A list of the most recent tech financings around Boston paints a pretty representative picture of what kinds of companies are getting built here (robotics, hardware, defense tech, custom goods via the Web). Consider:

—Billerica, MA-based Harvest Automation, a maker of agricultural robots, has raised $7.8 million in new funding led by Entree Capital. We first wrote about the company in 2008 when it was called Q Robotics. Since then, we’ve profiled Harvest here.

—Littleton, MA-based TeraDiode, a developer of high-powered lasers for defense and industrial applications, has closed $10 million in Series B financing led by Argonaut Ventures. I wrote about TeraDiode’s laser-weapon technology in July (yes, weapons). The company appointed a new CEO, Parviz Tayebati, in September.

—Cambridge, MA-based CustomMade.com said who its investors in its recent $2.1 million funding round are: Google Ventures and First Round Capital led the round, with a number of other firms and angel investors also participating. Earlier this fall, I wrote about CustomMade’s approach to online customization service.

That’s it for now, but there’s more financing news coming very shortly…

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Ah, the good old days of April. Spring was in the air, and bankers were running the numbers on IPOs for Northwest technology companies. It was fun while it lasted.

Here’s the flashback: Real-estate website Zillow filed its paperwork on April 18, and RFID maker Impinj followed suit three days later. I even interviewed Seattle-area investors and entrepreneurs about whether these were the first ripples of a new boom for local tech companies.

So much for all of that.

Zillow (NASDAQ: Z) did successfully go public, opening trading on July 20. But Impinj has moved slower, not updating its SEC filings since mid-July. And some other Washington state companies that say they have the fundamentals to go public are staying away until the markets improve.

Exhibit A is Inrix, the Kirkland-based provider of traffic data that started as a spinout from Microsoft. Back in late July, Inrix reported a new $37 million financing round, and CEO Bryan Mistele told me that the company was ready to go public “sooner rather than later,” and was doing better than Zillow when it filed.

That was just five days after Zillow started trading, and two weeks before S&P’s downgrade of the federal government sent the stock markets into a tailspin. These days, Inrix is taking a wait-and-see approach, spokesman Jim Bak says.

“Was it in he cards this year? Yes. Are we choosing to play the hand? No,” Bak says.

He points out that Inrix is having another good year—it’s a profitable, cash-flow-positive company that doesn’t need an IPO to sustain its business. So that makes the decision to wait and see even easier.

“We’ll probably have another year under our belt of 100 percent year-over-year cumulative annual revenue growth,” Bak says. “Everything is in place. The numbers are there, the growth curve is there … but the climate really isn’t ready.”

Vancouver, WA-based nLight Photonics, which makes semiconductor lasers, also has been talking up its IPO potential this year. In a series of news reports tied to its $17.5 million financing round in late August, company officials and investors said nLight was poised for an IPO—although they generally declined to put a timeline on taking that step.

But it definitely doesn’t sound like the step will come anytime soon. “When volatility is how we’ve seen, it’s not a good time to go public,” CEO Scott Keeney says.

In the meantime, nLight is profitable and growing 30-40 percent a year, Keeney says.

“It’s hard to speculate on how the current market changes the exact timing of how we’re thinking about the big step,” Keeney says. “I can say we are a fast-growing, strong venture-funded company, and that’s clearly in our plans.”

Impinj couldn’t comment on the timing and particulars of its IPO filing because it’s in the middle of the registration process, but said a public debut is still in its future.

“While the recent volatility in the capital markets has impacted many IPOs, we have no current intention of withdrawing our registration statement,” spokesman Jim Donaldson says. “The timing of Impinj’s IPO by will depend on many factors, including conditions in the capital markets, conditions in the markets for our products, and our financial performance.”

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All this talk about quarterly earnings and venture stats reminded me: I never posted my favorite stories from Xconomy Boston’s third quarter.

Yes, I know it’s almost the end of October, and the third quarter ended a month ago. I must have been traumatized by the collapse of the Red Sox or something (is baseball still going on?). Go ahead, run me out of town like Theo and Tito.

