was only allowed to visit after putting on a gown, shoe covers, and a hairnet—are four large screenprinting machines that are in nearly continuous operation, churning out the rubbery layers of phosphor material that make up the heart of Prysm’s displays. The way the company’s engineers explain it, the machines work just like those used to print designs on T-shirts—except that the phosphor stripes on Prysm’s screens are just millimeters wide, are made of exotic chemicals that glow red, green, or blue when exposed to laser light, and must be positioned with absolute precision. Which is not too different from clockmaking, when you think about it.

“Our first printing machine wasn’t even in a clean room,” says my host, Patrick Tan, Prysm’s vice president of panel development and manufacturing. “It was in the old Clock Tower Place mill building in Maynard, directly below the offices of Monster.com. Any time they had a party, it would rain wood fibers. We lived with that for as long as we could, but eventually we had to move—and that’s why we’re here in Concord.”

The startup finished that move last August, back when it was still known by its stealth name, Spudnik. It wasn’t until this January—almost five years after its founding by Boston University alums Roger Hajjar and Amit Jain—that the company finally lifted the veil on its technology, which it calls the laser phosphor display, or LPD. As I wrote in one of the first published profiles of the company, Prysm has big plans to use this old-meets-new technology to disrupt the market for large-format displays—that is, the wall-sized displays used for trade shows, stage productions, train station departure-time screens, and Times Square billboards.

Prysm’s current product isn’t huge by the standards of today’s flat-panel displays—it’s a 25-inch-diagonal screen, code-named Maui. But the screen on the Maui has no bezel, which means the units can be lined up edge-to-edge and stacked vertically to form a single, nearly seamless display of any required size. And perhaps the biggest selling point for the new display is that it’s driven by highly efficient lasers—the same commodity blue-violet lasers, in fact, that are found inside Blu-ray players. LPDs therefore use far less electricity than today’s dominant technology for large-format displays, arrays of light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

“Our first targeted application is for large indoor venues like airports, train stations, shopping malls, and convention centers, where LED displays are fairly entrenched today,” says Tan, a veteran of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). “One of the big problems with LED installations is that the first order of business is to get Tony the electrician to install power, they’re such big power consumers. For us, we should be able to run off of wall sockets.” A 142-inch screen that Prysm demonstrated recently in Amsterdam (shown in the picture here) used no more power than a microwave oven, Tan says.

The part of the Maui unit that’s being manufactured in Concord, inside a 32,000-square-foot building that formerly housed a maker of components for electron microscopes, is the business end—namely, the phosphor-covered layer of glass where … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s a good start to what promises to be a busy week in Seattle-area tech news. To get caught up, here’s a quick look at what’s been going on around town.

—Display Week, the Society for Information Display conference, is going on in Seattle this week. No, the iPad has not put this show out of business yet, thankfully. Some highlights of futuristic display technologies: Microsoft will demo a prototype interactive display called “magic window,” and E Ink, the Boston-area company that makes displays for the Amazon Kindle and other e-book readers, will present early versions of its display technology that are flexible and colorful (instead of black and white). Check out this Seattle Times preview for more info.

—Last week, Seattle-area startups Gist and Smartsheet announced they are having a “Google-off.” Gist recently got its product into the Google Apps Marketplace; it helps business people stay up to date about their contacts through e-mail, social media, and Web news. Smartsheet has been selling its work-management application through Google ever since the Apps Marketplace opened in March. Now the two startups have a friendly wager going over their respective month-over-month customer growth rates. At stake: beers, premium services, and money to charity. It’ll be interesting to see if Concur and Skytap, two other local companies in the Google marketplace, get in on the action.

—Gerry Langeler, a managing director at OVP Venture Partners (he’s based in Portland, OR), wrote an op-ed for the New York Times DealBook blog last week. He opposes the recent House bill to raise “carried interest” taxes on limited partnerships, arguing that the current lower tax rate is fair as compared to investments in homes, and that more tax will mean less talent in the investor pool.

He writes: “The real risk is on the younger generation of private equity professionals. If they find other pursuits more financially appealing (hedge funds, anyone?), the losses to company formation and job growth won’t show up right away. But show up they will, 5 to 10 years from now when the best and the brightest would have been hitting their stride. And the entrepreneurs will then have trouble finding savvy investors, and that will be a real, material loss of jobs and industrial competitiveness in this country.”

