We’ve all been wondering how the Adobe layoffs, reported earlier this week, may affect the Seattle area—especially given the slew of other recent cutbacks in the local tech industry. Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE), which is headquartered in San Jose, CA, has a strong presence in Seattle. As of recently, it employed some 500 people, focused on product development, operations, and advanced technology and research, at its Fremont offices.

Well, one prominent executive who’s leaving the company locally is Bill McCoy, Adobe’s general manager of ePublishing Business. McCoy is Adobe’s main e-book person. He made key contributions to Adobe’s PostScript and PDF technologies, and his team has helped lead projects like Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and Adobe InDesign. He’s on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, and has been heavily involved in the EPUB standards movement. (You can read more about McCoy at TeleRead.org.)

In a blog post this week, McCoy said he’s leaving Adobe “in the near future” to pursue other opportunities yet to be determined. “I will be taking a little bit of time off, but there is no doubt that I’ll continue to be involved in the future of digital books, especially where that future intersects with web standards and open source,” McCoy writes. “I believe that Adobe will continue to play a critical role as an enabler of interoperable solutions, but I also believe that the community needs to stay vigilant to ensure that for-profit corporations don’t just talk the talk about being open, but also walk the walk.”

It sounds like Adobe is overhauling its efforts in the area, as its competition with Amazon and other e-publishing companies heats up. In a blog post, Adobe said it “has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers. This organization will combine the efforts of Adobe’s eBook business responsible for the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions, and PDF and EPUB authoring support in Adobe InDesign with Adobe’s digital newspaper and magazine efforts.” The company added, “We are particularly excited about what we have in store for 2010. We plan to further our reach to emerging mobile reading platforms to allow readers to read anywhere, on any device.”

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Seattle-based Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) said today its acquisition of online apparel and shoe seller Zappos, based in Las Vegas, has closed. The Zappos management team will remain intact, the company said. In a blog post, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh said his board of directors has been “switched out,” and that the deal, worth about 10 million shares of Amazon stock, is valued at $1.2 billion, based on Friday’s closing price.

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Seattle-based Big Fish Games announced today it has hired Michael Vernon as chief financial officer and Ian Hurlock-Jones as chief technology officer. Vernon is a veteran of Seattle-area firms aQuantive and Zumobi, while Hurlock-Jones comes from Fox Interactive Media and Buy.com. Big Fish, a leading developer and distributor of casual games, announced it was opening its European headquarters in Cork, Ireland, in April. The company also has a small office in Vancouver, BC, which former CFO Glenn Walcott told me about last year. Big Fish raised $83.3 million back in September 2008.

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Some tech companies seem to be at their best when things are at their worst. Those are the ones you really need to keep an eye on, especially in a recession. Isilon Systems is one of those companies.

The Seattle-based data storage firm (NASDAQ: ISLN) is announcing its third-quarter earnings this afternoon, and it will be interesting to see how well its products are selling across a wide range of industries—everything from movie studios and media companies to financial institutions and biomedical research organizations. I recently sat down with Isilon’s founder and CEO, Sujal Patel, for a wide-ranging interview about the nine-year-old company’s technology and business strategy. It makes for a pretty compelling case study of a tech startup’s growing pains, and how it has bounced back from adversity to become a leading player in a crowded and competitive field.

In case you don’t know all the twists and turns in Isilon’s history, here’s a quick recap. Patel, a former engineer at Seattle-based RealNetworks (NASDAQ: RNWK), co-founded Isilon in January 2001. The basic idea was to provide cheaper and more efficient data storage for companies needing to host or deliver video, music, and other multimedia content that requires a lot of storage space. In his previous role as chief architect of RealNetworks’ media delivery software, Patel had seen many customers struggle to upgrade their storage capabilities. So there was a real problem to solve. But the tech bubble had collapsed, so customers weren’t necessarily in the mood to buy. Patel says he “pretty much timed the worst spot of the decade to start a company.”

What’s more, there were already about 250 venture-funded storage companies out there, Patel says, and about 50 of them sounded just like Isilon. Patel says he built his business plan around solving the specific problem Real’s customers had, and “how that problem would be pervasive across all mid-range to large enterprises over the next decade.” To start with, he set an incredibly narrow customer focus on photo-sharing and streaming media websites, and media companies.

Isilon’s technology approach was to cluster together a large number of storage “bricks”—each one includes disks, memory, processing, and networking—into a single storage unit. It was a novel approach in the field of network-attached storage, which today is a $4 billion industry with big players like NetApp, EMC, and Hewlett-Packard. Isilon’s technology requires solving some very tough software problems, but the payoff is better storage performance that is also cheaper and easier to manage, for companies dealing with huge amounts of unstructured data. “We can build one gigantic network drive, and we can scale it as the customer’s needs change over time,” Patel says.

