It’s not just the Silicon Valley giants of technology who are moving into the Seattle area to raid technical talent from Microsoft, Amazon, and others. These days, you’re just as likely to see some well-financed startups wooing the big-company guys with promises of changing the world.

A prime example is Nebula, a cloud computing startup that has about half of its roughly 30-person staff in Seattle. As Xconomy’s Wade Roush wrote in this detailed profile of the company, Nebula is selling a smarter version of a networking switch, one that is integrated with the open-source cloud computing platform OpenStack. Specifically, the Nebula device contains a 10 gigabit Ethernet switch along with access to the OpenStack software platform—a combination the company is calling a “cloud controller.”

Nebula’s device, which is just now being tested by potential customers, will allow companies to cheaply build private cloud computing systems. Nebula’s device uses customized OpenStack software and works with inexpensive, commodity servers, including hardware from the Facebook-sponsored Open Compute Project.

Chris Kemp, Nebula CEO

It’s worth mentioning that Nebula’s CEO, Chris Kemp, is one of the co-founders of OpenStack. He helped get the project off the ground when he was the chief technology officer for IT at NASA, working out of its Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA.

Kemp’s also no stranger to Seattle. He was a key employee at Classmates.com, and co-founded the vacation rental management startup Escapia before heading to NASA. Another veteran of Escapia and NASA, Devin Carlen, is a Nebula co-founder and its engineering vice president, based in the Seattle area.

When I visited Nebula’s temporary digs recently, Carlen and Kemp were in that tired-but-excited phase of developing a new company and getting the first versions of their product out to testing. Their conference room was peppered with notes and diagrams, piles of hardware, and the occasional wine bottle, as engineers worked intently in an office down the hall. The company’s current hiring plans will put it at about 50 people in the next six months or so, and a bit more than half of the team will probably be based in Palo Alto, CA. But “all the cool kids are in Seattle, of course,” Carlen says with a smile.

“Seattle’s actually been our secret weapon,” Kemp says. “We found it very difficult to bring folks on in the Bay Area. And, as it turns out, Amazon’s a great place to recruit from. Microsoft’s a great place to recruit from.”

Those hires include a pair that Nebula boasted about in a recent press release: principal engineer Tres Henry, a former lead in developing the Amazon Web Services Management Console; and Matt Gambardella, who … Next Page »

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Contrary to what you might expect, the pace of tech news out of San Diego didn’t slow down much before the Thanksgiving Holiday. We still managed to round it all up, though, and our briefing begins here.

—As director of the UC system’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2), Larry Smarr is an Internet pioneer who frequently offers his perspective on the future of IT technologies. Lately, however, Smarr has been providing a glimpse at the future of “quantified health” and digitally enabled genomic medicine. In a Q&A with Smarr, he told me he found he had one chemical marker (out of 60 that he regularly tracks) that was five times higher than the recommended upper limit—triggering a kind of detective story that illustrates the potential revolution in health IT and wireless health.

—In the U.S. Navy’s largest demonstration of alternative fuels, a decommissioned Navy destroyer refitted as a kind of ocean-going test facility completed a 17-hour transit from San Diego to Port Hueneme. The Spruance-class destroyer used a 50-50 mixture of standard Navy diesel fuel and algae-based diesel produced by San Francisco-based Solazyme.

—Mellmo, the four-year-old startup based in Solana Beach, CA, has been moving into overseas markets in Europe and Asia with Roambi, its Web-based business intelligence graphics service. Mellmo co-founder Quinton Alsbury also talked with me about Roambi Flow, a new service that enables corporate customers to wrap text around their Roambi graphics to produce magazine-quality reports for the iPad.

—The case of the 2010 murder of San Diego angel investor and retired life sciences executive John G. Watson came to a close when a San Diego jury convicted Kent Thomas Keigwin of first-degree murder, attempted grand theft of personal property, burglary, and forgery. The prosecutor argued that Keigwin, who was working as a financial advisor, used Watson’s personal information to transfer some $8.9 million from Watson’s accounts.

—San Diego-based Next Autoworks, which was once known as V Vehicle, withdrew its … Next Page »

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If you’re a young Silicon Valley entrepreneur, you’d probably give your Prius and your iPad, and maybe throw in your X-Men comic collection, to hear Andy Bechtolsheim ask you the question he posed to Chris Kemp this spring: “What’s the name of your company? I want to write you a check right now.”

If you don’t recall, Bechtolsheim is the Sun Microsystems co-founder and investor who wrote the $100,000 check that launched Google in 1998. The legend is that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had to incorporate under the name they’d picked so that they could actually cash it.

The 34-year-old Kemp, however, didn’t have a name ready. In fact, he didn’t even have a company—he was still a civil servant at the time of his meeting with Bechtolsheim, working as chief technology officer at NASA.

Kemp had led a project at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, to create open source software that would tie together the agency’s computing and storage resources into a private cloud computing environment similar to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). The project was called Nebula, and together with other software components built by cloud hosting service Rackspace, it formed the core of an open-source software library called OpenStack. Kemp had conceived the project mainly in order to help NASA, the White House, and other government organizations get more efficient about the way they use computing resources. With cloud computing as hot as it is, though, Kemp had already heard from a few Silicon Valley investors telling urging him to take OpenStack commercial. He’d always brushed off the idea.

Chris Kemp, Nebula CEO

But when he finally met with Bechtolsheim, he says, “Something clicked. I thought, ‘if Andy Bechtolsheim is willing to slide a check across the table, perhaps I should consider leaving NASA.’”

