A lot has happened in the technology world in the past year. So let’s take a minute to reflect on the defining moments of 2011 and where we stand now, as a local tech community with increasingly global impact.

This is by no means comprehensive, or even a summary of the most important stories of the year. It’s just a select few of the biggest highlights and lowlights, organized in spaghetti western fashion (cliché alert).

The Good: Oracle Buys Endeca

Some might argue this wasn’t necessarily “good” for the local tech scene, but Oracle’s $1B+ purchase of Cambridge, MA-based Endeca, the enterprise search and business intelligence firm, was one of the biggest deals of the year, and was kept under wraps pretty well. It will be interesting to watch whether Endeca’s technology and talent give Oracle a leg up in its competition with IBM, SAP, Microsoft, and Google. Endeca, which started in 1999, stands as a testament to the notion that billion-dollar tech companies can be built—and are being built—in Massachusetts. (See Acme Packet, Progress Software, Wayfair, and others on their way.)

Honorable mention: Carbonite, TripAdvisor, and Zipcar each went public with successful IPOs in 2011. That’s three more publicly traded tech companies in Boston that seem to be thriving in a tough market. Who will join them in 2012?

The Bad: RSA Gets Hacked

No one would argue this isn’t bad—and not just for local companies. In March, RSA Security reported a data breach involving its authentication products, which are widely used by big companies and government agencies. The Bedford, MA-based division of data storage giant EMC said it had … Next Page »

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I’m fond of saying that what Detroit needs is a Cory Booker. But I need to amend that: What Detroit really needs is a few more people like Ida Byrd-Hill, the founder of Uplift Inc., a startup whose motto is “Utilizing intellectual property, real estate, and technology to lift people out of tragedy by reconstructing cities one idea at a time.”

Byrd-Hill is an indomitable mother of two with an obvious passion for Detroit and its children. She says things like: “I don’t take up a cause lightly, and I don’t take it up to lose.”

“I will grind up a superintendent like it’s nothing.”

“If I have to pass laws to force you to do your job, then that’s what I’ll do.”

She doesn’t tolerate mediocrity or excuses, especially when it pertains to her kids. Byrd-Hill spent years traveling the globe as a financial advisor and corporate headhunter before giving birth to her twins, who are now in their first year of college.

She began advocating for the children of Detroit after her kids started school and she learned firsthand how dysfunctional the Detroit Public School (DPS) system can be. There’s no doubt she’s made more than one teacher who hoped to coast through the school year with the same old insufficient lesson plan quake in his boots.

One day when her son was younger, she asked him how his class experiments were going. “What experiments?” he replied. She fired off an email to the teacher asking for a list of the experiments he planned to have the students do during the school year. She received a “flip” response.

Her blood boiling—her children are her legacy after all, just like they’re Detroit’s legacy—she drove over to Grosse Pointe, a tony suburb east of the city, walked into a school, and asked if she could have a list of experiments being taught to students in the same grade as her son. They emailed her the requested information a few hours later. Experiencing the stark contrast in service kicked off “a long battle” between Byrd-Hill and DPS in which she demanded that school officials be held accountable for what goes on in Detroit schools, which has an abysmal estimated … Next Page »

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A comprehensive snapshot of San Diego’s innovation economy shows that 76 technology startups were formed during the three months that ended June 30, a nearly 20 percent increase over the 64 startups established during the same quarter last year.

Counting the 70 new tech companies formed during the first quarter, a total of 146 startups sprouted here during the first half of 2011, according to the latest Connect Innovation Report, which covers innovation activity in the San Diego area during the second quarter of 2011. The full report is available here.

Connect’s innovation report also highlights rising tech employment, a three-fold increase in the total value of M&A deals involving tech companies, and a historic high for patent applications. The report was prepared by Connect, the nonprofit group supporting San Diego innovation and entrepreneurship.

Taken as a whole, the indicators suggest that economic activity was improving for thousands of local life sciences, technology, and defense companies during the first half of 2011. For example, the 146 new companies founded during the first six months of 2011 marked a nearly 48 percent jump over the 99 new companies formed during the first half of 2010.

But the encouraging vital signs measured in the report were taken before this summer, when U.S. markets were unsettled by a variety of political and economic setbacks, both foreign and domestic.