Venture capitalists were sold. In August 2001, Isilon closed an $8.4 million funding round …Next Page »

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Investing in biotech can be scary. Only one out of 10 new drug candidates ever makes it through the gauntlet of clinical trials to become an FDA approved product, and it usually takes hundreds of millions of dollars and a decade or more of research to separate the winners from the losers. Investors usually can’t bother asking serious questions about profit-and-loss statements, or price-to-earnings ratios, until a company is 15 years old or more. And the hype—from gene therapy, to stem cells, to you fill in the blank—can be quite distracting.

So Christopher Henney, 68, who has seen it all in a 30-year career in biotech as co-founder of Immunex, Icos, and Dendreon, knew he had his work cut out yesterday. He was trying to convince a crowd of 100 financial pros at the CFA Society meeting in Seattle that biotech, the classic boom-or-bust industry, is really a good place to invest.

“I want to de-mythologize the scariness,” Henney said at the outset.

Henney started off his talk by reminding the audience how he and Steve Gillis, a pair of immunologists at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, went on to start Seattle-based Immunex, one of the members of what he called “the class of 1983.” These were the second-generation companies, following industry pioneer Genentech, that all went public back in a great wave of enthusiasm for biotechnology. The class included Amgen, Biogen, Cetus, Chiron, Genzyme, and Immunex. Seven of the 10 to 12 biotech companies (Henney didn’t name the losers) that went public in that early wave went on to create market valuations that exceeded $1 billion, Henney said.

But even during that great wave of optimism about the power of new genetic engineering technologies for creating new drugs, there were prominent skeptics. Henney told the story of how he and Gillis had a meeting in the early days of Immunex with “one of the doyennes” of the Seattle investment community, whom he didn’t name. Henney and Gillis told their story with great enthusiasm, and got a rude awakening.

“At the end, I remember him saying, ‘I don’t think it’s a scam, but I won’t introduce you to anybody, either,’” Henney recalled.

Both of them were academic scientists who “had a fair amount of hubris about our self-worth. To be told that what we’re doing was a scam, it wasn’t something I wanted to tell my Mom about,” Henney said.

He added, “It was our welcome-to-the-NFL moment.”

Still, the investor taking that position would have been right for the first 15 years or so. It took 17 years from Immunex’s founding before it struck gold with etanercept (Enbrel), a drug for autoimmune diseases that now generates more than $7 billion a year in worldwide sales for Amgen and Wyeth. It took much longer, and hundreds of millions of dollars more than industry pioneers like Henney thought it would, to create blockbuster drugs like that. “If you had thought about that beforehand, nobody would have given us any money at all,” Henney said.

But they got the money, and learned a lot of lessons along the way. In his talk last week, Henney distilled them into six hallmarks of a successful biotech that investors should look for, along with five red flags to watch out for as well (which I’m going to save for another story).

So, here are the six hallmarks to look for in a successful biotech …Next Page »

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Allurent co-founder Joe Chung today stepped down (or rather up to executive chairman) as CEO of the online shopping interface and e-commerce company, Xconomy has learned. Graeme Grant, formerly the chief operating officer, has been named to take his place at the helm of the Cambridge, MA-based company.

Reached by phone, Chung, an Xconomist, confirmed that the staff had been told about the change today. (There has not yet been an official announcement, and Chung was still listed on the website as CEO at the time of this writing.) “I hired Graeme to take over the company someday a couple years ago, and that day is now,” Chung says. He calls the changeover business as usual, however. In his new title of executive chairman, Chung will be concentrating on big deals, partnership relations, and overall strategy—pretty much what he was focusing on already.

“I’m still an employee. I’m still there full time,” he says. “The reality is that our roles are completely unchanged. Graeme’s been running the company for well over a year anyway.”

Grant takes the helm as Allurent, which creates shopping interfaces and “experiences” such as virtual shelves and improved displays for online retailers, is in the midst of a transition. In March, during what Chung says was “pretty much the worst time you can imagine launching a new product in retail,” the company moved to an all-Software as a Service (SaaS) model that provides web retailers with plug-and-play interactive merchandising widgets that they can rent on as as-needed basis.

“We’re really in an environment where retailers need to get more out of every single customer that comes to their site,” he says. To that end, the online shopping world is shifting, from a time when e-retailers just put up products and a shopping cart on the web and figured customers would find them to the point where they have to actively manage each customer relationship. That involves creating better interfaces to attract and retain customers, and making shopping more easy and fun.

