Who says consumer websites are dead? Maybe you don’t need the ridiculous traffic of, say, Seattle-based Cheezburger Network (LOLcats) to survive on advertising revenues. Maybe user-generated content around a targeted niche, especially where there are purchasing decisions being made, can work well after all.

That’s the sense I got after talking with Tom Seery, the founder and president of Seattle-based RealSelf. Launched in 2006, RealSelf.com provides information about cosmetic treatments in an online community format that includes user reviews, doctor listings, and expert advice from cosmetic surgeons, dentists, and dermatologists. The treatments in question—a multibillion dollar market worldwide—run the gamut from nose jobs and tummy tucks to orthodontic braces and breast implants.

RealSelf is particularly interesting because it sits at the intersection of a number of fast-growing (but also challenging) areas for startups—social and community review sites, health 2.0, and ad-supported media sites. The company has gained some traction, growing 150 percent year over year in Web traffic; it now gets more than 700,000 unique visitors per month, Seery says. In terms of local startups with a similar strategy for capturing niches of Internet content (but these are not competitors), I’d mention Avvo, TeachStreet, Raveable, Redfin, Urbanspoon, and Zillow.

Like most promising startups, the story of RealSelf began with some important personal and business observations. Seery was a longtime employee of Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE), and he saw the competing startup TripAdvisor plug away at hotel reviews and other user-generated ratings until 2004, when IAC (which then owned Expedia) had to buy it. “That was the ‘aha,’” Seery says. He thought, “Where else can we take this empowerment of consumers?”

Around the same time, Seery’s wife was researching a laser cosmetic treatment, and was having a hard time finding trustworthy reviews. So he thought, “Let’s create TripAdvisor for the cosmetic space.” The key adjustment he made was to introduce medical experts to the user community. The challenge there, as with most e-health sites like WebMD and Revolution Health, is that doctors are …Next Page »

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There’s a big argument over whether venture capitalists and even angel investors are doing as many early stage or small deals these days. The general sentiment is that no, they aren’t. Since we began our monthly roundup of Massachusetts venture deals back in June, however, we’ve argued that the data doesn’t support that view: virtually every month, the number of seed and Series A rounds has topped the number of later-round financings, and often by a wide margin.

Now comes what could be another blow to the small-deal naysayers: new data on the extremely small deals—those between $100,000 and $1 million—that typically aren’t reported in financing tabulations. As my colleague Greg Huang, Xconomy’s Seattle editor, wrote in his own look at small deals in the Northwest earlier this week: “Though small in size, these investments need to be included along with the bigger deals that get more press, if you want a more complete picture of the funding landscape in the innovation community.”

It turns out there were 10 of these “under the radar” high-tech deals—7 in Massachusetts, 2 in Connecticut, and 1 in New Hampshire (see table below)—in New England in September, according to data supplied by our partner ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company that tracks VC, angel, and other investments in private companies.

Six of the 10 deals involved equity investments; the remaining four were debt financings. And they spanned a wide range of fields from medical displays to tracking tags to new approaches to education. To me, the most interesting was OmniGuide, a Cambridge, MA, company we’ve written about before that took in $249,999 (you gotta wonder why that figure). OmniGuide, which raised $1.8 million in May, $25 million last year, and some $50 million before that (it’s a long story, go here), makes highly precise optical laser scalpels; its chairman is Analog Devices founder Ray Stata, and the CEO is MIT materials scientist Yoel Fink.

As the parent of two teenagers, I was also highly interested in the Westonian Group, which raised $170,250. The Westonian Group doesn’t appear to have a website, but it is the company behind Abroad101, a website for sharing information about study abroad programs.

Here, then, are our 10 “under the radar” deals from September.

Carrot Medical (Waltham, MA)                 Equity           $635,000
Ultra-high-definition displays for medical images

SoundTag (Braintree, MA)                         Equity          $535,000
Tracking tags for priority shipments

TenMarks Education (Newton, MA)          Debt            $350,000
New approach to math, science, and English education for children

SpecPage (Attleboro, MA)                           Equity          $313,000
Product marketing information exchange for food service and janitorial industries

SeeClickFix (New Haven, CT)                    Debt              $265,000
Technology for reporting and tracking non-emergency issues via the Internet

OmniGuide (Cambridge, MA)                   Equity             $249,999
Designs and manufactures highly precise optical laser scalpels.