Those broader economic concerns could have been a factor in a nationwide survey of CEO confidence conducted during the third quarter by Vistage International. The survey, which Connect included in its full report, found that small-business CEOs anticipate a slowdown in the pace of economic growth amid record-high economic uncertainty. Generally speaking, that means small companies are more cautious about making investments and slower to hire new workers. The September survey of 1,710 small business CEOs resulted in … Next Page »

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Professional athletes marketing their mugs in endorsements is nothing new. But the explosion of digital goods and micro-entrepreneurs has opened up a ton of new ways for sports stars to make their mark, such as the mobile apps and games from the likes of Chad Ochocinco and Mike Tyson.

Seattle startup Playmark is hoping to be a broker for even more innovation in the sector by setting up an easy-to-use online marketplace for licensing rights. The startup’s first major licensing partner is a big one: the NFL Players Association, which is also a strategic investor in the company.

“We think it’s a really tough thing to crack, and we feel we have arrived maybe at a way to crack the code by partnering with the Players Association,” says Playmark co-founder and CEO George Aposporos, a former early VP of business development at Amazon.com.

What makes the sports-licensing game so tough, Aposporos explains, are all the overlapping rights held by different entities over different parts of the overall sports experience. Playmark’s deal with the players’ union, for example, allows it to license the name, number, likeness, and autograph of some 2,000 NFL players. The rights to the games themselves are held by the league, and the individual owners control all the assets associated with their teams.

Playmark says it can help make navigating that thicket seamless for entrepreneurs who want to make sports-related products. The company wants to add leagues, teams, and other sports as time goes on—and its technology can sort out all of the various rights-holders on the back end, figuring out each rights-holder’s share of any given collection of material.

The players’ union also continues to have the final say on uses of its member’s likenesses. Playmark’s guidelines lay out some of the cases that are unlikely to be approved, such as “demeaning portrayal of athletes,” “distasteful humor and language,” or “adult content and illegal gambling.” Interestingly, the union also apparently only wants games that pit a user against one athlete, not multiple players at once.

“Maybe it’s my Amazon days, but one of my favorite quotations is ‘Making something easy is hard,’” Aposporos says. “You have to democratize access across different kinds of situations and essentially unify a lot of fragmentation.”

One early example of a licensing customer is ESPN’s Sports Bar Facebook game. That game already had some licensing rights, Aposporos says, but Playmark’s broader access to the players allowed ESPN’s game to offer even more digital goods. “Now, they’re adding autograph graphics from our system to build customizable social jerseys within the game,” he says.

Another interesting case involves Electronic Arts games, which owns the Madden NFL video game franchise. Part of making that game inclues digital 3D head scans of all the players—but that asset was locked up for use in the game until now. With Playmark brokering the rights, those head scans could be used in any number of applications, including physical goods like bobblehead dolls, for instance.

The market for licensed sports merchandise is huge—Aposporos says some estimates show it at around $18 billion worldwide. At those levels, “even a high single-digit share would be not insignificant,” he says.

It’s certainly a forward-looking deal for the players’ union to cut. But they surely understand better than anyone how short-lived a pro career can be, no matter how big those paychecks look at the time. “Our players can’t wait to see what today’s creative designers and developers can dream up,” said Keith Gordon, president of the union’s for-profit licensing arm.

Playmark currently has nine people on its team and is backed by angels from the Seattle area and beyond, along with the NFL players’ union investment, Aposporos says.

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Intellectual Ventures is stepping up its position in the mobile patent wars, suing Motorola Mobility in federal court today for allegedly infringing on a range of patents covering hardware and software.

Irony alert: Google, which is in the middle of acquiring Motorola Mobility for about $12.5 billion, has been listed in previous court filings as an investor in Intellectual Ventures, possibly through a licensing agreement. Motorola’s own patents were a major reason behind the acquisition—they were touted specifically by Google CEO Larry Page in this August blog post.

Patent expert and blogger Florian Mueller writes that, even though Google’s financial stake is in an IV subsidiary fund that’s not involved in the new Motorola suit, the development amounts to an “own goal” on Google’s part. (He’s also got some critical analysis of Google’s willingness to defend the Android ecosystem).

In a blog post announcing the lawsuit, Intellectual Ventures lawyer Melissa Finocchio writes that IV has “a responsibility to our current customers and our investors to defend our intellectual property rights against companies such as Motorola Mobility who use them without a license.”

