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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Anyone who says cleantech companies are having a tough time raising money should take a look at Boston-Power. The Westborough, MA-based advanced lithium-ion battery maker is announcing today that it’s taken in $30 million in equity funding, just three months after announcing a massive $125 million Series F funding round. The company has now attracted more than $346 million in financing since its founding in 2005.

Of course, that recent money has come with some strings attached. The newest investment was led by Beijing-based GSR Ventures, a firm that led Boston-Power’s $125 million Series F round and is focused on building companies in China. Along with the September financing, Boston-Power announced that it was moving the majority of its operations to China to chase the electric vehicle market, and said it was reducing its 80-person Bay State workforce by about 35 percent.

Boston-Power, which also sells its batteries to customers like Hewlett-Packard for portable electronics, plans to add between 600 and 800 jobs in China across manufacturing and engineering roles. The company has begun construction of a manufacturing facility near Shanghai in Liyang and has established a temporary R&D site in Beijing, which will focus on customer applications of its battery technology. Both sites are expected to be complete in 2012, said founder and international chairman Christina Lampe-Onnerud.

Boston-Power also has an executive search underway, in China, to fill positions like CEO, said Lampe-Onnerud, an Xconomist. In September, Boston-Power’s Westborough-based CEO, CFO, and vice president of marketing left as part of the shift to China. Lampe-Onnerud said the pool of CEO candidates the company is considering is mixed, comprising both engineers earlier in the careers and more senior managers.

For her part, Lampe-Onnerud says she is excited to think about what she’ll do next. Alongside the September financing, Lampe-Onnerud committed to remaining with Boston-Power for at least another year, in the role of international chairman, and is helping to oversee the shift in operations.

“This opens up opportunities for me to do what I love to do, which is executable innovation,” she says of when this one-year commitment period ends. “I’ll have a chance to look at other problems that need attention.”

She says she’s interested in staying in high-tech or cleantech, and that water-related energy and transportation are areas of particular interest. We’ll have to keep our eye on her.

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You’ve really got to feel for people working in the retail trenches this time of year. Not only are they getting ready to deal with a blitz of savings-crazed shoppers, they now have to contend with smarty-pants consumers who can aim their smartphone at any piece of merchandise to see if that holiday deal really is as good as advertised.

One Seattle startup is upping the ante even further. Starting Thursday, Decide is offering its sophisticated price-prediction service for consumer electronics through an iPhone app. And it’s expanding its catalog to include dozens of new products, from tablets and e-readers to headphones and video games (Decide already was predicting prices for TVs, smartphones, cameras, and laptops).

There’s no shortage of ways for scanning barcodes or simply searching for products to see how an in-store price stacks up against the competition. Other startups, including locals like Shopobot and Loottap, are also working on ways to better track retail prices.

But Decide takes things a significant step further by actually using statistical analysis and deep data mining to predict whether prices are going to rise or fall, or whether a newer model of a gadget is coming out soon.

This may sound familiar to anyone who remembers Farecast, a Seattle company that predicted when airline ticket prices were going to change. Farecast was acquired by Microsoft for use in its Bing travel search, and some of the Farecast folks have now taken the technology to consumer electronics shopping with Decide.

(Side note: As someone recently pointed out to me, how in the hell did a startup—much less one that has some Microsoft DNA—manage to get the Decide.com domain name when Bing’s actual slogan is “Bing and Decide”?)

That kind of technical and entrepreneurial pedigree—one of the founders is University of Washington search guru Oren Etzioni—means Decide is not just another e-commerce startup. While their current quarry is gadget shopping, the technology behind Decide actually helps point the way toward the future of search in general, where users might be able to ask questions, get predictions, and find more intuitive answers.

Mike Fridgen

In the meantime, there’s the holiday shopping season. Decide CEO Mike Fridgen says that this year is the prime time for consumers to get even more empowered about finding the best deal. He cites this report by RSR Research, which found that 43 percent of retailers surveyed intended to match, beat, or compete with prices that consumers found by searching with smartphone apps (another 43 percent in that survey said they weren’t even familiar with the concept yet).

“We really feel like this year is going to be the tipping point for people using mobile devices to shop in stores,” Fridgen says.

Decide also has a bit of advice for the after-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy: When it comes to consumer electronics, shoppers might want to avoid the crush of humanity at the door-buster sales and be cautious of early online promotions. Consumer Reports tapped Decide to analyze prices of its recommended laptops, cameras, and TVs during November and December of 2010, and found that the best deals on those models were often found after the Black Friday and “Cyber Monday” promotions that follow Thanksgiving.