Validus DC Systems (Brookfield, CT)         Debt              $204,000
Direct current power infrastructure for data and telecom centers

Paneve (Florence, MA)                                 Debt               $175,000
Software and hardware to reduce the costs of delivery and display of video media content

Westonian Group (Weston, MA)                Equity             $170,250
Company behind Abroad101, an interactive online community around study abroad programs

EnerTrac (Hudson, NH)                               Equity              $125,000
Fuel, oil, and propane tank monitoring products

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They are the deals that slip through the cracks unnoticed. They are worth less than $1 million, but at least $100,000. Though small in size, these investments need to be included along with the bigger deals that get more press, if you want a more complete picture of the funding landscape in the innovation community. And there were at least 16 of these deals in the Northwest in September (see table below), according to ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company tracking VC, angel, and other investments in private companies.

It’s probably too soon to talk about trends, because this is the first month we’ve had access to ChubbyBrain’s data on these smaller deals, which were compiled from regulatory filings, user submissions, and other sources. But here are some quick observations.

About two-thirds of the deals (11 of 16) were equity investments, while one-third (5 of 16) were debt financings. Half the investments (8) were in software companies, while about a quarter each were in biotech/medical (4) and cleantech (3) firms. The majority of the deals were in the Seattle area (10), but a significant number were near Portland or in Oregon (6). Anecdotally, all those breakdowns seem consistent with the deal flow we’ve been seeing and reporting on in the Northwest for the past year or so. The data didn’t include the investors or the stage of the investments.

Without further ado, here are the 16 “under the radar” deals from last month:

Vantos (Seattle)                                            Equity        $873,487
Investigation software

InEnTec (Bend, OR)                                     Equity        $800,000
Cleantech fuels

WA 32609 (Redmond, WA)                           Equity         $800,000
Biotech

Inson Medical Systems (Bellevue, WA)      Equity         $642,536
Biomedical drug delivery

Napera Networks (Mercer Island, WA)         Debt           $600,000
Networking software

Acucela (Bothell, WA)                                    Equity         $439,603
Biotech drugs

Adometry (Kirkland, WA)                               Equity         $400,000
Analytics software

Smilebox (Redmond, WA)                              Equity         $399,999
Consumer software

Asemblon (Redmond, WA)                             Debt            $386,000
Cleantech/materials

Ohio River Clean Fuels / Baard Energy (Vancouver, WA)    Debt            $245,000
Cleantech fuels

Safetec Compliance Systems (Vancouver, WA)                    Debt            $235,000
Software for chemical compliance

Second Porch (Portland, OR)                          Equity         $225,000
Social software

SynapticMash (Seattle)                                    Equity         $200,000
Educational software

Silere Medical Technology (Kirkland, WA)      Debt            $120,000
Medical devices

BallLogic (Portland, OR)                                   Equity         $100,000
Consumer devices

Site 9 (Portland, OR)                                          Equity         $100,000
Web development software

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We’ve brought you a lot of third-quarter venture data in the last week or so—and we’re not done yet (hint: I have something special coming up for you baseball fans). But we haven’t gotten around to our usual Top 10 deals list.

So let me remind you, it was a pretty good quarter here in Massachusetts. Overall venture investment into Bay State startups climbed substantially over Q2, capped by a strong September in which VCs invested some $228 million in 25 deals, according to data from ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company.

And now let me show you the list of the top 10 venture deals in New England—all of which happen to be from Massachusetts. This comes from a different set of data provided by Dow Jones VentureSource.