This time, I’m not consulting with my colleagues. I’m a rebel, a maverick. I work alone. Without further ado, here are my favorite stories from July through September:

Top 10 Tech Stories:

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They grow up so quick! Zulily, which offers daily “flash sales” on moms-and-kids items, easily led the field for angel and venture financing deals in Washington in August. That’s according to monthly data compiled by our partners at CB Insights, which tallied $79 million in overall financings across tech, biotech and cleantech companies for the month.

The new infusion of cash should help Zulily keep pace with its fast growth—after its public debut earlier this year, CEO Darrell Cavens told me, the startup rocketed from about 15,000 members to more than 4 million as of early August. The company also blew through four headquarters locations in about 18 months.

The August round, led by Meritech Capital Partners, brought Zulily’s total venture financing so far to $53.6 million.

Landing in second place was Vancouver, WA-based nLight Photonics, a supplier of high-powered semiconductor lasers. nLight said existing investors participating in the Series E round included Oak Investment Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Menlo Ventures.

That brings nLight’s total equity financing to $110 million—and the company hinted at an IPO in its future, saying in a press release that its investors have been with nLight for more than a decade and “have a strong record of companies achieving initial public offerings.”

The company also said it is growing in profitability, added more than 100 employees in the previous year, and booked more than $60 million in orders in the first half of 2011.

The third-largest financing for August went to Infinia, a Seattle-based developer of solar power generators. The company raised just over $6 million in equity financing, and could eventually raise a total of $25 million in the round, according to this SEC filing. The company’s listed investors include Black Pearl Capital, Foxconn Technology Group, and Seattle’s Vulcan Capital.

Coming in fourth for the month was Airbiquity, which raised $4 million in debt financing. Seattle-based Airbiquity supplies software and platform services for “connected car” features, with customers like Ford, OnStar, and BMW. Its investors are listed as Acorn Ventures of Bellevue, WA, Ignition Partners, Kirnaf Ltd., and Shell Internet Ventures.

The fifth-largest financing went to Medify, which reported in August that it had raised $1.8 million to date from angels and Voyager Capital, where the company was incubated. (The exact timing on that round is not exactly clear to me, because I couldn’t find it in the SEC filings).

In any case, as CEO Derek Streat told me, the idea behind Medify is to make information about healthcare much easier to navigate for patients and doctors. The team is stocked with veterans from Farecast, including co-founder Jay Bartot.

Rounding out the $1 million-plus financings for August is Presage Biosciences, which added nearly $1.6 million from unidentified investors. The company, which spun out of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, has developed a tool that drugmakers are using to get a better sense of which drugs are likely to succeed in clinical trials.

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Some big changes are afoot at an interesting Boston-area laser startup. TeraDiode, a Littleton, MA-based maker of laser systems for cutting, welding, and defense applications, said today it has named Parviz Tayebati the company’s new CEO and board member.

Tayebati, the former chief executive of telecom laser company Azna and photonics firm CoreTek, succeeds TeraDiode’s founding CEO and investor, David Sossen. Sossen is no longer listed on the company’s website as a member of the leadership team, and the firm isn’t taking interview requests today, according to a spokesperson.

Earlier this summer, Sossen told me about TeraDiode’s history and some of its technology’s far-out applications, such as laser weapons that could be deployed on a tank or ship to disable UAVs or blow up incoming rockets. That’s still years away, though. TeraDiode’s present applications include industrial welding, military target illumination, and heat-seeking-missile deterrents.

The company’s technology, based on a technique called wavelength beam combining, was developed at MIT Lincoln Lab to make direct-diode lasers brighter, more powerful, and more focused. In 2009, TeraDiode raised $4 million in Series A financing led by Stata Venture Partners. Last month, the startup said it had secured $3.2 million in new defense-related contracts.

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Semiconductor laser manufacturer nLight Corp. is heading toward a possible public stock offering after completing a $17.5 million round of venture financing from existing investors.

In an interview with VentureWire, chief financial officer Dave Schaezler said nLight is ”at a size where it makes sense to plan for an IPO,” although the Vancouver, WA-based company doesn’t have specific dates in mind for an initial IPO filing. (The full VentureWire story is behind a paywall, but a the Wall Street Journal’s Venture Capital Dispatch has a summary.)

The latest venture round included participation from longtime investors Oak Investment Partners, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Menlo Ventures, which nLight described in a release as having “a strong record of companies achieving initial public offerings.” nLight’s total equity funding stands at about $110 million.