“Really, your best strategy when it comes to buying electronics is to sleep in on Black Friday,” Fridgen says. Fridgen also notes that consumers should watch out for rapidly obsolete gadgets, since the new year might bring new models, making could even the cheapest buy you picked up over the holidays seem like a bum deal.

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San Diego’s high-tech sectors did not escape unscathed from the great recession of 2007-2009, but a new study says local technology industries have had a disproportionate effect in boosting the regional economy in recent years.

Using state employment data, the study released yesterday by the National University System Institute for Policy Research counted just over 6,000 high-tech employers in this region last year—or about 6 percent of all employers (with payrolls) in the San Diego region.

Yet these 6,000 companies directly employed 138,800 workers, or 11.2 percent of the total regional workforce in 2010. Using standard economic modeling, the institute estimated that San Diego’s technology industries indirectly created an additional 103,800 jobs last year, and induced another 120,400. The total—363,000 technology-dependant jobs—represents more than 29 percent, or close to a third of all jobs in the San Diego area.

Wages paid by technology companies have had an even-more disproportionate effect on the regional economy in recent years, according to the institute’s analysis. It shows the average annual wage of workers directly employed by technology companies in San Diego at $93,800 in 2010, more than double the $45,000 average annual wage paid by non-technology companies.

Accordingly, overall labor income generated directly by technology jobs reached $15.7 billion in 2010. The study found another $12.3 billion was generated by indirect and induced labor income, totaling $28 billion—or 45 percent of all labor income generated in the San Diego region last year.

San Diego’s technology sectors shed some jobs during the Great Recession of 2007-2009, contributing to a county unemployment rate that still stands at slightly more than 10 percent, according to August unemployment data. (The statewide unemployment rate in California was nearly 12 percent in August.) But technology employment held up much better than the overall  job market, according to the study. Employment in most tech sectors had returned to 2007 levels by 2010—except in computer and electronics manufacturing, which declined 8 percent, from 13,700 to 12,600 jobs throughout San Diego County.

In contrast to all other technology sectors, the number of biotechnology and pharmaceutical jobs actually increased by almost 21 percent in San Diego County during the recession—from 17,300 jobs in 2007 to 20,900 jobs in 2010.

The institute analyzed economic trends in nine high-tech sectors, based on a standard federal job classification system. The nine sectors are biomedical products, biotechnology and pharmaceutical, communications equipment, computer and electronics, defense and transportation, environmental technology, recreational goods, software, and technology consulting services.

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Ladies and gentlemen, your attention please. Ahem.

[A giant “6x6” fills the screen.]

Macho narrator voice:
Star Wars had The Empire Strikes Back (Vader: “I am your father”)
The Godfather had The Godfather Part II (Pacino: “You broke my heart”)
Mad Max had The Road Warrior…well, you get the idea.

Now Xconomy presents 6×6, the long-awaited sequel to its riveting, change-the-world program from last December, 5×5. (It was “5×5” because we weren’t in New York City yet. Now we are.)

Yes, for the second straight year, Xconomy has canvassed its national network to find the most original, sensational, and transformative tech ideas out there—across software, hardware, digital media, social technologies, robotics, and more. We are inviting a select few speakers to Boston for an afternoon of mind-bending presentations and business networking.

It’s all taking place on the afternoon of Thursday, December 1, from 1:30-5:30 pm, at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology in downtown Boston. One featured speaker will be on hand from each of our six cities: Boston, New York, Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, and San Diego. We hope “6×6: Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas” will be a rallying point for the Boston tech community to get together and discuss the future of their fields with our out-of-town guests.

The concept is to highlight some of the BIGGEST tech ideas out there—as well as the nuts and bolts of how founders are building successful businesses around these ideas. This event is about truly changing the world, so we’ve asked everyone to please check their daily deals, social network plug-ins, and run-of-the-mill mobile apps at the door.

Who better to set the table than Stephen Wolfram? We’ve invited the renowned scientist, inventor, and business leader to give the opening keynote. Wolfram is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research and the creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. So he knows a little bit about changing the world from a software, computing, and business perspective. Oh, and he also spent 10-plus years working to reinvent the entire landscape of modern scientific thought with his book project, A New Kind of Science. I’ll stop there, but you can read an interview I did with Wolfram around the beginning of last year. (As for what he’ll talk about on Dec. 1, it’s safe to say I have no freaking idea—but I’ll keep you posted.)

Here’s a quick rundown on who’s representing our six cities at 6×6:

—From the hometown of Boston, we have Dave Icke, the CEO of Cambridge-based MC10, a pioneer in developing flexible electronics and sensors for consumer, healthcare, and energy markets.