Which he soon did. Kemp resigned from NASA in April and together with Devin Carlen, an engineer who’d worked on the Nebula project for both NASA and Rackspace, and Steve O’Hara, a telecom and semiconductor industry veteran, incorporated Fourth Paradigm Development—soon renamed Nebula. By May 1, the company had collected seed funding from a billionaires’ club that included not just Bechtolsheim but also David Cheriton and Ram Shriram, both early investors in Google alongside Bechtolsheim. The team had also signed venture term sheets with John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Peter Bell at Highland Capital. (The exact amount of money the startup raised hasn’t been disclosed, but when I asked Kemp “Are we talking about a $2 million round here or a $20 million round?” he indicated that it was closer to the latter.)

Having recruited this dream team of investors, Nebula announced its existence in late July at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, better known as OSCON, in Portland, OR. It’s already hired 20 employees, about half working from its Palo Alto headquarters and the other half, all engineers, in Seattle. The company’s plan is to sell a hardware appliance—in essence, a very smart networking switch—that, once installed inside a company’s data center, will use OpenStack to automatically organize existing commodity servers and storage arrays into a private cloud infrastructure.

The attraction of the cloud model, of course, is that companies can save lots of money by spreading their big-data analytics tasks and other work flexibly across hundreds or thousands of computing nodes. The attraction of private clouds is that organizations that own them don’t have to pay Amazon’s rates, or risk putting their closely held financial information and other sensitive data on a … Next Page »

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You weren’t actually thinking about taking Memorial Day Weekend off, were you? If you’re an entrepreneur and you want some (relatively) easy money or fame, it’s time to get moving on your entry for one of the many startup-oriented competitions underway this summer. Here are just four that have hit my inbox this week.

—Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, CA, is organizing its second annual “Health IT Startup Showcase.” It’s a search for 10 outstanding startups seeking seed or Series A funding for technology ideas that could improve the quality or cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The finalists will be paired with investors and other startup founders to help them prepare for presentations to an audience of VCs, angels, and entrepreneurs at Morgenthaler’s DC to VC Summit in Mountain View, CA, on September 22. Two categories of startups are eligible: those under two years old with less than $500,000 in funding, and those under three years old with less than $1.5 million in funding. Applications are due August 9; the details are available in this PDF at Morgenthaler’s website.

—Mountain View, CA-based Evernote, maker of a cross-platform system for storing digital notes of all kinds, has organized its first-ever Developer Competition. Aimed to spur the creation of more apps for the “Evernote Trunk” (the company’s third-party app ecosystem), the competition carries $100,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize, six $5,000 finalist prizes, a $10,000 student prize, and a $10,000 “wildcard prize.” The winners will be showcased at the company’s Evernote Trunk Conference on August 18. The submission deadline is July 15; Evernote published all the details in a May 23 blog post.

—The Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO, announced the Startup Open this week. The competition is designed to identify the 50 most promising startups around the world. Any company that has had a “startup moment” since November 22, 2010 is eligible—meaning “any action related to launching a new business, such as incorporating a company; officially opening the doors for business; completing a first sale; or securing outside funding,” according to the foundation. Applications are due September 15. The 50 finalists will be announced on October 15, and those companies will compete for prizes during the foundations’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event in mid-November. Last year’s grand prize winner, Resolute Marine Energy founder Olivier Cebiero, received a trip to Richard Branson’s private island.

—This one’s far out—literally. Kaggle, a Melbourne, Australia-based Web startup that crowdsources scientific data analysis through online competitions, has announced a competition for new computer algorithms that could help to measure the distribution of dark matter in the universe by gauging the apparent ellipticity of images of distant galaxies. The competition is being sponsored by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Royal Astronomical Society, and the winner will be invited to present his or her solution at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The entry deadline is August 18. (Working with the Heritage Provider Network, Kaggle is also running a longer-term “Heritage Health Prize Competition” aimed at eliciting an algorithm that can predict, based solely on insurance claims data, which patients will be admitted to hospitals. You’ve got until April 3, 2013 to enter that one.)

—This one isn’t an organized competition, but it’s great for mobile game startups: San Francisco-based TinyCo, which makes games such as Tiny Zoo and Tiny Chef and is backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said this week that it has set up a $5 million “TinyFund” to help developers get iOS and Android games to market. TinyCo said it will provide selected teams with up to $500,000 in funding, along with marketing, development, and business support.

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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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As part of the anticipatory celebration for today’s official debut of Xconomy’s sixth website in New York City, I profiled New York’s Enterproid, which was Qualcomm’s grand prize winner in its 2011 QPrize competition. Get that and catch up on the rest of San Diego’s innovation news.

—Andrew Toy, Alexander Trewby, and David Zhu founded New York-based Enterproid last year to roll out technology that enables mobile customers to combine the features of their mobile consumer system and a secure enterprise system on the same Android-based device. Enterproid launched a private beta version of the technology, called “Divide,” on Feb. 28—the same day they were named as the 2011 QPrize grand prize winner by San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM).

—San Diego-based Sony Online Entertainment is stopping work on an undelivered game called “The Agency,” and closing its game development offices in Bellevue, WA; Denver, CO; and Tucson, AZ. A total of 205 jobs are being eliminated as SOE consolidates operations at its San Diego headquarters.

—San Diego’s Connect, the non-profit group created to support innovation and entrepreneurship, officially inducted Titan founder Gene Ray into its Hall of Fame at a luncheon celebration last week. Ray started Titan in 1981 to provide … Next Page »

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NASA has halted work on an advanced zoom 3D camera system under development in San Diego for the SUV-sized Mars Science Laboratory rover—to the disappointment of Avatar filmmaker James Cameron.