“Our goal continues to be to provide companies with access to our portfolio through licensing and sales, but we will not tolerate ongoing infringement of our patents to the detriment of our current customers and our business,” Finocchio writes.

As Ina Fried at AllThingsD points out at the end of this post, this suit just adds to the long list of patent claims being tossed around between technology heavyweights, including Apple, Samsung, HTC, and Microsoft. One thing of note, however: I wouldn’t say this really constitutes Intellectual Ventures “joining” the mobile patent wars, since it already has publicly cut licensing deals with both Samsung and HTC, among others.

Intellectual Ventures was co-founded and is led by Nathan Myhrvold, the former CTO of Microsoft. The court filing says Intellectual Ventures has “a portfolio of more than 35,000 assets,” with more than 3,000 patents or applications the result of the firm’s in-house invention lab or its network of contract inventors.

Intellectual Ventures also reiterates that it has earned more than $2 billion so far from licensing patents, and has paid more than $400 million to “individual inventors.”

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It’s been a wild few months for companies peddling daily deals. As market leader Groupon faces criticism for its accounting and turmoil in its executive ranks, bigger competitors continue to expand or kill their efforts, while smaller fish get gobbled up in a spree of consolidation.

If that’s not enough churn, you can also add some pretty hefty lawsuit filings.

Over the past several months, the parent company of Seattle-based Tippr added defendants to a federal patent-infringement lawsuit, eventually targeting a total of 14 other daily deals companies. The roster of defendants included reasonably well-known players like BuyWithMe, DealOn, and HomeRun, along with a clutch of smaller companies like Click-N-Shout and Deal Co-Op—but not the biggest players, Groupon and LivingSocial.

The case file is crowded with claims, motions, accusations, and denials—the kind of paperwork warfare that can earn intellectual property lawyers a pretty good living. Some of the defendants struck back, countersuing Tippr’s parent company, Kashless.

But now, suddenly, the fight is over. As of Sept. 15, every last defendant has settled with Kashless or been dismissed—in fact, the federal judge signed seven of the dismissal orders on one day.

The idea of some IP lawsuits from Kashless/Tippr isn’t really shocking. Martin Tobias, the entrepreneur behind Tippr, has been pretty outspoken about his patent holdings and their usefulness as a lever in the current Wild West era of daily deals offerings.

When he acquired a trove of related patents from the former Paul Allen company Mercata in 2010, Tobias told us that he’d just picked up “the pocket aces of IP in group collective buying.” He later said that “Tippr has the most extensive and deep patent portfolio in group buying.” And when Tippr acquired Austin, TX-based FanForce, Tobias said the deal was driven by the fact that “They realized what they were doing was covered by my patents.”

The sheer scale of this lawsuit is pretty interesting, however. When we originally reported on the lawsuit (and a related local case) in February, the patent claims only targeted BuyWithMe and DealOn. Why such a flurry of lawsuits through the daily deals chain? Even though the cases are now all settled, I couldn’t get any of the other companies involved to comment on the record (some were not even reachable).

Via email, Tobias confirms that his company “reached agreement” with all the defendants. Asked if that meant Tippr/Kashless had cut patent licensing deals with them, Tobias says, “I don’t want to say licensing agreements. The correct term is ‘settlement agreements.’ We are not disclosing the details of any of the settlement agreements. Tippr is extremely happy with the outcome of these settlement agreements.”

In my spelunking of the court files, I found just one reference to a licensing agreement (I could have missed something, since there are nearly 190 separate filings). It’s in this proposed dismissal motion, which says Kashless and Demand Chain (parent of Homerun) have “a settlement and license agreement … executed July 26, 2011, the terms of which shall remain confidential.”

One source with knowledge of the lawsuit, who insisted on anonymity, said Kashless had been trying to get many defendants to sign a licensing agreement to settle the cases—one that would take 4 percent of gross revenues. “That’s like the profit margin in this business,” the source said.

“But they probably got someone to. That’s what they were trying to pressure everyone into,” the source said. “A lot of these guys that he had on there were pretty small … People are going out of business like crazy.”

