Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) announced today it has signed a collaborative agreement with UQ Communications of Japan and Yota of Russia to support international roaming between the three WiMax operators. Financial terms were not disclosed. WiMax is a next-generation wireless broadband service, which Clearwire is rolling out across the U.S. Clearwire also has partnerships with YTL Communications of Malaysia, wi-tribe of Pakistan, Vee Telecom of Taiwan, and Global Mobile of Taiwan.

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Seattle-based MOD Systems, a maker of digital media delivery technologies for retailers, announced today it has opened a subsidiary in Tokyo. MOD Systems Japan will work with the company’s strategic investors, Toshiba and NCR, to drive business development in Japan. MOD raised $35 million from its investors in September, in a deal that has come under scrutiny in an ongoing lawsuit against MOD and its top executives.

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Seattle has become a major global health hub over the last decade, thanks in no small part to having the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the world leaders in funding for global health research, in our own backyard. Now, an emerging and related discipline is also finding an increasing number of connections here—global technology. Researchers around Seattle (and elsewhere) are thinking outside the box to come up with innovative, inexpensive technologies that can be easily implemented in developing countries to improve quality of life there.

“Technology is naturally mixing with global health as there is much low-hanging fruit where a little tech can make a big difference,” Gaetano Borriello, a University of Washington computer science professor, said in an e-mail. “Seattle is a hub for both, so it is a natural place for this new development to be happening.”

This past weekend, the third annual IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development took place at Carnegie Mellon University’s Qatar campus in Doha. Seattle-area researchers, specifically from the UW, made quite a showing at the meeting. Several Microsoft projects were presented too, and Bill Gates showed up to give the keynote talk.

Here are some global technology projects underway at the UW and presented at the meeting:

—*bus (or Starbus), a transportation tracking system developed by Borriello and UW technical communication professor Beth Kolko. *bus relies on only GPS and SMS technologies to track any vehicle by cell phone, as long as that vehicle has been equipped with a simple tracking device (*box). The researchers tested the system in Seattle this year and plan to start tests in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, soon. In areas with limited transportation and no means of communicating their schedules, a system like this would allow residents of those areas to get the most use possible out of buses and trains.

—MultiMath, a system that uses multiple numerical keyboards to allow students to share a computer in a classroom situation, led by UW computer scientist Richard Anderson and the UW Center for Information and Society’s Joyojeet Pal. The technology would allow a single computer to go farther in resource-poor settings, and allows children more interaction with each other to boot.

—AndroidRosa and JavaRosa, two open-source applications for data sharing on cell phones in the developing world, created by Borriello and his colleagues. The applications are part of the larger open-source cell phone-based data collection project OpenRosa. The idea behind Borriello’s applications is that sharing information such as medical records or tracking disease spread using paper records is slow, but establishing traditional online sharing systems is unrealistic in poor settings where computers, Internet service, and even electricity may be hard to come by. Cell phone usage is common even in poor countries, presenting an intriguing and efficient alternative to paper records.

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On Monday, Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay to license some of the university’s inventions and to work on technology commercialization strategies with its researchers, as reported by CIOL, Express India, TechFlash, and other outlets. It’s not really big news by itself—Intellectual Ventures has formed similar partnerships with other institutes in India, as well as in China, Japan, Korea, and soon, Singapore—but it fits into the broader strategy the firm is pursuing around the world to foster invention.

Last fall, Intellectual Ventures opened offices in five Asian countries in an effort to gain access to a much wider pool of inventors and talent. Led by global head of technology Patrick Ennis, a physicist and former managing director at Arch Venture Partners—and other members of Intellectual Ventures’ senior leadership team, including co-founder and president Edward Jung—the company is building relationships with prominent academic scientists in Asia, and setting up partnerships whereby it can license certain inventions in exchange for helping with patents and commercialization. The strategy reminds me a lot of Microsoft Research, which has set up labs in China and India in the past 10 years and built partnerships with local university researchers and administrators. (This blueprint is not surprising, given that Intellectual Ventures’ co-founder and CEO Nathan Myhrvold was the founder of Microsoft Research.)

The reception Intellectual Ventures is getting also reminds me of Microsoft Research. While most university officials see the partnerships as benefiting their researchers and increasing the flow of innovation, critics have rolled out the standard “patent troll” fears that the company is coming in to buy up all the best intellectual property—which will only be assuaged by years of relationship building and repeatedly demonstrating that these sorts of deals can benefit both sides.

Nevertheless, Intellectual Ventures’ Indian operation seems to be off to a strong start. It is now staffed by about 15 people, led by Ashok Misra, the former head of IIT-Bombay and a highly respected polymer materials scientist.