—New York City is sending Jason Baptiste, the CEO of OnSwipe, a scrappy young startup that is trying to invent the future of media through a new tablet publishing platform.

—Representing Detroit is Nathaniel Borenstein, the Chief Scientist of Mimecast, an e-mail management company headquartered in the U.K. Borenstein, who’s based in Michigan, is one of the fathers of modern e-mail systems, and will talk about the future of communication in the cloud.

—From San Francisco comes Adam Goldstein, the CEO of Hipmunk, an online travel search company that’s been making waves with its novel visual interface for finding flights and hotels.

—Seattle will be repped by Kabir Shahani, the CEO of Appature, a fast-growing startup specializing in social and relationship marketing technologies for the healthcare industry.

—And from the sunny climes of San Diego comes Bill Walker, Chief of Global Hawk Business Development at Northrop Grumman, the aerospace and defense tech giant. Walker will talk about high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

We also have a few intriguing “burst” bonus talks to highlight, from some of the most exciting startups around Boston. They will include Affectiva (CEO Dave Berman), an MIT Media Lab spinout that’s commercializing software to make your computer or smartphone understand your emotional state (talk about a big idea); Krush (CEO Gina Ashe), an ambitious startup focused on social commerce and marketing for apparel and lifestyle brands; and GrabCAD (CEO Hardi Meybaum), a company that’s connecting engineers with people who need stuff built, via an online community and marketplace.

We are really looking forward to 6×6, and we hope to see you there on Dec. 1. You can register at the special super saver rate here.

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Over the weekend, I learned that one of my heroes, Lee Davenport, had just passed away. Lee died of cancer at the age of 95 in his longtime home of Greenwich, CT. That’s where I first met him in 1994, when I was researching a book about the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the World War II lab where some of the nation’s best and brightest physicists secretly developed microwave radar—the most important technological weapon the U.S. and Britain brought to bear in the war.

Lee was an X-ray spectroscopist and all around electronics wizard. He interrupted his doctoral work in physics at the University of Pittsburgh to join the Rad Lab, where he helped lead development of the SCR-584 fire-control radar that tracked planes and buzz bombs and automatically relayed their position to anti-aircraft guns, saving a lot of Allied lives, soldiers and citizens. After the war, he helped build the Harvard cyclotron, and then went into industrial research, rising to become the head of research at General Telephone & Electronics (GTE) Laboratories.

All told, I did six formal interviews with Lee, three for the World War II book (The Invention That Changed the World), and three more for Engines of Tomorrow, a book about the management of corporate research. Afterwards, I saw him a time or two at conferences and when helping with two documentaries about the war, but we fell out of touch in recent years.

The New York Times ran a very nice obituary of Lee on Saturday. There are also some nice details in this article posted by Union College in New York, one of his alma maters. I urge you to read these for more of his story. But I wanted to share a few details that weren’t in those articles that showcase this remarkable and always-humble man—and I especially want to share his principles of innovation, which I think American corporations (or any corporation) would be well-advised to consider.

To start, here are some souvenirs of Lee Davenport’s life:

—Lee was once in a commuter plane crash, I think in upstate New York. He made it off the plane, but realized others were still inside. Dazed and hurt, he risked his own safety to go back and help several passengers or crew members escape. His wife showed me a newspaper clip recounting his actions, but I haven’t been able to track it down for this article.

Lee Davenport. Photo courtesy of Union College

—The GTE lab Lee oversaw was based in Bayside, NY. He spent 15 years as director in the 1960s and 1970s before retiring in 1980. GTE at the time owned Sylvania, and under Davenport, the lab created and patented the bright red phosphor later used universally in color TVs. I believe the patent was later sold or licensed to Sony and became part of its Trinitron technology.

—In 1963, as a publicity stunt while at GTE, Davenport appeared on the live television show I’ve Got A Secret, his secret being a way the lab had developed to transmit TV signals via lasers. The panelists failed to guess the secret, and he brought out the laser. Smoke was blown across the stage so the audience could see its light. Then Davenport interrupted the video portion of the live broadcast by blocking the light with his hand.

—Lee stayed incredibly active. One of the things he did in retirement was restore vintage cars in his garage. He then drove them all around in road rallies well into his 80s.

Lee, as I noted above, also knew some things about innovation. He came up with some basic principles about the subject for a series of lectures at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Based on his lecture notes, and with his permission, I distilled them for Engines of Tomorrow and my own talks. I’d like to share them again with you here.

Lee Davenport’s Seven Principles of Innovation

1) Success is based on schedules and results—not effort, job difficulty, or loyalty. “You must expect your R&D people to produce results and reward them accordingly.”

2) Since most projects last several years, managers must break them into shorter segments, with measurable goals at each phase.

