Notice anything new here? Over to the right a little… Little more… Next to the map? (Bear with me, loyal RSS and e-mail subscribers, this will all make sense in a minute.)

Today marks the official launch of our new Startups and Life Sciences channels, whose homepages you can access via those handy new buttons next to the map. As you can probably guess, these channels bring together all the stories on startups and life sciences, respectively, from across all of our cities.

Now, we’ve always believed that it’s the diversity of industries, technologies, people, and stories that makes innovation hubs like Boston, Seattle, and San Diego so fascinating—and we strive to ensure that our city-by-city coverage reflects that diversity. But we recognize that there are some of you out there who just don’t want any software-industry chocolate in your life-sciences peanut butter, and it’s for you that we’re building our topic-specific channels. Please give them a look, let us know what you think, and let us know what channels you’d like us to add next. In the meantime, if there’s a specific topic you’d really like to focus on (or a specific city, for that matter) chances are we’ve already got a dedicated feed for that.

Thanks to everybody who worked their tails off to get the channels up and running, with a special shout out to our CTO emeritus Andrew Koyfman, who juggled coding the channels with diapering his newborn son, and to our new friend, tech guru extraordinaire David Bernick, who helped us clean up some doo-doo of the IT variety that hit the fan at just the wrong moment. And thanks also to our new channel supporters: the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and LaunchCapital, for the startups channel, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Biogen Idec, and TVM Capital, for the life sciences channel. Welcome aboard, all!

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Sometimes we’re so busy doing new stuff here at Xconomy that we don’t have time to actually let you know about it. So here’s a handy list of things that have been happening at the company this summer that you might have missed.

—We published our first premium product, Startup School: The Xconomy Guide to Venture Incubators. Here on the site, there’s a free list of the 19 programs we canvassed where early-stage startups can obtain mentoring and seed funding. For $45 (going up to $60 on September 1), you can buy the full report, which contains details about the programs’ application deadlines and procedures, stipend and equity policies, notable graduates, and more.

—With help from Providence, RI-based Mofuse, we launched a mobile version of Xconomy at http://m.xconomy.com. It contains all the same great content as the full Xconomy site, but in a format that’s quick to load and easy to read on mobile devices.

—The first Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepeneurship drew a standing-room-only crowd on June 24. Ryan wrote a nice summary and Bob gave props to everyone who helped.

—We moved our Cambridge headquarters from a funky but tiny former dentist’s office at 10 Rogers Street to a funky and gigantic space in the venerable Foundry Works building at 101 Rogers Street.

—Our first Seattle Battle of the Tech Bands, co-hosted with the Washington Technology Industry Association, was a huge smash on July 30, garnering great reviews from The Seattle Times, TechFlash, and nPost. The winning bands: Indigo Soul (Audience Favorite) and Lions Ambition (Most Innovative).

—As always, we offer many ways to access Xconomy. You can sign up for e-mail newsletters, including newsletters pertaining specifically to subject areas like information technology or life sciences, or to news from Xconomy’s home cities of Boston, San Diego, and Seattle. Ditto for our RSS feeds.

—We’re very active on Twitter. Staffers tweet about a variety of Xconomy stories at @Xconomy. And several of us tweet regularly from our personal accounts: You can follow Bob at @bbuderi, Luke at @ldtimmerman, Ryan at @Ryan_McBride, and me at @wroush.

—If you want to distribute the full text of an Xconomy article to clients, customers, or colleagues, it’s easier than ever to buy a reprint.

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Carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide get a bad rap. Sure, the first is a silent killer that binds to hemoglobin and suffocates people in burning buildings, and the second is poisoning our atmosphere and driving global temperatures out of control. But did you know that they can also be used to make plastic?

Back in November 2007, I wrote one of the first press stories about Novomer, a startup then based in Ithaca, NY, that was beginning to exploit a novel catalyst discovered by a Cornell chemist to transform CO and CO2 into various types of packaging materials and other plastics. The company moved its headquarters to Boston last October, and as we reported on Monday, it has now raised an additional $14 million in venture funding, with Kirkland, WA-based OVP Venture Partners leading the round.

So it seemed like a good time to check in with the company, whose proprietary zinc-based catalyst prompts CO and CO2 to react with petroleum-based compounds called epoxides to form several important types of plastic used in packaging, coatings, medical implants, absorbent materials, and injection-molded products such as the cases for cell phones and computers. Novomer CEO Jim Mahoney says the company is close to announcing partnerships with major consumer-goods companies that will put its technology into production, making “pretty much all the types of plastic you touch on a daily basis.”

Mahoney says the latest venture round—which brings the company’s total funding to about $21 million—gives the company the cash it needs to ramp up its production process, buy raw materials, and design new products in conjunction with partners. “I wish I could give you the names now, but we’re right on the cusp of some pretty big partnerships, and I hope to be able to talk about them at the beginning of the year,” Mahoney says.