The company, founded in 2000, makes lasers for a wide array of uses in medical, defense, and industrial scenarios. The company said it has continued to grow its profitability while adding more than 100 employees in the past year and booking more than $60 million in orders in the first six months of 2011.

The news is part of a long-term survivor’s tale for nLight. The company was started in Seattle, and initially focused on the telecommunications industry. That quickly changed when telecoms went through a huge downturn in 2001.

As we reported in this 2009 profile, nLight dropped from about 80 employees down to 20 and refocused on different sectors, an era that CEO Scott Keeney said the company “barely survived.” Looks like it’s paying off now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Arbor Photonics has raised $200,000 from the sale of equity, according to SEC documents.

The University of Michigan spinoff, based in Ann Arbor, MI, is seeking a total of $617,153 in follow-on financing, the documents say.

Investors include RPM Ventures, the university’s Frankel Commercialization Fund, and Michigan’s 21st Century Job Fund, according to RPM Ventures managing partner Tony Grover.

Arbor Photonics is developing high-powered fiber optic lasers that are used to manufacture everything from microelectronics to defense equipment.

“This was certainly novel technology developed at the university” with wide applications, Grover says. RPM Ventures, based in Ann Arbor, initially invested $115,000 in Arbor Phonetics in October 2007. So far, the company has raised about $5 million.

The startup’s technology can produce a laser with five to seven times more power than ordinary lasers, he says.

“Traditional technology has reached a ceiling in performance,” Grover says. “Then Arbor Photonics comes along and breaks through [with lasers] none of the existing companies can match.”

Arbor Photonics is initially targeting industrial materials processing, a market worth well over $1 billion, Grover says.

The startup has landed its first customers and is starting to generate revenue, he says. Arbor Photonics estimates it will generate about $30 million to $35 million in sales by 2015.

“We’ve very pleased with the progress that they have made so far,” Grover says. CEO Phillip Amaya has had to “navigate a very difficult downturn these past couple of years. They are on the verge now…an exciting stage when they’re transitioning from [research and development] to commercial products.”

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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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Improvised explosive devices (IED) have been the scourge of the U.S. military in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon has spent billions of dollars on high tech tools in order to defeat such frustratingly low tech weapons.

East Lansing, MI-based BioPhotonic Solutions wants to add one more tool to the kit. The startup’s founder, Michigan State University chemistry professor Marcos Dantus, along with researchers from the Harvard University, are developing “smart” lasers that can identify chemical molecules—such as those found on IEDs—by measuring their vibrations. The lasers could have applications not only in the military, but in medicine as well.

In the IED example, a soldier traveling in a convoy in Afghanistan aims a laser down the road. The laser spots the unique chemical signature of the explosive TNT or the artillery shells commonly found in IEDs. Dantus says the laser currently possesses a range of 40 feet, though such a battlefield device is still a way off.

In 2005, the company received a $750,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to explore ways pulse lasers can detect explosives and nerve agents. BioPhotonic is currently working on a similar project with the Department of Homeland Security, Dantus said.

In a study published in February’s issue of the journal Nature Photonics, a laser microscope developed by Dantus and his team uses short bursts of energy to excite molecules, creating a unique vibration signature scientists can use to identify the chemical. Differences in vibrations are extremely hard to detect—that’s why the research is so valuable, Dantus says.

The technology offers vast opportunities in medicine. For instance, Harvard researchers envision the microscope as a non-invasive alternative to skin cancer biopsies, in which doctors must cut out a piece of tissue and send it to a laboratory for testing. Smart microscopes could also help doctors measure how the body absorbs drugs by analyzing the hair or skin.

Eventually, Dantus thinks device makers will attach these smart lasers to endoscopic devices, which can scan tumors deep in the human body.

BioPhotonic Solutions, which Dantus founded in 2003, sells technology that measures, shapes, and compresses laser pulses to laser manufacturers like Coherent, Spectra Physics, and Quantronix. The company, which has received Small Business Technology Transfer (SBTT) and National Science Foundation grants, generates gross revenues in excess of $1 million.

BioPhotonic is not the only university spinoff to exploring IED detection from afar. Based in Stillwater, MN, Ascir, a recent spinoff from the University of Minnesota, is developing “microblometers” that convert infrared radiation emitted by gases and chemicals into measurable electrical signals.