Top 10 New England Venture Deals of the Third Quarter

Epizyme (Cambridge) — $32 million
Second round
(Investors: Amgen Ventures, Astellas Venture Capital, Bay City Capital*, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, MPM Capital)

Avila Therapeutics (Waltham) — $30 million
Second round
(Investors: Abingworth Management Inc., Advent Venture Partners, Atlas Venture, Novartis Venture Fund*, Polaris Venture Partners)

Gloucester Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge) — $29 million
Later stage
(Investors: Apple Tree Partners, Novo*, ProQuest Investments, Prospect Venture Partners, Rho Ventures)

iWalk (Cambridge) — $20 million
First round
(Investors: General Catalyst Partners*)

Aveo Pharmaceuticals (Cambridge) — $20 million
Corporate financing
(Investors: OSI Pharmaceuticals)

PrimeraDx (Mansfield) — $19.8 million
Later stage
(Investors: Abingworth Management Inc., Burrill & Company, CHL Medical Partners*, InterWest Partners, Invus Group, Malaysia Technology Devt Corp, MPM Capital)

Rapid Micro Biosystems (Bedford) — $18.6 million
First round
(Investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Quaker BioVentures, TVM Capital GmbH, VIMAC Ventures)

MooBella (Taunton) — $18 million
Later stage
(Investors: Inventages Venture Capital*)

Pervasis Therapeutics (Cambridge) — $17 million
Later stage
(Investors: Flagship Ventures, Highland Capital Partners, Polaris Venture Partners)

Advanced Electron Beams (Wilmington) — $14.3 million
Later stage
(Investors: Atlas Venture, Flagship Ventures*, GE Energy Financial Services, General Catalyst Partners, RockPort Capital Partners)

* Lead investor

I have to mention the 11th ranked deal—iMedX, which took in $13 million in first-round funding. The company hails from Shelton, CT, and was the biggest third-quarter deal in New England outside of Massachusetts.

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Netherlands-based ProFibrix, which has a Seattle subsidiary, announced today it has raised $11 million in Series B funding, led by new investor Gilde Healthcare Partners and including existing investor Index Ventures. ProFibrix was founded in 2004 and makes a dry powder topical tissue sealant that stops bleeding during or after surgery. The product, called Fibrocaps, is currently in a clinical trial in the Netherlands. ProFibrix plans to submit an Investigational New Drug Application to the FDA in the first half of next year.

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Bellevue, WA-based medical imaging detection software company Confirma will be acquired by Milwaukee, WI-based health IT provider Merge Healthcare for approximately $22 million, according to a press release sent out today. The acquisition will allow Merge to incorporate Confirma’s technology into its IT offerings to doctors. Confirma’s main product, CADstream, is used for prostate and breast MRIs, with other functions in development.

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When Merck recalled its arthritis drug Vioxx on September 30, 2004, Connecticut-based online pharmacy FamilyMeds wasted no time notifying customers. Within three hours after the recall was announced, an automated telephone system began calling Vioxx users to inform them about the change. But there was a twist—to comply with the federal healthcare privacy law known as HIPAA, the system had to verify that the person on the other end of the line was actually the patient taking the drug. If the answer was yes, the system would go on to explain the recall. If it was no, the system would leave a phone number and passcode so that the patient could call back later.

That kind of interactive voice response technology is all fairly standard today—but in 2004 it was brand new. The company that made it possible was Burlington, MA-based Silverlink Communications. And from this single application—HIPAA-compliant automated phone communications—Silverlink has since built a major consulting and service operation designed to help healthcare providers reach patients with behavior-related messages of all sorts.

Say a big health plan with millions of members wants to nudge members who take a certain drug toward buying a new, cheaper formulation at twice the dose, then splitting the pills before taking them. Silverlink can not only figure out the most cost-effective way to convey that message, but it can follow up by combing pharmacy claims data to see how many people actually switched.

Though I first met Silverlink CEO Stan Nowak at a local conference on “Health 2.0,” the movement to apply Web-based automation and communication to many aspects of the healthcare system, Silverlink doesn’t fit snugly into that category. The company is really about two things: communication—via whatever mechanism, even the old-fashioned telephone or snail mail—and analytics, to find out what effect each message is having and craft more effective ones.

Because Silverlink’s customers have so many customers of their own, the company is able to package each message in many ways, deliver the variants over many channels, and quickly determine which combinations are most effective for each group. For example, if you want to encourage members who are in the 40-to-55 age group to switch from name-brand drugs to generic ones, is it better to emphasize the cost savings, the convenience, or the fact that everyone else is doing it (in other words, applying a bit of peer pressure)? “Effectively, we’re running multiple simultaneous controlled experiments at scale across populations and measuring the results within microsegments of that population,” says Nowak. “It works in a dramatic way to improve communication yields”—meaning real changes in patient behavior.

