Building owners and managers are often reluctant to adopt new energy efficiency technology because they doubt it will be worth the cost in the long run.

Nolan Browne, managing director of the Cambridge, MA-based (for now) Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems, is on the same page.

“I fundamentally agree with them,” he says. “If we don’t prove it, why would they want to buy it? We need to prove that it will work or last 20 to 30 years and that the occupant in that building is going to be happy and productive. If not, then it’s a problem.”

His organization is in the process of retrofitting an old building in the South Boston waterfront section known as the Innovation District. The facility will serve as the center’s offices and a “living lab” for demonstrating and validating energy efficient building technologies.

“Our goal is to become recognized as premier global leader in sustainable energy field,” says Browne. And it hopes to promote economic development through the technology it commercializes, he says.

The Center for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSE) is connected to the Munich-based Fraunhofer Society, an organization formed in 1949 and funded in part by the Marshall Plan to help spur economic recovery in post World War II through research projects that could benefit industry across the country.

Globally, Fraunhofer centers now perform research in a variety of arenas and have about 18,000 scientists and engineers, and a 1.66 billion euro annual research budget. They’re credited with having a role in the invention of things like MP3s and fat-free sausage, to name a few, says Browne. CSE was first formed in 2008 to collaborate with MIT on research in building technology and solar. It is part of a smattering of U.S.-based research centers known as Fraunhofer USA, an independent American 501c3 nonprofit focused on growing the U.S. economy through technology research and commercialization. The USA centers have different structures and non-profit charters than the German group, Browne says.

CSE—which launched with funding from National Grid and Massachusetts Technology Collaborative’s the Renewable Energy Trust (now part of the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center)—works in a few different ways with industry partners. The CSE can be commissioned by companies who are in need new technology or modifications to their existing products, but don’t have the needed internal R&D capabilities. And CSE scientists can come up with an idea and develop the project in house and bring it to potential industry partners. Some of CSE’s projects are publicly funded, focusing on cleantech areas the government has deemed promising. It has attracted research funding from private donors and foundations.

For its South Boston project—dubbed the Building Technology Showcase—CSE will be installing materials and systems from a host of energy efficiency players (Browne wouldn’t name names) and collecting real-time data on how the products are working. The project is costing more than $20 million, and has the support from groups such as the U.S. Department of Commerce’s economic development agency, the city of Boston, MassCEC, the Massachusetts Department of Energy and Environmental Affairs, the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Economic Development, and Commonwealth Ventures, Browne says.

And it’s not just typical efficiency tools you might think of—like solar panels or energy use monitoring software that the CSE will be

… Next Page »

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IT companies dominated New England deals this week, with word of acquisitions, financings, and potential IPOs.

—M/A-COM Technology Solutions, a Lowell, MA-based wireless chip maker, said in an SEC filing that it hopes to raise up to $230 million in an initial public offering. The firm is now owned by semiconductor-focused private equity fund Gaas Labs.

—TechStars Boston 2011 alum Kinvey, a mobile software developer, took in $2 million in seed funding, led by Atlas Venture. The financing also included Avalon Ventures, and Boston angel investors Chris Lynch, Mike Baker, Jennifer Lum, Ty Danco, and Joe Caruso.

—Waltham, MA-based Tantaline, a developer of corrosion-resistant surface alloys for use in the oil and gas, chemical processing, energy, pharmaceuticals, and mining industries, said it snagged a $3.6 million Series B investment. The money came from Harvard, MA-based Berwind Private Equity, and Danish firms Vaekstfonden and CC Holdings.

—My colleague Greg rounded up news about a couple of Boston-area VC firms that are raising money: Kepha Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

—Burlington, MA-based IT virtualization firm DynamicOps wrapped up $5 million in equity-based funding, an SEC filing showed.

—Lumenpulse, LED lighting fixtures manufacturer with U.S. headquarters in Boston, nabbed $16 million in a mixed Series A offering of equity and debt. The funding comes from a group of investors including the company’s management and board, and Silicon Valley Bank.

—Burlington-based Bluesocket was acquired by wireless and communications equipment-maker ADTRAN (NASDAQ: ADTN) for an undisclosed sum. Bluesocket, a maker of wireless networking and security products, will be rolled into ADTRAN’s enterprise networks unit.

—Avalon Ventures led a $3 million Series A financing for Boston-based Nanigans, a provider of a real-time bidding advertising platform for Facebook. The deal also included some Boston-area angel investors.