Chung says the new product line—Allurent on Demand—has been growing well despite the recession, and he predicted great things for Grant. “I’m very happy for Graeme in the sense that this is his first CEO gig, and he’s going to do a great job,” he says. “He’s a real rising star, and you’ll see a lot of him in our industry for sure.”

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Seattle-based Earth Class Mail, which helps companies access and manage their postal mail online, announced today it has promoted Sarah Carr to chief executive. Carr succeeds Ron Wiener, the company’s founding CEO who stepped down in June and is now chairman of the board. Carr joined Earth Class Mail in September 2008 as chief operating officer and was promoted to president in June. The company was founded in 2004 and has been backed by Ignition Partners, Keiretsu Forum, and Alliance of Angels.

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On Monday, Seattle-based Daptiv, a maker of project management software, announced Chase Franklin has joined the firm as its new chief executive. Franklin, the former co-founder and CEO of Qpass (now owned by Amdocs), succeeds Jeff Pancottine, who stepped down as Daptiv’s CEO this summer.

I reached Franklin by e-mail this week to hear his thoughts on his new job, as well as a little more context around the transition. After all, if there’s a “Qpass mafia” throwing its weight around at local tech companies (as we’ve been tracking over the past month), Franklin might well be considered the Don Corleone of the family.

“At the risk of overextending the ‘Mafia’ metaphor, Daptiv made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” Franklin says.

“Seriously, the company has tremendous potential, and in spite of the fact that I wasn’t looking for a full-time gig, after numerous discussions with the board and key execs, this opportunity was just too good to pass up,” Franklin says. “It has some parallels to my experience at Qpass, but of course it’s also different in many ways. As I considered what type of company I wanted to be involved with, I knew it would center around serious software delivered through a [software as a service]/cloud metaphor. I also felt that my management experience would be helpful at Daptiv, which is working its way through an awkward moment in its development.”

Franklin couldn’t say anything more specific about the company’s priorities and challenges just yet. “I’m spending all my cycles getting up to speed on the business,” he says.

Venture capitalist Bill Bryant, a fellow Qpass co-founder, offered some more perspective. “Chase is at heart a keen product strategist who is going to drive a forward roadmap for Daptiv that corresponds to what customers want in a [project portfolio management] solution,” Bryant says. “He is equally an inspirational leader who is unflappable in crises, and will lead from the trenches with the kind of bold actions that Daptiv needs to reinvigorate itself. I have no doubt that Chase will attract talent to Daptiv; he knows how to get the very best of that talent.”

Asked for his thoughts on the company’s challenges, Bryant says, “Daptiv’s fundamental issue is common to first-to-market entrants: they were early, but now are facing a number of competitors like @Task, Clarizen, and Liquid Planner, who are offering an up-to-date product and business model. But it’s a large multibillion [dollar] market that I’m quite sure Chase will navigate with aplomb.”

Daptiv was founded in 1997 (as eProject), and has raised about $21 million in venture funding since 2007. Its investors include Bay Partners, Kennet Partners, King Street Partners, and Wolf Bay Holdings. The company went through layoffs earlier this year and had about 100 employees as of March.

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Score one more for the Qpass mafia. Chase Franklin, the co-founder and former CEO of digital commerce firm Qpass (sold to Amdocs for $275 million in 2006), has joined Seattle-based Daptiv as its chief executive, effective immediately. Daptiv makes collaborative business software, and raised $9 million in Series B funding back in August 2008. Its investors include Bay Partners, Kennet Partners, King Street Partners, and Wolf Bay Holdings.

Franklin was most recently chief of strategy for content and media at Amdocs (NYSE: DOX). His claim to fame is leading Seattle-based Qpass from its founding in 1997, and evolving the company from a consumer brand to an online commerce platform for personal computers, set top boxes, and mobile devices. After the bubble burst in 2000, Qpass faced a dilemma when it couldn’t go public, and it needed to decide in which direction to move—keep pushing its product across different market segments, or pick one and stick with it.

Former colleagues credit Franklin with making the tough choices, and making them quickly: Qpass focused on mobile, where wireless carriers would pay the company to help them generate more revenue from subscribers through digital products like ringtones and games. The company was first to market in mobile services and payment processing, and never looked back.

Before his Qpass days, Franklin spent more than a decade at Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), leading product development and management for Microsoft Office, interactive television, and MSN properties. He is regarded as a gifted strategist in the software world. He is also one of about 30 former Qpass employees whom we tracked down in their present jobs last month—and he brings the number of ex-Qpassion CEOs to 11.