That’s not to say there’s no money left in the sector. Two days before the final Tippr/Kashless settlements were signed, research firm BIA/Kelsey bumped up its growth forecast for daily deals, instant deals, and flash sales, saying the market “will grow from $873 million in 2010 to $4.2 billion in 2015.”

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A U.S. District Court judge ruled in favor of New York-based Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) in a patent-infringement case brought by Israel’s generic drug giant Teva (NASDAQ: TEVA) over impotence blockbuster sildenafil (Viagra), according to a press release. Teva had been trying to invalidate Pfizer’s patent so it could market a generic version of the drug, but the ruling upholds Pfizer’s patent protection until 2019. Sildenafil is one of Pfizer’s biggest hits, bringing in $1.9 billion in sales in 2010.

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Cooley, the national law firm that serves tech, cleantech, and biotech companies, said today that three new attorneys have joined its Seattle office as partners in its intellectual property practice. Bill Christiansen, Emily Wagner, and Carol Laherty moved over to Cooley from Seed IP, where they represented many of the West Coast’s leading biotech companies.

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David Cole, the former chairman of the Center for Automotive Research, recently announced his new role as co-founder and chairman of AutoHarvest, a nonprofit website that aims to connect the auto industry with the local entrepreneurial ecosystem in order to market and commercialize intellectual property.

Once connected, members can build personal and company profiles; participate as a buyer, seller, or collaborator; showcase intellectual property and technology to other users; communicate through virtual think tanks; and form ventures and potential licensing deals with entrepreneurs and established companies.

AutoHarvest has already amassed a list of notable supporters and funders, including the Big Three automakers, Covisint, Delphi, TARDEC, Visteon, 3M, major Michigan universities, business incubators, and state and local economic development entities.

AutoHarvest’s website is still in the late stages of development in the Ann Arbor and Detroit markets, but it plans to launch globally next year.

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At first glance, the nondescript office park at 800 Republic Drive in Allen Park, MI, is notable only for being situated next to the Detroit Lions’ practice facility. That’s set to change on Nov. 18, when the building will be transformed into TechShop Detroit, a joint project between Ford and TechShop, the DIY communal fabrication studio where everyone from garage-workshop tinkerers to tech-savvy rocket scientists can come and create their own homegrown inventions.

Ford is the first automaker to work with Menlo Park, CA-based TechShop, which operates a network of membership-based workshops similar to health clubs, except instead of getting access to treadmills and barbells, members who pay $100 per month can get their hands on 3D printers, laser cutters, industrial-grade sewing and textile equipment, vehicle bays, and virtually every kind of tool and software you can imagine. And the Detroit outpost of TechShop will be the first one to be paired with a facility geared toward helping TechShop members commercialize their inventions.

Imagination, says Jim Newton, TechShop’s founder and chairman, is the entire impetus for the operation.

“All we care about is that you have an idea, and our staff will help you turn that idea into a real, live thing,” Newton said at a press event today. “Our mission is not that big—we just want to usher in the next Industrial Revolution.”

TechShop Detroit will also help fuel a vision that Ford Global Technologies, the domestic auto industry’s only internal intellectual property management and licensing group, hopes to bring to life—a first-of-its-kind intellectual property exchange and technology showroom where everyday inventors, industry insiders, universities and research labs can display and even license their automotive innovations and other ideas.

“The showroom idea can be considered TechShop Plus,” said Bill Coughlin, president and CEO of Ford Global Technologies. “It will be an open meeting place that will enable inventors to showcase what they create in TechShop and then negotiate, network, and even sell their idea to players in the automotive industry, from manufacturers and suppliers to research institutions and startups.”

The innovation exchange, which will be housed in the Republic Drive facility alongside TechShop, will be managed by the Detroit-based AutoHarvest Foundation, a new nonprofit organization set up by auto executives to help connect the … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based patent licensing and invention firm, has responded on its blog to a recent report by the influential public radio program “This American Life” that delved into the controversy around intellectual property rights—and specifically, the accusation that IV is a massive “patent troll” that uses its trove of intellectual property to extract money rather than adding anything constructive to the world.

It’s a very thoroughly reported take on this overall story, which is not a new one to the tech community, but will definitely have legs because of its detail, cast of characters, bombastic accusations, and secretive legal arrangements.