One of the processes the company is developing, Mahoney says, is a new way to use carbon monoxide as a feedstock to make acrylic acids, the super-absorbent polymers used in products such as disposable diapers. “We can make very cost-effective acrylic acids, and this is the most environmentally responsible way to make it,” he says. And, as with anything having to with diapers, “It’s a big market,” says Mahoney.

Indeed, what green-minded consumer wouldn’t choose products made using cheap, abundant materials that would otherwise escape into the environment? (In the case of Novomer’s CO2-based plastics, the process also helps to sequester a greenhouse gas.) Novomer’s challenge, according to Mahoney, isn’t persuading potential partners that the company’s technology is more sustainable and eco-friendly than conventional ways of making plastics—it’s convincing them that the end products perform just as well, and that they won’t cost more.

“Some people look at the sustainability aspects first and want to make sure they are significantly more responsible, then they move on to performance and economics,” Mahoney says. “Other companies will look at the economics first. We have to deliver on all of those, and so far we have been able to demonstrate that. But fortunately many consumer-goods companies are really starting to demand these materials, because their customers want them—as long as they don’t have to pay more.”

While OVP Venture Partners has several cleantech companies in its portfolio, it isn’t particularly well known for investing in materials companies (an exception being Seattle-based EnerG2), nor in East Coast firms. OVP managing director Carl Weissman says the Novomer deal came about primarily because of his longtime relationship with Mahoney, who was his boss at Bothell, WA-based chemical firm Prolinx from 1998 to 2001. “Normally we’re Pacific Northwest or West Coast” in focus, says Weissman, who has joined Novomer’s board as a result of the funding. “The only reason to stretch that thesis is the excitement about the opportunity—and the relationship I have with [Mahoney] will allow me to monitor the company’s progress.”

There’s one other Novomer-OVP connection: Novomer’s proprietary catalyst was discovered by Geoffrey Coates, a professor in Cornell’s chemistry department, where OVP managing director Gerry Langeler got his undergraduate degree. Langeler will be an observer on Novomer’s board.

Novomer’s Series A investors—Flagship Ventures of Cambridge, MA, Physic Ventures of San Francisco, and DSM Venturing of the Netherlands—have all returned for the Series B round. “It’s a nice syndicate to invest with,” says Weissman. “I’ve known people at Flagship and Physic for a while. It’s my first opportunity to invest with them at OVP.”

With reporting from Seattle by Greg Huang.

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We’re happy to announce that there’s now an easier to way to read Xconomy on your mobile phone. Go to http://m.xconomy.com for the new mobile-friendly version of our site, which we’ve simplified for easy navigation on small screens.

All the usual content is there: our Boston, San Diego, and Seattle news stories, along with Xconomist Forum posts from all three cities, not to mention subject-specific pages for our infotech, life science, startups, energy, and deals stories. But it’s all designed to look super-clean and load quickly on a mobile device.

The truth is that no website designed with desktop browsing in mind fares well on the screen of a mobile phone. iPhone owners might demur, but even with the iPhone’s Safari browser, you have to do a bunch of zooming and panning to make your way around a regular Web page. If you’re on the go and you just want to catch a few blog posts, you don’t want to mess with all that, or with the nifty tabs, menus, and image maps that make many sites more functional in full Web browsers but just get in the way on mobile devices.

That’s why there’s a crop of companies—some of them in Xconomy’s own home towns—devoted to helping publishers optimize their content for mobile devices. We found a great one in Providence, RI, called Mofuse. Funded in part by the Slater Technology Fund, which uses money appropriated by the Rhode Island legislature to help promote technology entrepreneurship in the Ocean State, Mofuse is already helping thousands of organizations go mobile, including Fox News, Harvard Business School, Chicago Public Radio, as well as great blogs like Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. (See Mofuse’s press release about our partnership.)

We hope you enjoy the mobile site, and welcome your feedback, suggestions, and bug notes. Because our office mobile armory is limited to a few iPhones and Blackberrys, we’re especially eager to hear how the site looks and functions on other platforms. Please post a comment below, or write me at wroush@xconomy.com.

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Folks in Xconomy’s Boston office are gathering our business cards and dancing shoes for tonight’s second annual Battle of the Tech Bands. Tickets are dwindling fast, but you can still get yours before 4:00 pm online here, or at the door at the Middle East Restaurant & Nightclub.  Doors open at 7:00 pm—hope to see you there!

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The biggest deals among Boston-area firms last week came from the life sciences sector.

—Xtalic of Marlborough, MA—a developer of nanostructured alloys for a variety of applications—reportedly raised about $10 million in Series B financing. North Bridge Venture Partners and Matrix Partners participated in the deal.

—Cambridge, MA-based Genzyme (NASDAQ:GENZ) forged a potentially massive partnership with Osiris Therapeutics (NASDAQ:OSIR) of Columbia, MD, centered on two adult stem cell treatments. Genzyme will pay Osiris $130 million in up front fees and up to $1.25 billion in potential milestone payments to commercialize the treatments—called Prochymal and Chondrogen—outside the U.S. and Canada.

—Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) of Cambridge, MA, teamed with Genentech to develop GA101, an antibody drug for blood cancer that’s currently in Phase I/II clinical trials. Under the terms of the agreement, Biogen will pay Genetech $31.5 million up front.

—Watertown, MA-based Acusphere (NASDAQ:ACUS) granted Frazer, PA-based Cephalon (NASDAQ:CEPH) an exclusive worldwide license to its injectable formulation of the anti-inflammatory drug celecoxib, in return for a $5 million initial fee and $15 million in loans.

—Fraud-detection software maker Memento of Concord, MA, reportedly raised a $10 million fourth financing round from 406. Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Rock Maple Ventures.

—Atlas Venture of Waltham, MA, has reportedly set out to raise $500 million for its eighth fund.

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Habitual visitors to our Boston and Seattle homepages might have noticed something new about a month ago—a pretty blue box perched right on top of the event-listings box and packed full of headlines about venture financings and M&A deals. Click a headline, and you get a tidy little summary of the transaction, complete with information on the target company, investors, terms, and so forth. Click “More VC/M&A Deals” at the bottom of the box and you get a whole archive of transactions from New England and the Pacific Northwest, respectively.

This fantastic new feature of the site comes courtesy of the very generous folks at Menlo Park, CA-based VentureDeal. They provide a comprehensive nationwide database of corporate intelligence, subscription-based access to highly detailed real-time information about funding and acquisition transactions, and a host of custom research services. They worked with us to create custom, geographically sorted feeds for each of the sites in our network in order to provide a unique resource for Xconomy readers interested in local VC and M&A deals—if a deal goes down in one of the regions that our network covers, you’ll be able to find out about it in the VentureDeal box.

For those of you who are fond of Wade, Greg, Luke, Ryan, and Bob’s intrepid reporting on these kinds of transactions (or my weekly roundups of them and other local biz/tech deals), never fear—we plan to continue covering the news as we’ve always done in a our main blog. The VentureDeal feeds are meant to complement this coverage, by providing a comprehensive, reference-style database of all the transactions in our sphere of interest.

We think both types of information—the journalistic and the encyclopedic—are valuable, and we hope you agree. The VentureDeal archive for the Boston area is here, and the one for the Seattle area is here. Check them out and let us know what you think.

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Aren’t things supposed to slow down in the summer? There was lots of dealmaking happening in New England last week, across life sciences and high-tech fields.

—Northborough, MA-based Aspen Aerogels, which makes nanotech-based insulation, raised $37 million from Arcapita Ventures, Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, Reservoir Capital Group, and RockPort Capital Partners.

—Waltham, MA-based ImmunoGen (NASDAQ: IMGN), which has half a dozen cancer drugs in clinical trials, raised about $25 million in a sale of stock to Ziff Asset Management.

—RFID software maker OATSystems, also of Waltham, was acquired by Checkpoint Systems (NYSE: CKP) of Thorofare, NJ, for an undisclosed sum.

—GTC Biotherapeutics of Framingham, MA, inked a deal with Deerfield, IL-based Ovation Pharmaceuticals to develop and market the anticlotting drug ATryn—which GTC produces in the milk of genetically engineered goats—in the United States.

—Foxborough, MA-based cyber security firm Industrial Defender acquired Teltone of Bothell, WA, for an undisclosed sum.

—RNAi-based drug developer RXi Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXII) of Worcester, MA, announced a $8.7 million private placement of stock.

—Software consulting firm Security Innovation of Wilmington, MA, raised $7.1 million in a Series A financing round led by Brook Venture Partners.

—Boston’s Spark Capital teamed with Seattle’s Bezos Expeditions to invest a reported $15 million in Twitter.

—Photovoltaics maker Evergreen Solar (NASDAQ: ESLR) of Marlboro, MA announced a $300 million sale of senior convertible notes to help fund construction of its manufacturing facilities. A few days later, it expanded the offering to $325 million.

—New England Patriots owner the Kraft Group of Foxborough, MA, led a $4.6 million Series A investment in New York-based social media site BlogTalkRadio. The startup’s software gives users free tools for creating their own call-in talk shows.

—Woonsocket, RI-based prescription drug provider CVS Caremark forged an alliance with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) to give consumers online tools for tracking their health information, using Microsoft’s HealthVault.

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You know how, in the excitement of a new relationship, you often find yourself celebrating dozens of little “anniversaries?” The day you met, first date, first… You get the idea. Building a company is like that, with so many milestones to be passed and, a year hence, commemorated. First business plan. First viable business plan. First successful pitch. Incorporation. First financing. Heck, around here we could probably work up some feelings about the delivery of our first Staples order.

But today is the big one—because, Xconomy readers, today marks one year since we met you. Last June 27 we introduced ourselves, offering what we hoped you’d appreciate as a fresh take on the Boston-area innovation economy. And, to our delight, you got it—and over the year you’ve helped us make it better.

For a bunch of journalists who had previously spent most of our time at magazines, where lead times, printing presses, and bulk mail can sometimes put an uncomfortable distance between writer and reader, it has been thrilling to get your immediate reactions, your questions and ideas, and occasionally even your assistance with stories. And what you’ve helped us learn in this first year has given us the confidence to venture beyond our Kendall Square neighborhood and begin introducing ourselves to other key innovation clusters (hey there, Seattle).