3) Never allow general goals. Avoid such words as: approve, advance, increase, investigate, study, explore. All are false goals—immeasurable.

4) Look for idea people. Only a few individuals have truly unique, even hare-brained ideas. Encourage them.

5) Find product champions—internal entrepreneurs who understand technology, explain it clearly, and can push ideas through corporate barriers. These traits typically elude top researchers.

6) Keep a little something on the side. A bootleg research budget is sometimes the only way to pursue ideas that break the mold.

7) Hire young blood. A research staff’s average age must not increase even one year per annum. In a high-tech lab, a nice average is under 35.

As I once wrote of Lee, “as a physicist and industrial research director, he has enjoyed a ringside seat on the electronics age—from tubes to chip, analog to digital. In war and peace, he’s seen ideas come and go—and come again. That gives him an all-too-rare commodity: perspective.”

Here’s to you, Lee.

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Seattle has already birthed a couple of early stage companies trying to help shoppers track the price swings and model rollouts of expensive electronic gadgets. Well, add another one to the mix—thanks in part to the national battle between Amazon.com and big-box retailers over collecting taxes for online sales.

I’m talking about Shopobot, which just set up shop in the TechStars/Founder’s Co-op building in South Lake Union, right next door to Amazon. Shopobot crawls product and price data around the Web and helps shoppers decide where to get the best deal on cameras, laptops, TVs, and other products.

The company got started in January when co-founder Dave Matthews (no, not that one) left his job at Microsoft and moved to the San Francisco area to join co-founder and longtime friend Julius Schorzman, also a former Seattleite. They originally were targeting book shopping online, until Matthews’ passion for photography led to an experiment tracking the price of camera gear. Voila! Shopobot’s mission was clear.

Schorzman and Matthews

The startup got into the AngelPad accelerator program, and landed seed investments from Google Ventures, AOL Ventures, and others. The company’s public rollout was covered in the New York Times and other media.

With Seattle entrepreneur Dan Shapiro selling similar startup Sparkbuy to Google this spring, and Farecast co-founder Oren Etzioni now tackling electronics shopping with Decide.com, it was clear that this was now a hot area for startups to focus on.

So, everything seemed to be going fine—until the state-by-state battle over online sales tax collections re-emerged in California.

As I wrote in March, recession-hammered state governments are starting to eye online sales as a juicy source of revenue. That’s a problem because, until now, the national laws governing online sales tax collection meant that there was a pretty narrow set of circumstances in which officials could force a company to collect local taxes on its sales in a given state.

Amazon has been very aggressive in making sure the number of states in which it collects sales taxes is low, but bigger bricks-and-mortar retailers hate the price disadvantage and are pushing hard to make online sellers collect sales tax in more places.

In late June, California officials passed a law trying to force Amazon and other online sellers to collect sales tax on purchases from Golden State residents. Amazon promptly followed through with its threat to drop some 10,000 affiliate businesses, third-party portals that market Amazon products through their own sites.

That included Shopobot. Just like that, a major source of revenue for the little company was gone, stuck in a political battle between very big players. “All of a sudden, we were … Next Page »

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Here in the Boston area we like hard technologies. We like companies with weird names. We like companies that have vision. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: Tenebraex, SiOnyx, and MC10.

They are the micro-cluster of imaging tech companies. They are working on a mix of far-out stuff and closer-in products, with a multiple-focus approach that befits their chosen field. If they were superheroes, Tenebraex would have eyes in the back of its head (panoramic view); SiOnyx would see in the dark; and MC10 would morph into different shapes depending on what it was looking at. Taken together, they just might reinvent the cameras we use every day.

One example: Imagine an ultra-thin camera phone that can take high-resolution, wide-angle photos and video in a dimly-lit bar or restaurant, or outside at night. That’s what combining the companies’ capabilities could do—though, as far as I know, they are not working together.

Several months ago I first talked with Peter Jones, the CEO of Scallop Imaging, which is the fastest-growing division of Boston-based optical tech firm Tenebraex. Why am I telling you this now? One, I’ve been busy. Two, Scallop is about to debut its third camera product in September. Last week, Jones said the upcoming “as-yet-unnamed camera will be the industry’s first multi-megapixel panoramic camera for very low light environments.”

Scallop’s new camera follows in the footsteps of its earlier products: digital and analog versions of a device (see photo below) that stitches together images from five separate camera sensors into a 180-degree, distortion-free, high-res panoramic view, for security and surveillance applications. The advantage over traditional fisheye lenses and pan-and-tilt cameras? Image quality, cost, and convenience, Jones said.