First, there’s no question that IV is a massive “non-practicing entity” for a lot of the patents it holds. It’s not making flash memory or mobile backup software, but holds intellectual property for those kinds of products and makes money by licensing the patents to others. And quite a bit of money, too—co-founder Nathan Myhrvold has said IV’s more than 30,000 patents have brought in $2 billion in revenue, with some $700 million last year alone.

Being an “NPE” is, of course, a pretty classic definition of a patent troll. And the “This American Life” reporters do a really good job of talking to patent experts about the history of the American patent system, particularly in software, where you can often find patents that claim ownership of the most basic behaviors in the Internet age.

This point gets to the main conflict at hand: overbroad patent claims and demands for licensing money pitted against the democratic strain in coder culture that values showing your work and sharing knowledge.

Intellectual Ventures has been pretty consistent in how it responds to these kinds of allegations, saying that it’s doing something very different in the field by trying to create a more robust, efficient, liquid market for intellectual property. Where a few big tech firms and lots of patent lawyers once ruled, IV sees itself as establishing a new middleman class that can essentially move around patent rights like so many other commodities.

That’s the tone conveyed in IV’s blog response to the “This American Life” piece. Under the headline “Disruption Invites Controversy,” IV says some of the characterizations in the public radio piece veered into absurdity, and missed the theme that IV sees underlying its existence: the shift to a dramatically different market for patents.

“Many of the world’s leading technology companies are now beginning to recognize that patents are actually strategic assets that can be worth billions of dollars,” IV wrote. “This evolution in perspective is another crucial step toward an efficient market for inventions, and we are proud to have contributed to it.”

It was pretty easy to pinpoint the exact spot where IV got into real hot water with this particular report. The public radio reporters asked IV for an example of some inventor that the firm has helped, to buttress the company’s do-gooder claims. Intellectual Ventures offered up … Next Page »

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Busy day for a couple of well-known cleantech companies around Boston. One public company has signed a big deal in China, while the other, an ambitious upstart, is carefully protecting its intellectual property as it heads toward large-scale commercialization.

—A123 Systems (NASDAQ: AONE), the Waltham, MA-based maker of lithium ion batteries, said today it has won a contract with China’s Dongfang Electric, a large manufacturer of wind turbines and power equipment. A123 will provide an energy storage system for Dongfang’s manufacturing facility in Hangzhou by the end of this year. Financial terms weren’t given. If all goes well, this will be A123’s first storage system installed in China.

A report in CNET today has more context on the deal: A123’s battery bank will be attached to a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine and diesel generator to test how well the batteries can smooth out the dips in wind energy production. A123 has car battery manufacturing facilities in China, but no grid storage systems there yet, the report says.

—Joule Unlimited, the Cambridge, MA-based biofuels startup, said today it has been awarded a pair of U.S. patents that cover its method for producing ethanol at high volumes and high efficiencies. The method involves genetically engineering “photosynthetic bacteria”—microorganisms that convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into ethanol without fermenting sugars from cellulose or other types of biomass. The patents (#7,981,647 and #7,968,321), which were granted in the past month, cover various enzymatic mechanisms that Joule has engineered into cells to maximize their ethanol productivity.

Joule has received plenty of media attention since it started in 2007. The company is also applying its method to produce energy in the form of diesel fuel, which could power trucks and planes. Joule has previously been awarded patents in the area of diesel production. The overarching idea is to replace fossil fuels, but most biofuels makers have found “they can’t compete on a cost basis,” said Joule senior vice president Troy Campione, on a panel at our XSITE conference last month. Joule, of course, believes it is different.

The company has a pilot plant in Texas that has been producing ethanol and is slated to start producing diesel later this year. Joule says it has also signed a lease for land in New Mexico on which it is building a demonstration-scale plant that will begin operations next year.

While the new patents should help distance Joule from some of its competitors, they don’t necessarily get the company to commercialization any faster. George Church, the Harvard geneticist (and chairman of Joule’s technical advisory board), was quoted in the New York Times in March saying, “It’s not a totally obvious organism and they’ve changed it pretty radically, so it’s not clear they can protect everything by patents.”

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Private research organizations employ almost 31,000 people in San Diego County, more than the number of similar employees in any other California county, according to a new quarterly innovation report from Connect, the local non-profit group for technology and entrepreneurship.