So thanks for a great year; we’d be honored if you’d hang around for another one. And for those of you building companies of your own, a little anniversary gift: just a few things we know now that we wish we knew last year.

• Write everything down, even if you’re the sort of person who remembers what page in your seventh-grade language arts book described the difference between onomatopoeia and alliteration.

• Put it somewhere you’ll be able to find it once working on a startup has transformed you into somebody who can’t remember seventh grade. Or yesterday.

• People don’t eat as much at catered events as the caterer would have you believe, so cut the suggested order in half. (This from our founder, editor-in-chief, and Chief Executive Tightwad Bob Buderi.)

• Be leery of mocking the habits of more seasoned businesspeople, so as to avoid embarrassment when you eventually adopt said habits. (This to our founder, editor-in-chief, and Chief Executive Thumb-Typer Bob Buderi.)

• Hire people you trust. (OK, this one we did know a year ago—and it’s probably the single biggest reason for our success to date—but it bears repeating at regular intervals. Hourly would be good.)

• Trust them.

• Fancy titles are one excellent—and free—form of compensation that a startup can readily offer. (Courtesy of Co-founder, Executive Editor, and Chief Operating Officer moi.)

• A fancy title can engender in others the idea that you actually know how to do the job it describes—go with that.

• A truly surprising array of people will help you and your company along the way. Thank them. At least twice.

So thank you. And Happy Readerversary!

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Good morning Boston. Good morning Seattle. And good morning world. Today marks the public debut of the Xconomy network, as we launch both a Seattle website that will serve as a sister to our original Boston/Kendall Square site and a national overview site designed to be a gateway to both cities. (This means some changes for readers of our original site in Boston, who may be surprised right now to find themselves on a new home page—read on for details).

“Holy crap, we’re doing it!” I told myself Saturday, when we quietly turned on the new Seattle and national pages (echoing my own thoughts when we completed Xconomy’s Series A funding last summer). My mild expletive stemmed partly from the fact that I’m a bit of a cheapskate, and our burn rate has risen substantially with the opening of a new office—in Seattle’s Pill Hill area—and the hiring of three top talents (see below). But it referred mostly to the fact that opening a second Xconomy location is a key step toward our vision of building an extensive network of news blogs dedicated to covering the innovation economy of key high-tech and life sciences clusters.

So it’s a very big day for us. The original Xconomy quietly went live in Cambridge, MA, last June 27. It has since steadily built its readership, reach, and reputation far beyond our first-year plans. If you’re new to Xconomy, we aren’t a typical blog: we’re more like a cross between a blog, a daily newspaper, and a magazine, running articles that range from 30-odd words to more than 3,000, depending on where the story takes us. With the exception of the posts in our Xconomist Forum (more on that in a moment), all of our stories are written by professional journalists.

Xconomy was founded on the principle that growth in the economy is driven by high-tech innovation—which is all we cover. As I wrote at our launch: “We believe that you can best understand today’s high-tech economy by keeping your eye on the places where diverse people, technologies, organizations, expertise, and interests come together. Life sciences is made stronger by world-class information technology. Nanotechnology helps drive biotechnology, computing, and energy…The collaboration of—and friction between—academia and industry sparks profound changes in the way novel technologies are commercialized…The interactions of venture capitalists, angel investors, professors, students, lawyers, consultants, accountants, legislators, consumers—all these forces and interests come together in different ways to spur or hinder technological creativity and economic growth.”

It’s not just the stories we write that reflect this philosophy, but also the events we stage. Our June 24 Xconomy Forum on cloud computing at Akamai’s headquarters in Cambridge will mark our seventh innovation-oriented event to date. Earlier get-togethers ranged from thought provoking—like our biotech-meets-IT-meets-robotics-meets-venture capital forum in December and the intimate Life Sciences 2028 conversation that Nobel Laureate Phillip Sharp and other life sciences leaders helped us conduct in April—to the raucous, like our Battle of the Tech Bands in January.

Starting today, we hope to repeat our Boston success with Xconomy Seattle, which has behind it a truly great team—with deep ties to the local innovation community. On the editorial front are two standout technology journalists: Luke Timmerman, our national biotechnology editor, who spent six years at the Seattle Times before joining Bloomberg in San Francisco as U.S. biotechnology reporter, and Seattle editor Greg Huang, formerly a New York Times professional fellow and an editor at Technology Review and New Scientist. Greg has spent a lot of time in Seattle and recently joined me in co-authoring Guanxi, a book about Microsoft’s Beijing research lab. Seattle, of course, is a great music hub, and Greg, now 3,000 miles from his band, might be seeking some jam partners as well.

Luke and Greg are joined by our new VP and West Coast managing director of business development, David Caffey, a veteran of Microsoft and other companies. David is known far and wide in the technology community by his nickname, Dcaff. What better moniker could a guy want in America’s biggest coffee town?