Some recent customers include hotels, museums, retail stores, and the U.S. military. One of the more intriguing applications of the technology lies in robotics. Last winter, a U.S. Army research lab organized a contest at Fort Bragg, NC. A number of teams sent mobile robots into a remote area to beam back images—presumably to check out the surroundings without having to send troops in. The robot that used Scallop’s camera finished in the top two (in terms of meeting its objectives), and it was the only one that didn’t get stuck in the woods, Jones said. He attributed the performance in part to its wide field of view.

My colleague Wade first profiled Scallop Imaging back in 2008. Since then, the division has grown to about 50 people. Tenebraex, its parent company, is no flash in the pan either. The company started in 1992 and is profitable, having invested in Scallop “multiple millions” of dollars in research and development, Jones said. “The majority of our future growth will come from Scallop.”

The company’s upcoming low-light camera overlaps a bit with another local firm. … Next Page »

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Second Rotation, the Boston company that runs the electronics recycling site Gazelle.com, has been fairly quiet for the past year. No more.

The startup said today it has raised a $22 million Series D financing round led by Craton Equity Partners. Existing investors Physic Ventures, Venrock Associates, and RockPort Capital also participated in the round. The company most recently raised a $12 million C round in 2010 (announced exactly a year ago today). It has raised about $44 million to date.

Xconomy wrote about Second Rotation when it first came out with the Gazelle brand in 2008, and before that, back when my colleague Rebecca had an old Motorola phone on which she spoke with Gazelle co-founder Israel Ganot. (It turns out she still has that phone. OK, I shouldn’t throw phones, I mean stones—I only upgraded to a BlackBerry earlier this year. Did I mention I hate my data plan?)

Second Rotation was founded in 2006. The company says its revenues grew by 155 percent in 2010 compared with the previous year. Gazelle, which also says it has more than 175,000 customers who have traded in or recycled phones and other used electronics, plans to use the new financing to accelerate its marketing to mass media and make new investments in operational capital, inventory acquisition, and other areas of the business.

“Our goal is to completely transform the way consumers think about the consumer electronics they buy, sell and own,” said Ganot, who is now the CEO, in a statement today.

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Ormet Circuits, a San Diego company with proprietary technology for printing circuit patterns on a variety of materials, has raised more than $1.7 million from equity investors, according to a recent regulatory filing. On its website, Ormet says its technology can print circuits with high electrical and thermal conductivity and good solderability on cardboard, plastic, and paper. The ink is cured to become a fused metal network that alloys itself to conventional circuit materials. The company says it is currently concentrating on the creation of electrical and thermal vias in multi layer structures.

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Boston-area IT, energy, and life sciences firms are making up for a short week last week with plenty of headlines on acquisitions and venture investments this time around.

—Waltham,MA-based business software maker DynaTrace was bought by Detroit-based Compuware (NASDAQ: CPWR) for $256 million in cash, a deal that closed on July 1. DynaTrace, whose technology enables companies to manage the performance of their software applications, has raised $22 million since its founding in 2005.

—Boston-based EnerNOC (NASDAQ: ENOC), a energy management and demand response technology provider, bought Energy Response, Australia and New Zealand’s largest demand response provider, for an undisclosed sum.

—Zafgen, a Cambridge, MA-based developer of obesity drugs, bagged a $33 million Series C round led by its existing investors, including Third Rock Ventures and Atlas Venture. The deal doubled Zafgen’s total financing to $66 million.

—Maynard, MA-based Allegro Diagnostics added another $5.4 million to its Series A funding round, from existing investors Kodiak Venture Partners and Catalyst Health Ventures.

—Waltham-base med tech startup Avedro nabbed a $25 million Series C financing led by SCP Vitalife and Aperture Venture Partners, with participation from previous backers Prism VentureWorks, De Novo Ventures, Flagship Ventures, Borealis Ventures and Echelon Ventures. The company is … Next Page »

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Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, said something interesting in last weekend’s New York Times magazine interview. It wasn’t his “there’s no tech bubble” spiel, or even his prediction that we’ll all be riding around in self-driving cars in 10 to 20 years, thanks to Google.

No, it was that he singled out “wearable computing”—portable devices like a pendant around your neck that record “everything around you all the time”—as a Next Big Thing. (Like Twitter, Facebook, or the iPhone, this could either be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the downfall of humanity—or both.)

Now one Boston-area startup is taking the mechanics of the idea a step further. MC10, based in Cambridge, MA, is developing flexible (“conformal”) electronics that can bend, stretch, and wrap around to conform to surfaces in the natural world, like the human body. That’s a far cry from the guts of today’s computers, which are based on rigid silicon circuits that are laid out on flat surfaces.