I caught up with the staff of Intellectual Ventures to hear about the workings of the Indian university partnership. Nicholas Gibson, one of the firm’s directors of business development in Japan, said via e-mail, “The agreement with IIT-Bombay is important as it gives [us] more direct access to top flight university-based Indian inventors. The deal also gives IIT-B access to commercialization possibilities …Next Page »

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Here are seven key questions and answers about the electricity economy and smart-grid technology.

1. What is “electronomics” and where does it fit in today’s energy world?

One of the best ways to understand the new electric smart grid of the 21st century is by applying electronomics, which helps you analyze the rapidly emerging electricity economy. Electronomics means jobs, progress and prosperity; but it also spells huge financial opportunities and brand new companies and industries that will be created on a vast scale, a scale we haven’t seen in the United States for many decades or more.

Electronomics is also one of the key underpinnings for the stimulus package currently being shaped and fashioned in Washington DC. There are lots of stimulus ideas that create jobs for a year or two and that refurbish aging infrastructure. That’s really important. We need new bridges and roads and highways.

But the smart grid infrastructure that we’re talking about is much more lasting in its impact. It is the development of a new infrastructure that will permit new forms of commerce to take place. It is akin to the transcontinental railroad, the phone system, the interstate highway system and the Internet in the way that it will help enhance new fortunes and spawn new Googles and Microsofts.

Building out this grid will also allow us to remain competitive in a world that is rapidly moving from a petroleum economy to an electricity economy. Right now, we’re falling behind. Many of the most exciting and aggressive smart grid initiatives are coming from overseas. Much of the Middle East is using its oil money to create a state‐of‐the‐art smart grid along with sustainable cities. Europe spends 10x what we do on smart grid research. And China is leading the world in high‐voltage transmission and next‐generation grid efforts. If we want to keep pace, we have to master Electronomics and really dig in here.

2. What is the current state of the U.S. electric infrastructure?

The electric infrastructure in the United States has been called the most complex machine on earth, and with good reason. There are so many moving parts. For starters, the system has 14,000 transmission substations and 4,500 large substations for distribution. And, just as importantly, there are over 3,000 entities—each with a competing agenda—that own a piece of this national electric infrastructure. Actually, it’s not a truly cohesive infrastructure at all. Many countries around the world have one national electric grid. We don’t. Ours is fragmented, to say the least, and this makes it hard to implement technical and political “repairs.”

In addition to being fragmented, our electric infrastructure today is aging, outmoded, underfunded and overstressed. Basically, we’re talking about a 19th century system from the days of Edison and Westinghouse that uses 20th century equipment in an effort to keep up with a 21st century economy. This is the digital age and our electric grid is using electro‐mechanics from the 1960s and 70s rather than microprocessors. Approximately 70 percent of the transformers and transmission lines are 25 years old; and 60 percent of the circuit breakers are 30 or more years old.

We are paying the price for this. Congestion within our current electric infrastructure costs ratepayers $2 billion a year, and commercial ventures are losing more than $100 billion to outages. That’s not all, though. We’re simply not investing in our electric infrastructure. In fact, when it comes to our electric grid, we have an embarrassingly low R&D rate—about 1/20th the average of all U.S. industries.

No wonder that communities with decaying electric infrastructure lose jobs that shift to places with low‐cost, high‐quality power; and no wonder that our country is losing clean‐technology jobs to other nations around the world. The regulators are well intentioned, but they are out of touch. They are still rewarding utilities for installing instantly obsolete equipment, and they are still allowing utilities to sell more power at a time when we need to use less. This is a demand issue—not a supply issue.

The bottom line is that the electric system, as it’s currently configured, is out of sync. Wholesale power transactions jumped more than 300 percent between 2000 and 2005; near misses in terms of outages skyrocketed by 1,000 percent between 1997 and 2002; and there’s no way we can release the pressure by using alternative energy like solar and wind because they require intermittent bursts of power that today’s infrastructure just isn’t capable of providing.

3. What should / could the U.S. electric infrastructure look like if we really focused our energy and resources?

Infrastructure has always been the key to prosperity in the United States—whether it’s been the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highway system, rural electricity, or the telephone or Internet network. And building a smart electricity grid for the 21st century is no different. What we need to aim for is pretty clear. Our goal should be one vast, interconnected, intelligent system that is …Next Page »

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If you’re interested in creating technologies for developing countries, or involved with a Web-based software startup in the Northwest, you definitely want to know Will Poole. OK, that covers a lot of people, but it’s not an overstatement.

Poole is one of the most prominent ex-Microsofties to leave the company in the past year. Until last September, he was vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group (one of the better division names, in my opinion), and was in charge of providing software to markets in less-developed nations around the world. Before that, he was responsible for the Windows desktop operating system, so he knows a few things about shipping large-scale products. He first came to Microsoft in 1996 through its acquisition of eShop, a company he co-founded in 1991. Some of his post-Microsoft insights can be found on his “creative capitalism” website here.