Researchers teased that statistic from U.S. Department of Labor data for the third quarter of 2010, the most recent quarter available, according to Steve Hoey, a project leader at Connect who called the new finding “a testament to the strong R&D base we have in our region.” The report ranked Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County second, with almost 19,000 working at private research institutions. Los Angeles was third with more than 17,000.

Such findings in the report underscore how San Diego has become a hotbed for early stage technology and life sciences companies, despite a decline in the amount of venture capital invested here.

Entrepreneurs started 70 companies in San Diego during the first three months of this year— double the 35 startups formed during the same quarter of 2010, according to Connect’s First Quarter 2011 Innovation Report. The report also shows an uptick in tech sector employment, continuing strength in federal research funding, a sharp increase in patents issued to local inventors, and increasing mergers & acquisition activity. Venture capital investments in San Diego startups, however, continue to decline.

Here’s a breakdown of the report’s major indices:

—The 70 new startups founded in San Diego accounted for nearly 12 percent of the 597 technology and life sciences companies created throughout California during the first quarter. San Diego’s tech startups created more than 130 new jobs, nearly 8 percent of the 1,700 new jobs created by new startups statewide. Twenty-seven of San Diego’s new companies are developing software, an increase that was offset in the life sciences where only 11 new companies were formed. Another 17 were communications startups, with the rest focused on recreational goods, defense, computer, and environmental sectors.

—Communications equipment manufacturing, as usual, represented the largest employment sector of the local innovation economy, with almost 28,000 jobs. San Diego’s life sciences sector and software each accounted for 27,400 jobs, and defense … Next Page »

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Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based patent firm started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, is announcing a new two-way intellectual property deal with Boise, ID-based semiconductor maker Micron Technology (NASDAQ:MU).
Like many licensing deals we see from Intellectual Ventures, this one gives Micron access to IV’s portfolio of “more than 30,000″ patents. The second element of the deal is an ongoing arrangement for the firms to buy patents from each other.
In a joint release, the companies said their deal “helps Micron protect its core business so it can focus on innovation.” Financial terms were not disclosed.

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A chat with the nation’s first chief technology officer was one of the highlights of the past week in tech news. Aneesh Chopra, President Barack Obama’s CTO, is in town this week for a panel discussion at the Technology Alliance’s State of Technology luncheon. He had lunch with local corporate execs yesterday, and we published this interview that touched on just a couple of the administration’s main topics: Why innovation is primed to take off in healthcare, and how the new Startup America Partnership can help the private sector develop strong infrastructure for new companies.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech news from the past week or so:

—I profiled startup Pinpoint Pickup, a towncar-booking app that has bootstrapped its way to services in seven cities. This all comes as competitors like San Francisco-based Uber get tons of press and millions in investment, all without anything near the scope of expansion that Pinpoint has achieved.

—Xconomy’s Greg Huang checked in with Charles River Ventures about the firm’s stake in Intellectual Ventures, the intellectual property machine founded by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Charles River Ventures has put a whopping $300 million into Intellectual Ventures. Partner Izhar Armony says more investors would get into the developing market if they weren’t convinced that IP is “a dirty world controlled by lawyers.”

—Like just about everybody in the local startup scene, I swung by the Seattle 2.0 Awards. It was an interesting mix of celebration and navel-gazing (the good kind), punctuated by an energetic keynote speech from California VC Mark Suster—lots of F-bombs, a Public Enemy reference, and even a bit of aggressive crowd control. Also featured: Rampaging mascots.

—There were a couple of acquisitions to report, both on the same day. BuzzLabs, a member of Seattle’s burgeoning social media cluster, was snapped up by CityGrid Media, a unit of Barry Diller-headed IAC. BuzzLabs works on social media monitoring, helping other companies sort through the tons of things people are saying about them online. The other deal involved Seattle’s Smashing Ideas, a 15-year-old digital media and marketing company. It was acquired by Random House, the publishing unit of Bertlesmann AG. Terms were not disclosed for either deal.

—Finally, two bits of Xconomy news. We have a recharged Facebook page, to which we’re adding photos, stories, and all the other goodies you’d expect—with more to come. And it comes with a promise: No spam. We’re selecting three of our best stories throughout the day to push through Facebook, so we won’t clog up your feed with every last tidbit. We’ve also added more horsepower to our upcoming event, “Separating Hype from Reality in Alternative Fuels.” Kelly Ogilvie from Blue Marble Energy joins folks from Harvest Power, General Biodiesel and more as we sort through the opportunities for this industry in the years ahead.