Brent Frei, the co-founder of Bellevue, WA-based Smartsheet and Onyx Software, knows a thing or two about collaborative software (Daptiv’s space). Though he says he doesn’t know a lot about Daptiv’s new CEO, Frei has high praise for Qpass employees who served during Franklin’s tenure. “They stuck it out through thick and thin, and they are high-quality folks,” Frei says. “That alone would suggest that he’s got some strongly positive substance.”

In a statement, Franklin said Daptiv is “widely recognized as a leader in collaborative project and portfolio management solutions for the enterprise.” He added, “The Daptiv team has a significant foundation in its technology and customer base on which to build as we progress in our vision of helping organizations better manage their work.”

Daptiv was founded in 1997 and says it has more than 700 corporate customers, including Amgen, BASF, BP, and Honeywell.

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I spent nine years working for a Customer Relationship Management software provider called Onyx Software. Our CRM systems were (at the time) largely implemented and run on-site at our customers’ locations. I ran the Professional Services team for the Americas—we were responsible for aligning business strategy with our software implementations, conducting business modeling, installing and customizing our software, performing training, and supporting our product.

Today I run Deneki Outdoors, a company that owns and operates fly fishing lodges in Alaska, British Columbia, the Bahamas, and Chile. We’ve got six year-round employees spread across those locations, and 40 folks who work for us seasonally.

What in the world could you learn at an enterprise software company that also applies to a fly fishing lodge business? Here are three big lessons.

—As a small business in 2009, you probably don’t need to own a single server.

Just a few years ago, running sophisticated business systems like CRM, financials, document management, and heck, even e-mail and calendaring, meant buying enterprise software packages, installing them on servers that you own and maintain, and paying a person or a team of people to keep things running smoothly. In 2009, the vast majority of small business functions can be supported by hosted applications that are simple, cheap, and close to zero maintenance.

Our business runs on Google Apps, Salesforce.com, and hosted Quickbooks. Other modern productivity tools like Skype help too, but our ability to run our core business functions on hosted platforms leads to a huge savings for us in terms of time and money. We don’t own a single server. We’ve never had to perform an upgrade. Customization is a piece of cake. Our “core systems” have been down for all of about three hours in the past five years combined.

If you run a small business, let the SaaS [software as a service] folks do the dirty work …Next Page »

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This is a special, bi-coastal edition of the X Factor (it doesn’t usually run in Seattle). For my column on Tuesday, I surveyed seven Boston-area startup CEOs and asked them to characterize their company cultures in one word. Truth be told, I canvassed nine CEOs, but only seven got back to me before my deadline. The remaining two have now weighed in, so part of this post is to share their words with you.

The other reason behind this post is to compare the words chosen by the Boston CEOs I canvassed with the words chosen by some counterparts in Seattle. As you’ll see, there was a surprising trend that had at least one Xconomy editor (chief correspondent Wade Roush) wondering whether entrepreneurs on the two coasts have gotten their personalities mixed up in some kind of bizarre startup transporter accident. Read on for that.

Here are the last two Boston entries:

Taligen Therapeutics (Cambridge, MA)
CEO: Abbie Celniker
Culture: “Passionate”
Comment: Taligen, which moved to Cambridge from Colorado in mid-2008 and raised $26 million out of a planned $65 financing round in May, according to a regulatory filing, is developing drugs to fight arthritis and other inflammatory diseases. “We all passionately believe in the science. We are all passionate about winning and we are all passionate about how imperative it is to have fun while you are working to solve challenging problems,” Celniker says.

Visible Measures (Boston, MA)
CEO: Brian Shin
Culture: “Energetic”
Comments: Shin’s four-year-old company has raised nearly $30 million for its efforts to index and provide analytics around web video content. “We have a lot of eclectic and energetic folks and we try to foster an open culture to embrace and enable their success :),” says Shin in an e-mail.

Now to the East Coast-West Coast “word-off.” As I mentioned on Tuesday, I had “borrowed” the idea for my column from Greg Huang, Xconomy’s Seattle editor. Earlier in the month, in two separate stories, here and here, he had posted the one words (if that’s how you say it) from nine Seattle-area CEOs. He had nine, and now I have nine, so I thought, ‘Why not take this whole West Coast vs. East Coast thing to a whole new, no doubt meaningless, level and compare the words from both coasts?’

So, here, for your amusement and edification or whatever, are the nine Seattle CEO words stacked up against the nine Boston CEO words. As you will see, only one word, “focused” was mentioned on both coast. And only one other word, “passionate,” was mentioned twice (both times by Boston CEOs).