I recently spoke with Poole to find out what he’s up to. I got the sense that his new role as a dedicated social technologist and investor is yielding a slew of projects we’re going to be hearing about soon. He also had some provocative thoughts on the challenges faced by organizations like the One Laptop Per Child Foundation—and anyone selling technology globally.

“Most people advised me to take a whole year off, but that’s not in my nature,” Poole says. “My overall goal is to contribute to the formation and growth of companies that can, by virtue of their successful and [large] scale operation, deliver good financial results to investors and shareholders, and also deliver on social and economic development.” That could mean improving education, nurturing an ecosystem of collaborative software developers, solving problems of how technology can assist healthcare, and so forth.

It sounds like he’s in a better place to do that now. “The thing I’m enjoying now is operating across a broader range of organizations that have a greater range of ways of doing things,” says Poole. “Microsoft does [software as a service] that goes out over global distribution channels. That’s only part of the story. What I get to do now is work more closely with nonprofits, thought leaders in academia,” and other groups, he says.

His most public new role is as co-chairman of Redwood City, CA-based NComputing, which provides personal-computing technologies to schools and businesses in developing markets. “I saw they had a disruptive technology,” Poole says. “It delivered a computing experience at a dramatically lower cost—at initial purchase and in ongoing management and energy consumption. It really changed the game.”

Poole says NComputing is having a “profound effect on markets that were previously unable to use computer infrastructure because of cost.” His role is to help the company build its business from a strategic perspective, using his knowledge and contacts from around the world. “The exciting thing about NComputing is they’re already at scale,” he says. “It’s cheaper to fill up a school [with these PCs] than any other choice out there.” Poole says NComputing has about 150 employees in 14 countries, and they’re currently selling into 90 countries.

The most important lesson from his time at Microsoft and NComputing? …Next Page »

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Why can’t big companies invent? How should inventors handle their intellectual property? And what are countries around the world doing on these fronts? I recently stopped by Intellectual Ventures in Bellevue, WA, to get the scoop from Patrick Ennis, IV’s global head of technology. Ennis was a venture capitalist with Arch Venture Partners in Seattle for 10 years before taking his current post in early 2008. (Between jobs, he took some time off and, among other things, chopped wood full-time for a week.)

Back in October, Xconomy reported that Ennis is heading up Intellectual Ventures’ expansion in China, Japan, Korea, India, and Singapore. The invention company, which is led by founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung, currently has some $5 billion under management, 450-plus employees, and 160 university partnerships around the world. I wanted to get a deeper sense of Ennis’s philosophies on invention and intellectual property on a global scale.

Ennis organized his thoughts loosely around a talk he gave last month at the Ready To Commercialize 2008 conference, run by the Office of Technology Commercialization at the University of Texas (which happened to be IV’s 100th university partner). In Austin, he spoke on game-changing approaches to commercializing inventions. The conversation we had over lunch in Bellevue was free-flowing and touched on everything from anatomy and antibiotics to Sumerian culture and the Renaissance.

I was particularly intrigued by Ennis’s take on the current state of global competition and its historical context. “It’s a complicated world,” he said. “Leonardo da Vinci could do what he did because the world was not as complicated. Leonardo could not be a Renaissance person today—there’s too much to know.”

A few more highlights from Ennis, in his own words:

—On doing business at Intellectual Ventures: “We want to create a market for invention. We want to reward inventors, perfect the process of invention, and make invention respectable…We don’t ask for exclusive deal sourcing agreements, we like to earn our business a deal at a time, the old-fashioned way. All organizations, if they succeed, have to fight the hubris thing. You see that with all big companies. IBM had it, Microsoft had it, and Google, quicker than any other startup, got it. It’s amazing how the hubris seeped into Google real quick. And the backlash is coming—you see it in the EU and, to a certain extent, in the States.”

“We’re a collection of individuals, and business is always done personally, one on one, whether you work for a 10-person company, or 450, or 4,000,” Ennis says. “That’s when companies lose their way, …Next Page »

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Last month, Xconomy reported on a visit to China by five Seattle-area tech companies as part of a mobile-telecom mission organized by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). The goal of the trip was to open up business opportunities for the companies by setting up meetings with potential partners, investors, and customers. On Friday, I sat down for a one-on-one with Ken Myer, the president and CEO of the WTIA (and an Xconomist), to talk about the trip and what he learned about the Chinese mobile market.

Myer led the delegation, together with the Washington State Community, Trade and Economic Development office, and representatives from the local tech companies Formotus, McObject, Mobile Semiconductor, RealNetworks, and Zoodango. The trip included stops in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, extensive meetings with dozens of companies and local government officials, and an excursion to the Great Wall—Myer’s first trip there, though he’s been to China several times.