The three-year-old company has garnered increasing attention for its efforts, raising a $12.5 million Series B round led by Braemar Energy Ventures last month. (North Bridge Venture Partners was the original venture investor in 2009.) MC10 also has a deal with Reebok to develop a wearable product that’s very hush-hush (probably electronics integrated into footwear or other apparel for monitoring performance). The startup has also collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions to develop a new type of balloon catheter, equipped with sensors, to assist with heart procedures. Next up: wearable power and newfangled image sensors.

“We’re trying to change the world by reshaping electronics,” says Dave Icke, CEO of MC10. Icke is a semiconductor industry veteran who was previously an executive with Advanced Electron Beams and Teradyne.

The idea of flexible electronics isn’t new. But unlike other approaches over the past decade, such as using organic semiconductor materials or microwires (which tend to be slow), MC10 uses high-performance silicon circuits, which means the devices could be as fast as the computers you’re used to using. The trick is in exactly how the silicon is laid out and combined with stretchy materials. Imagine little islands of silicon linked by springy interconnects—“like a Slinky in between,” Icke says—with the whole thing deposited on a pre-stretched polymer. Depending on the application, the team adjusts the thickness of the islands and the interconnects so as to minimize the strain on the circuitry.

MC10's silicon-based photovoltaic cells could be used for portable or even wearable, personal power generation (image: John Rogers, UIUC)

MC10’s technology is based on research done in the lab of John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a co-founder of the company. Rogers, a former postdoc with chemist George Whitesides at Harvard University, was the winner of the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize announced last month. And the glue for the whole team is Carmichael Roberts, the general partner who led North Bridge’s investment; Roberts also worked with Whitesides as a postdoc, and he knew Icke from a previous company. (Icke, for his part, had gone to business school with North Bridge’s Jamie Goldstein.)

That’s all well and good, but making a living as a hardware startup is no easy task, especially when you’re selling a new technology. So MC10 has identified a couple of potentially lucrative markets for the next phase of its growth. One is portable (or even wearable) power generation—a set of projects supported by existing government contracts. Imagine a flexible sheet of solar-cell material that coats or is woven into the surface of a tent or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to absorb sunlight and store electricity. People have been talking about designing such a material for years, but MC10’s (see photo above) just might be good enough to make it work.

“Instead of having a bolt-on rigid box that gets attached to a roof or vehicle, [people could] integrate those efficient materials into a tent or awning, or into vests and clothing,” Icke says. … Next Page »

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If laser weapons and tools ever become mainstream, it might be because of a quiet little company called TeraDiode.

Sure, there are lots of more imminent (and perhaps more practical) applications for the Littleton, MA-based laser firm—welding, cutting metal, illuminating targets, and so forth—but blowing stuff up is what a laser was meant to do. At least if you grew up watching Star Trek phaser battles, Star Wars dogfights, and other forms of popular but admittedly dorky sci-fi entertainment.

TeraDiode, a two-year-old spinout from MIT Lincoln Laboratory, is commercializing a new kind of laser system, using what’s called a direct-diode laser, that it says is brighter, more powerful, and more focused than its predecessors. The technology is based on semiconductor lasers (which are electrically rather than chemically driven) plus a sophisticated optical system to manipulate individual beams to form a single output beam—a technique known as wavelength beam combining.

The 11-person company raised $4 million in a Series A round led by Stata Venture Partners in the fall of 2009, and is currently closing a second financing round from VCs and strategic investors, says founder and CEO David Sossen. The company has also landed some $3 million in U.S. defense contracts, he says.

Sossen, a veteran of Arthur D. Little and other firms, was a founding investor in TeraDiode, together with Fred Leonberger, a photonics expert from optical-tech firm JDSU. The startup’s laser technology, and its subsequent business development, is the handiwork of a couple of former Lincoln Lab scientists, Bien Chann and Robin Huang (no relation to the author), who both left to co-found the company in late 2009.

Lasers have been used in industrial applications for some 40 years. And the U.S. military has used lasers for decades, but in limited ways, because the devices tend to be bulky, inefficient (not enough power output), and prone to breakdown. To create a “directed energy weapon,” for example, a conventional chemical-based laser would need to be about the size of a building.

Until now, the limiting factors for laser diodes have been power output and beam quality. “We’ve broken through that barrier,” Sossen says, adding that his company’s relatively compact lasers (which for commercial uses are a bit bigger than a breadbox but smaller than competing devices) can output between several hundred and several thousand watts, and in principle up to 100 kilowatts (with a bigger laser)—enough power to do some real damage. And at different wavelengths, depending on the application.

TeraDiode envisions selling lasers “compact enough to be deployable on a tank or … Next Page »

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Companies in the health IT, electronics, and biotech spaces have all been making deals headlines this week.