We are extremely pleased to have assembled a distinguished group of advisors—we call them Xconomists—for our Seattle node. These folks are all experts in their fields, and well-known not just in Seattle but also around the world. You can find all the Seattle Xconomists, along with their Boston counterparts, here. And when they have something they want to say about business, technology, or innovation, you’ll find it in the Xconomist Forums on our Seattle, Boston, and national home pages.

We are also honored to be supported in Seattle by a number of underwriters and partners. These include Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Polaris Venture Partners, the Science & Technology Directorate of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and the leading high-tech and life sciences trade organizations in Washington: the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association, the Washington Technology Industry Association, and the Technology Alliance and its Alliance of Angels program.

While the Seattle launch represents the biggest piece of this week’s expansion, today also marks the debut of our national Xconomy.com site, which is designed to be the hub of our growing network, providing easy access to the best stories and Xconomist posts from each city, as well as a few more broadly focused items of its own. Some of our valued readers here in Boston probably got a little surprise this morning. Your Xconomy.com bookmark no longer delivers you to the original site—which was called “Xconomy Kendall Square” in reference to our neighborhood, arguably Boston’s innovation epicenter—but to our new national home page. The old Xconomy home page can now be found at www.Xconomy.com/Boston. You’ll see we’ve renamed it Xconomy Boston to help keep things simple and consistent as we grow our network.

With all those changes, one thing that remains the same is our commitment to providing world-class coverage of the local innovation stories that are driving global trends. Thank you in advance for joining us as we expand Xconomy from a stand-alone site into a vibrant (if, for the time being, small) network. We hope you like what Xconomy is doing and welcome your comments and suggestions at editors@xconomy.com.

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A super-stealthy MIT spinoff is poking its head out today to announce that it has finalized a licensing agreement with the Institute. The pact gives Arch Therapeutics rights to a family of clear liquids developed by research scientist Rutledge Ellis-Behnke that stanch or prevent bleeding after an injury or during surgery.

Ellis-Behnke and his colleagues had started out working with the liquids, which are packed with tiny protein fragments, or peptides, as potential aids to the regeneration of damaged neural tissue; they discovered in the course of brain surgeries on lab animals that some of the peptides stopped bleeding—within just 15 seconds. It turned out that what was happening was the nanoscale peptides were self-assembling into a biodegradable gel that sealed the wound on contact.

Around the same time as that work was published in 2006, Ellis-Behnke founded Arch—which then went by the perhaps-too-literal Clear Nano Solutions—with healthcare investment veteran Terrence Norchi and Steve Kelly, a serial entrepreneur and founding CEO of Myomo, another MIT spinoff. (Both Myomo’s founders and Ellis-Behnke have received grants from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.) The company still has yet to ink any venture financing deals; in an article in Mass High Tech written shortly after the company’s founding, Kelly was identified as the sole investor in the firm.

It’s still early days, but Arch materials might eventually be used in the operating room, on the battle field, or even in first-aid kits. Says former Cleveland Clinic head and Arch advisor Floyd D. Loop in a press release: “Discovering ways to control something so fundamental as bleeding has potentially huge implications for the medical field.”

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For a journalist I’m pretty bad with names, but I had no problem recognizing the ones on T2 Biosystems’ roster. The founders of the Cambridge, MA-based medical diagnostics startup, which sprung from research at MIT and Mass General Hospital, are pretty much local legends. Take Tyler Jacks, the director of MIT’s Center for Cancer Research and one of the central figures in the effort to unravel the genetic underpinnings of cancer. Then there’s Ralph Weissleder, who directs MGH’s Center for Molecular Imaging Research and is one of the pioneers of that field. And there’s the not-so-secret sauce for biomedical startups around here: MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer, founder of umpteen companies and guru of drug delivery, tissue engineering, and other fields at the intersection of chemical engineering and biomedicine.

Those three joined with MIT’s Michael Cima, Analog Devices’ W. David Lee, and MGH’s Lee Josephson—no slouches themselves—to found T2 in 2006 with $5.5 million in Series A funding from Flagship Ventures, Polaris Venture Partners, and IDG Ventures. And it was that combination of a “class A venture capital group” and founders with “an extremely strong historical track record of innovation” that attracted brand-new CEO John McDonough to the company.

McDonough, who joined T2 last month, told me with evident pride that between them the company’s founders have almost 2,000 scientific publications and well over 700 issued or filed patents. McDonough himself is no stranger to notable numbers. In his last job, he was the president of the development division of Marlborough, MA’s Cytyc, a maker of diagnostics, imaging tools, and treatments all aimed at the women’s health market. In that role, McDonough helped Cytyc to acquire five companies together worth over $1 billion—and then, last October, to be acquired itself by Bedford, MA’s Hologic (NASDAQ: HOLX) for a whopping $6.2 billion.