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Lumenpulse, a manufacturer of LED lighting fixtures, announced today that it has raised $16 million in an equity- and debt-based Series A round of financing. The company, whose U.S. headquarters are in Boston, said the funding will go to market and product development. Investors in the round include Lumenpulse’s management and board of directors, as well as Silicon Valley Bank, which provided a new term loan and working capital line of credit.

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Livermore, CA-based BridgeLux, which is developing epitaxial manufacturing techniques for building cheaper LED lights, has collected $60 million in Series E financing, according to a report today in Dow Jones VentureWire. Craton Equity Partners, a Los Angeles-based private equity firm, led the round, which could increase to as much as $80 million, according to the report. The company collected $50 million in Series D financing in early 2010 from VantagePoint Venture Partners, Doll Capital Management, and El Dorado Ventures.

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Sun Catalytix, a Cambridge, MA-based energy storage and renewable fuels startup, said today it has added Mike Decelle as its new president and chief executive. Decelle is a photonics industry veteran who was mostly recently CEO of LumenZ, a Boston-based LED technology company that was reported by the Boston Globe to be shut down earlier this spring. Sun Catalytix raised a $9.5 million Series B round last October, which was led by Tata and included Polaris Venture Partners.

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Relume Technologies, an Oxford, MI, maker of LED products and smart grid control systems, said today that it has tapped Crawford Lipsey to be its new CEO. Lipsey was previously an executive for Acuity Brands, a major provider of lighting and control products. Former CEO Mike McClear is now serving as the Relume’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Peter Hochstein is the company’s co-founder, president, and chief of technology, and his role has not changed, according to the company.

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Diagnostics and software startups were active on the New England-area deals front this week. We saw news of acquisitions, financings, and stock purchases, and also covered some more in-depth strategy at a big area tech name.

—Pathogenetix, a Woburn, MA-based diagnostics startup formerly named U.S. Genomics, brought in $1.3 million in equity-based funding, and $900,000 of a targeted $1.2 million debt offering, according to two SEC filings. While under the U.S. Genomics name, the firm raised $4.5 million in private equity funding from Becton, Dickinson, & Co. to develop infectious disease diagnostics technology.

—Cambridge, MA-based Daktari Diagnostics wrapped up a $1.8 million equity investment, a regulatory filing revealed. The deal brings the funding pot to more than $5.5 million for Daktari, a biotech that is pursuing a system for testing HIV patients’ blood in locations lacking sophisticated lab technology.

—GTC Biotherapeutics, a Framingham, MA-based company that was the first to get FDA approval for a drug produced by genetically modified animals, was bought by LFB Biotechnologies for 30 cents per share, a total of $18.3 million. The deal will give France-based LFB Biotechnologies a 90 percent stake in GTC. The firm will also cash out all of GTC’s minority shareholders for $2.7 million total.

—Greg took a look at the acquisition and innovation strategies at Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC). The firm, which last year bought Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain for $2 billion and is rumored to be eyeing Seattle-based Isilon Systems (NASDAQ: ISLN), plans to … Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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Last week the Northwest Energy Angels—a group of over 45 private investors who have banded together to invest exclusively in cleantech and energy companies located here in the Pacific Northwest—held its annual Summer Showcase at Tesla Motors’ South Lake Union showroom. Founded by Seattle entrepreneur Martin Tobias and state lawmaker Jeff Morris in 2006, the angels provide early-stage capital to cleantech entrepreneurs and connect promising companies with potential investors.

So far, the group has invested more than $3 million in 17 local companies, a sign that it is active and growing—along with the Pacific Northwest cleantech sector. Back in March the Angels hired on local tech veteran Margo Shiroyama as the new executive director, and the group is recruiting new angels, hoping to bring the membership up to 60 by the end of the year.

On Friday afternoon many of the angels joined representatives from local cleantech companies, and green-minded community members at Tesla to mingle, connect, and hear updates from 11 companies that had presented at a prior NW Energy Angels event. Drinks were served in 100 percent compostable plant polymer Greenware. I would be lying if I said a few in the crowd weren’t eyeing Tesla’s bright red Roadster on display in the front of the room. (After the presentations, many signed up for test drives around the neighborhood, though I was not so lucky.) But the combination of compostable cups and fully electric cars sure did set the scene for an event on cleantech business ideas.

One of the more high profile attendees included U.S. Rep Jay Inslee, the Democrat who represents Washington’s first congressional district. Energy Angel Bill Lemon introduced Inslee as our “tireless advocate in the promotion of clean energies.” In his introductory remarks, Inslee urged the companies to develop new clean technologies and move the country and world forward toward renewable energies.

“The future of the U.S. economy is not determined at the Fed, or the White House, or the Congress. It is determined by people like you,” he said. “It is a system that is broken because it is rife with subsidies that support old technologies that have been around for the past hundred years.”