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A couple of startup companies set a world aviation record last night.

But they were pretty low-key about it. As I walked into the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, WA, a half hour north of Seattle, I saw little activity. It was after hours, and the hangar-like building was nearly deserted except for the futuristic planes suspended from the ceiling—Burt Rutan’s “Quickie” and a Beechcraft Starship—and part of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuselage on the display floor. It was a bit like “Star Wars” meets “Night at the Museum.”

Tom Nugent, the co-founder and president of Kent, WA-based LaserMotive, greeted me and said they were almost ready for showtime. A small team of engineers divided its attention between the back of a command truck and the adjacent trailer that held the laser optics equipment that would make the show possible. Two German guys who hadn’t slept in days (and were still on Munich time) were sprawled out on deck chairs in front of computer monitors like they were playing a video game. One held a remote controller that he used to guide a “quadrocopter”—a small, 1-kilogram, square-shaped flying contraption with blinking lights and four spinning rotors—made by their company, Ascending Technologies.

Jan Stumpf and Michael Achtelik, the co-CEOs of Ascending Technologies, partnered with LaserMotive to perform this feat last night. The goal: to use a laser to power an aircraft in continuous flight for about 12 hours (far longer than its battery would last without recharging, which is only about five minutes). That would be a world record, by a long shot, for the longest free flight of an electric vehicle.

Indeed, this demonstration is a big deal for the future of electric planes, said Barry Smith, the executive director of the Future of Flight facility. Imagine putting a laser on top of every cellular tower, he said, so that certain types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would never need to land to recharge or refuel. That could potentially revolutionize communications, surveillance, and security and defense applications. Longer term, it could even impact the long-held dream of powering manned aircraft with electricity instead of jet fuel—though that is very far off.

For now, Nugent says, “The significance is we’re going to show this quadrocopter, and any aerial vehicle [of this size], will be able to fly effectively forever. It’s no longer limited by battery capacity.”

LaserMotive has done smaller flight tests before, but not on a free-flying vehicle like this. The company is best known for winning the $900,000 NASA Power Beaming Challenge last year, in one of the levels of the “Space Elevator Games.” That involved using a laser to power a climbing robot up a cable to a certain height (1 kilometer) at a certain speed (about 9 mph). But lately the company has been targeting UAVs as a big commercial application of its wireless power technology. (The next level of the NASA challenge, which was supposed to happen later this year, is still up in the air, so to speak.)

“Goggles on!” someone shouted, and we all complied. That meant the infrared laser, which puts out about 200 watts of light power, was switching on. The beam was directed using a series of mirrors and optics and shot out the top of the trailer. You couldn’t see it with the naked eye except for a reddish halo on the 50-foot ceiling. At the same time, the quadrocopter lifted off (under its own battery power), guided by Stumpf, and floated up to meet the beam, about 30 feet off the ground (see left).

“Not centered,” Nugent said. Then the computer vision system of LaserMotive’s setup kicked in. Software and cameras aligned with the path of the laser beam tracked the vehicle’s position, and positioned the beam so it hit the photovoltaic cells on the underside of the craft; those solar cells transformed the laser’s energy into electricity to continuously charge the quadrocopter’s battery.

With that, all human corrections fell away, and it was just a drone hovering eerily in space, rotors humming quietly. It swayed a few feet from side to side, and the laser tracked it. It was about 7:40 pm.

This is the boring part, Nugent said. And boring is good. Exciting is bad. For the next 12 hours, if all went well, nothing more would happen. The craft would stay up all night (as would the crew), … Next Page »

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Quick, name a semiconductor company in the Boston area that’s been getting lots of venture financing lately. OK, well, you already read the headline, so that one doesn’t count. My point is, there haven’t been too many of those—until today.

SiOnyx is the Beverly, MA-based semiconductor materials company that is working on commercializing so-called “black silicon.” This is essentially silicon that is much more efficient at absorbing light at certain wavelengths (and producing electricity) because it has been treated by just the right combination of laser pulses and chemicals. That means black silicon could potentially be used to make ultra-sensitive image sensors for digital cameras, night-vision goggles, and medical imaging equipment, as well as much more efficient solar cells. As my colleague Wade reported almost exactly two years ago, SiOnyx thinks it can revolutionize these fields, in part because its advanced technology can piggy-back on conventional silicon-based manufacturing processes.