So where, exactly, is T2 aiming all that scientific and managerial momentum? The idea is to build small, portable devices that bring the diagnostic power of traditional medical lab machines into ambulances, rural doctors’ offices, battlefields, cruise ships, and the like. And T2 is pursuing the same trifecta of advantages that others have sought in such point-of-care diagnostics: smaller, cheaper, faster. As in, handheld instead of appliance-sized, a few thousands of dollars a pop instead of maybe a quarter of a million, and producing test results in minutes instead of days or weeks. “We’re well on our way to developing what I truly believe will be a disruptive set of instruments,” McDonough says.

Of course not everybody is sold on the POC vision. (One basic question being, how many medical tests are really critical to have right away, on the spot?) And many an effort to develop a portable diagnostic device has been stymied by, among other things, a technological strategy that’s too complicated and finicky to make work in varied real-world settings. On the first point, McDonough says that the demand for POC tools is real, citing estimates that peg that particular slice of the $35 billion diagnostics market as one of the fastest-growing—at about $3 billion now and increasing some 10 percent a year. On the question of technological complexity, well, T2’s system is actually pretty simple. Rather than trying to miniaturize and combine all the steps of traditional testing—including sample preparation, separation of components, in some cases culturing of cells, and so forth—the startup eliminated them.

T2’s system uses specially engineered nanoparticles as a sort of a magnetic dye; each particle has an iron core and a polymer coating, and is studded with molecules that bind to whatever it is you’re trying to detect, be it a virus, a cancer cell, or a particular protein. These nanoparticles can be thrown directly into a sample of blood or urine, say; if the target cell or molecule is present, the particles wind up clustering together as they stick to it. That aggregation can be detected by the portable reader device, using magnetic resonance. It’s the same basic technology as is used in magnetic resonance imaging—except since the device doesn’t need to generate the copious amounts of precise data necessary to construct an image it can be built with penny-sized magnets, instead of the massive, expensive ones required for an MRI scanner.

McDonough says that T2 should have 8 x 11 inch prototype of the reader in hand in a month or two. And the startup is in the midst of deciding just what test or tests it will try to bring to market first. With a staff of just 13 people—mostly scientists and engineers—it’s important not to get pulled in too many different directions, McDonough says. But he adds that T2 is ripe for partnerships in such areas as water testing, drug development, testing for illegal drugs: “We can measure anything and we can do it quickly.”

Oh, and one more thing because I know Bob will want to know even if you don’t. T2’s name, in turns out, comes not from the second Terminator movie but from the signal that results when the nanoparticles cluster together. I think I can remember that.

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The digital revolution hasn’t changed the fact that new printing technology spreads slowly. Johannes Gutenberg, for example, first used metal movable type to publish his famous Bible in 1455, but it wasn’t until 1480 or so that letterpress printing became widespread in Europe, and England didn’t get its first printing press until 1489.

The folks at E Ink are hoping it doesn’t take quite that long—a quarter century or more—for their electronic paper technology to catch on. Nonetheless, the decade-old company is prepared for the long haul. On Tuesday, I met with Dave Jackson, E Ink’s director of marketing and planning. He told me that after years of development work, 2006 was finally “the year of transition from prototyping to mass production.” This year and next, he says, will see the company’s high-resolution, lower-power display technology start to turn up in a range of commercial gadgets, from wristwatches and e-book reading devices (including a new one from Sony) to laptops (where they’re being used as secondary screens for Windows Vista’s Sideshow feature) and USB flash drives (where they function as capacity indicators).

It’s been a long journey. Cambridge-based E Ink was founded in 1997 by MIT Media Lab physicist Joseph Jacobson and two Media Lab students; since then, it’s been the subject of hundreds of enthusiastic articles by technology journalists, including myself. Rather than pen yet another explanation of Jacobson’s technology, I’ll just quote from a review of the E Ink-equipped Sony PRS-500 reading device that I wrote earlier this year for MIT’s Technology Review:

“Their clever idea: sandwich millions of tiny, liquid-filled microcapsules between two layers of electrodes, the top one transparent. Floating inside each microcapsule are thousands of positively charged white particles and negatively charged black particles. A negative charge applied at a given electrode on the lower layer pulls the white particles to the bottom of nearby microcapsules and pushes the black particles to the top, creating a black mark beneath the transparent electrode; clusters of these marks make up the equivalent of a black pixel in an LCD screen. This held out the promise of both higher resolution (since the pixels can be made smaller than those in LCDs) and longer battery life (since the particles stay in place, without any further electricity use, until the user calls up the next page).”

To repeat that last point, E Ink’s electronic paper—actually, the company is calling the latest version “VizPlex Imaging Film,” to distinguish it from other emerging brands of e-paper—has two big advantages over LCDs: a resolution approaching that of newsprint and zero power consumption between rewritings. But it also has two big downsides: First, it’s a monochrome technology. (Up to 16 levels of gray are possible, but color microcapsule-based displays are still years away.) And second, it takes about three-quarters of a second to refresh a VizPlex page, due to the need to thoroughly “erase” capsules that are in an in-between gray state. That’s an improvement over previous versions of the film, which took a second or more to refresh, but it’s still far too slow for purposes such as video. In situations such as Sony’s e-book devices, the erasing process also results in a momentary but jarring flash every time the user “turns” the page.