When Wade saw this comparison, his first reaction was to accuse me of mixing up the two lists. After I assured him that wasn’t the case, he said he thought most of the East Coast CEOs gave New-Agey, feel-good answers that seemed more reminiscent of West Coast lifestyles, while the West Coast entrepreneurs gave hard-edged, down-to-earth words that are more traditionally associated with New England’s Puritan work ethic.

What do you think? Have East Coast entrepreneurs been studying the West Coast playbook too hard, or vice-versa? Do you see other patterns? Which single word do you like best? My own favorite is “vibrant” (I was born in Berkeley, after all). But I think the best word for a startup culture to be built around is probably “focused.”

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Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) announced today it has rolled out its WiMax wireless broadband service in 10 new cities, including Bellingham, WA, and Boise, ID. Also on the list are eight cities in Texas, including Amarillo, Corpus Christi, Lubbock, and Waco. The new markets join Las Vegas, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Portland, OR as WiMax hubs. Yesterday, Clearwire also announced two new executives who are helping with the WiMax deployments: Erik Prusch, chief financial officer, and Teresa Elder, president of strategic partnerships and wholesale.

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First, let me get this out up front—I’m ripping off the idea for this column from my colleague Greg Huang, editor of Xconomy Seattle. Thanks Greg!

Second, I spend a lot of time talking with venture capitalists about the startup business, and with entrepreneurs about venture capitalists AND the startup business. But those can be pretty detailed conversations. So the idea here is to short-circuit all that—and get the entire conversation down to one word, literally.

As Greg noted in his article, “A startup’s culture is what sets it apart from its peers. It is the essence of the operation. It directly affects the company’s strategy, hiring practices, and the personality of its products.”

I’d add that establishing and maintaining a corporate culture that employees buy into, and that even inspires them, is critical to success, and can often be a source of strength or guidance when a company goes through trying times.

So, following Greg’s example, I contacted a slew of Boston-area CEOs to ask them to sum up corporate culture. I got back seven answers in time for this column. There’s no deep analysis here, but I have added a bit of context to their remarks. I’d be curious to hear what you think.

Allurent (Cambridge, MA)
CEO: Joe Chung
Culture: “Synergistic.”
Comments: Actually, Chung’s first response was “synerfystic,” and I thought, being a creative guy, he had coined a new word with some deep meaning. But then he clarified, citing a Blackberry error, and said he meant “synergistic.” Allurent is doing retail e-commerce in a recession, a tough challenge. I’d say if you can find synergies in just about anything you do, that’s a plus.

Aveo Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge, MA)
CEO: Tuan Ha-Ngoc
Culture: “Vibrant”
Comments: Aveo has an aggressive vision: take on the big boys of cancer drug development, thanks partly to a unique and, the company says, more accurate way to mimic cancer in mouse models. But as Ha-Ngoc says, “Vibrant is an appropriate word that describes our culture since it is both the result and the sum of all other elements of AVEO’s culture i.e. creative and dedicated people working together in a transparent, respectful way and with tremendous passion in making substantial impact in the lives of cancer patients around the world.”

Daily Grommet (Lexington, MA)
CEO: Jules Pieri
Culture: “Adventurous”
Comment: Okay, it turns out Pieri, whose e-commerce startup features …Next Page »

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You can tell a lot about a company from its chief executive. They set the tone, the direction, the pace of operations. For a startup, it all starts with the CEO.

A startup’s culture is what sets it apart from its peers. It is the essence of the operation. It directly affects the company’s strategy, hiring practices, and the personality of its products.

Corporate culture is notoriously hard to define and measure, but critically important to whether a business will succeed. So I recently took a small (and highly unscientific) sample of Northwest startups, spanning the fields of business software, Internet, mobile, gaming, video, and materials—and asked the CEOs to talk about their company’s culture. Furthermore, I asked them to boil their culture and philosophy down to one word.

I’ll spare you any psychoanalysis of their answers, but it’s interesting to see how their descriptions reflect both their own personality and the market they’re in:
.

Apptio (Bellevue, WA)
CEO: Sunny Gupta
Culture: “Paranoid”
Comments: Gupta says the Apptio mantra is “glass half-empty.” But he doesn’t mean it in a negative way. He means the company is relentlessly focused on pushing its advantage, improving its weaknesses, and crushing its competition all around—a necessary mindset in the crowded and cutthroat environment of IT cost management and optimization.

Elemental Technologies (Portland, OR)
CEO: Sam Blackman
Culture: “Execution”
Comments: Blackman says he and his co-founders came from a previous company that started out executing well, but then took its eye off the ball and got distracted by things like …Next Page »

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Want to know how to raise a big round of venture funding in a recession? If you’re in the software business, talk to Sunny Gupta.