Today the company is announcing a $12.5 million Series B financing round that includes new investors Crosslink Capital in San Francisco and Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s venture firm. Strategic partner Coherent, a laser company in Santa Clara, CA, also has signed on as a new investor in SiOnyx, and existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Harris & Harris also participated in the round. The $12.5 million represents the completion (and sum total) of the financing round that Xconomy first wrote about in June.

“When we last talked about the company, we were vague about the application areas,” says SiOnyx CEO Stephen Saylor. “It’s a platform technology, and you want to evolve it and see where the value is.” (More on this in a minute.)

The SiOnyx technology is based on research from physicist Eric Mazur’s group at Harvard University. In the late 1990s, Mazur’s team first developed (and coined the term) black silicon in a series of experiments that used sulfur gases and femtosecond lasers—which emit sharp pulses of light that last only a millionth of a billionth of a second—to roughen up the surface of silicon wafers (see photo below). After discovering how well the resulting material absorbed photons, and delving deep into its atomic properties, the team decided to start a company.

SiOnyx was incorporated in 2005, and the following year, it gained an exclusive license from Harvard to commercialize its process. In 2007, the startup raised $11 million in venture capital from Harris & Harris, Polaris, and RedShift Ventures. It also has raised an undisclosed amount of non-dilutive financing from government sources and partners, Saylor says, which brings the company’s total funding to more than $35 million.

So where is the first big commercial market? Try camera phones taking pictures in low lighting—at night or in a dark bar or restaurant. And other applications like night-vision cameras, next-generation automotive sensors for detecting driving hazards, security and surveillance, and medical imaging devices. The basic idea, as Saylor explains, is that black silicon gives you performance in the dark comparable to what a conventional image sensor can do in daylight. That’s partly because the material is much better at absorbing photons in the near-infrared part of the spectrum than conventional silicon detectors.

“We’re going where [others] are blind, and we enable you to see,” Saylor says. “There is no other way to deliver this kind of performance.”

The question, then, is whether SiOnyx can scale up its capabilities fast enough to … Next Page »

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Salem, NH-based Laser Light Engines, a maker of laser-driven light sources for 3-D and digital projectors, said today it has closed a $13 million Series B financing round from existing investors Braemar Energy Ventures and Harris & Harris Group, and from existing strategic partner IMAX. Laser Light, which is developing a custom light source for IMAX’s digital projection systems, says it will use the new money to expand its product development, engineering, and marketing efforts. The company previously raised a $5 million Series A round in 2008.

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There has been a smattering of innovation news from around the state this week:

—University of Michigan researchers are developing a laser-based system to protect military helicopters from heat-seeking missiles by jamming their sensors, according to a report in Gizmag. Mohammed Islam, a U-M professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is leading the research and soon might be testing a prototype at his spinoff company, Ann Arbor-based Omni Sciences.

—Wayne State University Physician Group, a nonprofit that operates 100-plus medical practices and serves 670,000 patients in Detroit, said today it is using Orion Health’s technology to collect and manage patient data, independent of its own existing electronic health record system. The system will help the Wayne State organization create an exchange of clinical and demographic data between hospitals, medical centers, and its own offices.

—GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Snyder has come under fire from his Democratic opponents for allegedly outsourcing jobs while he was on the board of Gateway, the computer maker, in the 1990s. AnnArbor.com has the gory details here. Last month, Xconomy’s Howard Lovy wrote an in-depth piece on Snyder’s background and experience in the tech industry.

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San Jose, CA-based Oclaro (NASDAQ: OCLR), an optical communications and laser technology firm, announced today it has acquired Mintera, based in Acton, MA, for $12 million in cash upfront. The deal could be worth as much as $32 million in total, if Mintera reaches cumulative revenues of $70M over the next 18 months. Mintera’s annual revenue was about $20 million over the most recent fiscal year, according to the press release. The company was founded in 2000 and specializes in high-speed optical transmission systems. Its investors included Court Square Ventures, JDSU, Polaris Venture Partners, Portview Communications Partners, RRE Ventures, and Star Ventures. Terry Unter, Mintera’s CEO, will remain with Oclaro for a transitional period of unspecified length.