Inslee then outlined his five pillars for the future of clean energy, which he termed his “vision for America.” The steps included creating demand for new technology, increasing energy standards for machinery (including cars, buildings, and gadgets), changing the tax code to provide clean energy incentives for small businesses, increasing federal energy R&D, and leveling the playing field between clean energy businesses and industry old timers like oil and coal.

“These five pillars, I think, have the capability to get us into the international game. And it needs to happen this year—next year is a year too late,” Inslee said. “This is the most exciting thing technologically since we went to the moon,” adding that Seattle and the Pacific Northwest are poised to be cleantech leaders based on our booming regional tech industry. “When there’s a technological transition, Washington shines!” he said.

The remainder of the event was dedicated to a series of short company updates and networking among cleantechies. The presenting companies included a few more established startup success stories, as well as a handful of brand new companies fresh on the scene. Though all of the companies had been represented at prior NW Energy Angel events, many of them have escaped our radar until now. But whether you’ve heard of these startups before or not, if you’re interested in what’s up-and-coming in the Pacific Northwest cleantech sector, take a look at these highlights:

—EMME (Beaverton, OR)

Standing for Energy Management Made Easy, EMME develops energy management devices. These are monitoring gadgets for everything from heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment, to wireless power monitors, and power meter breaker boxes—that helps consumers keep track of their home’s carbon footprint, and save money and energy. “It will tell you how much you’re spending on heating, cooling, your refrigerator is spending, your big screen TV,” said Jon Brodeur, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “And it will give you recommendations on what to do to save energy costs,” without having to change out any appliances.

—EnerG2 (Seattle, WA)

You’ve probably heard of EnerG2, a nanomaterials startup focused on energy storage. The company, which develops ultra-high performance synthetic carbon material for use in double layer capacitors, has had such success in the last few years that Lemon kicked himself for passing up an opportunity to invest. “Boy do I really, really regret it!” he said. Since that missed opportunity, EnerG2 has brought in $8.5 million in its Series A venture investment—which chief operating and financial officer Chris Wheaton joked happened during in the fall of 2008, “nearly financial Armageddon.” Later on, EnerG2 secured another $21.3 million in federal stimulus money. “It completely blew the doors off for us,” Wheaton added. “There’s nothing like success to create more success.”

—EnergySavvy (Seattle, WA)

This energy-efficiency focused startup works to help homeowners understand the “miles per gallon” of their homes by helping consumers calculate their energy use and find places they can cut back, make changes, and save both energy and money. Only an eight-person operation, according to Scott Case, the vice president of product management, EnergySavvy has had so much interest from prospective customers they have been struggling to grow fast enough to keep up. The company makes its money … Next Page »

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Jason Hartlove has a name and a rakish mug worthy of a soap-opera star, a resume that any Silicon Valley engineer would envy, and a bit of swagger as a turnaround CEO. He co-invented the optical mouse at Hewlett-Packard, ran a 3,000-employee manufacturing operation for HP spinoff Agilent in Malaysia, and set South Korea’s struggling MagnaChip Semiconductor on its current path to an IPO. “One of my investors said this—so I won’t claim it for myself—but I am a technology MacGyver,” Hartlove says. “If you give me some piece of technology, I can really figure out what to do with it.”

But at Palo Alto, CA-based Nanosys, where he took over as CEO in October 2008, Hartlove may be facing his biggest challenge yet. With an impressive portfolio of patents based on work at MIT, Harvard, UC Berkeley, and other institutions, the nine-year-old company has repeatedly been described as one of the most promising in a batch of nanotechnology startups that emerged around the turn of the millennium. In its early years, it investigated areas like solar cells and display electronics where it was thought that nano-engineered materials could lead to higher power output or greater efficiencies. But real commercial applications for nanotechnology insights have been slow to emerge, and Nanosys has yet to bring a single product all the way to the market (the first is set to appear in the fourth quarter of this year, if all goes according to plan).

“The clock is ticking for Nanosys…since its financial backers are counting on a return on investment in another three to five years,” wrote Technology Review magazine. That was in 2004—just a few months before Nanosys called off a planned IPO that still hasn’t happened.