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As examples of ultra-fast growth in the tech world, people like to talk about Groupon and Zynga. While they are phenomenal success stories, neither of those companies is publicly traded yet—nor, for that matter, are Twitter or Facebook. Well, how about a different kind of tech company that started in 2008 and held its IPO today?

That would be RPX, a San Francisco-based “defensive patent aggregation” company with Seattle roots, whose venture investors are in Boston, London, and the Bay Area. RPX filed for an initial public offering in January and says today it has raised $159.6 million in an offering underwritten by Goldman Sachs and Barclays Capital. The firm sold about 8.4 million shares at $19 per share, with trading to begin on the Nasdaq today. (Pricing above the anticipated range of $16-$18 was announced this morning.)

What’s remarkable is how fast a ride it has been for RPX (NASDAQ: RPXC) and its investors, which include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Charles River Ventures, and Index Ventures. The patent rights firm was co-founded just under three years ago by John Amster and Geoff Barker, both former execs at Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, the controversial invention and patent licensing company led by Nathan Myhrvold.

RPX’s approach is different from IV’s. As Amster told me last year, RPX focuses much more narrowly—on acquiring patents that its corporate customers pay for access to and can use for defensive purposes, to deter or beat back patent infringement lawsuits. Members pay a subscription fee—a fixed percentage of their operating budget, typically between tens of thousands and a few million dollars—to access the RPX portfolio. And RPX pledges not to sue anyone, unlike IV.

Here’s why RPX is so interesting financially. Its revenue tripled from about $33 million in 2009 to about $95 million in 2010. The firm has been profitable since 2009, with nearly $14 million in net income last year. What’s more, it has the potential for a billion-dollar market cap after its IPO. And its membership group has grown to 80-plus companies and now includes giants like Cisco, Google, Nokia, Samsung, Sony, Verizon, and Zynga.

It’s a simple proposition—to help companies lower their patent-litigation costs or avoid them altogether. And paying licensing or access fees seems to be getting more popular among … Next Page »

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Quick, which Boston- and San Francisco-area venture firm has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into the burgeoning—and controversial—market of intellectual property and patent protection over the past five years?

If you said Charles River Ventures, you are correct. In fact, CRV is the only big venture investor behind Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based firm known for its unique (and often criticized) approach to the business of invention. Charles River says that, together with its limited partners, it has poured some $300 million into the company since 2006.

That’s an astounding figure, and it shows that Charles River is betting on intellectual property in a huge way—perhaps more so than anything else in its portfolio. Besides Intellectual Ventures, the VC firm is also invested in RPX, a San Francisco-based defensive patent aggregation firm, which filed for an IPO in January and plans to go public today—more on that coming in a separate story. (Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures are also investors in RPX, which was co-founded by two former employees of Intellectual Ventures.) Yet most venture firms still treat the field of intellectual property as a bit of a scourge—or, at best, a fringe area—even though it has great ramifications for VCs and their startups. So why did CRV decide to take the plunge?

The story goes back to 2001, the year after Intellectual Ventures was formed, when Nathan Myhrvold, the company’s polymath, founder, and CEO (and Microsoft’s former chief technology officer), came to Boston and met with Izhar Armony, a partner at Charles River Ventures. After some intensive Myhrvold-speak—for example, “invention is the essence of innovation”—he drilled down to his main point. Venture firms, Myhrvold argued, spend almost all their money on things that are essentially commodities—engineers, business people, infrastructure for startups—but what’s actually unique, and arguably most valuable, is invention.

Many would disagree—people and execution are pretty essential to businesses, after all—but the seed was planted. “Nathan helped open my eyes to the notion that IP [intellectual property] is a very important market—it’s actually a very big market in tech,” Armony says. He adds that there’s a $50 billion-plus market in IP rights and licensing, versus a $6 billion litigation market based on legal fees.

So in 2003 he led CRV’s investment in Intellectual Ventures’ “invention science fund,” which aimed to create new inventions across a wide range of fields, in part by bringing together renowned scientists and inventors and brainstorming ideas in a structured way. Such “invention sessions” have led to major projects and spinouts such as TerraPower, the Bellevue, WA-based nuclear-reactor firm (in which CRV also became an investor). In total, CRV committed $39 million to the invention science fund, co-investing with the likes of Bill Gates and Microsoft.

But the really big business opportunity came along in 2006, when CRV and its limited partners decided to commit an additional $300 million—I’ll say it again, $300 million—to Intellectual Ventures’ … Next Page »

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As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

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There are two sides to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based “invention capital” company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. The revenue-generating side of the business is a stockpile of more than 30,000 patents, which Intellectual Ventures licenses and sells to other firms, including tech companies large and small looking to defend themselves in lawsuits. IV also isn’t shy about suing to defend its patent portfolio.

On the other hand—and in a different set of buildings, actually—is the invention lab. Tucked into nondescript space in outer Bellevue, the lab is stocked with a huge amount of equipment, from sophisticated laser arrays to really big band saws, sometimes purchased at fire-sale prices. This is the epicenter of the “make side” of Intellectual Ventures, which also includes a network of affiliated individual inventors who work on their own. That side of the business files about 500 patents per year on inventions that are cooked up in-house, not acquired from somewhere else.

You’ve probably heard of some of the biggest creations to emerge from the lab, including the TerraPower next-generation nuclear reactor, the “photonic fence” of lasers designed to keep malarial mosquitos at bay and “Modernist Cuisine,” a nearly 50-pound food-geek compendium that that is redefining the term “cookbook.”

But the lab staff also is working on plenty of projects you might not have heard of, including some interesting stuff in the arena of global health. Some of this work, no surprise, is being financed by Myhrvold’s old boss, Bill Gates.

On a recent visit to the workshop, I got a look at some of the interesting but under-the-radar things that the Intellectual Ventures crew is working on. Here’s a quick look, with details from Geoff Deane, the company’s VP of engineering and head of the lab:

—Malaria diagnosis. One of the problems in treating malaria in the developing world is finding an effective way to diagnose people.Today, blood tests might have to be strapped to the back of a motorcycle and driven 100 miles to the nearest health facility, making the economics of diagnosis not much better than the actual production of malaria drugs. So frequently, the path is just to medicate almost everyone, Deane says—and routine overuse of medication can eventually lead to drug-resistant strains.

The Intellectual Ventures team set out to build a quick, portable, durable screening system. There is a reliable marker in something called hemozoin, a blood byproduct that the malaria parasite excretes. So, the IV team set out to detect it, and wound up with a method that involved a complex-looking … Next Page »

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When you’re one of the richest people in the world, your autobiography gets the deluxe publicity rollout. Exhibit A is billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose new book, “Idea Man,” is about to hit the market.

The first excerpt, adapted in Vanity Fair, caused tons of headlines, mostly for its depiction of a heated fight with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer—Allen accused them of trying to dilute his stake in the company while he had cancer, just before he left day-to-day duties behind.

Now comes the follow-up interview with 60 Minutes, which teased the segment today with a small story and video on its website. The interview was conducted by Lesley Stahl.

Among the glimpses we’re seeing now: Allen says the book was motivated not by revenge, but a desire to air his side of some major events in business and technology. “I just felt like it’s an important piece of technology history, and I should tell it like it happened,” he said.

Asked whether he and Gates will eventually have a bit of a showdown over what’s in the book, Allen said: “I don’t know about screaming, but I’m sure it’ll be a heated discussion.”

He also talks fondly about Gates visiting him while Allen was sick a second time with cancer. This goes to an element of the Vanity Fair excerpt that I thought was missed by a lot of the first-day coverage: Despite any sour feelings about old fights, it’s clear that Allen has some still-glowing feelings for his old partner. Like any good relationship, it’s complicated.

“There’s a bond there that can’t be denied, and I think we both feel that,” Allen said.

CBS said Stahl also digs into Allen’s recent wide-ranging patent suit against an array of big tech companies, and reports that Allen found the negative reaction “surprising, because I invested a huge amount to develop these ideas.” (60 Minutes also apparently got to check out the Octopus.)

Allen will be giving a live interview in his hometown as well, later this month at Town Hall Seattle. GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, who has covered Microsoft for years dating back to the days of the printed Seattle P-I, will do the questioning.

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