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SiOnyx, a Beverly, MA-based developer of “black silicon” for imaging systems, has raised $6.3 million of a planned $12 million round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The Harvard University spin-out previously raised $11 million in a venture round from Harris & Harris, Polaris Venture Partners, and RedShift Ventures, in 2007. In October 2008, Wade took a deep dive into how the startup is doping silicon to be a more sensitive detector than standard silicon. The firm also has an office in Beaverton, OR.

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David Bernick saw his mom’s struggles in coordinating care for his elderly grandmother. His mom relied on spreadsheets and Post-It notes to organize his grandmother’s visits with doctors, home health workers, and physical therapists. “This is a lot of stuff to keep track of,” Bernick says. “This is a real problem and it’s only going to get worse.”

Bernick, a 33-year-old hacker and veteran software engineer, says he has been working in earnest since January to develop Web-based software that supports those in the trenches of home health care: home nursing agencies and doctors, as well as patients and their family members. He and his business partner, Neil Aresty, have formed Eldersync.com in Boston to commercialize the technology. Aresty, a lawyer by training, previously co-founded and served as chief executive at the Boston legal software firm Lextranet, which was sold to the St. Paul, MN-based business services outfit Merrill in 2007 for an undisclosed sum. Bernick says that he was one of Aresty’s first technical employees at Lextranet.

Two home health firms began to test a beta version of Eldersync last month, Bernick says, and he’s looking for more agencies to try it out. Health workers can use the Web-based system to schedule visits with patients in their homes, can verify via text message or phone call to the system that they’ve seen a patient, and can file notes on a patient’s status to the system using any Internet-connected device. The plan is to also sync the online system with a patient’s home health monitoring devices. So caregivers or family members who have a patient’s permission can, say, tap that patient’s online Eldersync dashboard to check his blood sugar levels or heart rate.

Beyond seeing a need for their technology in their own families, Aresty and Bernick discovered that home health agencies present a large initial market for Eldersync. The agencies are growing rapidly in part because of efforts around the nation to provide care for people in their homes to reduce expensive hospital stays, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, which projects that the number of home health workers will grow from the 1.74 million counted in 2008 to … Next Page »

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You want some real tech? Here’s some real tech: LaserMotive, the Kent, WA-based startup founded by physicists Jordin Kare and Tom Nugent, has published a white paper on how to beam power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) so they don’t have to land and refuel, or change batteries. The idea is to recharge UAVs while they’re in the air using a laser power source from the ground. Presumably such “eternal” UAVs that never need to land would be very useful for military and reconnaissance operations.

In San Diego, which is a regional hub of UAV expertise, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that defense contractors like Predator manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Northrop Grumman’s unmanned systems business are hustling to develop a new generation of relatively inexpensive UAVs. Most larger UAVs, like the Predator and Fire Scout, a robotic helicopter made by Northrop Grumman, run on gasoline, but smaller ones can run on electricity and are quieter.

That’s where LaserMotive comes into play. This inventive little company, which I first wrote about in-depth last month, has developed power-beaming technology using laser diodes to transmit energy through the air, and specially constructed solar cells to receive the beam and turn it into usable electricity. LaserMotive demonstrated its technology by winning the Level 1 prize of the NASA Power Beaming challenge last fall (part of its Space Elevator Games), in which it powered a robot to climb up a kilometer-long cable using only lasers from the ground. (The company will go for the Level 2 prize later this year.)

But powering UAVs and other practical devices has been the company’s plan for a while, and this is its first big market opportunity. Nugent, LaserMotive’s co-founder and president, said in a statement that his company’s plan is “an important step not only in powering UAVs, but in extending their abilities, improving their endurance and enabling new missions.” He added, “It is especially viable for high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles and other types of aircraft that need power over a long period of time.”

If you want to know the technical specs and capabilities of LaserMotive’s system (things like range, power levels, and efficiency), read the company’s report. But it seems like an intriguing market. The industry research firm Teal Group says the market for UAVs is expected to grow worldwide from $4.9 billion to $11.5 billion annually in the next 10 years.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Enravel (Seattle)

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

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

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

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