In a statement Friday, privately held Malin Space Science Systems (MSSS) of San Diego said there wasn’t enough time remaining to finish testing and integrating the advanced 3D zoom instruments for the scheduled launch of the spacecraft this November. The cameras were supposed to be mounted to the top of a mast on Curiosity, the name NASA has given the newest Mars rover.

“While Curiosity won’t benefit from the 3D motion imaging that the zooms enable, I’m certain that this technology will play an important role in future missions,” Cameron says in a statement from the company. MSSS lists the filmmaker in its credits as “Mastcam Co-Investigator.”

As I reported in 2008, the San Diego company had enlisted Cameron’s help years ago, with the idea of combining its scientific mission with imaging capabilities that could be used to create a stunning movie about Mars. “We proposed this integrated camera system that could do the science imaging that NASA wanted, but also had this zoom capability,” Michael Ravine, MSSS advanced project manager, told me at the time.

Cameron had used a pair of Russian deep-diving research submarines in a similar way to obtain footage from the bottom of the Atlantic for his 1997 film Titanic.

NASA had halted previous development of an HD zoom lens system in 2007, and MSSS delivered two fixed focal length cameras last April. With the two completed and delivered fixed focal length cameras in hand, NASA then decided to fund completion of zoom cameras, with the possibility of swapping out the old cameras for the new ones if they could be assembled and tested in time. The move, which followed the boffo success of Cameron’s 3D film Avatar, included a decision to make stereoscopic 3D zoom camera systems for the spacecraft.

Curiosity on a tilt table at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA

While MSSS finished work on the cameras by the December deadline, subsequent optical analysis of the images showed irregularities due to unexpected and extremely small variations in the fabrication of some pieces. “At the end of the day there just wasn’t enough time to disassemble the units, make the changes, put them back together, and get the instruments to JPL in time,” Ravine said.

In the statement issued by the company, the director renowned for his determination sounded an upbeat note about the setback. He’s quoted as saying, “We’re certainly going to make the most of our cameras that are working so well on Curiosity right now,” but you know, it’s a press release.

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The space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff on January 28, 1986—twenty-five years ago today. The disaster took the lives of six astronauts and one schoolteacher, and shook NASA to its core. Like other televised national traumas, it burned itself into the memories of millions of people. I was just a spectator to the catastrophe, watching speechless and horrified along with everyone else as the video clips were played and replayed on television. But that day altered the direction of my life in unusually concrete ways, and I can’t let the anniversary pass without a bit of reflection.

In January 1986 I was a 19-year-old freshman at Harvard College. On the morning of January 28, I was working on an assignment in the computer room at the university’s science center, and a student who had just taken a seat at the terminal next to mine mentioned the accident. I didn’t believe him at first. But he seemed serious enough about the story to make me nervous.

This was years before the advent of the Web—I couldn’t simply log on and check the news. So I got up and literally ran back to my dorm room, where my roommates and I had a small color TV. I remember thinking, as I charged through Harvard Yard, that the story couldn’t possibly be true. Hadn’t the shuttle traveled safely into space dozens of times before? Didn’t the engineers at NASA know how to prevent such a disaster? But sure enough, when I turned on the TV, there were the images of the spaceship disintegrating against an azure sky, sending tendrils of smoke and flames in all directions.

Like many people that day, I spent hours watching the coverage unfold, culminating with President Reagan’s eloquent televised address. The horror of the event was immediate for me. It was awful to imagine what the seven crew members must have experienced as the shuttle broke up, and to realize what a huge setback the accident represented for the U.S. space program, which I had followed with zeal since I was old enough to watch TV.

But the disaster’s real influence settled in only over the next several months, as investigators such as physicist Richard Feynman worked out the chain of events that had led to the explosion. As it turned out, a rubber O-ring in one of the solid rocket boosters, stiffened by that morning’s cold weather, had failed, allowing flames to burst through, in turn causing the shuttle’s main fuel tank to explode. It was such a predictable and seemingly preventable problem that for the first time in my life I began to question NASA’s competence, and to understand just how important the human element in any large technological system can be. On a broader level, I began to look at all technological and scientific endeavors with a much more skeptical—-one might even say disillusioned—eye.

I had a work-study job that year doing data analysis for an X-ray astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Within weeks after the accident it was clear that the massive satellite that this astronomer had been helping to design, which had been scheduled to go into space aboard a shuttle, would be delayed for years while NASA retrenched. This was a big professional blow for him, and for many other scientists whose instruments could only get into space aboard the shuttle; it affected the whole mood at the center over the following months. This, in turn, contributed to my own growing disenchantment with the job and with my long-cherished idea of becoming an astronomer or astrophysicist. (I hasten to add that I wasn’t very good at math, which would have derailed my plans eventually anyway.)

By the end of my sophomore year, less than a year and a half after the Challenger disaster, I had decided to switch majors from physics and astronomy to the history of science. In this discipline, my professors encouraged me to think skeptically about ideas that I had previously accepted uncritically, such as “American know-how” and the inevitability of technological progress. Eventually I went on to graduate studies in the history of technology at MIT and wrote a doctoral thesis about the social and political effects of technological disasters. That, in turn, helped launch me on a career in science and technology journalism. (Though there were also plenty of other influences—such as my unexpected detour into campus journalism at the Harvard Independent, and a chance encounter with Carl Sagan. But that’s another story.)

