Every day, I come across loads of interesting material that I’d love to blog about but can’t because I don’t have the time or the right venue. I usually just stick this stuff into Evernote and tell myself I’ll write about it later.

Well, it’s later. In today’s column I want to round up a dozen or so fun articles, websites, and apps, and other stuff you may not have come across before. There’s no particular theme here, beyond the fact that I said to myself “Cool!” or “That’s so perceptive!” to myself when I first stumbled across these items. Enjoy.

1. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP

This is a remarkable iPad and iPhone game from a small game development house in Toronto. Actually, it’s a little misleading to call it a game. It’s more of a musical-mythopoetic adventure, with graphics that are deliberately low-tech (they’re in 8-bit style) but ravishing nonetheless, and an amazing electronic soundtrack by Jim Guthrie. I can’t say I understand the storyline—something about a megatome, psionics, and trigons—but it doesn’t matter. The point is to immerse yourself in the game’s enchanting environment.

2. The Toronto Standard

There must be some kind of radioactive entrepreneurial-design pixie dust in the air in Toronto these days. Another company there, Playground Digital, just helped rebuild The Toronto Standard, a short-lived Toronto newspaper (1848-1850) that now provides a “daily digital briefing on the life of the city.” It’s not the briefings that impress me so much as the packaging.  Playground has reinvented the way Web content flows into the browser page; they call it a “liquid layout.” When you resize your browser window, the images and the columns resize themselves, always adopting the most elegant layout for the available screen width. And if you go to the site on a smartphone or tablet, prepare to have your mind blown—the whole site intelligently reflows when you switch from landscape to portrait orientation (and this in the Safari browser, not in a native app). The whole Web should work this way.

3. Give Me Something To Read

This site, together with Longform.org and Longreads, satiates my periodic need for a long piece of narrative journalism that I can really sink my canines into. It’s a curated list of interesting articles being saved to Instapaper, the mobile-friendly app where you can store and read stripped-down versions of Web content. Among today’s selections: “The Grand Tour,” a New Yorker article about Chinese tourists in Europe, and “A Political Meltdown,” a Walrus Magazine piece about Canada’s role in a shortage of medical isotopes.

4. The End of Content Ownership

Lance Ulanoff at PC Magazine is a consistently perceptive technology writer with a broad range of interests. This Ulanoff piece, from just this week, is a great example—it argues that much sooner than we think, we’re all going to stop storing our purchased digital content locally (whether they’re on our hard drives, like songs from iTunes, or on other physical media like books, CDs, or paper) and get almost everything from the cloud. Even books will be streamed from the cloud, page by page, Ulanoff persuasively argues.

5. Bing for iPad

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the slickest mobile app I’ve seen in weeks is from Microsoft. It’s the new Bing app for the iPad. Like Bing on the Web, it hits you first with a stunning full-screen image, then lets you dive into beautifully designed, smoothly functional sections on weather, news, maps, movies, images, videos, and shopping. There’s also an intriguing … Next Page »

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We had another mixed bag of Seattle biotech news this week, as one of the region’s oldest biotech companies (Cell Therapeutics) ran dangerously low on cash, and one of the newer scientific institutions (Institute for Systems Biology) said its budget for the coming year is growing by $20 million.

—Cell Therapeutics is skating closer than ever to the brink, with only enough cash to last until the end of February. The Seattle-based biotech company (NASDAQ: CTIC) is attempting to keep its head above water to commercialize two cancer drugs. The company had trading in its stock halted last week in order to meet requirements of Italian securities regulators, although it resumed trading yesterday.

—What breed is your dog? A pair of canine genomics researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center developed a test to answer this question, now being marketed by Mars, the giant candy and pet food company. Mars doesn’t disclose sales, but the test, at $125 to $150 a pop, hasn’t yet caught on the way its founders hoped.

—It’s a struggle to whip up enthusiasm for high-risk, high-reward biotech investments, but the folks at the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association are soldiering on this year with the eighth annual Invest Northwest. The trade group has signed up more than 200 people to attend the meeting March 17-18, and has a goal of getting to 500-600.

—Leroy Hood gave an update on the Institute for Systems Biology last Friday at the Technology Alliance’s Science & Technology Discovery Series. Despite the downturn, support is growing for his vision of “P4″ (predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory) medicine. The Institute’s budget is increasing from $35 million to $55 million next year because of support from the government of Luxembourg.

—Helix Biomedix, the Bothell, WA-based maker of peptide molecules, raised $3.2 million in convertible debt for general corporate purposes and to go after new opportunities in the consumer market. The firm’s peptides are used in skin care and cosmetic products.

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Two scientists walked into Leroy Hood‘s office in Seattle a little more than five years ago with a burning question about the genomes of dogs. They had sequenced the entire string of DNA in the canine genome for biomedical researchers, and sought out the high-speed gene sequencing pioneer for business advice. They wondered what it would take to build a business that sells information to pet owners, who might be curious about what breed their dog is.

This conversation in the summer of 2003 led to the formation of Seattle-based Argus Genetics, a spin-off company from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The technology has since been licensed to Mars Inc., the $21 billion-a-year candy and pet food giant in McLean, VA, which has turned it into a test called the Wisdom Panel MX. I heard the story of how this idea evolved into a product from Carl Weissman, a venture capitalist at Seattle-based Accelerator (and OVP Venture Partners), and Neale Fretwell, a business development manager for Mars’s veterinary division.

