[Editors note: Architect Robert Noble wrote this article with Glenn Croston]

The San Diego area is the home of numerous cleantech businesses that are developing innovative green cars (Aptera, V-Vehicle Co.), developing alternative fuels (GreenHouse International, Synthetic Genomics Inc., Sapphire Energy), finding alternatives to petrochemicals (Genomatica, Verdezyne), and providing renewable energy and energy efficiency solutions (KEMA, Kyocera, Envision Solar).

Assisting our growing cluster is a network of non-profits, trade groups, government agencies, universities, and investors who share a common interest in cultivating a green economy. These groups collaborate on many projects, strengthening our vision for more green businesses, jobs, and investments in cleantech innovation. But while they share common goals, local green groups are also distinct in many ways and often compete for money, members, and media; their varying perspective, focus, message, membership, and goals can be confusing. If you’re an entrepreneur, how can you find support for the green innovations you hope to commercialize? Where do investors look for opportunities and advice? Where can founders find the resources they need to move their ventures forward?

We’ve compiled a listing of these groups to help San Diego entrepreneurs and others find the resources they need to grow green, and to help San Diego’s green economy grow.

—The California Center for Sustainable Energy (CCSE) is the cornerstone in developing San Diego’s green business cluster. As a non-profit, the CCSE works to advance the adoption of renewable energy, green building design, clean transportation options, and energy efficiency by providing workshops, information, and training.

—Cleantech San Diego is a membership-based non-profit industry association that sponsors events for businesses, investors, and others working in the cleantech cluster. They summarize their mission on their website, saying, “Cleantech San Diego advocates for new sources of investment capital, workforce development, international trade, federal and state research funding, targeted regulation, and sustainable land use planning and development.”

—San Diego Clean Enterprise Program, which is administered by Cleantech San Diego through a partnership with the City of San Diego and the mayor, which provides interest-free financing for energy efficiency improvements for small businesses. Cleantech San Diego also is working with the rest of the green community to support funding and grant applications, such as the effort to win $260 million in Clean Renewable Energy Bonds (CREBs) for local solar projects.

—San Diego Gas & Electric committed to develop a distributed solar power generation system in the San Diego region in 2008. So it’s no surprise that …Next Page »

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The Renewable Energy Business Network (REBN), a networking group for cleantech professionals with 10,000 members across 17 local chapters and a strong presence in the Boston area, has merged with the Clean Economy Network Foundation (CENF), a young cleantech policy research and education organization based in Washington, DC.

The news came today in an e-mail to all REBN members from founder Rob Day, currently a partner at Boston-based Black Coral Capital.

“REBN has been growing by leaps and bounds and frankly it outgrew our ability to support it with the really thin organization that we had,” Day tells Xconomy. “We started talked with CENF because they were already thinking about how they were going to tackle community building at the national level. They are a great organization, and they are full-time on this, and now we are going to be able to bring that support to REBN. And for them, it means they don’t have to reinvent the wheel.”

“There is so much synergy these days between the policy part that CENF has been working on and the networking stuff that business people care about that it just made a lot of sense” to merge the two organizations, Day continues.

The REBN name will be gradually phased out and replaced by the Clean Economy Network label, Day says. “The ‘renewable energy’ part of REBN was a bit of an anachronism anyway,” he says. “We’ve been getting into efficiency and even things like water and materials. It’s all one community, really.”

REBN co-executive directors Laura Bartsch and Helen Fairman have become network co-directors at CENF. The group’s executive director, Jeff Anderson, was formerly campaign manager at Cleantech and Green Business for Obama, a grassroots group that lobbied for the election of Barack Obama as president.

But while Day acknowledges that “these guys have shown themselves to be pretty effective community organizers,” he sayd CENF itself “is a non-partisan organization that is not involved in policy advocacy. That means REBN will continue to be non-partisan, not supporting one politician or blue or red or anything like that, but simply in favor of supporting the development of a clean economy.”

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My head is exploding trying to keep up with all the tech-business events going on around Seattle these days. Here’s a quick guide to the most prominent ones on my brain, in the hopes of saving you some stress (and keeping you up to date):

—Last night’s “Women in Tech” event from TechFlash was a smash hit, with a first-rate panel and networking. You can check out recaps of the event here and here. Yes, the crowd was predominantly women. I’m surprised more tech guys weren’t there to soak up the diverse perspectives and add their own input (or to get a date).

—Tonight’s panel on “the changing face of venture capital” at the University of Washington (computer science and engineering) should provide some spirited discussion of the unique challenges that investors and entrepreneurs are facing in the current climate. It’s an all-star lineup of local VCs: Mark Ashida from OVP, Greg Gottesman from Madrona, Ron Howell from WRF Capital, Bill McAleer from Voyager, and Cam Myhrvold from Ignition.

—Also tonight is the Clean Tech Open’s Pacific Northwest Regional Awards gala at the ACT Theater in downtown Seattle. Gov. Chris Gregoire is giving the keynote address, and will be followed by the announcement of three Northwest finalist winners (cleantech companies) who will then move on to a Western regional competition.