Gupta’s company, Bellevue, WA-based Apptio, is announcing a $14 million Series B financing round today. The round includes existing investors Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners, and also new investors Shasta Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz Fund. Apptio is not the only company Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have co-invested in with Madrona; they also bet on Seattle-based ExtraHop Networks in April.

The Apptio investment is a pretty big deal, given its size and the difficulty software startups everywhere are having in securing follow-up funding. Apptio previously raised $7 million from Madrona, Greylock, Ignition Partners, and others in November 2007. Today’s announcement is a huge vote of confidence from its lead investors—and it means Apptio will be able to ramp up its expansion and sales in a major way.

“This is a big milestone for us,” says Gupta, Apptio’s CEO, who previously founded iConclude (which was acquired by Opsware and then Hewlett-Packard in 2007). “Nineteen, 20 months in, we’re executing like crazy. We’ve really delivered on the vision. We’re starting to transform the way CIOs [chief information officers] manage the business of IT by helping them understand the cost of services.”

When last we checked on Apptio, the firm had announced a slew of new, high-profile corporate customers that it helps manage and optimize the costs of IT systems like computers, mobile devices, software packages, servers, and data centers. Apptio’s software, which it provides “on-demand” as a service, helps make companies’ IT costs more transparent, allowing CIOs to “run IT like a business,” Gupta says. “Our investors believe it’s a billion dollars-plus opportunity.”

Apptio has signed up about three dozen corporate customers, small and large, including Starbucks, Alaska Airlines, SumTotal, and NYK Logistics. Because of its strong customer traction, Gupta says, Apptio was able to raise “more money than we thought we really needed. We wanted to have …Next Page »

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Yesterday was a busy day for Razorfish chief strategy officer Jeff Lanctot. With the official announcement that French advertising firm Publicis will acquire Microsoft-owned Razorfish, Lanctot had quite a lot on his plate. Despite his having to fly out from Seattle to another office, I managed to get a few answers from him about the deal and what it may actually mean for Razorfish.

Publicis is buying the digital marketing company from Microsoft for $530 million in cash and stock. “We view this deal [as] accelerating our mission of expanding our global reach and client offerings,” Lanctot said in an e-mail. But he added that even with the change in ownership, Razorfish won’t change unduly, existing as part of Publicis but operating autonomously. “Razorfish will operate as an independent entity under VivaKi, the operating unit of Publicis Groupe,” he said. This means there won’t be any big changes in management either, he added, with Bob Lord staying on as CEO with the rest of the Razorfish managers—at least in the coming weeks and months.

Publicis stands to gain a lot from the deal, with Razorfish already being one of the largest companies of its kind in the world. Acquiring Razorfish “will make Publicis Groupe a leading player in digital communications, including Search and Display,” Lanctot wrote.

Razorfish users don’t need to panic yet, even if they are concerned about how things may change, since the final transaction isn’t expected to conclude until the end of the year. “Until the deal closes, it’s business as usual,” Lanctot said.

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Scene: An abandoned brick building along the Connecticut River. The image dissolves, then reforms to show a new, ultra-modern factory in its place. Move to interior shot of computers and server banks. Brilliant academics ponder the future. Highly trained young professionals walk purposefully, the future alive in their eyes.

I have no idea whether the scene depicted above is accurate. But that’s the vision planted in my mind by the announcement earlier this month that the state of Massachusetts and a coalition of corporate and academic institutions—MIT, Boston University, the University of Massachusetts, Cisco, and EMC—had banded together to plan a High Performance Computing Center (HPCC) for Holyoke, MA.

Xconomy broke the news about the HPCC on June 9. The general idea is that a state-of-the-art “green” data and computing center in Holyoke, cooled by the Connecticut’s waters and powered by affordable, renewable hydropower, will establish Massachusetts as a leader in next-generation computing technologies and bring jobs and dollars to the depressed Holyoke region. The center would presumably house the networked servers and storage systems needed to address complex research problems in fields from genomics to climate modeling, as well as various commercial projects. “The potential for breakthrough technologies and research is enormous,” said Governor Deval “the Govinnovator” Patrick in a statement, “and both the center and this collaboration will undoubtedly serve to lift up the City of Holyoke and regional economies throughout Western Massachusetts.”

That’s the essence of the coverage to date. But, of course, that is only the beginning of the story—since the plan hasn’t even been finalized yet. I was especially interested in the corporate angle to all this, since corporate innovation is an issue I’ve spent a book or two exploring. And while to date this column has dealt mainly with entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and startups, innovation really does happen in big companies, too. And so, against the backdrop of the envisioned High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke, this is a look at such an attempt.