E-book devices remain the flagship application for E Ink’s films. Sony just came out with its revamped PRS-505 (which has a much more elegant design than the PRS-500, judging from the unit Jackson showed me), and Jackson says half a dozen other companies, including Amazon, will introduce devices based on E Ink’s technology over the next few months. But E Ink has also been busy adapting VizPlex for other applications where monochrome is all that’s needed and refresh time isn’t an issue. One example is Motorola’s MotoFone, a thin, light, and inexpensive cell phone with an incredible 12 days of standby time. Another is Lexar Media’s JumpDrive Mercury USB flash drive, which uses a tiny E Ink display to show how much memory is left on the device. Jackson says VizPlex displays will soon be incorporated into credit cards, where they will be used to display temporary security passcodes (ever-changing versions of the static codes now printed on the back of many cards).

Though E Ink makes the particle-filled microcapsules, it is still largely an R&D house, not a manufacturer. Five rounds of financing, including one that just ended in September, have netted the company an eye-popping $150 million in funding, mainly from strategic industrial partners such as Air Products and Chemicals, Intel Capital, Motorola, Philips Venture Capital Fund, and TOPPAN Printing Company of Japan. The strengths these investors see may lie partly in a system of 120 issued patents and more than 100 pending ones. In its spring 2007 ratings of the patent portofolios of U.S. corporations, Chicago’s Patent Board ranked E Ink 26th out of 500 companies.

But the company is still far from conquering its category, and it faces competitive dangers along the way. For example, Qualcomm, the San Diego-based telecommunications chipmaker, has developed a prototype e-paper system that uses microelectromechanical switches to control interference between visible wavelengths of light, producing color images that can be rewritten in tens of microseconds—more than fast enough for video. And old-fashioned color LCD displays keep coming down in price—meaning that for the time being, E Ink’s films will remain premium products, employed as much for their novelty as for their quality.

Nonetheless, “It’s a fun time to be here,” Jackson says. “We’re getting the bugs out, and we’ve got a lot of customers that we’re shipping to.” If the devices that use E Ink’s films start to see significant consumer uptake, the company could start building up a value that’s not just on paper.

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Nano-Terra, a start-up founded by legendary Harvard chemistry professor George Whitesides, might be dealing on the small scale, working with materials measured in nanometers and microns, but the company is imagining a big future.

That’s not surprising, given that Whitesides has founded a number of successful companies, notably Genzyme, the biotech giant now worth more than $3 billion—and that Nano-Terra recently licensed more than 50 patents and patent applications from Harvard that cover the design and production of materials at molecular levels. Basically, the company hopes to do anything that can be done with Whitesides’ nanoscale fabrication technologies outside of biotech.

“What Nano-Terra has is a breadth of technologies out of the Whitesides lab that allows you to go into many areas, to grow value that way,” says Carmichael Roberts, Whitesides’ longtime collaborator and a co-founder of the company. The two also founded the drug development company Surface Logix and medical device company WMR Biomedical (both are also Xconomists). The products and therapies that biotech companies tend to focus on may eventually have huge payoffs, but they face years of trials and regulatory hurdles that make them risky ventures, Roberts says. A company that can produce new or better commercial and industrial products may not have a single big payday, but could still be extremely successful, he says.

One of Nano-Terra’s key technologies is soft lithography, a method of nanoscale patterning that’s cheaper and more flexible than the photolithography used to print circuits on computer chips. Soft lithography can be used to print circuits on curved surfaces, which might lead to windshields printed with microscopic defrosting wires to clear away ice without obscuring vision, for instance, or water-repellant coatings that prevent fogging. It could also allow the printing of anti-counterfeiting stamps on documents. Nano-Terra already has a deal with the Department of Defense to develop a coating that could be printed on a missile’s nosecone to protect it from electromagnetic interference.

Nano-Terra’s other capabilities include methods of self-assembly—getting materials to build themselves up into, say, tiny light-emitting diodes or electronic circuits, perhaps turning a t-shirt into a computer display. The company can also control the surface chemistry of materials, creating sensors for diagnostic or environmental testing. It might make microfluidic devices, using its technology to move fluids around a tiny laboratory on a chip, which could be used for portable food safety monitoring or homeland defense applications.

All in all, Nano-Terra’s technologies are “a very powerful toolbox that allows you to manipulate things at the micro and nanoscale,” says Lara Estroff, a former post-doc of Whitesides’ who is now a professor of materials science at Cornell. When it comes to using chemistry to develop better ways to build a variety of devices and materials, “he’s the best there is at it, I think.”

The 17-person company is backed by Harvard, which will receive royalties from any products developed by Nano-Terra, and some private investors, but has no venture capital and won’t say how much funding it’s lined up. The business model, Roberts says, is to collaborate with established companies to improve current production processes or look for new products that couldn’t previously be made. In May, Nano-Terra signed a multiyear development agreement with 3M, and in February it agreed to work with Merck to develop better pharmaceutical and industrial chemicals, possibly by as soon as next year.