Founded in 2002, Silverlink has about 100 employees, and has increased its headcount by 40 percent in the past year. The company has raised about $14 million in venture backing, including a $2.1 million Series A round in 2003 led by Sigma Partners, a $5.6 million B round in 2004 led by HLM Venture Partners, and a $6 million Series C round in 2006, also led by HLM. Kaiser Permanente Ventures, the investment wing of the giant California HMO, joined for the C round. Customers include the nationwide health insurer Aetna and leading pharmacy benefit manager Pharmacare. The company doesn’t share financial figures, but it does say that 2008 revenues were up 47 percent over 2007, and that it recently passed the 200 million mark—meaning that many healthcare consumers have received communications administered by Silverlink.

Nowak says Silverlink’s market is still growing, thanks to some big, long-term shifts in the way health insurance works. “The role of the consumer in healthcare has expanded pretty dramatically since 2003, and looks to expand even more as we …Next Page »

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The economic climate these days reminds me of the famous line about the weather at the “Crosby Clambake” golf tournament (now the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am) held each February on California’s Monterey peninsula, in unpredictable conditions that shift quickly from sun to cold and rain: “There’s plenty of it.”

So it seemed a good time to get out a barometer and ask what the &!#@* an entrepreneur/startup should do in today’s climate? Is the economy really on the rebound? If so, is it time to change strategy? Should companies, say, get more aggressive about hiring people or expanding? Maybe they should court a suitor or investors because deal terms are improving? Or maybe not—maybe you should just stay the course.

[The X Factor is a mostly weekly column featuring conversations with local innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors that mostly runs on Tuesdays. This is an exception.]

I put my queries to four Xconomists, all experienced and highly successful investors, entrepreneurs, and business executives. No one pretended to have figured out whether the economy is rebounding or not. As serial entrepreneur-turned-VC Carmichael Roberts, now of North Bridge Venture Partners, put it: “It is impossible to tell what the heck is going on right now and whether we’re starting to recover or not.” The market, he says, is “too sideways.”

But that didn’t mean Roberts et al didn’t have some valuable advice and insights about what entrepreneurs should do in the current weather. All felt that for the foreseeable future, the climate would be fundamentally different than in recent years—and so should a company’s business strategy. As Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele says: “If you think the same strategy that worked before the meltdown is going to work now, you’re not living on earth. This is a different world, probably similar to the what this was 30 to 40 years ago, and it requires a different mindset.”

Their advice and insights, laid out below, focused largely on how to change your mindset. The ideas run from being extremely flexible about business models to asking tough questions about your business and its value to customers—and about your customers and investors and their value to you. Much of their advice has to do with entrepreneurs raising money in this climate, but parts are also relevant to executives of established companies.

John Abele, co-founder and director, Boston Scientific:

Be willing to make hard assessments—and be flexible with your own models.

“You got to do some slicing and dicing,” says Abele. “Some things are going to be more valuable in a constrained environment,” he says of today’s climate. “A number of things are going to be less valuable.” This includes your own products and your customers, and you must be prepared to adapt your model and offerings to take advantage of what will be most valuable. “A lot of people get trapped in their model and seem to have difficulty moving beyond that,” he says.

For instance, Abele is the owner of the Kingbridge Conference Centre & Institute outside Toronto, which is focused on better ways to conduct meetings and conferences to facilitate collaboration and education, among other things. “So one of the categories we focused on was infrastructure, for example power companies, that will have to do a lot of education to accommodate changes in regulation and technology,” Abele says. “They will be even more valuable to us, particularly if we have special education packages.”

Similarly, a medical company might look at its customers and prospective customers to determine which will be best off in the current climate and then ask whether those customers will …Next Page »

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It was a fairly quiet week for deals in the Northwest, with some activity in biotech, software, materials, and devices.

—Seattle-based Arzeda, a developer of artificial enzymes, formed a partnership with DuPont to create new crop seeds that incorporate Arzeda’s technology, which should increase the productivity of the plants for food, as Eric reported. Financial terms were not released.