My guest for today’s column is Jeff Nick, SVP and chief technology officer for EMC. The story he tells isn’t just of a data storage and management company wanting to spur the construction of an advanced computing center to grow its current businesses. Rather, Nick laid out a multi-tiered strategy of how EMC plans to combine its shorter-term business ambitions with efforts to explore the future in virtual computing, cloud computing, data management, security, and more within the confines of the fully operational, fully commercial data center.

At a high level, Nick characterized the project as offering “three dimensions of opportunity” for EMC and its R&D strategy. The first lies in the opportunity to test new techniques involving the center’s physical infrastructure, what Nick calls “ping, power, and pipe.” (”Ping” is a new term for me that Nick says refers to the way cables are physically laid down to network computers together.)

Systems infrastructure, as opposed to the physical infrastructure, is the second area of opportunity EMC’s chief technology officer sees. This covers areas such as virtualization—the specialty of VMware, a California company that is majority-owned by EMC—and cloud computing, the domain of EMC’s Cloud Infrastructure and Services Division.

These technologies will be both the undergirding for, and to some extent the subject of, the research projects envisioned for the new center. For instance, Nick says the HPCC will …Next Page »

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Carl Icahn has landed a one-two punch on Biogen Idec. Today, the Cambridge, MA-based biotech confirmed what the activist investor had proclaimed last week—that two members of Icahn’s board slate have been elected to Biogen’s board of directors. This afternoon, the company acknowledged that Richard Mulligan, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Gene Therapy Initiative, had won election to its board. He will be joining fellow Icahn slate member Alex Denner, whose election was confirmed last week by the biotech.

As Xconomy reported in an exclusive interview with Denner and Mulligan last Thursday, Denner appeared to be the runaway winner in last week’s board election, where four director seats were up for grabs on the company’s 13-member board. We cited an Icahn vote-tracking tally that showed Mulligan in third place. But Biogen (NASDAQ: BIIB) only confirmed that Denner and two of its own candidates, Robert Pangia and William Young, had won election. Last week, Biogen said the race for the remaining place was still too close to call.

“We welcome Alexander Denner and Richard Mulligan to the Board and look forward to working with them to build on Biogen Idec’s strong track record of delivering value,” said Bruce R. Ross, Biogen Idec’s chairman, in a statement.

With a two-person toehold on Biogen’s 13-person board, Icahn plans to press an agenda for change at the company. As noted in our story last week, Denner and Mulligan told me that they hoped to focus on five areas at Biogen: shoring up relationships with partners, improving cost structure, strengthening and shoring up the product pipeline, improving strategic direction and focus, and settling litigation issues.

“Our objective is not to put the company up for sale,” Denner told me last week. “It’s to improve shareholder value, improve the pipeline, reinvigorate the culture and research, implement smarter spending, and improve the relationships between Biogen, Genentech-Roche, and Elan-and potentially to renegotiate a deal with Elan that’s better for the shareholders of both companies.”

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Where does technological innovation happen around Boston? What are the sources of new software and hardware creations? You’ve probably heard about Google and Microsoft moving to Cambridge in the past couple of years—but did you know Microsoft has two labs in Cambridge, not one? Or that another Silicon Valley company has a research lab just upstairs from Google in Kendall Square? Then of course there’s IBM’s social software lab, which gave us Wordle. And the aerospace robotics research lab on the 12th floor of a Cambridge office tower at One Broadway.

So far, my columns have been stories—with beginnings, middles, and ends—based on little things we reporters like to do, such as interviews, with plenty of quotes from the innovators, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists I visit.

This week is different: for today’s column, I’ve done exactly no interviews. But I have done a good amount of research. This week, I decided to write about something I have been noticing for quite some time—the growing presence of non-university software and IT research and development labs in the Boston area, especially around Kendall Square here in Cambridge. At Xconomy, we’ve written about several of these labs and efforts piecemeal—like when Google came to town, or when Microsoft hired Reed Sturtevant to open a new advanced development lab at One Memorial Drive. We’ve even chronicled the decline of a once-world famous computer science lab, the Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL), which is still based on Broadway in Cambridge, not far from MIT.

But I’ve always wanted to wrap these up into a bigger article, with full details on each lab—how many people they employ, what areas of technology they specialize in, and so on. Truth be told, I haven’t gotten to that in this column, either. But I’ve made a start.