Their experience struck me as useful stuff for anyone thinking globally about the impact of their company or organization, particularly in the mobile sector. So, here are Myer’s top five take-aways after observing the China mobile market up close:

1. It’s even bigger than you think. With more than 700 million handsets out there (100 million were sold in the first half of this year alone), the Chinese market size is truly impressive. “Embedded software around improving performance or cost of a device is an early adopter opportunity,” Myer says.

2. Mobile behaviors of consumers are very different compared with the U.S. Hardly anyone leaves a voice message, there’s lots of texting, and much less use of data applications—the mobile market is something like 90 percent voice and 10 percent data (versus 69 percent voice and 31 percent data in the U.S.), according to Myer.

3. Think regionally. Domestic growth is key to the Chinese mobile industry. And a lot of that growth is in rural areas, where there are cheap “mountain plans” for wireless service. “There’s no single application for all of the country,” says Myer. “Pick a province, and focus on one arm of a carrier that’s amenable to working with you.”

4. Mobile business applications are in early days. “It’s a good time to get in,” says Myer, though there are long sales cycles and adoption times at this point. And mobile gaming is even further behind.

5. As for intellectual property, go in with your eyes wide open. Keep in mind Web services are probably easier to protect than a technology that involves a disk or file that can be copied.

Myer also stressed the importance of building personal and business relationships. Each day on the trip was filled with formal business meetings, followed by a lavish banquet. (Myer cited steamed fish, seafood, and duck as his favorite dishes.) “Meals are really where the relationship is established. You talk to people one-on-one, and you cement the personal relationship…It’s important to think of these efforts as long-term,” he says. At the same time, “we want to get business and revenues flowing for our members.” To that end, Myer says he plans to return to China early next year, in part to visit more companies and formalize a trade cooperation agreement with Chinese officials.

Lastly, Myer had an unrelated (and much more Washington-centric) public service announcement: Get your applications in this week for the annual Industry Achievement Awards, which will be given out at the WTIA’s 25th anniversary bash on the evening of March 25, 2009, at the Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle. The deadline for all entries is this Friday, November 21. The award categories include technology innovator of the year, consumer product or service of the year, and a new one, breakthrough startup of the year.

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“Language lessons,” says the Korean sportscaster in his Howard Cosell voice at the end of Better Off Dead. It’s what allowed Lane Meyer (played by John Cusack) to ski the K-12 on one ski, and 23 years later, it’s still the key to building relationships in global business. So when we heard on Friday that Livemocha, a Bellevue, WA-based online language-learning startup, had won the NWSource People’s Picks 2008 award for “favorite startup,” we were eager to find out more.

Livemocha beat out 10 other fellow finalists including AdaQuest, Evri, and Xconomy (yes, really—we have no idea who voted for us, but thank you). Last year’s winner was Zillow, so Livemocha is in good company. The NWSource writeup cites Livemocha’s “model of diversity, with employees from India, China, Japan, Iran and the Ukraine, to name a few,” and its “very robust Ping-Pong culture.” Evri, for its part, has a Ping-Pong table, but not a Ping-Pong culture, according to one employee. Here at Xconomy, we have none of the above, but we’re working on it.

But seriously, Livemocha has been steadily building its Web 2.0 e-learning service, which lets users around the world chat in their native language online and by video with people who want to learn foreign-language skills. The year-old startup, led by co-founder and CEO Shirish Nadkarni, has garnered lots of media attention and surpassed one million registered members in September. Last January, Nadkarni announced Livemocha had closed a $6 million venture round led by Seattle-based Maveron. (By coincidence, another investor is Sunny Gupta, whose new company Apptio we profiled today.) It all sounds like a perfect application for social networks, as long as the user interface is fun, reliable, and easy to use.

No word yet on whether I can find someone to teach me that Howard Cosell accent, but there are at least 11 major languages on offer…

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Updated Nov. 5 with comments from senior vice president Rick Rashid (see below): You did good, Bill Gates. When you decided to build a new computer-science research lab in Beijing in 1998, you probably saw it as a relatively low-risk venture with a high upside. It would be challenging and take a lot of work on the ground, sure, but Microsoft would benefit from tapping top researchers in China and giving back to the local computer-science community, thereby earning good will in a country with huge market potential. From most appearances, the bet has paid off.