—Arlington, WA-based MicroGreen Polymers raised $1.6 million from WRF Capital and angel investors including Northwest Energy Angels, Alliance of Angels, and Atlas Accelerator, as Luke reported in an exclusive. The company has developed technology to recycle plastics into cheaper and more environmentally friendly coffee cups, food packaging, and other items. The money is part of an ongoing round that MicroGreen expects will net $3 million to $4 million this month.

—In another Xconomy exclusive, we talked with the founder of Santa Clara, CA-based Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), Kai Li, a Princeton University computer science professor who has been visiting the University of Washington for about a year. Data Domain just got bought by Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) for $2.1 billion in cash. Li spoke in depth about the ideas behind Data Domain, its growth and acquisition, and the future of data storage.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based Kineta, a biotech firm with an unusual business model, acquired the licenses to an array of compounds from Redwood City, CA-based Airmid with the goal of reaching clinical trials for drugs to tamp down autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. Kineta is looking to run promising drug candidates through early-stage clinical trials and then form partnerships with bigger drugmakers to run bigger trials, collecting upfront payments, milestones, and royalties on any product sales.

—EndoGastric Solutions, a medical device company based in Redmond, WA, and Redwood City, CA, raised $7.5 million from undisclosed investors. The firm, which was originally incubated in Kirkland, WA, at Scout Medical Technologies, makes devices that treat heartburn and obesity. It previously raised $79 million in venture capital from MPM Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, and other investors.

—Seattle-based Cozi, a startup that makes family organizing and activity planning software, formed a partnership with Nestle to launch its service on the food company’s website, as Eric reported. Cozi’s software will be rebranded on the site with both companies’ names. Financial terms of the deal were not announced.

—Earth Class Mail, a Seattle company that delivers physical mail to businesses digitally, is providing key technology for Kansas City, MO-based Perfect Output’s document management service, as Eric reported. Financial details of the partnership were not given.

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Hopkinton, MA-based EMC is throwing its weight behind a massive social media campaign to find a bone marrow donor for one of its employees, 28-year-old Nick Glasgow. The “donor drive” arrived in the Boston area today with events at EMC locations in Cambridge, MA, and Franklin, MA, where potential donors can visit to see whether their own marrow might provide a match.

Glasgow, a California resident, was diagnosed with leukemia nine weeks ago, according to EMC. Initial treatments have proved ineffective, and no matching bone marrow donor has been identified in national databases. The search is complicated by the fact that Glasgow is of mixed Caucasian and Asian heritage, making the pool of potential donors much smaller. (Glasgow’s story and the challenges of blood-marrow matching for mixed-raced patients are the subject of this AP article.)

Companies in the technology business, including EMC, Cisco, Salesforce.com, and NetApp, have been rallying to Glasgow’s cause, publicizing the national donor drive through Facebook, Twitter, blog posts, and the like.

Potential donors who are themselves of mixed ethnicity, are healthy, and are between the ages of 18 and 60 can visit these EMC locations today to be screened:

11 Cambridge Technology Center, Cambridge MA (4th Floor)
9:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

50 Constitution Blvd, Franklin, MA (Johnson Conference Room, 3rd Floor)
12:30 pm – 2:30 pm

The donor drive is being hosted by EMC and the Be The Match Foundation. Readers outside the Boston area can sign up to receive a testing kit from the Asian American Donor Program.

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Yesterday’s judging round yielded 16 finalists in the UW Business Plan Competition, organized by the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The advancing teams, who will compete for prizes on May 21, are: 3 Phase Energy Systems, AuraViz, Big Canvas, Ecowell, Energizing Solutions, Green Windows, HydroSense, MicroDose, Myyeyou, Nanocel, Nanofacture, Nova Theranostics, Olive Only, Shockmetrics, Sisalwood, and Soluxra.

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[This is the second part of a series on how the process of identifying venture-backed startups and commercialization opportunities at the University of Washington is evolving---Eds.]

How does the University of Washington Tech Transfer office view its ongoing relationship with venture capitalists?

On Wednesday, we reported on how venture firms around town are going about their business, working with researchers at the UW and looking for the next big startup. The focus was on recent changes at UW TechTransfer—with the high-profile hires of Linden Rhoads and Janis Machala, both prominent leaders in the tech-business community—that seem to have led to increased involvement with industry and venture capital. I wanted to hear Rhoads’s top-level perspective on this, as well as some more specifics from a few local VCs. I also dug up a couple intriguing bits of news, and things to look for down the road.