Below, with the help of our rising star intern from Boston University, Roxanne Palmer, and chief correspondent Wade Roush (who wrote many of the stories I mentioned above), I’ve mapped out the labs we know about. I’ve also added a few descriptions about the efforts when available. A few caveats: the list doesn’t include university labs, such as MIT’s Media Lab. Also, there is wide disagreement in IT, especially when it comes to software, about what can be considered R&D. I’ve tried to focus on labs or efforts that go beyond routine or normal product development to farther-out efforts that are riskier, more open-ended, and aren’t expected to bear fruit until a year or three down the road.

To see details about a lab and links to our stories, where available, you can either click on a little orange light bulb on the map below (these are creative R&D efforts, get it?) or browse the company list at this Google Maps page. If you go with the light bulb option, you may have to zoom in to see individual labs that are close together. For instance, both Google and VMware are housed in the same building at 5 Cambridge Center—but you only see one icon unless you get very up close and personal. The same is true for Aurora Flight Sciences and Conduit Labs, which are both at One Broadway in Cambridge.

A last caveat: this is a work in progress, and it’s not based on any exact science. So I’d love your feedback, both about labs I’ve included that maybe shouldn’t be here because the work is too short-term and routine, and about those I’ve missed (and I’m sure I’ve missed a lot). Either drop a comment below or write us at editors@xconomy.com.

View Boston Tech R&D Labs in a larger map

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(Updated with Biogen Idec announcement of preliminary results, 3:18 pm, June 4—see below)

When last we left the cliffhanger that was yesterday’s Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) annual meeting: the forces of billionaire investor Carl Icahn claimed they had won two of four director seats up for election. The New York Times was reporting Icahn had secured at least one place, and Biogen itself had adjourned the meeting saying results of the vote were not yet clear and would be announced later this month.

That was after a contentious day in which Biogen officials kept the voting open longer than anticipated—prompting charges by Icahn that the company was trying to change the outcome in its favor and leading the dissidents to file a lawsuit seeking to force Biogen to close the polls. “This is not North Korea,” proclaimed the leading member of Icahn’s slate, Alex Denner, when the extended voting period was first announced.

In short, it was not your usual boring cookie-and-coffee shareholder meeting. Since then, Biogen has essentially said only that the voting results are not yet fully tabulated and that it will announce the outcome as soon as possible. The company has not commented on what a potential Icahn pick or two on the board might mean. “From our perspective, it’s difficult to comment on Dr. Denner’s claim, given that the official tabulation has not yet been completed,” says Jennifer Neiman, a company spokeswoman.

Alex Denner, left, and Richard Mulligan, on a Cambridge street.

It is a different matter for Icahn’s team, though. I met Denner and the other apparent Icahn-backed victor, Richard Mulligan, last night for an exclusive interview. The pair describe how the Biogen contingent had abruptly left the meeting without shaking hands with them, and they named (for the first time, as far as I can tell) the two members of Biogen’s slate they thought had lost. Denner and Mulligan also shared some insights about why they believe they were more successful this year than last—when Icahn’s slate was shut out from winning a single board seat. And they spoke about their plans to reinvigorate Biogen—stressing, in Denner’s words, that “our objective is not to put the company up for sale.” (This is the same assurance Denner made to shareholders of San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals, and it worked in that hard-fought proxy contest, as he was elected to Amylin’s board.)

On the voting front, Denner appears to have been the runaway winner. According to a preliminary tally from a vote tracking service they use, Denner was more than 20 million votes ahead of the nearest other vote-getter. But with four seats in total up for election, the next four candidates—Mulligan and three of Biogen’s four choices—were closely grouped, within a few million votes of each other and apparently at the point where one or two changes of mind by major shareholders could shift the outcome.

But the tally showed Mulligan in third place overall. If that holds when the votes are finalized, that means he would also gain a board seat. So would Biogen picks Robert Pangia and William Young, while Biogen choices Alan Glassberg and Lawrence Best would be defeated. All four are current Biogen board members. The other two members of Icahn’s slate, Thomas Deuel and David Sidransky, were far back and appeared out of the running.

[Update: June 4, 3:18 pm: Biogen has put out a press release announcing that it appears Denner, Pangia, and Young have been elected to its board, as indicated in our article. It says the vote for the fourth board seat is too close to call.]

Denner says the vote has not been finalized and that he anticipates Biogen might try strategies to change the outcome—but that he feels confident he and Mulligan will prevail. “From what our sources tell us it’s very clear,” he told me earlier in the day. But, “I guess you never know.”

Last night, Denner reiterated his objection to the delay in the voting and expanded a bit on his North Korea analogy. “I think it’s like North Korea or some banana republic, where the voting process is not respected,” he says.

Denner says they felt like two wall flowers at a dance when Biogen’s leadership …Next Page »

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