I’m told Langeler will be interviewed about this topic on CNBC today at 11:20 am PT.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Redmond, WA-based Microsoft has filed a federal lawsuit against its rival Salesforce.com, claiming the online customer relationship management (CRM) company infringes on nine of its patents. Microsoft is seeking a jury trial, damages, and injunctions. The news was reported earlier by CNET and other media outlets. The patents cover technologies such as display and user-interface features. The move is significant in part because it is reportedly only the fourth time that Microsoft has initiated a patent suit against a competitor.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Engineers are not salespeople. They are certainly not sound-bite machines either. If they were either of the above, there would have been a flurry of media stories coming out of Seattle this week centered around the National Academy of Engineering’s “grand challenges” summit held here on Sunday and Monday. Maybe that’s why it took me longer than usual to synthesize what I heard into a coherent wrap-up.

Alas, the meeting was probably disappointing to most journalists. But if you are a scientist or a savvy businessperson interested in the future of technology, you should have been there. Its goal was to inspire students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to solve some of society’s most important problems—and it did. But it did so in a unique way—with some very high-level, thought-provoking talks and discussions that went far beyond what I was expecting as a casual observer. (OK, I’ll admit I’m an engineer by training, and still think like an engineer in many ways.)

It’s not exaggerating to say engineers have created the world we live in, and that they hold the future of the planet in their hands. They can also make you a lot of money if you work with them in the right way. A lot of tech entrepreneurs have other ideas, but I think the gap between technology researchers and startups needs to be bridged, for the good of society. This week, local summit organizers Matt O’Donnell, Ed Lazowska, and Bonnie Dunbar took a step in that direction, and got a lot of people buzzing about the future of technology and society.

Without further ado, here is my top 10 countdown of highlights from the summit, which focused on engineering better medicines and advancing tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace:

10. Eat broccoli.

During the medicine panel, Buddy Ratner, a University of Washington professor of bioengineering, raised an issue from the audience. “What’s the business model for preventive medicine?” he asked. His point was that companies pour billions of dollars into new drugs, but some of the advances that have had the most impact on improving overall health in society are low-tech things like washing hands before doing surgery, providing people with clean drinking water, and eating broccoli to help prevent cancer.

9. The new drug pipeline is broken—except when it’s not.

This was a point of contention on the panel. Lonnie Edelheit, former senior vice president of R&D at General Electric, argued that “if we don’t worry about cost, it’ll stay confusing until the system breaks completely.” Nicholas Peppas, chair of biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin, countered, “I don’t think the system is broken. It is still an excellent system, it works relatively well. This country has produced most of the great drugs and made them available at relatively low cost.”

8. Not everyone loves Dendreon.

Seattle’s biotech darling, which just made history by winning FDA approval for a new kind of prostate cancer drug, has its share of detractors. In discussing how to fix the drug pipeline, Bruce Montgomery, senior vice president at Gilead Sciences, said, “The problem is the reward system for … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

A small explosion at E Ink forced an evacuation of the company’s Cambridge, MA, offices and manufacturing facilities near Fresh Pond this afternoon. No injuries were reported, but employees have been sent home for the weekend as the company deals with water damage from the building’s sprinkler system.

The company said in a statement released to Xconomy: “There was a small incident at E Ink today. The incident was contained to a very small space within [the] R & D facility. No one was injured. There is no damage and no interruption of production. The incident was quickly taken care of and E Ink is cooperating with the fire department. Employees were sent home for the day because the sprinklers were engaged as result of the flash and resulting smoke. All employees will return to business on Monday.”

E Ink, which is a division of Taiwanese display maker Prime View International, makes the electrophoretic displays used in e-reader devices such as the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and Plastic Logic’s forthcoming Que proReader.

Sriram Peruvemba, E Ink’s vice president of marketing, told Xconomy that the incident occurred in a “pod” or shop area in the company’s R&D operation where an employee was mixing various materials, and that it will not slow manufacturing of the “VizPlex” films used by E Ink’s customers.

E Ink researchers and engineers studying new display technologies routinely work with small amounts of dangerous materials, Peruvemba says. “Basically the research guys constantly get approval form the local authorities to bring in small quantities of different substances, including substances that may be flammable if mixed incorrectly,” he says. “In the next day or two we will know exactly what he mixed and what caused this. All of that will now be investigated by the fire department.”