Nanosys CEO Jason Hartlove

After the pulling the plug on the IPO, “the company sort of struggled a little between 2005 and 2007 about what exactly its mission was,” Hartlove told me earlier this week. “It continued to do some directed research but didn’t really have an eye toward commercialization.” The shakeup year was 2008: CEO Calvin Chow was let go, former Symyx Technologies CEO and Venrock partner Steve Goldby became the company’s interim leader (he’s still chairman today), and the board recruited Hartlove to find Nanosys some real products.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call Hartlove’s tactics since 2008 MacGyveresque, and so far, he hasn’t even used a Swiss Army knife. He has focused the company on the two research programs that seemed most likely to produce marketable products in the near future. And he has pushed forward one of them, a “QuantumRail” component that increases the brightness and efficiency of LED backlights for mobile device displays, to the point that the company is earning “real revenue from real paying customers,” in Hartlove’s words. The first customer is LG Innotek, which plans to use the QuantumRail in 5 million phone-sized displays by the end of 2010; its purchases recently contributed to Nanosys’s first break-even month.

Demand for the nanocrystals that go into the QuantumRail, as well as the high-capacity anode material that Nanosys is developing for the lithium-ion battery industry, is growing fast enough that the company will soon need to find larger quarters outside Palo Alto, Hartlove says. And within 18 months, he says, the company hopes to be in a position to restart the IPO process. “We’ll have display products on the market, battery products on the market, a track record of revenue and profitability,” he says. “Those are the milestones.”

At least one Nanosys investor, Lux Capital, seems to buy into Hartlove’s optimism. “Things have really accelerated and they’re on a rapid path to success,” says Josh Wolfe, a managing partner at the New York-based firm, which contributed to a … Next Page »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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[[Updated: See the editor's note below]]

It has come to light that Digital Lumens, a Salem, MA-based developer of energy-efficient lighting products, has raised $6.3 million in a round of equity financing, according to an SEC filing. The filing doesn’t specifically list investors in the round, but it does say that board members include Jon Karlen of Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston and Lee Barbieri of Stata Venture Partners in Dover, MA.

Digital Lumen says on its website that it plans to provide lighting that uses 10 percent as much energy as other products, though it doesn’t describe its technology in detail. Attempts to reach company representatives were unsuccessful this morning. The startup has the same Salem address as Groom Energy Solutions, a provider of energy-efficiency products and services, according to the SEC filing. Also, Groom Energy CEO Jonathan Guerster is listed as an executive and board member of Digital Lumens, which was previously named GroomLED. (Digital Lumens smells like a spinoff of Groom Energy to me, but Guerster was not at his office this morning to confirm this.)

Tom Pincince is president and CEO of Digital Lumens, according to his LinkedIn profile. Pincince was previously CEO of Brix Networks. Brix Networks is a former Chelmsford, MA-based provider of software to monitor the quality of signals, content, and delivery in IP networks, and Quebec’s EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering (NASDAQ:EXFO) acquired Brix for $28.5 million in cash in spring 2008.

Flybridge spokeswoman Kate Castle told me that Digital Lumens is in stealth mode and she was unable to comment on the startup.

[[Editor's note: After this story was published, a reader pointed out that Tom Pincince's LinkedIn profile lists him as president and CEO of Digital Lumens. The story has been updated to include this information.]]

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Yet another Boston-area innovation institution has been hit by the recession: the summer internship. Jackie Wilbur, the director of the Career Development Office at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says that in this year’s tight job market, many local startups that would ordinarily take on Sloan students as summer interns simply can’t afford it. Enter Brad Feld.

A 1988 graduate of Sloan and co-founder of the Foundry Group, a Boulder, CO-based venture capital firm, Feld was looking to make a gift to his alma mater that would nurture the climate of entrepreneurship at the school. “With the current economic downturn,” says Feld, “there was a lot of interest in helping subsidize some of these internships.” So part of a donation Feld recently sent to the school will be used to fund summer internships for six first-year Sloan MBA students at Boston-area startups. The program pays half of the students’ $1,000 weekly salary, with the companies themselves putting up the rest.

Rajiv Bhatia, one of the beneficiaries of the program, sees distinct advantages in working for a startup. “You’re most likely working directly with the senior management. Your impact is immediately felt and immediately seen.”

On June 8, Bhatia will join the team at QDVision, an MIT spinout located in Watertown, MA. QDVision specializes in the commercialization of quantum dots, nanoscopic semiconductors that can be used to construct an optic that makes the light from energy-efficient LED lamps resemble the eye-pleasing wavelengths of an incandescent bulb. The company recently partnered with Nexxus Lighting (NASDAQ: NEXS) to release a lamp combining Nexxus’ LED lighting platform with the QDVision optic. Bhatia will assist the company in devising further commercial applications for quantum dot technology.

“For anyone interested in entrepreneurship, a summer internship is a great way to dive in,” says Feld. “And—for the companies—it’s a fantastic source of highly qualified and smart folks that can work on projects that might otherwise never be gotten to.”

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