Other, still-unannounced collaborations are in the works. While Roberts wouldn’t specify what the collaborations might come up with, he expects healthy profits. “If we develop a process that can be core to several of 3M’s businesses, that puts us in a good position to really capitalize downstream,” he says.

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The Muddy Charles Pub is MIT’s legendary watering hole. Perched in a corner of the Walker Memorial building looking out over Memorial Drive, it’s bare bones to say the least. Think plain wooden tables, industrial carpet, and a spartan bar off to one side. But the place buzzes with campus news and the entrepreneurial spirit, as students, former students, and outsiders (including folks from Harvard) pop in and out through its doors—as well as through the big windows that run down to the floor. Many an area company or deal has been hatched over pitchers of beer at the Muddy.

Last Friday night was no different. I went there to meet with Dave Danielson, now our newest Xconomist. Dave is a minor Muddy legend. Just finishing his PhD in materials science, he served last year as chair of the Muddy board, on which he still sits. He’s also known around town as Mr. Energy. Four years ago, Dave founded the MIT Energy Club, which has quickly become a powerful catalyst for energy awareness and deal-making. Outgoing with a quick laugh, he pretty much knows anybody and everybody connected with the local energy scene—not just on campus but around the state. As we drank Sam Adams Summer Ale on a warm night, Dave was especially effusive, because he had just been signed to become a senior associate at General Catalyst once he completes his doctorate in November.

It’s a shrewd move by GC, which is known best for its IT deals. These include the travel site Kayak.com and Eons, the portal for the over-50 crowd created by Jeff Taylor of Monster.com fame, where General Catalyst is a partner with Sequoia. GC has recently invested in a handful of energy deals as well—among them Mascoma and Stion. But these have been few and far between—and usually in the B round. Danielson is being tapped to look into earlier-stage opportunities, in both energy and nanotechnology, which relates to his materials science expertise. He is stoked, and the Muddy might be a great place for him to get started. “I think I could do a half-dozen deals right here at the Muddy in the next six months,” he laughs.

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When Tim Swager talks about the future of nanomaterials, people listen. And when the respected nanotech leader says venture capitalists don’t get it when it comes to nano startups, you can’t help but sit up and take notice.

Swager is the head of MIT’s Department of Chemistry and the winner of this year’s prestigious $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize for invention. He has made his name in nanotech developing everything from ultrasensitive “molecular wire” sensors for detecting traces of explosives—currently used by U.S. soldiers in Iraq to screen vehicles—to fluorescent dyes that light up when they bind to amyloid protein molecules, which could enable doctors to make early diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease using NMR and optical imaging. And Swager is no stranger to the startup process: he is a founder of Cambridge-based Iptyx, a nanomaterials spinoff that develops organic electronics and electro-optical materials for imaging and energy applications, and a technical advisor to Nano-C in Westwood, MA, Plextronics in Pittsburgh, PA, and Rhode Island-based Collegium Pharmaceutical. But these days Swager sees some serious hurdles when it comes to early-stage funding of nanotechnologies.

It wasn’t always like this, he says. Starting in the late 1990s, Swager witnessed an upsurge in nanotech funding that paralleled the dot-com boom, albeit on a smaller scale. “VCs a few years ago were not focused on the technology, only the market,” he says. “In general they were willfully blind to the competition, and I would say it was exactly like the folk tale about ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes.’ Nobody seemed to mind that there was nothing there in terms of the technology as long as they could claim a market.”

Times have clearly changed. “Now VCs seem to be very risk adverse in all areas but the biological sciences,” he says. “I don’t really understand the biological science focus. There is probably more risk there.”

Of course, nanotech companies have never received as much venture funding as biotech, and for good reason—commercially speaking, they remain largely unproven. Which is why most nano companies have relied on government and corporate funding, even during boom times. But Swager’s point is that nanotech has now been around long enough, and has demonstrated enough potential applications, that it should mitigate some of the risk from an investor’s point of view.

Upon further reflection, he adds, “Two problems with materials is that although they can be the enabling technology, they are far upstream from products and therefore do not command as big of a cut in the value chain. The frustration I have with the VC community is that new materials can find many applications and are really a platform technology. There are many ways to get inventions to market. Biotech has bigger potential payoffs but often—not always—has much more narrow focus.”

Given these challenges, what is Swager’s advice for today’s nano entrepreneurs? “If you have something with unique properties, keep pushing forward,” he says. “I suspect in the materials area, you will have to push it farther before getting VC money. However, if it can do something that nothing else can, then you will be successful.”

Some intriguing tech areas to watch, says Swager, are organic light-emitting and -absorbing nanomaterials for imaging devices and solar cells (”huge potential,” he adds), carbon nanotube and graphene-based electronics, and organic polymers for applications in the semiconductor industry. The latter could dramatically enhance the speed of integrated circuits by more effectively insulating one part of a circuit from another, thereby enabling chips to be packed much more densely. Swager is convinced this can be done practically. “The future,” he proclaims, “will be organics.”

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