—Next week brings NWEN’s “Entrepreneur University” on Nov. 5 at the Bellevue Hyatt. It’s an all-day extravaganza about starting, growing, and managing your own company. Don’t miss the talks by Jennifer Mintz Clark, Andy Sack, and the Bacon Salt guys, or the “Entrepreneur Idol” pitch competition. (I’ll be there as one of the judges.)

—That same afternoon, on Nov. 5, Microsoft chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie is speaking at UW, as part of the computer science and engineering department’s Distinguished Lecturer Series. Mundie will talk about how software and information technology can help solve our most pressing global challenges and reshape scientific exploration. (I’ll need to go quantum so I can be in two places at once that day.)

—On Nov. 6, the Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association (WBBA) is holding its annual meeting at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. Elias Zerhouni, the former director of the National Institutes of Health, is giving the keynote.

—A bit further out, Nov. 18 is the night of the Washington Technology Industry Association’s annual “predictions” dinner event at the Grand Hyatt in Seattle. John Cook of TechFlash will put some of the usual VC/entrepreneur suspects on the spot about their thoughts on 2010. On a separate note, WTIA recently announced that applications are now open for its 2010 Industry Achievement Awards, which will take place on March 4.

—Last but not least, Xconomy is organizing an evening on “The Future of Search and Information Discovery” (and Seattle’s role in shaping it) on Nov. 30, at the University of Washington (Walker-Ames Room in Kane Hall). We’ll get Google and Microsoft to share the stage, and surround them with some compelling VCs and startups, to talk about the technical problems and business opportunities in Web search, real-time information discovery, social media, and user interfaces.

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More and more big companies are supplying their employees not with standard desktop PCs and office software, but with “virtualized desktops.” If your company has made the switch, then your desktop may still look the same, but your office programs are actually running in your company’s data center, where a server is feeding a screen image to your machine over the company’s internal network.

It’s an attractive way to provide software to people in large organizations, since centralized services are far easier to maintain and upgrade. Vendors both large (Microsoft, Citrix, VMware) and small (Virtual Computer, InstallFree) are offering systems that make desktop virtualization more manageable, and research firm Gartner predicts that at least 15 percent of professional desktop PCs will be virtualized by 2014. But if an organization is very large or is extended across the globe, it can get tricky and expensive to keep hundreds or thousands of desktop-to-data-center connections open across a private network.

Cambridge, MA-based Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) is proposing an alternative. Today, the company is rolling out a new service that enables desktop virtualization over the open Internet, with help from Akamai’s network of 50,000 “edge servers” around the world. The company originally built this network to smooth the delivery of multimedia content to Web audiences, but has been enhancing it over the last few years so that companies can also use it to improve the performance of Web- and Internet-based software applications. (A contract drug research company in California called Synteract, for example, uses Akamai’s network to speed up the Web-based system its researchers use to log clinical trial data.) So it’s not much of a stretch for Akamai to invite companies to route their virtual desktop traffic through Akamai’s servers as well.

“We have spent a lot of time applying our newer capabilities to browser-based applications, but we also want to accelerate other types of applications that aren’t browser-based,” says Neil Cohen, Akamai’s director of product marketing. That meant tailoring the company’s existing “IP Application Accelerator” service to work with virtual desktop management software such as Citrix’s XenDesktop, VMware View, and Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (known as MED-V).

All of these virtual desktop infrastructure products can smooth the switch to centralized desktop management—but they don’t deal with some of the inherent problems in Internet-based networking, which include bandwidth limitations and lost data packets, an annoyance that grows more serious with distance. “The farther away you get from the virtual infrastructure”—meaning, the data center where the applications are running—”the worse the performance gets,” Cohen says. Companies can cure that problem by expanding their private networks, but “if you have to build new pipes to new locations to maintain performance, it kind of defeats the point” of economizing through virtualization, Cohen points out.

By feeding their desktop traffic over Akamai’s network, Cohen says, companies can switch to a virtualized desktop infrastructure even in far-flung international offices without having to install expensive Internet lines or new networking hardware. They can also extend virtual desktops to workers who may be connecting from an airport or a home office, rather than over a company’s virtual private network. “Akamai believes there is a large opportunity to deliver high-performance virtual desktops to anyone, anywhere, anytime, rather than having them be constrained to be on their private networks,” says Cohen.

Akamai will sell the new desktop virtualization acceleration service directly to companies that are already deploying software from Citrix and other virtualization vendors. But it will also make the system available through Entisys Solutions, a Concord, CA-based reseller that works closely with Citrix. The price will depend on the number of employees using the technology, says Cohen.

Akamai is the first company to offer large enterprises a way to handle desktop virtualization purely over the Internet, Cohen says. “They now have a choice when they are thinking about investing in virtual desktop infrastructure,” he says. “They can ask ‘Am I better served deploying over the wide area network, or over the Internet with Akamai, where it’s cheaper to buy bandwidth.’”

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While Scott Kirsner and my fellow Xconomist Tim Rowe both recently have commented on the benefits of mixing and mingling in Kendall Square, we have a more basic problem that won’t be solved by just rubbing shoulders. Chalk it up to Yankee stoicism; our long, dark winter; or our independent sectors of software, communications, medical devices, interactive media, financial services, health care, and finance. Whatever the cause, you probably haven’t heard of “Northern Hospitality” for a reason. Simply put, we just don’t talk with each other like people do in other parts of the country, and changing will help entrepreneurs.

Starting a new company is hard. We talk a lot about entrepreneurship and innovation in the technology community, but that’s not really the entrepreneur’s chief mission. Big companies innovate and create things. Mature small companies do, too. What makes entrepreneurs unique is coupling that with creating a new organization, which means creating something out of nothing.

To do that, they need to find those rare people who are willing to take the risk with them, and who share the dream and want to solve the same types of problems. These include co-founders, employees, lawyers, distributions partners, suppliers, and most importantly, customers.

Finding all those people takes time and energy. It can be hit or miss, and it’s mostly miss. Unfortunately for entrepreneurs, the biggest expense usually is time, which also is usually in fairly short supply. With a little effort from the rest of us, we can help entrepreneurs cut these costs dramatically and help build an even more vibrant technology community here in Boston.

Last year, Bill Warner (another Xconomist) and I collaborated with the Mass Technology Leadership Council to launch Innovation 2008, an “unConference.” Unlike traditional conferences with lots of speakers and little networking, this new model of conference is mostly structured networking that delivers content based on participants’ interests rather than a pre-planned rigid agenda. The attendees create the sessions themselves, allowing people with shared interests to find each other efficiently, and then they spend an hour at a time sharing their expertise, asking questions, discussing critical issues, and getting to know each other. It was a huge hit, particularly by breaking down traditional barriers between old and young, investors and entrepreneurs, and people in different sectors because everyone had something to offer.

This year, we are turning that event, which will be held on October 1, into the kick-off for a year-long platform. We will ask particular participants to become “connectors,” and for the next 12 months, they will try to be the quick “answer man/woman” who entrepreneurs can contact with the simple question: “Who do you think would be the right person to help me with __________?” Connectors either make an introduction and get out of the way, or refer the request to another connector who might have a better answer.

A select group of entrepreneurs from the unConference also will be invited to join a …Next Page »

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In a convergence of two legendary Boston-area technology concerns, Waltham, MA-based defense contracting giant Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) said today it will acquire Cambridge, MA-based BBN Technologies in a deal expected to close by the end of this year. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. BBN pioneered the development of the Arpanet, the predecessor to today’s Internet, and continues to have strengths in networking, speech recognition and translation technologies, quantum cryptography and communications, and related fields. The privately held firm was acquired by Cambridge, MA-based venture firm General Catalyst and Palo Alto, CA-based Accel Partners from Verizon Communications in 2004. Raytheon said BBN will become part of its Network Centric Systems division. We’ll have more details on the acquisition in a follow-up story.

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[Updated 8/31/09 11:15 am. See below.] Startup Weekend brought together about 180 people from 15 teams to compete for 54 hours at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, and in the end, two official winners emerged last night. A mobile software application called Learn That Name, for the iPhone and Palm Pre, won the audience favorite vote, while contextual search startup Search Kick won $5,000 from Microsoft’s BizSpark startup program, plus a potential investment of $5,000 from H-Farm, an Italian-based design and investment firm that set up shop in Seattle last fall.

Search Kick is a browser plug-in that displays discounts from your trusted memberships while you search the Web. Say you have a AAA card, or are a member of AARP or the American Bar Association. As I understand it, you could install the Search Kick plug-in, and then when you search for things like restaurants, hotels, or any products, the software identifies any discounts you may get based on that membership. The startup, led by developers from Microsoft’s Bing search engine, would go beyond that, but that’s the initial concept.

Max Ciccotosto, founder of Seattle-based Wishpot, was there to represent H-Farm in its selection of Search Kick. “We liked the team, we liked the progress they made over the weekend and we liked the idea as well (it’s simple, useful and everyone gets it in one sentence),” he said in an e-mail this morning. “We also think we can help quite a bit in that space.” [This paragraph, and the final one below, added at 11:15 am.]

Learn That Name was led by Eric Koester, an attorney at Cooley Godward Kronish. He came up with his product idea on Friday night after forgetting the name of another attendee at Startup Weekend who was one of his LinkedIn contacts. His team’s mobile app quizzes you game-style on the names of people in your LinkedIn, using their photos and multiple-choice answers. As part of its demo, Learn That Name had two of the Startup Weekend organizers, Clint Nelsen and Cameron Preston, go head-to-head to see who could correctly identify the most attendees on an iPhone.

In the demo, Koester added that a future version could help people network more effectively. “In terms of growing this further, we think there’s going to be ways you can actually communicate with people,” he said. “So what we want to see in future releases is, if you miss someone, it will recommend, ‘Hey, you should talk to this person, and get to know this person better.’”

Afterwards, Koester said the team is planning to launch the app on the App Store and Palm Pre store in the next few weeks—that involves adding and testing some final features, submitting the app to the stores, incorporating the business, and getting the word out. He also told me that the Startup Weekend experience was particularly interesting to him as a startup lawyer. “I learned more about what my clients go through every day,” he said. “Building a successful business is an art—so seeing that unfold in a 54 hour period was really eye-opening for me. Lots of hard work and collaboration…fun to be a part of it.”

I also asked Ciccotosto for his advice to entrepreneurs at future Startup Weekends. “I’d say to focus more on the ‘proof of concept.’ Define the problem, give a rough idea of the market, and most importantly get some of the key scenarios to work,” he said. “Ideally the outcome should be ‘could I now bring this to a few prospective customers and validate the idea?’”

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In a tender offer registered today with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Waltham, MA-based network software maker Novell said it will buy back up to $121.6 million in convertible debt notes from the debt holders. The one-for-one offer, which commences June 15 and expires July 14, covers 0.50 percent convertible senior debentures due in 2024, the company said in an announcement.

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The Seattle music scene is one of those cliches that people around the country always ask me about, along with the coffee and the weather. But I don’t mind, not one bit. From Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana and Pearl Jam, from the Presidents of the USA to Death Cab for Cutie and Fleet Foxes, the Northwest has produced some of the highest-flying acts in the business. (OK, I also have to mention Sleater-Kinney, Pedro the Lion, and Sir Mix-a-Lot…despite those atrocious Burger King ads.)

Here at Xconomy, we are all about bringing the tech-business community together in new and exciting ways, in addition to our core mission of providing authoritative, hyperlocal coverage of the innovation scene. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned from our experiences in our network cities, it’s that really active innovation scenes go hand-in-hand with an abundance of creative talent and a strong arts culture. In particular, we’ve found an astounding amount of overlap between the music scene and techies/researchers working in innovative fields like software, gaming, and biotech.

So, on behalf of our whole staff, Luke and I are thrilled to announce that we are teaming up with the Washington Technology Industry Association to bring you the Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands. The contest will be featured at the WTIA Annual Summer Celebration on the evening of Thursday, July 30, 2009, outside the Pyramid Ale House in Seattle. The WTIA Summer Celebration is one of the foremost networking events of the year, and now it will be even more of a blast. Here is more info on entering the band contest, and event registration.

“We’re really happy to be partnering with the WTIA on this amazing event,” says Xconomy co-founder and CEO Bob Buderi. “We’ve held some great battles in Boston. We expect Seattle to bring it.”

Here’s how it works. The Xconomy Battle of the Tech Bands is open to all bands (amateur and pro alike) that have at least one member who works at a Northwest technology, life sciences, or tech-investment firm. Why enter? For starters, you’ll get to show off for your friends; meet fellow entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, developers, and engineers; and, oh yeah, possibly take home some serious loot—if you’ve got the chops. There will be two grand prize winners: the audience will pick its favorite band, and so will our esteemed panel of judges (more on prizes and judges to come).

In the past year and a half, Xconomy has put on its Battle of the Tech Bands twice in the Boston area, and they have been smash hits, the most recent drawing upwards of 450 people and raising a bunch of money for some great local charities. (My band played a guest set at the last Battle, so I can personally vouch for how much fun it was—yes, I lead a double life in music, as I suspect many around here do.) The winning bands have received free studio time and promotional services courtesy of local companies. We also gave away some fabulous door prizes, like Roomba vacuum cleaners from iRobot, Zune music players from Microsoft, and Rock Band video game bundles from Harmonix Music Systems.

So please join us for the inaugural Battle in Seattle. If you’d like to be considered for a slot in the Battle of the Tech Bands, send your band’s info (including MP3s, URLs, contact info, and the tech company or companies your band represents) to techbands@xconomy.com. Complete details for entering the contest are here—the deadline for band submissions is Friday, June 12.

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It is high season for tech gatherings in Seattle. The next couple of weeks will feature a dizzying array of events chock-full of compelling computing content, not to mention top-tier networking. How is a busy entrepreneur, researcher, or investor to choose which ones to attend? Let Xconomy be your guide…

—This Wednesday, April 22 (yes, tomorrow), the Washington Technology Industry Association is putting on a feast for all of you interested in the future of human-computer interfaces. Bill Bryant of Draper Fisher Jurvetson is moderating an all-star panel of interface experts: Cliff Kushler of Tegic and Swype (text-input software for mobile devices); James Landay from the University of Washington’s computer science and engineering department (activity sensing, user behaviors); Bert Keely of Microsoft (Windows Pen & Touch technologies); and Jeff Pobst of Hidden Path (gaming interfaces).

Bryant says, “The kind of topics we’ll be discussing are at the heart of what user-centered computing will look like in the coming years and decades.” He points out that when you think about everything from the Wii to Windows 7 to Web browsers (and throw in the iPhone and GPS devices for good measure), “the entire history of computing can be summarized as ‘advances in user interfaces.’” Now there’s food for thought.

—How far along is Windows Azure? Microsoft’s cloud computing service was announced last fall, and is seen as a competitor to Amazon Web Services, Google’s App Engine, and other offerings like VMware’s “virtual data center” operating system. But who is actually using it yet, how does it work, and what is Microsoft’s cloud strategy? On April 30, Microsoft is hosting an event organized by the WTIA where it will answer those questions, and more. Doug Hauger, Microsoft’s general manager of cloud infrastructure services, will give an overview of Azure and Microsoft’s view of cloud computing software and services.

A bonus speaker will be Ian Knox, director of product management at Skytap, a Seattle-based cloud computing and virtual lab startup. Knox will talk about using cloud computing for Windows applications and lowering IT lab costs, among other things. All in all, it’s essential stuff for anyone interested in shaping the future of the cloud.

—On May 1, the Technology Alliance is hosting its annual State of Technology luncheon. This year’s theme is “framing the future.” The guest of honor is Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s chief software architect, who will have a keynote conversation with the UW’s Ed Lazowska. (We’ll see if he puts Ozzie on the spot about Windows Azure or Microsoft Live Labs.) Throw in an address by Gov. Chris Gregoire, a benchmarking presentation by Technology Alliance board chair Jeremy Jaech (of Verdiem), and recognition of the Alliance of Angels’ 2009 company of the year, and you have the technology event of the season, not to be missed.

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Connie Bourassa-Shaw has been the director of the University of Washington’s Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CIE) in the Foster School of Business for just three years. But her ties to the UW go back to 1987, when she was a writer for the UW economic and business magazine, Pacific Northwest Executive. She has played various roles in the UW business scene since then, including director of communications at the business school and executive director of the Program for Innovation and Entrepreneurship—a program for business school students only that Bourassa-Shaw later developed into the CIE, which serves students from all disciplines.

After a brief stint away from the university as the executive director of the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, Bourassa-Shaw returned in 2006 to head the CIE. I called her up to find out more about her thoughts on UW’s take on business, how her center helps academics find their way in the commercial world, and what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Despite the dismal economy, which has impacted the CIE directly (she has had to put plans for new programs on hold due to budget constraints), Bourassa-Shaw remains optimistic that Seattle will continue to grow as a hub for startups.

The following is an edited version of our conversation.

Xconomy: What is the role of the CIE at UW?

Connie Bourassa-Shaw: We do all entrepreneurship, all the time. We are really trying to instill entrepreneurship into the fabric of the University of Washington, so that any student, any faculty member, any staff member who is interested in entrepreneurship can take classes, participate in activities, find the resources they need to do a startup, which include broad accessibility to the entrepreneurial community. We have very strong inroads into the community at large, both the venture capital and angel side, the equity side, and entrepreneur side. Serial entrepreneurs who understand the process from one end to the other can be a resource in terms of being a mentor or a coach.

We provide a special program for faculty, who are different from students doing our entrepreneurship curriculum. I work closely with TechTransfer, because that’s where any faculty or student has to go if they are working on something with commercial potential.

X: What are the student programs, and where do they fit into the Seattle innovation scene?

CB-S: We provide a curriculum for students. We have about 700 MBAs, and 88 percent of those take at least one class in entrepreneurship. I get asked the question a lot, how can you teach someone to be an entrepreneur? My sense is that you can’t turn anyone into an entrepreneur. But there is a type of person who is destined to be an entrepreneur. I usually say it’s a genetic defect. For those people …Next Page »

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And the hits keep coming. In a busy week for financing deals, Seattle-based ExtraHop Networks is announcing today it has raised a $5.1 million Series A round, led by Madrona Venture Group. Prominent angel investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz also participated in the funding round, which closed at the end of February.

ExtraHop, which jumped out of stealth mode in December, makes software to help corporate information-technology organizations monitor their applications environments and network transactions. The overall effect is to let both network operations teams and applications teams troubleshoot IT problems. That’s unusual, as most available tools are targeted to one group or the other. “It’s like Google Earth for networks. It’s a great tool for reactively exploring what might have caused specific problems,” says Jesse Rothstein, ExtraHop’s co-founder and CEO.

He means you can see IT problems from a high level, and zoom in and out to investigate possible causes. Rothstein is a hardcore techie, a veteran senior architect from Seattle’s F5 Networks, so he throws around terms like TCP alerts, packet sniffers, and seven-layer networking models as if they were items on a grocery list. Helen Tang, ExtraHop’s vice president of marketing, gives some real-world context when she points out that a networking problem might be that your chief financial officer can’t send an e-mail because too many computing resources are being directed to your company’s firewall at the same time. “The network is so mission-critical to any business these days,” she says.

If there’s a common theme to software companies we’re hearing a lot about these days, it’s the ability to help businesses manage their IT costs and do more with less. Some local examples of this broader trend would be Apptio (IT optimization), Skytap (virtual machines), and Symform (data storage). “One message that resonates in the current economic climate is to help understaffed teams work efficiently,” Rothstein says. “We help organizations make their existing IT systems and infrastructure work fast and reliably.”

Rothstein and fellow F5 veteran Raja Mukerji founded ExtraHop in January 2007. They landed seed funding from Madrona and other private investors in November 2007, and began selling …Next Page »

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Darkstrand, a Chicago firm that provides industry with access to an ultra high-speed fiber optic network, says it has reached a collaboration agreement with Calit2, the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, based at UCSD and UC Irvine. Under the collaboration agreement, Calit2 will become a provider of specialized expertise to Darkstrand’s business customers on the National Lambda Rail, which transmits data at rates of 10 gigabits per second or faster. The network is a 15,000-mile loop created in 2005 to connect academic research centers and national laboratories in 30 U.S. cities, including San Diego, Seattle, and Boston.

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At a luncheon that followed the La Jolla Research and Innovation Summit on Friday, I sat with Bob Dynes, the former President of the University of California system, who began talking about the formation of CalIT2 (Cal-IT-squared) almost a decade ago.

These days, the research center also known as the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology is playing an increasingly central role in multi-disciplinary advances that span academic departments, campuses, and even industries. The prevalence of CalIT2’s influence was evident throughout presentations made at the summit, which was organized for venture investors as a showcase of San Diego’s innovative capabilities. Sony Electronics, for example, used an algorithm developed at CalIT2’s machine perception lab as the basis for the “shutter smile” technology in the company’s latest generation of consumer digital cameras.

“Who would ever have guessed that CalIT2 would look the way it does today!” exclaimed Dynes, who spent 22 years at Bell Labs before arriving at UC San Diego as a physics professor in 1991. Dynes became UCSD’s chancellor in 1996, and told me he began working to create the institute—and to recruit founding director (and Xconomist) Larry Smarr—in 1999.

CalIT2 is one of four institutes for science and innovation that California Gov. Gray Davis officially launched in 2002 by signing legislation that provided $308 million in lease-revenue bonds. Since then, CalIT2 has come to embody Smarr’s ambitious vision for tackling daunting, large-scale problems.

“What we’ve succeeded in is this idea of institutional innovation,” Smarr said in an interview. By using the power of high-speed networks and high-performance computing, Smarr said CalIT2 can take on seemingly intractable problems in everything from molecular biology to atmospheric science by assembling multidisciplinary teams of the best minds, whether or not they are on UC campuses. He calls it a “persistent framework for collaboration.”

New buildings for CalIT2 were built at …Next Page »

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It’s shaping up to be a really special event. Xconomy is putting on a forum about cleantech innovation this Thursday evening at K&L Gates in downtown Seattle. Our distinguished panelists will put away their PowerPoint slides and get right down to debating the tough questions. What are the real opportunities in cleantech-meets-software? How should the Northwest build critical mass in this critical industry? How do we get technologies out of world-class research labs and into the hands of business people who can make them into useful products? Which opportunities are all hype, and which ones are real?

Following the panel will be an extensive networking reception, kicked off by two-minute company presentations from Prometheus Energy (Kirt Montague), EnerG2 (Chris Wheaton), and Vu1 (David Grieger). The reception will bring together venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, researchers, startups, law firms, and big companies from across the spectrum of information technology, energy, and biotech. We’re hoping to stimulate deep discussions that will lead to real, innovative partnerships. But first, a bit more about our main speakers—and what they’ve been telling us lately.

Our panel moderator, Michael Butler, is the co-founder and CEO of Seattle-based Cascadia Capital and an expert on the emerging cleantech and sustainability markets. Earlier this month, Butler commented on the progress of the cleantech industry in Washington state. “We’re well behind…not only California and Massachusetts, but we’re well behind Colorado and Texas, and I fear we’re behind states like Michigan and Pennsylvania.” He pointed to a couple reasons for this. One, the “sectors that have taken off are driven by technologies deep in the stack that we’re not very good at.” (Solar is an example.) Two, he said, “We don’t feel the pain. We have clean, affordable energy” in the form of hydro—and other states don’t.

That sets the stage for a dynamic panel with expertise that cuts across software, entrepreneurship, technology transfer, and energy. Here are snippets of what each of our panelists has said in recent months on the pages of Xconomy:

—Mark Aggar, director of environmental technology strategy at Microsoft, on the role of big software companies in the cleantech revolution: “We have a strong role to play in ensuring our products are both energy efficient and have minimal impact on the environment…We have very broad reach into all elements of people’s lives—homes, businesses. We have the platforms and the technologies to help accelerate systems to help us live a more sustainable life. Plus it’s the right thing to do. And there are a lot of people at Microsoft who feel that way.”

—Jesse Berst, managing director of Global Smart Energy in Redmond, WA, on the prospects of building critical mass in cleantech in the Northwest: “I’m not sanguine about Seattle as a big leader in the area. I don’t know if we’ll have a cluster here.” But there are concrete steps we can take. “Real, permanent job growth comes from small-to-mid-size companies that grow up,” he says. Large organizations like Boeing and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory are “a warehouse of breakthrough concepts,” but they often struggle with commercializing technologies. Lastly, he says, there’s a talent shortage. “We have to import power engineers.”

—Jeremy Jaech, CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem (and co-founder of Aldus and Visio), on business opportunities in cleantech-meets-software, particularly in energy efficiency and IT management: “Big companies—that’s where the energy savings are…Companies are starting to create C-level positions, like chief sustainability officer, that are responsible for the carbon footprint of the company…They want to be a step ahead of the government, and a lot of it starts with measurement.” He adds, “Companies are starting to get really interested.”

—Linden Rhoads, vice provost for UW TechTransfer, on how to better commercialize energy technologies from research labs: “We’re combing the nation for the venture capitalists who are truly aware of a specific research area. And people from industry, like someone from Intel…We might talk to someone like Alex Jen, our chairman of materials science, who has this incredible idea around thin-film solar, on organic material rather than silicon…So let’s find out from industry what aspects are the most important things to them…We want to recruit the most relevant people from inside these companies…to get involved with our researchers many years before there is any intellectual property coming out. We’re hoping to get our really prolific faculty involved early with industry, and we hope to stack the pipeline of innovation.”

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The energy and environmental sectors, like all too many other parts of the business world, have a dearth of women in leadership positions. But a new networking group dedicated to changing that situation is launching officially tomorrow in Boston. Called New England Women in Energy & the Environment (NEWIEE), the group’s goals are to foster networking and collaboration between women interested in energy and environmental issues, provide educational opportunities, highlight women’s achievements in the sectors, and recruit more young women into energy and environmental enterprises.

The group’s founder and executive director, Judy Chang, says she created NEWIEE late last year because “I realized that women were thinly spread throughout the energy and environmental sectors and wanted to bring them together in the form of an open, aware and dynamic organization,” according to a statement the group circulated this week. Chang is a principal at the Brattle Group, a Cambridge, MA, firm that specializes in consulting and expert testimony on economics, finance, and regulatory issues.

The group plans to organize educational panel discussions in areas such as new cleantech and green-energy technologies. One event held in January focused on financing energy and brownfield projects amidst the economic downturn; speakers included Charlotte Kim, a partner at Choate, Hall and Stewart in Boston, and Beth Barton, a partner at Day Pitney in Hartford, CT.

NEWIEE will celebrate its launch on Thursday with an afternoon reception at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. The reception is being sponsored by the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association, which is running a conference at the World Trade Center this week called Building Energy 2009.

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First of all, the terms “downturn” and “recession” don’t do justice to the current climate, says early-stage tech investor Andy Sack. As he puts it, “This is the seminal event of our lifetimes. This is our World War II. I guarantee I’ll be talking to my grandchildren about the Depression of 2009-10: ‘Make sure you save.’”

Sack was speaking at the MIT Enterprise Forum Venture Lab event in downtown Seattle last night. He was joined by Michelle Jacobson Goldberg, a partner at Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners who is on the board of Mpire (maker of Widgetbucks), Visible Technologies, and SEOmoz. The room was packed with scores of entrepreneurs looking for financing advice. “It’s ugly out there, and raising money has never been f-ing harder,” Sack told them.

What’s interesting is that both Ignition and Founder’s Co-op, Sack’s seed-stage fund with Chris DeVore, have made investments in the past 90 days. Founder’s Co-op has made bets on Frugal Mechanic; LookStat, an analytics and workflow-automation startup focused on the microstock photography industry (this was news to me); and a new smartphone company that hasn’t been announced yet. Meanwhile, Ignition announced earlier this week that it has led a $10 million investment in Silicon Valley-based Zenprise, a mobile-management software firm.

Goldberg and Sack spoke for about an hour on their perspective as investors, what startups need to know to get funded these days, and what the hot (and not so hot) areas of investment are. Here’s my top 10 list of takeaways:

10. Valuations are way down. “Anything that’s early, if you used to raise $3 million, you might raise $1 million now,” Sack says. And count on a similar calculation for the valuation, he adds.

9. Investors are seeing more pitches than ever. “There’s been an incredible amount of deal flow,” Goldberg says. To which Sack adds, “Deals are getting done, but more slowly and with a higher bar…Deals getting done really have to resonate with a customer base.”

8. Your next financing is your last. “Everyone wants to see your break-even plan,” says Sack. “Financing risk is higher than technology risk.” And Goldberg adds, “Take the money …Next Page »

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Bellevue, WA-based Intellectual Ventures said today it has formed an alliance with Telcordia Technologies, a networking and telecommunications firm in Piscataway, NJ. Intellectual Ventures has acquired the rights to license about 500 of Telcordia’s patents, and in return, has also agreed to fund inventions from Telcordia’s R&D lab. Financial terms of the deal were not given.

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If you’re a glass-half-empty person, you might say the mesh networking technology pioneered by Boston’s Ember Corporation is a solution in search of a problem. If you’re a glass-half-full person, you’d probably call the company’s eight-year history a case study in flexible thinking. Regardless, after years of market struggles, Ember seems to have found a niche where its technology for self-organizing digital radio networks will shine: smart-energy systems designed to give utilities and consumers more control over how they use energy.

Andy Wheeler and Robert Poor, who built experimental wireless sensor networks for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency while they were students at MIT, founded Ember in 2001 with $3 million in seed funding from Polaris Venture Partners, DFJ New England, Stata Venture Partners, and Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe. (In subsequent funding rounds over the years, the company has raised an additional $78 million.) The idea was to find applications for the concept of ad-hoc mesh networking, in which pairs of transceivers in a network set up two-way communications as conditions allow, and messages hop from node to node until they reach their destination (roughly the same way they do inside the Internet).

In its early years, Ember made mesh-networking software for other companies’ microchips, usually equipment designed to be embedded in temperature sensors for petroleum refinery pipes and other similar devices. But over time, the company has evolved into a chipmaker in its own right—just one that happens to have a special expertise in the software running on its chips. And it has gone open-source, investing heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for low-power, low-bandwidth mesh networking.

Wheeler and Poor have both moved on to other companies. Meanwhile, Ember has moved on to new application areas—with the biggest near-term payoffs likely to emerge from a utility industry initiative called the Advanced Metering Infrastructure. In pilot AMI projects in states like California and Texas, computerized “smart meters,” or energy gateways, are being attached to utility customers’ homes. The devices communicate wirelessly both with utility control centers and with in-home thermostats, displays, and smart appliances, allowing utilities to dial back electrical usage during hours of peak demand and giving customers more information about their energy consumption patterns. The home side of these communications depends on technology from Ember, which is the leading supplier of communications chips for AMI devices.

“The core technology is not that different from what Andy and Rob had in mind,” Ember’s president and CEO, Robert LeFort, says. “But it’s being used in applications they never had in mind when they were developing it.”

LeFort joined Ember in 2006 from semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies, where he had spent four years as president of the company’s North American operations. I interviewed him about Ember’s development and its business opportunities last week at the company’s headquarters in the Fort Point district of South Boston. An abridged version of our talk follows.

Xconomy: How did Ember evolve from a software company into a chip company?

Robert LeFort: It’s just very hard to make a business case for embedded software. You typically earn a royalty on a per-instance basis, and you don’t usually cover even the cost of developing the software. So you need to be doing more than just software. The end devices and modules [using Ember's software] were interesting to us, and chips seemed to be a better fit. So in 2003 we introduced our first chip, the 2420, which we still sell today. And in 2004 Ember acquired RF [radio frequency] technology and the chip team that developed it from Cambridge, UK-based Cambridge Consultants. [The company's main products today are newer microprocessor models called the EM250 and EM260, both announced in 2006.] We monetize our software through the chips. I think it’s fair to say that there’s nobody who uses our software who doesn’t also buy our chips. And if you look at our competitors from the 2000 era, the ones who went up the chain and sold just software have not fared so well.

X: Talk a little about the company’s recent turn toward smart energy applications.

RL: There were a variety of things that converged, and some other things that fell off the table. When I first came, we were very excited about commercial buildings and lighting. Wireless mesh networking is perfect for that application, but we learned that it is a very fragmented market that moves very slowly. It’s still a good market for us, but it’s incremental. The home automation market is also good, but somewhat limited until they get the costs down and the maturity up.

Meanwhile, I think smart energy will work really well. It’s something we saw from being so tightly involved with the ZigBee Alliance, just from being down in the trenches and talking to guys about what they were doing. I would say smart energy only made up about 10 percent of our revenue in 2008, but we expect it to be 40 or 50 percent in 2009.

X: You mentioned the ZigBee Alliance. As I remember it, when ZigBee started out years ago it was mainly pitched as low-bandwidth alternative to the Bluetooth standard for home entertainment and automation applications. The one that sticks out in my mind was a remote control for opening and closing your blinds, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at the time. But Ember became instrumental in adapting the standard for more advanced applications, like monitoring devices for their energy usage. How did Ember help to advance that standard, specifically?

RL: We were big proponents of the ZigBee Pro networking standard, and fundamental to that is true ad-hoc routing. We believe that RF links are inherently unreliable. Unlike a Bluetooth device or a cell phone, a temperature sensor that loses its signal can’t move six inches to the right to get a better signal. You need a network that can handle that efficiently. We wanted to build a network where you wouldn’t be constrained by …Next Page »

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Cambridge, MA-based Mazu Networks, which makes software for optimizing the performance of enterprise applications over networks, will become a unit of San Francisco-based Riverbed Technology (NASDAQ: RVBD), according to an announcement yesterday. Riverbed, which focuses on wide-area-network optimization, will pay $25 million up front for Mazu plus up to $22 million in performance-based payments over the first 12 months after the acquisition closes. Mazu, founded in 2000, had raised $47 milllion in venture funding from Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Matrix Partners, Pilot House Ventures, StarVest Partners, Symantec, and other investors, according to Private Equity Hub.

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