Microsoft Research Asia, which turns 10 years old today, is the largest of the company’s research labs outside of Redmond. (The others are located in Silicon Valley; Cambridge, England; Bangalore, India; and the newest one in Cambridge, MA.) It has about 350 full-time researchers and engineers, has employed 2,500 student interns, and has published some 3,000 papers in technical journals and conferences. More than 250 technologies from the lab have apparently been transferred into Microsoft products, including Office, Windows, Xbox, and MSN. Microsoft Research founder Nathan Myhrvold and senior vice president of research Rick Rashid played key roles in establishing the Chinese lab. (You can read more about its rise, and its impact on Microsoft, China, and information technology, in this book by a couple of Xconomy authors.)

This week is about celebrating with the community in Beijing—and getting work done at the same time. The Microsoft festivities include a faculty summit involving hundreds of visiting professors and administrators from the Asia-Pacific region, a technical advisory board meeting, and several lab-hosted banquet dinners. Gates himself won’t be there, but he visited in August during the Olympics. Among the Redmond returnees is Harry Shum, Microsoft’s vice president for search product development, who was the previous head of the Beijing lab. Ya-Qin Zhang, the lab director before him, is now a vice president in charge of Microsoft’s R&D and sales in China. (Microsoft now employs some 5,000 people in China.) I’m guessing the only member of the lab’s founding team who won’t be there is Kai-Fu Lee, who now heads up Google Greater China, after a high-profile split with Microsoft in 2005.

Rashid sent an e-mail to the lab and to the company’s top brass, including Gates and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer: “I could not be more proud of what has been accomplished. Today was a great milestone for MSR Asia and for Microsoft Research.”

Reached by e-mail yesterday, the Beijing lab’s current managing director, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, said he was “completely occupied” with the week’s events. Hon is a former Apple employee who started working for Microsoft in Redmond on speech and user interfaces in 1995. Born and raised in China, he helped launch the Beijing lab and did a fair bit of recruiting in the early days. Hon moved to Beijing in 2004 to join the lab as assistant managing director, and also headed the lab’s Search Technology Center.

Microsoft’s foreign research labs have always been about finding the best talent around the world, and the Beijing lab has been a pretty striking example of this strategy. “There’s no doubt China produces a lot of engineers, but 10 years ago, no one knew what their quality was, particularly when we talk about people who can do world-class research,” said Hon in a recent interview with a Microsoft press officer. “We proved we could find that top talent and give them an environment in which to succeed.”

The Beijing lab’s main technical areas have evolved somewhat over the years. The researchers now focus on user interfaces, multimedia, data-centric computing (with a recent emphasis on cloud computing), search and ads, and fundamentals like theory, systems, and networking. It will be interesting to see how the lab contributes to the company’s recent initiatives in Web-based software, services, and advertising, and in mobile software. Looking ahead, how does Hon want people to view the Beijing lab—and Microsoft as a whole? “I want them to continue to think of Microsoft as an innovator,” Hon said in the interview. “We have very fierce competition from high-tech companies and people generating new technologies. We cannot sit still.”

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This morning, I stopped by the panel on venture capital in cleantech, at the Renewable Energy Finance Forum-West conference at the Grand Hyatt in downtown Seattle. It was moderated by Nancy Floyd of Nth Power and Michael Butler of Seattle-based Cascadia Capital (who’s an Xconomist). The panelists were Raj Atluru of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Anup Jacob of Virgin Green Fund, and Brad Zenger of Pivotal Investments.

The panelists were optimistic, but also grounded in reality. They touched on their investment strategy, how they position themselves against the cleantech-deal competition, and their favorite areas of investments. Here are my quick Top 10 takeaways from the session:

10. Record investment levels in energy. New records were set in the third quarter for investment in cleantech, with $2.6 billion invested globally, $1.8 billion of that in North America, according to Butler of Cascadia Capital.

9. Cleantech isn’t a sector. It’s many different sectors with very different markets. To name just a few: solar, wind, geothermal, other renewables, biofuels, energy efficiency, green buildings, smart grid, waste, recycling, water.

8. Solar is king. The king is dead. Long live the king. Solar energy has been receiving more than 40 percent of cleantech investments. Yet none of the panelists talked about solar as being their most exciting plays. “We’ve placed our bets in solar already,” said Atluru of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “You’re going to see solar drop off. People are moving into other categories.” Yet there are clearly still opportunities, as production costs are falling, said Zenger of Pivotal Investments.

7. Biofuels 2.0 is “emerging from the ashes,” said Butler. After the high-profile problems of Seattle-based Imperium Renewables, next-generation biofuels are starting to come on, though the panelists expressed caution because of the high fixed costs needed to build refineries and other infrastructure.

6. Smart grid is getting a lot of attention from info-tech investors, in part because it’s capital-efficient. Waste, water, and recycling aren’t getting as much investment as they deserve, but that may change given the enormous market opportunities worldwide.

5. Because of the downturn, investors are much more cautious about cleantech and other technologies. “We have to sacrifice growth to get to cash flow,” said Jacob of Virgin Green Fund. “We’re only doing deals with revenues and cash flows. We’re very focused on market risk.” Larger energy projects, ones that swing for the fences, may suffer for the next couple years, said Atluru. Also, he said, time horizons for exits have increased to 7-9 years, up from 5-7 years not too long ago.

4. It’s a time of great opportunity. “The needle has moved from optimism to skepticism in cleantech. We’re looking for big winners… and not shying away from failure,” said Atluru. “We expect to see 30 percent [of our companies] not make it. If they all succeed, we’re not taking enough risk.” Zenger, of Pivotal Investments, added, “This is a great time to work with customers. A new company carries its own oxygen and doesn’t depend on the greater markets.”

3. Declining oil and natural gas prices may lead to less investment in certain energy technologies like waste gasification and wind power.

2. Entrepreneurship in the U.S. and around the world is very strong. The energy sector “has globalized really, really quickly,” said Atluru. “The enthusiasm of entrepreneurs in this sector is an order of magnitude higher than any other sector. We’re seeing entrepreneurs who have done it in other sectors, and they’re not going back.” And the panelists agreed that entrepreneurs are ahead of investors when it comes to dealing with the economic downturn.

1. A final thought to the audience. “Don’t give up,” said Zenger. “This is the time to invest in the next cycle.”

[The filing of this story was delayed by a drained laptop battery and lack of power outlets. I'm sure there's a renewable energy lesson in there somewhere---Eds.]

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It’s 10:15 pm, and Patrick Ennis is in a taxi bound for the airport in Delhi, India. He’s getting ready for a 1:00 am flight to Beijing. The streets of India are legendary for displaying 2,000 years of transportation history in one place—animals, pedestrians, carts, bikes, cars, buses, trucks—and it sounds like tonight is no different. “I learned to drive in New York, but this is much harder,” says Ennis. Though it’s late at night, he adds, “It’s still 10 times as much traffic as Seattle.”

Ennis is the global head of technology for Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm focused on invention. He joined about six months ago; before that, he was a managing director at Seattle-based Arch Venture Partners, where he funded and built technology startups, many coming out of universities and national labs. And before that, he held senior positions in technology and business at Lucent Technologies, AT&T, and Bell Labs. He did his Ph.D. in physics at Yale, and did scientific research for about eight years before joining Bell Labs.

As we reported last week, Ennis is currently part of a high-powered traveling team that includes Intellectual Ventures co-founders Nathan Myhrvold and Edward Jung. They are on a three-week, five-country tour of Asia to meet with the local communities and launch new offices there. I hope to sit down with Ennis for a more comprehensive discussion after he returns, but in the meantime here are some thoughts he provided by phone—through a dicey wireless connection in Delhi. He touched on some details from the tour, his impressions of the various Asian cities (including the food), and how the VC industry compares with the invention industry.

Ennis said he’d been in Tokyo, Singapore, and Delhi so far, spending three to four days in each city. Next up: Beijing and Seoul. “We’re in the middle of our tour,” he says. “It’s going very well. Our focus on invention is being well-received here, it’s truly a global world now.” Ennis says that in each city, they’ve been putting on events where they have a reception and invite local inventors, university professors, and administrators of research institutions. They’ve also been meeting with local university officials privately. “We have an inventor network we’re building in Asia…We want to get to know the whole ecosystem…and we do presentations. It’s like in Silicon Valley, you invite people who are interested in what you’re doing, to mingle and network.”

Ennis is no stranger to Asia. In the mid-to-late ’90s, he worked in optical networking and sold a lot of products to Asian national carriers like Korea Telecom. And when he was at Arch Venture Partners, several of the firm’s portfolio companies had partners in Asia. So Ennis has worked in places like Taipei, Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore. “A trend you see more is VCs, even if they don’t have formal offices or deals in Asia, spend more time there,” he says.

He didn’t give details of his meetings this week, but he provided some general impressions. “Asia is so dynamic in terms of growth, innovation, and optimism,” Ennis says. “The energy here is palpable, it’s similar to the energy that exists in places like Seattle and Silicon Valley, both in the technology …Next Page »

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Things are really heating up in the casual games business. Today, Hong Kong-based Infinity Equity announced it has invested $20 million in Oberon Media, a major developer of casual games and gaming platforms. Oberon is based in New York, but has a publishing office in Seattle called I-Play. The news comes on the heels of last month’s $83 million financing of Seattle-based Big Fish Games (which was led by U.K.-based Balderton Capital), which seems to reinforce the strength and global reach of the Seattle-area gaming cluster.