—Wilmington, MA-based Lilliputian Systems, a maker of tiny fuel cells for powering cell phones and laptops, took in $11.1 million of a targeted $21 million equity- and rights-based financing from 14 investors, according to an SEC filing.

—Vigix, a Cambridge, MA-based maker of kiosks for dispensing goods from loyalty cards to iPods, nabbed a $1.5 million Series A-1 round, led by Waltham, MA-based Still River Funds.

—South San Francisco-based Genentech paid Cambridge-based Forma Therapeutics for the exclusive worldwide rights to a small-molecule drug program designed to starve tumors by blocking a molecular target involved in cancer cell metabolism. Genentech will also provide support for research, cover all the development costs, and agree to make milestone payments if the drug hits certain development goals. The kicker is that if the Forma drug reaches its development goals, Genentech can acquire the full rights to it, making an asset buyout payment that would be distributed to Forma’s investors, plus further milestone payments to Forma if certain sales goals are met, though Forma would miss out on the royalty stream.

—Nimbus Discovery, a Cambridge-based startup focused on computer-aided drug discovery, raised $24 million in Series A funding. The money came from Microsoft’s Bill Gates (a Nimbus seed investor), as well as lead investors Atlas Venture, SR One, and Lilly Ventures.

—-MC10, a Cambridge-based developer of products like biomedical sensors and consumer electronics that can bend and stretch, pinned down $12.5 million in funding. The Series B deal was led by new investor Braemar Energy Ventures, with participation from previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and Terawatt Ventures.

—InfraReDx,a Burlington, MA-based developer of medical devices, raised $24.1 million in funding from existing investors to help support clinical trials for expanded applications of its new coronary imaging system.

—Beverly, MA-based health IT firm Eliza snagged an investment from Parthenon Capital Partners, marking the company’s first institutional financing round. The funding will go toward providing partial liquidity to certain shareholders and to funding future growth initiatives for Eliza, which offers technology for communicating healthcare information to patients.

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Cambridge, MA-based MC10, a startup focused on designing electronics that can bend and stretch with the natural world, said today it has raised $12.5 million in Series B financing led by new investor Braemar Energy Ventures. Previous investors North Bridge Venture Partners, Osage University Partners, and Terawatt Ventures also participated in the round. MC10 is working on flexible biomedical sensors and devices, consumer electronics, sports and military applications, and portable (and possibly wearable) energy-generation devices. The company was founded in 2008 based on research done at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (John Rogers) and Harvard University (George Whitesides). MC10 is led by CEO David Icke.

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Lilliputian Systems, a Wilmington, MA-based developer of fuel cells small enough to power mobile phones and laptops, has brought in $11.1 million of a potential $21 million offering of equity and options, an SEC filing shows. The money comes from 14 investors. Lilliputian raised $25 million in 2009, from Stata Venture Partners, Altira Group, Atlas Venture, Fairhaven Capital, Rockport Capital, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

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Sparkbuy, a consumer electronics shopping site based in Seattle, has been purchased by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), the startup announced today on its website. The company, which has been around for less than a year, had raised about $1 million, led by Benaroya Ventures and angel investor Geoff Entress. Terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed, but this looks like a clear case of talent acquisition by a big company.

“I know, right? We can hardly believe it ourselves,” the company’s leaders wrote on its website, which also said that Sparkbuy is shutting down as the team joins Google. The Mountain View, CA-based search giant added in a statement to All Things D that the Sparkbuy team will work out of Google’s Kirkland, WA, office.

That’s quite a turnaround for a little startup that just came out of stealth mode last November and only started up its service in late March. The idea behind Sparkbuy, led by entrepreneur Dan Shapiro, was to make online electronics shopping more customizable and powerful for consumers. In fact, with features like little sliders that customized search ranges for price and technical specifications, Sparkbuy was directly inspired by online travel sites like Expedia and Kayak.

Just last month, we reported on Sparkbuy adding products from Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) to its stable, which had already included laptops and other gadgets from Amazon.com and Newegg. That partnership bumped up the product offerings to about 3,000 items.

Shapiro previously co-founded mobile picture site Ontela, which merged with Photobucket in late 2009.

A Seattle-based Sparkbuy competitor, Decide.com, is still in stealth mode. Last month, it raised a $6 million investment round. Decide was co-founded by Internet search expert and University of Washington professor Oren Etzioni.