The original idea from Elaine Ostrander and Leonid Kruglyak at the “Hutch” intrigued Weissman when he got the referral, even if it made some of his investing partners roll their eyes because it wasn’t their usual swing-for-the-fences-to-treat-cancer kind of bet. Weissman and Kristina Burow, a Kauffman Fellow now with Arch Venture Partners, started their research. They learned there are 60 million dogs in the U.S., and half are purebred, while half are from mixed-breed heritage. They talked to breeders and purebred owners, and found out they didn’t want the test because it might disqualify purebreds from shows. That left mixed-breeds. There are 30 million of those dogs, and the test could be developed and sold for $100. That meant if Argus could capture at least 11 percent of the market, it could have a $330 million opportunity.

“Dog people are serious,” Weissman says. “It looked like an interesting business to us.”

It also seemed like something that could take off quickly, Weissman thought. It was an application of cutting-edge science that didn’t need to pass the strict scrutiny of the FDA, or go through hassles with reimbursement from health insurers. He negotiated for the rights to the technology from the Hutch, and set up the company in a structure that left what he calls “significant ownership stakes” for Ostrander, Krugylyak, and the Hutchinson Center, who get royalties on sales from Mars. (Ostrander has since left for the National Institutes of Health, and Krugylak is now at Princeton University.)

Mars got an early bead on this technology because it has sponsored some of Ostrander’s research in the past, Fretwell says.

Here’s how it works. A pet owner comes into a veterinarian’s office, curious about what breed their dog is. They provide a blood sample, … Next Page »

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When NASA announced last week it was postponing the launch of its next mission to Mars by 26 months, Michael Ravine says his heart sank—and then he breathed a sigh of relief.As the advanced projects manager at San Diego’s Malin Space Science Systems, Ravine says his team has been working frantically to deliver two cameras for the mission by the end of January. They are the last two of four cameras that NASA hired the company to build for the Mars Science Laboratory, an SUV-size rover designed for backcountry four-wheeling across the Martian landscape.

NASA’s decision to delay the launch that was set for next October until 2011 was disappointing, Ravine says. But the extra time could give one of San Diego’s most unusual business ventures a chance to restore advanced optical capabilities that NASA was forced to delete from the two cameras to meet its test schedule.

Malin’s 2004 proposal called for building identical stereoscopic cameras that would be mounted on masts aboard the big Mars rover. Ravine says that for several reasons their plans included a wide-field zoom lens in each mast camera. One was the fact that Ravine had recruited “Titanic” filmmaker James … Next Page »

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A million people in India are getting clean, cheap drinking water every day because of technology from a little company in Bothell, WA, that few people in the Northwest have ever heard of.

The company, Halosource, has started getting traction in the Indian market this year with its technology that makes water safe to drink. About 200,000 water purifiers have been sold there that use the company’s proprietary method for killing bacteria and viruses, through a partnership with Eureka Forbes, according to Halosource CEO John Kaestle.

The problem of contaminated drinking water—and the business opportunity for anyone who can solve it—is enormous. About one-fifth of people on Earth lack access to safe drinking water, a condition that led to the death of 2.2 million people in 2004, according to the United Nations. The global market for consumer products to purify the basic human necessity is worth an estimated $18 billion, according to market research firm Frost & Sullivan. Tackling that market is no small goal for a venture-backed company with about 100 employees.

To get its products adopted in the market, Halosource has formed partnerships with local companies in India, China, and Brazil. The technology can come in various formats, but has gained popularity in India with a simple product that the emerging middle class can afford.

“This is a whole new product class addressing a need for a whole new consumer class,” says Andrew Clews, Halosource’s vice president for marketing and business development, in an interview at the company’s office.

The problem with bad drinking water isn’t new. Boiling water effectively kills bugs, but is time-consuming and expensive. Carbon-filtering systems (think Brita) filter out dirt, and sediment particles, but can’t kill bacteria and viruses that make people ill with diarrhea, dysentery, and numerous other nasty ailments. Chlorine tablets work, but make water taste bad.

Newer technologies like reverse osmosis or ultraviolet lights in water tanks are becoming available in China and India, Clews says, but they can cost $200 to $350 for a home system, and depend on reliable water pressure and electricity. That’s not realistic in large parts of those countries, Kaestle says.

That’s where Halosource enters. Its proprietary technology is in a cartridge about the size of a yo-yo, at the bottom of a jug. Water in the jug (about the size of a Gatorade cooler) flows down thanks to gravity. It passes through the cartridge, which is filled with polystyrene beads coated with bromine, a chemical with the germ-killing punch of chlorine but without the foul taste.

All bacteria and viruses are killed on contact in seconds. No indoor plumbing or water pressure is needed. No electricity. It can take muddy water from a drainage ditch, or a rooftop, and in tandem with a sediment filter from another company, can produce water safe enough to drink, Kaestle says.

The cost? Consumers can buy the jug-and-cartridge product, called AquaSure, for about $40 to $60. Replacement cartridges cost $7 to $10, and typically need to be replaced every six months.

Andy Dale, managing director at Buerk Dale Victor, a Seattle-based venture capital firm that is one of the company’s early backers, says the progress at the company in the last couple years has been “incredible.”

“Here you’ve got a relatively small Seattle company that is dead center in solving one of the biggest global problems there is,” Dale says. “They’re making their mark in their industry.”

The technology has caught the attention of folks at the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH) in Seattle, a Gates Foundation-funded nonprofit devoted to fostering new technologies to solve health … Next Page »

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