Rhoads first stressed the importance of outreach to the community. “We’re hosting many representatives from area firms, as well as Boston firms and other areas, and venture arms of pharmaceutical companies, but given the economic realities, none of that activity has turned out to be the most important to us,” says Rhoads. “Most important to us is the depth of our relationships with our traditional VC partners. It goes far beyond their actual portfolio companies.”

In this “far beyond” realm is the work that Seattle-area venture capitalists do to help recruit star faculty, serve on UW committees, and, of course, meet with the school’s researchers to advise them on commercialization possibilities.

Last month, UW TechTransfer held its first half-day retreat (including an advisory board meeting) since Rhoads took the helm. She says they hosted about 50 top business leaders in a room on campus for five hours: people like Nick Hanauer of Second Avenue Partners, Bob Nelsen of Arch Venture Partners, Matt McIlwain and Greg Gottesman of Madrona Venture Group, Ron Howell of the Washington Research Foundation (WRF Capital), Cameron Myhrvold of Ignition Partners, Bill McAleer from Voyager Capital, and Chad Waite from OVP. (The list of who’s who keeps going— Alan Frazier, Carl Weissman, …Next Page »

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For hundreds of years, students and spectators could gather in operating theaters like the Ether Dome at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital to watch doctors perform surgery. Now IBM and researchers at another famous Boston hospital, Brigham and Women’s, have developed a tool that lets many physicians gather virutally to get a good look at a single patient. Called the Radiology Theatre, it’s a secure Web-based collaboration environment where teams of doctors in different locations can examine high-resolution CT scans, MRIs, and other test results and discuss the information over audio and video links.

“We are not all in the same location, and the information that’s needed to take care of patients does not all come from the same place,” says Francine Jacobson, a thoracic radiologist at Brigham and Women’s who is the lead investigator working with IBM’s software engineers. “Bringing together both the data and the radiologists in the same Web browser in a truly interactive manner, and avoiding a lot of the compatibility issues we’ve had in the past, is truly exciting.”

Officially unveiled today, the Radiology Theatre is essentially a mashup of free and open-source software components—such as the WebKit browser engine, the OpenAjax Hub, and the Oviyam medical image browser (developed in India)—that IBM has integrated using a proprietary Web application development platform called Blue Spruce. The system makes it easy to combine multiple types of Web resources and communications tools, such as maps, images, chat interfaces, whiteboards, and live webcam video, inside a single browser window. Over the last few months, IBM’s Emerging Internet Technology Group has been demonstrating several proof-of-concept projects built on Blue Spruce, including a news browser for financial analysts and a map-based collaboration platform for real estate investors.

The Radiology Theatre is the first telemedicine application for Blue Spruce. “The fundamental reason we did this was that everybody has been trying to replicate the power of face-to-face interactions, but they haven’t gotten there, because the images aren’t clear enough or the network isn’t fast enough or they could share certain kinds of data in a Web conference but they’d have to send other data by e-mail,” says David Boloker, the Brookline, MA-based chief technology officer for the Emerging Internet Technology Group. “We wanted to see how far we could extend the browser with high-definition video and audio and multi-user interactions, all on the same Web page.”

While TV doctors still gather in hushed radiology rooms to scrutinize film-based X-rays and CT scans on light boards, nearly all medical images are now captured digitally. In the Radiology Theatre, physicians logging in from different locations can call up these digital images from hospital databases, zoom in on specific sections of the images, use whiteboard tools to draw on the images, and consult in real time via webcam. Boloker says the initial idea for the system came from discussions with radiologists in Melbourne, Australia, who needed a better way to consult with physicians in rural clinics in Australia’s Northern Territory, thousands of miles away. But the same technologies that lets doctors communicate with other doctors could eventually be used to help far-away doctors communicate with patients, says Boloker. “You can do it all via the Web,” he says.

Jacobson has been using the Radiology Theatre to explore CT data and pulmonary function test results from patients involved in a long-term study of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) funded by the Flight Attendant Medical Research Institute. She’s not making use of the system’s collaboration features, at the moment, but she says just being able to combine several types of data on the same screen is valuable. “When you’re looking for things that will lead to earlier identification of disease states, it’s important to learn what subtle things that we might consider normal that we should notice,” Jacobson says. With Radiology Theature, “We can look at the density of lung tissue in a particular area while at the same time looking at the pulmonary function test.”