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GainSpan, a San Jose, CA-based maker of Wi-Fi modules embedded in a range of devices, has increased the size of a recent round of equity-based funding to $10.15 million, according to an amended regulatory document filed last week. The company reported in November 2010 that it had raised $5.1 million in the round, with part of the funds coming from Intel Capital. Other previous backers of GainSpan include New Venture Partners, Opus Capital, OVP Venture Partners, and Sigma Partners.

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It’s no secret that some big West Coast players have shown interest in Boston’s homegrown mobile technology lately. In the past few weeks, San Jose, CA-based eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) has bought Where, a location-based mobile advertising and recommendations provider, and mobile payments startup Fig Card, to roll into its PayPal division.

But Boston-based Skyhook Wireless has a slightly different relationship with a Bay Area Internet giant. It’s been wrestling in court with Mountain View, CA-based search engine giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), around its location-finding technology for mobile phones. Skyhook has sued Google for alleged patent infringement, as well as alleged interference by Google with deals Skyhook had inked with Motorola and Samsung for devices running on Google’s Android smartphone platform. (You can read more about the lawsuits here and here.)

It looks like there’s still a long way to go for that case to be resolved—last week lawyers from both sides met before a Suffolk County Superior Court. Google’s lawyers asked for the judge to throw out the case, on the basis that Google had pre-existing agreements with device makers, in which some of its standard apps automatically collected location data. Meanwhile, Skyhook’s lawyers re-emphasized their claim that Google road-blocked Motorola and Samsung from following through on agreements to ship smartphones with Skyhook’s XPS software, which determines a user’s location using WiFi, cellular, and GPS access points.

Yesterday, the judge denied both Google’s motion to dismiss the case and for a summary judgment, court documents show. The case will now to go into full discovery to gather the necessary documents and depositions, a period that could take six months—a timetable suggested by Google lawyers last week.

So it’s a small victory for Skyhook, but its legal work is just beginning. “Their goal is to try and bleed us out and our goal is to try and make sure we get the facts brought to light,” Skyhook CEO Ted Morgan told me this week.

Meanwhile, Skyhook has been nabbing some bigger victories out of the courtroom. This week it announced that MapQuest, the San Francisco-based mapping division of AOL, will use Skyhook’s technology in an upcoming turn-by-turn navigation app for Android phones. Skyhook has inked similar deals with UberMedia, Citysearch, and Priceline over the past few months.

“In the meantime what we’re doing is going after all the top Android apps that offer location,” Morgan says. “That way we’ll get on every Android device, but it will be through the apps instead of device makers.”

Google’s and Apple’s impending appearances before a U.S. Senate committee also shed some positive light onto Skyhook’s technology, he says. Lawmakers have expressed concern over reports that Apple logs user location data on mobile devices. Google, which has claimed that … Next Page »

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Washington state companies collected about $53 million in equity financing from venture capitalists and angels in March, led by an $11 million VC round for Vancouver, WA-based semiconductor laser manufacturer nLight Photonics, according to data compiled by research firm CB Insights.

nLight still had another $4 million left to sell from the offering, according to last month’s SEC filing. The investors in nLight’s March financing round weren’t disclosed, but the company website lists Mohr Davidow Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, Menlo Ventures and Adams Capital Management as its backers. nLight has been around since 2000 and has manufacturing facilities in Hillsboro, OR, Finland, and China. Along with lasers, the company also supplies optical fiber products.

The second-largest investment in March went to Tier 3, the Seattle-based cloud-computing provider. It was the company’s first publicly announced investment round, with Ignition Capital and Madrona Venture Group supplying the money. Microsoft is among nearly 100 customers for the expanding company, which was founded in 2006.

Coming in third for large equity investments was $6.9 million for Physware, a Bellevue, WA-based provider of software for designing the circuitry in computer systems and other electronics. The company was founded by Vikram Jandhyala, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Washington. Physware also has an office in Mountain View, CA. Investors were not disclosed.

Another Bellevue company, Visible Technologies, was among the top investment hauls for March with a $6 million infusion from Investor Growth Capital, Centurion Holdings, Ignition Partners, WPP Group, and In-Q-Tel, according to CB Insights’ data. Visible provides social media monitoring for businesses—a growing field that helps companies sort out what customers are saying about them online. Visible has offices in Seattle, London and New York, and relationships with companies like Microsoft, Xerox, and Boost Mobile.

Rounding out the top five equity investments was Powerit Solutions, a cleantech company that provides energy management and conservation for industry clients, which landed a $5 million investment led by Black Coral Capital. Powerit’s Seattle branch is part of a larger company, which includes an office in Sweden. Powerit also announced last month a new CEO for its North America and Northern Europe divisions— Matthew Schiltz, formerly of Seattle-based DocuSign.

You can check out the rest of the March financing data here, including several more deals less than $5 million and one debt financing.

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