For me, the Challenger disaster hit at the moment when I was perhaps most impressionable—when I was in the middle of defining my world-view and choosing my future. It taught me that the world was full of risks I hadn’t contemplated; that America was not invulnerable; that extravagant endeavours can go extravagantly wrong. These are all lessons that people slightly older than myself probably learned from Vietnam, Apollo 13, and Watergate—and we certainly relearned them as a nation when the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 and the shuttle Columbia broke up on re-entry in 2003. But for me, Challenger was the veil-lifting moment. And it’s all still symbolized in my mind by the iconic TV images of the exploding spacecraft, its twin boosters veering across the sky like ghostly fireworks.

This article is adapted from an essay I originally wrote for the book A Creative Guide to Exploring Your Life by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Holly Barlow Sweet (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009). Republished by permission.

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What is the right genetic profile for an astronaut—someone who’s going to spend months living on the moon, or years traveling to an asteroid or Mars?

Craig Venter has an answer. The biologist told a group of scientists at NASA Ames on Saturday that NASA already does genetic selection when it picks astronauts. He just suggests that the space agency get even more systematic about its process.

“Inner ear changes could allow people to escape motion sickness,” Venter said. “(You could have genes for) bone regeneration, DNA repair from radiation, a strong immune system, small stature, high energy utilization, a low risk of genetic disease, smell receptors, a lack of hair, slow skin turnover, dental decay and so on. If people are traveling in space for their whole lives, they may want to engineer genetic traits for other purposes.”

Venter is currently a co-founder and CEO of San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute, a non-profit in Rockville, MD, that is working to discover and sequence as many genes as possible. He and his team developed a rapid technique for sequencing genes that beat the Human Genome Project’s approach to the problem in 2000.

He calls genetic engineering tools “the number-one wealth generator for the next century” and told the scientists that they give the world “the chance to completely change how we make everything, from food to fuel.”

NASA, meanwhile, is exploring the possibility of sending humans into space for long periods, and conditions in space can be problematic—everything from sweat to vomit to human waste has to be handled.

Venter described how rapid sequencing of genes could help NASA to better understand and cope with the closed environment of a space capsule, where each astronaut carries thousands of bacteria in his or her body.

“If you measure your blood stream after a meal, you will have … Next Page »

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A couple of startup companies set a world aviation record last night.

But they were pretty low-key about it. As I walked into the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Mukilteo, WA, a half hour north of Seattle, I saw little activity. It was after hours, and the hangar-like building was nearly deserted except for the futuristic planes suspended from the ceiling—Burt Rutan’s “Quickie” and a Beechcraft Starship—and part of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner fuselage on the display floor. It was a bit like “Star Wars” meets “Night at the Museum.”

Tom Nugent, the co-founder and president of Kent, WA-based LaserMotive, greeted me and said they were almost ready for showtime. A small team of engineers divided its attention between the back of a command truck and the adjacent trailer that held the laser optics equipment that would make the show possible. Two German guys who hadn’t slept in days (and were still on Munich time) were sprawled out on deck chairs in front of computer monitors like they were playing a video game. One held a remote controller that he used to guide a “quadrocopter”—a small, 1-kilogram, square-shaped flying contraption with blinking lights and four spinning rotors—made by their company, Ascending Technologies.

Jan Stumpf and Michael Achtelik, the co-CEOs of Ascending Technologies, partnered with LaserMotive to perform this feat last night. The goal: to use a laser to power an aircraft in continuous flight for about 12 hours (far longer than its battery would last without recharging, which is only about five minutes). That would be a world record, by a long shot, for the longest free flight of an electric vehicle.

Indeed, this demonstration is a big deal for the future of electric planes, said Barry Smith, the executive director of the Future of Flight facility. Imagine putting a laser on top of every cellular tower, he said, so that certain types of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) would never need to land to recharge or refuel. That could potentially revolutionize communications, surveillance, and security and defense applications. Longer term, it could even impact the long-held dream of powering manned aircraft with electricity instead of jet fuel—though that is very far off.

For now, Nugent says, “The significance is we’re going to show this quadrocopter, and any aerial vehicle [of this size], will be able to fly effectively forever. It’s no longer limited by battery capacity.”

LaserMotive has done smaller flight tests before, but not on a free-flying vehicle like this. The company is best known for winning the $900,000 NASA Power Beaming Challenge last year, in one of the levels of the “Space Elevator Games.” That involved using a laser to power a climbing robot up a cable to a certain height (1 kilometer) at a certain speed (about 9 mph). But lately the company has been targeting UAVs as a big commercial application of its wireless power technology. (The next level of the NASA challenge, which was supposed to happen later this year, is still up in the air, so to speak.)

“Goggles on!” someone shouted, and we all complied. That meant the infrared laser, which puts out about 200 watts of light power, was switching on. The beam was directed using a series of mirrors and optics and shot out the top of the trailer. You couldn’t see it with the naked eye except for a reddish halo on the 50-foot ceiling. At the same time, the quadrocopter lifted off (under its own battery power), guided by Stumpf, and floated up to meet the beam, about 30 feet off the ground (see left).

“Not centered,” Nugent said. Then the computer vision system of LaserMotive’s setup kicked in. Software and cameras aligned with the path of the laser beam tracked the vehicle’s position, and positioned the beam so it hit the photovoltaic cells on the underside of the craft; those solar cells transformed the laser’s energy into electricity to continuously charge the quadrocopter’s battery.

With that, all human corrections fell away, and it was just a drone hovering eerily in space, rotors humming quietly. It swayed a few feet from side to side, and the laser tracked it. It was about 7:40 pm.

This is the boring part, Nugent said. And boring is good. Exciting is bad. For the next 12 hours, if all went well, nothing more would happen. The craft would stay up all night (as would the crew), … Next Page »

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I left Seattle just over a month ago, and people keep asking if I miss anything about it. Yes, I say. But it’s not the amazing coffee, the great food, the nice people, or the beautiful scenery. I miss Microsoft.

I’m only half-kidding. I don’t miss hearing about Steve Ballmer’s iPhone and every turn of the Microsoft product screw on a daily, up-close basis. And Microsoft serves as a punching bag (or a crutch) for the media and business community way too often for my tastes. But a tech community needs a giant like that to anchor it, and keep it grounded. Amazon.com wouldn’t be in Seattle if not for Microsoft’s talent pool. RealNetworks wouldn’t be there either. Every other techie you meet in Seattle has a Microsoft connection.

Nothing like that exists in Boston. There’s a community around IBM and a bunch of hardware and data storage companies. There’s an entrepreneurial network around MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Northeastern, and many other schools in the area. There are big companies like EMC, Nuance, and Raytheon. But there isn’t one overarching technology presence.

And yet, on a national scale, Redmond, WA-based Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) has been quiet lately. Too quiet. All the noise in the tech industry is being made by the likes of Facebook, Google, Apple, and even IBM these days. Under the surface, though, big things are happening across the cities in Xconomy’s network. We might even look back at 2010 and say it was the turning point for Microsoft’s new businesses.

Here are a few dots to connect:

—Microsoft’s big Web search project known as Bing is just over a year old. Doesn’t it feel like longer than that? Credit Microsoft’s marketing efforts for getting the word out about this, the most dangerous competitor to Google’s core business. Bing has slowly but steadily gained market share in search—up to 12.6 percent this summer, while Google has 65.8 percent (according to comScore). Just yesterday, Bing announced it is officially powering all of Yahoo’s search capabilities in the U.S. and Canada. Next up: integrating Yahoo with Microsoft’s search advertising platform, and trying to make some real money.

—Other than Bing, Microsoft’s best chance to capture the online consumer crowd … Next Page »

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Corey Goodman, the prominent biotech entrepreneur, looked at the view from his home at Tomales Bay in Marin County, CA one day in the late ’90s, and was stunned by what he saw. Officials were taking water samples, looking for bacterial contamination that was making people sick. It was all a big mystery where it came from, and what to do.

“I remember thinking, here we are in the Bay Area, in the era of molecular biology and genomics technology, and we’re using technology to sample water that was about 100 years old, literally from the 19th century,” Goodman says. “You could watch public policy being made, and they were doing it blind. I figured there has to be a better way.”

It took a long time to find, but Goodman is betting he’s found the answer now in a startup called PhyloTech. This is Goodman’s first foray into environmental health, after a long and decorated career in academia, as the co-founder of such medical biotech companies as Exelixis (NASDAQ: EXEL), and Renovis, and as president of Pfizer’s Biotherapeutics and Bioinnovation Center. Now he’s the chairman of PhyloTech, and one of the angel investors who have pumped in $1.2 million in seed financing, along with Seraph Capital and Wavepoint Ventures.

The new company is led by Thane Kreiner, a former senior vice president at Affymetrix and a Goodman protégé. The science comes from the lab of Gary Andersen at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, CA. The vision is to perform the first-ever comprehensive, and highly selective analysis of all 55,000 known forms of bacteria in nature, what’s known as the “microbiome.” It’s possible to hunt for certain bacteria based on their genomic signature with next-generation sequencers or RT-PCR machines, but it costs too much, takes too long, and can only look for a limited number of varieties of bacteria in a sample. No technology until now has been designed to tackle something as broad as the full microbiome, Kreiner says.

Corey Goodman

PhyloTech’s method, licensed from Lawrence Berkeley, uses a gene chip it calls the “PhyloChip,” paired with bioinformatics software, that can spot specific signatures of all the bacteria in a sample of food or water, Kreiner says. By hiring a contract lab in North Carolina, and saving money on servers by renting space through a cloud computing vendor, PhyloTech has found a way to run these comprehensive tests for customers for less than $1,000 per sample and send back the results in a few weeks. This structure made it so the company could pursue a variety of hundred-million-dollar plus markets, like water testing, food safety, and even possibly diagnostic uses to look for clues into why people get allergic reactions, for example.

Based on PhyloTech’s lean cost structure, and the demand it sees from customers who have been coming to Andersen’s lab, Kreiner says it’s possible for the company to become profitable as soon as the end of 2011.

“The sky’s really the limit for our potential,” Kreiner says. “There could be multiple subsidiaries, spinoffs, and joint ventures over time.”

Besides Goodman and Kreiner, Janet Warrington is one of the co-founders and key architects who will help decide which opportunities to pursue first. She worked alongside Kreiner for 12 years at gene chipmaker Affymetrix (NASDAQ: AFFX), where she was the vice president of research and development.

The story about where this technology comes from is pretty interesting. Goodman, as mentioned above, was flabbergasted that state and federal environmental officials … Next Page »

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Engineers are not salespeople. They are certainly not sound-bite machines either. If they were either of the above, there would have been a flurry of media stories coming out of Seattle this week centered around the National Academy of Engineering’s “grand challenges” summit held here on Sunday and Monday. Maybe that’s why it took me longer than usual to synthesize what I heard into a coherent wrap-up.

Alas, the meeting was probably disappointing to most journalists. But if you are a scientist or a savvy businessperson interested in the future of technology, you should have been there. Its goal was to inspire students, researchers, and entrepreneurs to solve some of society’s most important problems—and it did. But it did so in a unique way—with some very high-level, thought-provoking talks and discussions that went far beyond what I was expecting as a casual observer. (OK, I’ll admit I’m an engineer by training, and still think like an engineer in many ways.)

It’s not exaggerating to say engineers have created the world we live in, and that they hold the future of the planet in their hands. They can also make you a lot of money if you work with them in the right way. A lot of tech entrepreneurs have other ideas, but I think the gap between technology researchers and startups needs to be bridged, for the good of society. This week, local summit organizers Matt O’Donnell, Ed Lazowska, and Bonnie Dunbar took a step in that direction, and got a lot of people buzzing about the future of technology and society.

Without further ado, here is my top 10 countdown of highlights from the summit, which focused on engineering better medicines and advancing tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace:

10. Eat broccoli.

During the medicine panel, Buddy Ratner, a University of Washington professor of bioengineering, raised an issue from the audience. “What’s the business model for preventive medicine?” he asked. His point was that companies pour billions of dollars into new drugs, but some of the advances that have had the most impact on improving overall health in society are low-tech things like washing hands before doing surgery, providing people with clean drinking water, and eating broccoli to help prevent cancer.

9. The new drug pipeline is broken—except when it’s not.

This was a point of contention on the panel. Lonnie Edelheit, former senior vice president of R&D at General Electric, argued that “if we don’t worry about cost, it’ll stay confusing until the system breaks completely.” Nicholas Peppas, chair of biomedical engineering at University of Texas at Austin, countered, “I don’t think the system is broken. It is still an excellent system, it works relatively well. This country has produced most of the great drugs and made them available at relatively low cost.”

8. Not everyone loves Dendreon.

Seattle’s biotech darling, which just made history by winning FDA approval for a new kind of prostate cancer drug, has its share of detractors. In discussing how to fix the drug pipeline, Bruce Montgomery, senior vice president at Gilead Sciences, said, “The problem is the reward system for … Next Page »

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You want some real tech? Here’s some real tech: LaserMotive, the Kent, WA-based startup founded by physicists Jordin Kare and Tom Nugent, has published a white paper on how to beam power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) so they don’t have to land and refuel, or change batteries. The idea is to recharge UAVs while they’re in the air using a laser power source from the ground. Presumably such “eternal” UAVs that never need to land would be very useful for military and reconnaissance operations.

In San Diego, which is a regional hub of UAV expertise, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports that defense contractors like Predator manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems and Northrop Grumman’s unmanned systems business are hustling to develop a new generation of relatively inexpensive UAVs. Most larger UAVs, like the Predator and Fire Scout, a robotic helicopter made by Northrop Grumman, run on gasoline, but smaller ones can run on electricity and are quieter.

That’s where LaserMotive comes into play. This inventive little company, which I first wrote about in-depth last month, has developed power-beaming technology using laser diodes to transmit energy through the air, and specially constructed solar cells to receive the beam and turn it into usable electricity. LaserMotive demonstrated its technology by winning the Level 1 prize of the NASA Power Beaming challenge last fall (part of its Space Elevator Games), in which it powered a robot to climb up a kilometer-long cable using only lasers from the ground. (The company will go for the Level 2 prize later this year.)

But powering UAVs and other practical devices has been the company’s plan for a while, and this is its first big market opportunity. Nugent, LaserMotive’s co-founder and president, said in a statement that his company’s plan is “an important step not only in powering UAVs, but in extending their abilities, improving their endurance and enabling new missions.” He added, “It is especially viable for high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial vehicles and other types of aircraft that need power over a long period of time.”

If you want to know the technical specs and capabilities of LaserMotive’s system (things like range, power levels, and efficiency), read the company’s report. But it seems like an intriguing market. The industry research firm Teal Group says the market for UAVs is expected to grow worldwide from $4.9 billion to $11.5 billion annually in the next 10 years.

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Engineering has an image problem. Sure, it’s the technical backbone of many things people use every day, from airplanes, cars, and buildings to new medicines, mobile devices, and the Internet. But it doesn’t always attract the best and brightest young people interested in solving society’s biggest problems or changing the world. That’s because people often have a narrow view of what engineering entails, or think it’s too boring, geeky, or technically difficult to pursue.

Enter the “grand challenges summit” organized by the National Academy of Engineering, which is coming to Seattle next week on May 2-3. This is part of an ongoing series of six NAE events around the U.S. this year that are meant to inspire students and rally faculty, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and investors around some of society’s most important problems. The plan is to concentrate on big ideas like improving healthcare, producing clean energy, providing access to clean water, restoring urban infrastructure, preventing nuclear terror, and making computer systems secure.

The Seattle event features an all-star cast of speakers, including Bruce Montgomery from Gilead Sciences, Larry Smarr from Calit2 and UC San Diego, Ed Crawley from MIT, former NASA administrator Mike Griffin (now at the University of Alabama), and former NASA astronaut Bonnie Dunbar (now CEO of the Museum of Flight). They will be joined by engineers from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and General Electric, as well as prominent scholars from the UW, including Matt O’Donnell, dean of engineering, Ed Lazowska from computer science & engineering, and Suzie Pun from bioengineering. The sessions will focus on how engineers can make better medicines, as well as better tools for scientific discovery in computing and aerospace.

O’Donnell, who helped bring the summit to Seattle, says the number of students interested in engineering has been declining for the past couple of decades—in particular, the percentage of U.S. students (compared with international students) enrolled in the nation’s graduate programs. “Engineering ain’t too sexy in society,” says O’Donnell, a biomedical engineer with expertise in ultrasound and other diagnostic imaging technologies. “A lot of folks in engineering are worried.”

He says the idea behind the grand challenges is, “Let’s excite people about what engineering can do for society. It’s not just about having your startup and making money—which is cool, and we all love that. But it’s not just the next PDA or iPhone app.” The goal, he says, is to “sexify” engineering and show that “it’s a way of thinking and analyzing systems, integrating quantitative [methods] with real-world concerns. You can build a bridge or PDA, but you can also think about sustainable systems, urban development, or how you put markets together.” (The NAE summits strike me as an adult complement to the FIRST Robotics competitions for middle-school and high-school kids, which are also about inspiring a new generation of engineers and changing the popular culture around engineering.)

The first grand challenges summit took place in early 2009 and was the brainchild of Tom Katsouleas, the dean of engineering at Duke University. O’Donnell was invited to moderate a panel on engineering new medicines. “It was absolutely a blast,” he says. “But then the kids and professionals in … Next Page »

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Think it’s possible to shoot down a swarm of buzzing mosquitoes in mid-air? Or maybe you want to power up a remote flying vehicle? Tom Nugent is your man. The Seattle-area entrepreneur just might be the most versatile guy with a laser you’ve ever met.

Yes, a laser. Until recently, Nugent worked in the laboratory of Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company led by Nathan Myhrvold, where one of his projects was the so-called “photonic fence.” This effort has gotten lots of media attention, most recently for an impressive demo at the TED conference in February. That’s where Myhrvold showed a video of a laser burning the wings off a flying mosquito in super slow-motion. The idea is this technology, implemented on a larger scale, could help prevent the spread of malaria or protect crops against flying pests.

But Nugent’s focus now is on something that might be more practical: power beaming. That means using lasers to deliver energy to remote sensors, vehicles, or base stations. It’s a two-way trick: the receiver has to have a solar cell to convert the laser’s energy into electricity. But as long as the solar cell is viable, the technology could be useful in any situation where installing a wire is impractical, where batteries run down, or where it’s too expensive to truck in fuel.

That’s really just the beginning, to Nugent’s mind. One of his ultimate goals is to be able to beam large amounts of solar power to Earth from space, presumably to help solve global-scale energy problems. For now, though, he’ll settle for beaming power to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other remote devices, including very early technology that could help scientists develop something called a space elevator. These ideas, in sum, have turned into a small company called LaserMotive, based in Kent, WA.

Before dismissing these projects as far-fetched, a little background is required. The idea of power beaming has been around for decades. But advances in cheaper and more energy-efficient diode lasers have made it possible to pursue the idea commercially in the past few years. Even the rise of laser hair removal products (which you might see on late night TV) have helped things move forward. So in 2007, Nugent and fellow physicist (and Intellectual Ventures veteran) Jordin Kare, an expert on laser rocket propulsion and optics who worked on the “Star Wars” nuclear-missile defense system in the 1980s—decided to make a business out of power beaming, and co-founded LaserMotive.

“We think we can produce revenue while we get experience,” says Nugent, LaserMotive’s president.

Their first project: tackling the power beaming aspect of NASA’s “Space Elevator Games.” If you don’t know what a space elevator is, that’s OK—it doesn’t exist yet. The über-futuristic idea is to have a cable anchored to the ground, extending thousands of miles into space, that could be used to launch payloads into orbit. The space end would be unattached, and the Earth’s rotation would keep it taut so a robot “elevator” could move up and down the cable, carrying equipment. Sure, this would take billions of dollars and a few decades to get working, but it could ultimately make space operations much cheaper than using rockets. That’s the idea, at least.

If a space elevator is ever going to work, it will need power at multiple steps along the way. So, at “Level 1” of the NASA Power Beaming Challenge, held last November in Mojave, CA, Nugent and Kare’s team used a ground-based infrared laser to beam energy to specially designed solar cells aboard an 11-pound robot (see photo, left) driven by an electric motor. (All power must come from the ground.) The robot climbed a 900-meter length of metal cable suspended from a helicopter. Nugent and Kare’s was the only team to make it to the top with an average climbing speed of more than 2 meters per second—their robot went nearly 4 meters per second (9 mph)—beating out two other teams, who failed to reach the top. The prize was $900,000 (before taxes, Nugent laments—yes, it’s that time of year).

The upcoming “Level 2” competition will be held later this year, … Next Page »

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It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes his son Cam and eight-year-old grandson Alex, had already arrived and were busy setting up for the day—a table of coffee and donut holes for the crew and onlookers, a Subaru converted into a mobile data acquisition center, and several barrels of fuel at the ready.

For Shadle, 68, and his partner and co-owner of the North American Eagle, Keith Zanghi, 55, the day’s engine test was just one stop along a more than 11-year journey to build the fastest land vehicle in the world. The goal: 800 miles per hour.

Shadle and his crew, all based in Washington state, were busy lowering the Eagle, a 56-foot-long tubular car forged out of the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, from the trailer. The nose and tail cones had been removed for transport, reducing the car to 48 feet in length—just short enough to fit inside the trailer. Other crew members busily prepared the steel cables that would anchor the car to two gravel-filled trucks, weighing 80,000 lbs in all, and to a nearby tree with deep roots—a “safety precaution,” the crew said. This setup procedure was nothing new for them.

“We’ve probably been out to this airport maybe 25 times, and we tie up to our favorite tree back there,” Zanghi said. “Luckily it’s not raining. It could be worse.”

For both Shadle and Zanghi, the thirst for speed was born out of a love of drag racing at an early age. And naturally, like any “typical teenager of that era,” as Shadle calls himself, drag racing led to more racing at higher speeds, and eventually, flight.

“For me, it started back when I was just a kid back in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. My uncles were all back from World War II and they got into stock car racing—the old jalopies running on dirt tracks. And of course we used to go to the races, so I’d hang out in the pits and watch my hero uncles,” Shadle said. “My first drag race on a real strip was at an airport. We raced on Friday nights for 50 cents and you could race all night.” Later, in his 20s, Shadle joined the Air Force and developed his career as a pilot.

“Just like Ed, we all grew up with the space program. The Mercury astronauts were my heroes—the Gemini and Apollo [as well]. All I did was build model airplanes when I was a kid,” Zanghi said.

The shared passion for flight, speed, and all the machinery behind them brought Shadle and Zanghi together in the 1990s when they both found themselves on a team working to build a vehicle that could break the land speed record. They were beat out, however, by Great Britain’s Richard Noble and Andy Green, who in 1997 achieved the current record of 763.1 mph with the ThrustSSC.

“At that time, the record was 633 mph, which is about 140 mph below the speed of sound, so we were building a car that was designed to go sub-sonic.” Zanghi said. When the British team broke the record, their car went supersonic. “As soon as that happened, we knew our car was obsolete,” he said.

When their project folded, Shadle and Zanghi decided to team up on a brand new endeavor, and in 1999 they bought the Eagle’s junked F-104 fuselage, without wings, for $25,000. The single-engine supersonic interceptor had its heyday flying with the U.S Air Force from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.

According to Zanghi, the F-104 had the ideal shape for land speed racing. The body was … Next Page »

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Seattle’s KeyArena was rocking this morning. I walked in around 9 am, and heard the Guns N’ Roses hard rock anthem “Welcome to the Jungle” blaring from the speakers. Referees in pinstriped uniforms monitored every move of the gladiators on display. School mascots led the crowd in clapping, stomping, and cheering.

“RO-bots! RO-bots! RO-bots!”

You read that right. This wasn’t the state high school basketball championship. It was the FIRST Robotics regional competition, in which 64 high school teams from Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, and Turkey (not sure how that’s regional) teamed up to build robots that can do nifty things, like kick soccer balls through a tiny goal.

This was a display of brainpower that would have been perceived as pretty darn nerdy in my high school, but not in here. FIRST, the brainchild of engineer Dean Kamen of Segway fame, got going in the early 1990s, and has since grown into a movement that’s been modeled after all the things sports do well to captivate the imaginations of young people. This event was sponsored by a few innovative organizations that depend on a steady stream of bright young scientists and engineers—-Microsoft, Boeing, NASA, and The Bezos Family Foundation, to name a few.

I was curious to see if it was as big a deal as advertised. I’m embarrassed to admit I had never heard of FIRST until last June in Boston. That’s when I saw Kamen give a fiery speech at an Xconomy event—which drew at least a 60-second standing ovation from the audience of about 300 people—about how he was on a mission to do nothing less than “change the culture of the United States.” In Kamen’s vision, young people would look up to scientists and engineers like they do today to Paris Hilton or Shaquille O’Neal. Obviously few kids who dream of playing in the NBA or starring in some reality show will ever achieve those goals, but if they applied all of their talent and drive to something like engineering and robotics, as Kamen says, then this is a sport in which they can certainly go pro.

The students, because they are young, have a long time to think about what they want to do with their lives. I was more interested in what the parents had to say. So I walked up into the stands and randomly interviewed a couple of them—David and Susan Olive of Gig Harbor, WA. They were there to root for their son, Parker, a sophomore at the Tacoma School for the Arts, and his 30-some teammates.

Neither of the Olives are engineers—Susan is an accountant by training, and David is a general manager for a vending company. They have introduced their son to lots of different sports and activities through the years, and he has dabbled in some arts. Nothing really stuck.

That was true until October, says Susan Olive. He joined the robotics team, and tried his hand at programming, while some of the other kids had other assignments like design or building. By January, he was wholly absorbed, staying after school until 7 or 8 pm, even when he still had homework to do after that, Susan Olive says. He started working on the programming on weekends, not because someone told him to do it, but because he wanted to. By today’s event in March, he had developed enough skill that he was helping offer advice to some of the other teams on their programming, his mother says with a surprised tone.

“Now he’s considering pursuing engineering in college,” Susan Olive says. “It’s been absolutely amazing for him. This is the first time we’ve seen him light up with a real passion. They make it fun. It’s really been a life-changing experience.”

FIRST may not get a lot of attention in the local news, but it has definitely struck a chord. There are some 45,000 high school students in 12 countries competing this year for a spot in the championship round held at the Georgia Dome from April 15-17. I wasn’t able to stick around to see if the Tacoma School of the Arts advanced through today’s qualifying regional matches, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they make it, judging from the spirit they showed in a 9-2 victory this morning.

“It’s really sparked something in him,” Susan Olive says of her son. “It’s amazing. It’s really a way to make engineering and math and science fun and practical.”

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Kent, WA-based LaserMotive has won $900,000 in a NASA competition to build a small prototype device that one day could help lead to a commercial “space elevator,” a cable that could transport cargo to and from outer space. The news was reported by the New York Times and other outlets. LaserMotive, a laser power-beaming company, is led by Thomas Nugent and Jordin Kare, who both also work with Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures. The power-beaming project and competition was reported by TechFlash earlier today.

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Kryptiq, a Portland, OR-based developer of healthcare software announced today that NASA’s space medicine division will begin using Kryptiq’s Connect IQ software for sharing health data.  Financial details of the deal were not revealed.  NASA will use Connect IQ to share health information with its patients, colleagues and partners, including other government space organizations like the Russian Federal Space Agency (RSA).  There are currently about 30,000 practices that use Connect IQ.

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