Jacobson says she expects the Radiology Theatre to come in handy as she gets deeper into a multi-center study of the genetic epidemiology of COPD that involves researchers in Denver. But collaborators don’t have to be thousands of miles away: she says the Radiology Theatre might also help doctors at the Brigham intensive care unit who need to consult with experts across the street at the new Shapiro Cardiovascular Center. “I think as medicine has become more specialized, we are less co-located, and more based in the particular clinics where we work,” Jacobson says. “We’re all very busy, so getting together is not easy.”

IBM doesn’t have immediate plans to turn the Radiology Theatre into a commercial product, but it views the underlying Blue Spruce platform as part of its bid to influence the burgeoning market for cooperative, browser-based applications. And Boloker says he views the Radiology Theatre “as a platform that we could easily built a product on in the future.” While many of the individual components of the radiology environment are based on open-source software, and might therefore be easy for competitors to replicate, “the core platform—including audio and video and multi-user interaction—is all IBM technology,” Boloker says. “We’ve made it much easier to bring in widgets from here and there and make them all work together in a secure way.”

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Boston-based PatientFlow Technology, which makes software that helps hospitals deal with backups in emergency rooms, ICUs, and other care settings, has been acquired by health care improvement consulting company Press Ganey of South Bend, IN, according to an announcement today. The companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, but said that the acquisition would not lead to any layoffs at PatientFlow.

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Seattle and Boston, two of Xconomy’s network cities, have something extra to be proud of today—at least when it comes to Internet startups. Each city contributed two companies to a popular list of the year’s best Web applications for improving customers’ real lives.

That’s according to the tech-news blog ReadWriteWeb, which has published its list of the “top 10 real world Web apps of 2008.” These are Web services that help keep people’s offline lives more organized and efficient. The categories were finance, health, education, politics, nonprofits, and travel. Without further ado:

—In Seattle, the teacher/student community site TeachStreet won in the education category, while the airfare-tracking site Yapta won in travel. TeachStreet expanded to the San Francisco Bay Area last month, from Seattle and Portland. Yapta is in the process of closing a funding round of at least $2.7 million.

—In the Boston area, the social-networking sites PatientsLikeMe and Sermo, both based in Cambridge, MA, won in the health category. PatientsLikeMe is an online community for people with life-changing medical conditions like Lou Gehrig’s disease, HIV, and Parkinson’s disease. Sermo is a site where 90,000 doctors exchange information about medical practice. Sermo recently signed a deal to open up access to this network to financial industry experts who subscribe to the Bloomberg Professional information service.

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Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

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Ambric, a Beaverton, OR-based semiconductor company, has announced it is shutting down and looking for a corporate buyer. The firm has suspended all operations not having to do with its sale or existing customer agreements. Ambric has developed software-programmable parallel processor chips that are used in video coding, wireless base stations, and medical and military imaging. It has been funded by the likes of OVP Venture Partners and Northwest Technology Ventures.

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Redmond, WA-based Micronics, a maker of tools for molecular diagnostics and monitoring, announced today it has closed a Series C financing round led by the Southwest Michigan First Life Science Fund. The latest round, combined with a Series B round raised earlier this year from private investors, brings a total of $9 million in capital to Micronics, whose disease detection and diagnostic products are based on microfluidics technologies.

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Burlington, MA-based ChartOne, which makes software used by hospitals to manage the distribution of confidential paper and electronic medical records, was acquired by Alpharetta, GA-based HealthPort in a deal that closed on Monday, HealthPort said in an announcement. ChartOne was HealthPort’s closest competitor, according to the statement, which did not reveal the terms of the acquisition.

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Nexus Medical Partners of Quincy, MA, is the lead investor in a $14 million financing round for Pittsburgh-based Aethon, a maker of RFID systems for tracking hospital equipment, the startup said yesterday. New York, NY-based Radius Ventures co-led the round, which was also joined by existing investors Trident Capital, Pacific Venture Group, Salix Ventures, Draper Triangle Ventures and Ascension Health Ventures.

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