Oberon is known for building gaming platforms, including billing and advertising tools, as well as publishing and distributing casual games across various online, mobile, and interactive TV platforms. Oberon acquired I-Play in 2007, which led Oberon to merge its Seattle-based game studio (Oberon Games) into the I-Play publishing division. Earlier this year, local gaming guru Don Ryan, who oversaw Oberon’s Seattle office, moved to New York and was promoted to chief operating officer.

Now it appears Oberon is making a play for China’s exploding casual-gaming market, which currently stands at 50 million users and $2 billion in annual sales, according to Infinity Equity. It will be interesting to see whether the company’s Seattle office plays a role in building relationships overseas. “Expanding our business into China is an important part of Oberon Media’s global strategy,” said Tal Kerret, chairman of Oberon, in a statement. “This new partnership will serve as an asset for extending our pursuits there and establishing an Oberon Media presence on the ground.”

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When I visited Nathan Myhrvold in the summertime, he lamented that he wasn’t able to attend the Olympics in Beijing (though he did provide some insight into the physics of ping-pong matches). But this week and next, Myhrvold is taking a grander tour of Asia, as his Bellevue, WA-based invention company, Intellectual Ventures, opens a series of new offices in the region. It is the firm’s first major foray into the global market, with the goal being to amplify its focus on investing in technological invention as a key commodity and driver of innovation.

To that end, Myhrvold (an Xconomist) and Edward Jung, the founders of Intellectual Ventures, are in the midst of hosting office launches and events this month in five Asian countries. The company’s new regional headquarters is in Singapore, with additional offices located in Tokyo, Japan; Bangalore, India; Beijing, China; and Seoul, South Korea. Each office will be staffed by roughly seven to 10 people. “I am struck by the gap between Asia’s collective, innovative talent and the lack of resources for Asia’s greatest inventors. IV is working to fill this gap,” said Jung in a statement.

So what exactly will Intellectual Ventures be doing there? As Myhrvold told me previously, “Most inventing organizations like universities and nonprofits have a tech transfer office or a technology licensing office. Most institutions in Asia don’t.” Intellectual Ventures, he said, wants to “be an outsourced tech transfer agent for inventing institutions that don’t have one. We can provide the same functionality that you’d get from a technology licensing office. We evaluate ideas, we pay for them to be patented, we provide a little bit of funding for them, and then we license them. There’s no reason that smart people in Asia shouldn’t be able to get the same traction that Stanford provides.”

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My last memory of Andrew Chien might be wrestling with him on the living room floor circa 1981. Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, his family and mine were friends. Chien grew up to be a professor of computer science at his hometown University of Illinois, then a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and now a vice president and director of research at Intel. Our meeting yesterday, at the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, was much more civilized than our last encounter (when I was about 10 and he was a teenager).

Besides his expertise in distributed computing and corporate research, Chien is interesting to Xconomy because of his connections to various innovation communities, on the West Coast and elsewhere. He has lived in San Diego for the past 10 years or so, but his Intel office is in Hillsboro, OR, and he also spends a fair bit of time at corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. “Intel is very distributed,” he says. “I have global responsibilities, including in China and India.” When we talked, he was getting ready for a business trip to Taiwan.

From his global perspective, Chien has some keen insights into East Coast and West Coast innovation. “The Boston community was built on the backs of Route 128 defense contractors, which gave birth to the Digitals of the world, and then biotechs came out of universities,” he says. San Diego has some similarities to that model, Chien points out. “I’m amazed by Qualcomm and the wirelesss diaspora that came out of it. Qualcomm came out of the defense industry—Route 15 companies, which were heavily defense contractors—and there’s materials and radio expertise which is quite different from what you see in Silicon Valley.”

“The other interesting thing in San Diego,” he continues, “is there’s been really interesting crossover between information theory and communications, with life sciences. All that [information theory] methodology is spilling into the bio space…Bioinformatics really started at the level of blueprints. Then it moved rapidly to gene regulation, control loops, and systems. Those systems don’t operate in the traditional way that systems operate in electrical or mechanical engineering, because they’re statistical. Bringing those [mathematical] techniques to bear on biological systems to understand how they work, that synergy is powerful…The number of information theorists per capita in San Diego is high.”

I asked Chien what Intel Research is doing in the field, and he mentioned nucleic acid sequencing (e.g., DNA and RNA). “It’s all in the broad vein of the ‘X-dollar genome,’ which is getting cheaper and cheaper. Most techniques today, like 23andMe and Affymetrix, are based on optical sensing,” he says. “For Intel, optical is interesting, but it’s not the sweet spot for our interest…The grand dream is, can you move to a basis of electrical sensing.” If so, he says, you could do a huge amount of scaling up that’s possible because of the infrastructure built up around silicon chips. “The very broad vision of where this goes is not for medical or scientific research, but for sequencing as broad-based sensing—for instance, environmental sensing [e.g., food or water testing for safety] at low cost. It’s a long-range research effort.”

On that note, I asked Chien about his broader vision for Intel Research. “We call it ‘Essential Computing,’” he says. “About two and a half years ago, when I started at Intel, we took a hard look at where computing is going. The big change is that computing is moving from work-oriented tasks to social and communication-oriented applications, including health and well-being.” Essential computing, as Chien explains, will “simplify and enrich our lives.”

The effort rests on two main pillars or technological thrusts, he says. The first is “new functionality” that will allow computing devices to sense and be aware of everything from your emotional state to who your friends are. To some extent, that’s happening already. The second pillar is motivated by what Chien calls “the dirty secret of the IT industry—our technology is hard to use. It often lets us down. We need to make technology something you’d depend on” for sensitive communications with people important to you, he says. In the end, it’s about making computing devices simpler and easier to use. “It’s like your wristwatch,” Chien says. “It’s got to become that integrated and that reliable.”

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Sometimes you just have to write the story even when you don’t know all the details yet. This is one of those times. This is the story of H-Farm, an Italian design and investment firm, coming to America.

But it’s only Part One of the story—a preview, really. That’s because it won’t be until next month that I sit down with Riccardo Donadon, the founder of H-Farm, when he visits Seattle. In the meantime, my Italian isn’t what it used to be, so I can’t just call up the company and start asking questions (OK, I never could). So in case I missed something, please do comment or let me know.

The story begins in 2005, when Donadon founded H-Farm as the first private Italian incubator of startups. Before that, he was an Internet entrepreneur, having created the online shopping site Mall Italy Lab (sold to Infostrada in 1999) and E-Tree (sold to Etnoteam Group in 2001). He started H-Farm in the scenic countryside of Cà Tron, near Venice and his hometown of Treviso. The company’s second principal, Maurizio Rossi, joined as an investor. Rossi came from the fashion and design industry, having worked for LVMH and sports-brand marketing firm Vista Point.

It’s an intriguing combination of design and technology expertise—and it shows in the eight or so companies that have been incubated by H-Farm so far. The group includes H-art, an interactive media company that does design for high-end brands like Gucci and Armani, and Zooppa, a user-generated advertising firm. H-Farm’s portfolio also has startups in mobile, graphics, consumer Internet, and retail—including social-shopping site Wishpot, based in Seattle and profiled here last week.

Which brings us to an even bigger Seattle connection. It turns out H-Farm isn’t just an incubator. “Using design thinking,” the company’s website says, “H-Farm is going to develop a worldwide interconnected network of innovative technology and new media start-ups.” In other words, besides spinning off companies, H-Farm seems to want to help its U.S. startups gain a foothold in the European market, while also introducing its broader portfolio to U.S. customers—and that requires setting up an office here.

Last month, H-Farm started renting office space near Seattle’s Pioneer Square—sharing it with Wishpot and another startup in stealth mode. It is H-Farm’s only office in the U.S., and the company plans to make it the major center of operations outside of Italy. H-Farm’s website says, “This operation will endow it with the possibility of significant growth on the other side of the Atlantic as well as the chance to increase its projects and activities.” Why Seattle? Max Ciccotosto, Wishpot’s co-founder, says, “They’d looked in the Bay Area, but they really got feedback that Seattle was the right market for them.”

To me, the West Coast makes sense for H-Farm’s expertise, and I suspect the choice of Seattle boiled down to personal and business relationships in the area. Ciccotosto, a native of Italy, says he originally met H-Farm last year through one of his investors, Rob Monster of Monster Venture Partners. “Rob said, ‘There’s a guy [from H-Farm] coming from Venice, can you meet him?’” It turned out Ciccotosto was going to a fashion-industry party hosted by Nordstrom’s that night, so he relayed the message to the H-Farm visitor, a senior employee named Marco Janeczek (who was born in Poland but raised in Italy). Evidently, the cocktails and fashion models were a hit—and pretty soon Ciccotosto was on his way to securing a Series A investment from H-Farm. The Italian firm has also gained several advisors around town, so it’s a well-connected operation.

I’ll be getting the scoop on H-Farm’s local strategy from Donadon soon. In the meantime, it doesn’t look like the firm is soliciting wide-ranging funding proposals from early-stage startups, à la incubators like Founder’s Co-op or Y Combinator, which we’ve been covering at Xconomy. So its role in the local innovation community is less clear at this point, but its outside perspective could be valuable. “These guys come with heavy global expertise,” says Ciccotosto.

H-Farm is accepting proposals through the end of September in a very specific area: new applications for the Apple iPhone. The company says it has received more than 100 proposals so far, and will invest $250,000 in the winner(s). It also says it will make a new call for proposals in October, in an area yet to be announced, so stay tuned.

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