An arson attack on E Ink’s offices in 2008 caused an estimated $5,000 in damage.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Yesterday afternoon, I attended the Seattle-based Technology Alliance’s “Innovation Showcase” at the Rainier Square Conference Center downtown. This is a relatively new event—the fourth one so far, and the first open to the press—in which tech and life sciences companies from Washington state pitch their businesses to a small, select crowd of angel investors, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and service providers.

The event had a strong University of Washington flavor, as several of the speakers and sponsors had UW ties. Linden Rhoads, vice provost and head of the UW Center for Commercialization, and her deputies, Rick LeFaivre and Tom Clement, each said a few words about the presenters.

Similar to the NWEN First Look Forum last week, the five presenting companies cut across some very different disciplines, including hardware, wireless sensors, and biotech. Guess how many software or Internet companies presented? None.

Well, none of the traditional Web 2.0, social networking, or business software, at least. Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance, told me this was a conscious decision. Her team chose non-software companies for this event, in part because software startups tend to need less capital and can get off the ground more easily these days than other tech and life sciences firms. One of the goals of the Innovation Showcase was to highlight different kinds of companies compared to other events around town—though each was built on a strong technical idea.

Here’s a quick rundown on the companies, and what stood out to me. No audience voting, no winners, just the facts. I’ll say a little more about some companies than others, but this is by no means comprehensive:

1. Enravel (Seattle)

Linden Rhoads introduced this startup by pulling out her iPhone and iPad (yes, one of those) and talking about the devices’ display capabilities. “These are great, these are fun, but they’re going to be so much more fun when there are projectors available for them,” she said. “That day is very, very close at hand.”

Enravel is led by UW mechanical engineer Brian Schowengerdt, an expert in alternative displays, user interfaces, and human visual perception. He co-founded the company in 2009 to commercialize a laser-based “pico projector.” The idea, he says, is to “take a display of iPad size and compress it into the size of an iPhone.” More specifically, to shrink a projector to “the size of a grain of rice” and use it to project on-screen images, video, games, websites, e-mail—you name it—onto any larger surface.

The core technology is a “scanning fiber” projector that uses fiber optics and a vibrating element to scan an image and blow it up, for example, to a size of 17 inches across from just five inches away. A matchbook-size assembly of laser diodes (off the shelf) provides the light source to project the image. You could imagine such a projector might be crammed into a smartphone and used … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

As Don Corleone said in The Godfather, “A man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.” If that’s true, then a Seattle company called Cozi should help quite a few people become real men.

Cozi is a tech startup focused on family-related software for the home. That includes things like online calendars, shopping lists, to-do lists, message boards, and family journals for sharing family memories and photos. These are the kinds of things, the company reasons, that busy families want to have to keep the trains running on time, and which most still do with paper and pen, or a physical bulletin board. Cozi puts it all online.

But there’s something deeper here. Cozi’s mission statement is to help family members improve their relationships with each other, through its software. I’m paraphrasing, but this is essentially the company’s 10-year “audacious goal.” It’s posted on the wall of Cozi’s meeting room at its headquarters in the Smith Tower near Pioneer Square. The place feels like a comfortable living room, as CEO and co-founder Robbie Cape pointed out when he showed me around. I came away with a strong sense that Cozi is a family, not just a company. And that if Cape were in a Godfather movie, you’d call him Don Cozi. (I’m kind of hoping that sticks.)

In any case, a sweeping mission to help families is all good—and atypical of tech startups, where 80-hour weeks and product focus are the norm. But it’s one thing to have a noble mission, and another to deliver on it. That’s why Cozi is interesting right now: for the first time, it can see a viable path to achieving its mission. “We are only now starting to see signs that the vision we had when we started the company can become a reality,” Cape says.

Cozi seems to have surged ahead of most startups in family organization software, including Fircle, Famundo, and Nesting.com. Seattle-based Trumba started as an online calendar service for families, but has switched to focusing on businesses and other organizations. Meanwhile, most big companies like Microsoft and Google don’t focus on family software because to them, the market is too small.

Being privately held, Cozi doesn’t disclose its financial performance and growth rates. But here are some hints of success. Cozi’s software now comes pre-loaded on all Dell machines. It has … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share: