Wade Roush wrote:

One of the great things about doing your computing in the cloud is that you don’t have to worry about which machines your jobs are running on, or whether they have the right software on them, or even what city they’re in. Indeed, that’s the whole point. But one of the less ideal things about doing your computing in the cloud is that the network everyone uses to reach various public clouds—the Internet itself—is so unpredictable.

Cloud providers—who essentially rent out processing and storage resources so that companies can outsource IT infrastructure—can guarantee a certain level of service within their clouds. But there’s almost nothing they can do about traffic delays on the Internet, a problem that falls right back into the laps of users who were trying to increase efficiency in the first place.

Now, companies that rely on big cloud providers like Google, Amazon Web Services, or GoGrid will have a better way to see how the network connections linking them to each provider’s data centers are performing—and make judgments over time about which clouds are easiest to reach. That’s thanks to Apparent Networks, a Wellesley Hills, MA-based network performance software startup that’s introducing a service today called the Cloud Performance Center. It’s a free online tool that visually quantifies network performance for up to five “paths” between a user’s location and any specified cloud provider. (After the first five paths, Apparent charges $5 per path per month for the information.)

Information about network performance is useful because large delays or “latency” can disrupt business and weaken the argument for outsourcing computing jobs to off-premises resources. “Providers like Amazon or Google are building these beautiful data centers with top-notch people that have got these great services that are highly available, and that’s all good, but when I have to connect, I have to do it over the same old Internet,” says Jim Melvin, Apparent Networks’ president and chief marketing officer. “What we’ve done is provision the Internet, in North America to start with, with performance monitors in about a dozen key points like Boston, Miami, San Francisco, Vancouver, and Detroit. Our service will allow customers to see the performance for any of the top-tier cloud providers in those locations, trending back in time.”

So if you have an office in Boston, you can use the Cloud Performance Center to see which cloud provider has a history of the fastest network connections to the Hub. Melvin emphasizes that Apparent is “not trying to poke anyone in the eye” over the latency issue, but rather to raise awareness. Network connection slowdowns are most often a result of logjams within the network itself, he says.

“The vision and the ideal of cloud computing is that you don’t have to worry about where the compute cycles are being generated, but we’ve seen countless times that the reality of the Internet today is that you cannot count on connectivity,” he says. “You do need to care what level of performance you’re getting across the Internet.”

The fact that cloud computing providers can’t or won’t take responsibility for network performance issues once information leaves the data center “is one of the big stumbling blocks for the growth of cloud computing in general,” Melvin says. His company’s so-called “path-based” performance monitoring is one way businesses can get around that problem, he argues—indeed, he says some Apparent clients are already using the service to monitors tens of thousands of paths.

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[Corrected 11/11/09, 3:15 pm. See below] Qualcomm chief operating officer, Len Lauer, says the San Diego wireless chipmaking giant is working across a broad front of technology development to accommodate a surge in wireless data traffic.

“The mobile Internet has arrived,” Lauer says in the opening keynote talk yesterday at the 2009 3G CDMA Americas Regional Conference. With more than 4 billion wireless subscribers around the world now—including 885 million 3G phone users—Lauer says the growth in wireless data is reflected by a roughly one-third increase in revenue reported over the past year by Verizon, AT&T, and other major carriers.

[Corrects to say Lauer was comparing monthly data traffic in 2014, not monthly growth in data traffic] By 2014, or just five years, Lauer says  worldwide mobile data traffic in one month will exceed total mobile data traffic for all of 2008.

Qualcomm founder and former chairman and CEO Irwin Jacobs and his son Paul Jacobs, who is Qualcomm’s current chairman and CEO, sounded a similar theme when they warned of capacity constraints last month during a keynote appearance at the CTIA Fall 2009 conference in San Diego.

In addition to the increasing demand for mobile data from smart phones and netbooks, Lauer says the trend can only accelerate as new wireless device categories proliferate, especially in what he calls machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Examples of M2M technology developers include CardioNet, a Pennsylvania wireless health company that uses wireless sensors to continuously monitor heart patients for irregular heartbeats; wireless smart grid technologies being deployed by electric utilities (including San Diego Gas & Electric), and eBook devices like Amazon’s Kindle.

“Other operators are seeing this as a viable market, but it is going to take awhile to develop,” Lauer says, citing estimates that 229 million M2M cellular connections are forecast for 2013. “We do see from Qualcomm’s standpoint this being a very large opportunity for our chips.”

To cope with the surge in wireless data traffic, Lauer outlined a range of technology advances that Qualcomm has underway:

—The latest generation of advanced wireless receivers, which include updated revisions to the EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized) telecommunications standard (part of Qualcomm’s CDMA2000 family), operate …Next Page »

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Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) is about to receive an investment of at least $1.5 billion led by Sprint Nextel, according to the Wall Street Journal. Sprint will invest $1 billion, and its partners, including Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks, will chip in an additional $500 million, for continuing support of Clearwire’s WiMax broadband network. Google, which has invested previously in Clearwire, is not participating in the current financing round. The official announcement could come as early as this week, the WSJ reports.

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The deals rained down on the Northwest this past week. We saw some strong activity in biotech, gaming, and software.

—Integrated Diagnostics, the new biotech company founded by Lee Hood, has secured $30 million in venture funding from Menlo Park, CA-based InterWest Partners, the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust, and Germany-based dievini Hopp Biotech holding, as Luke reported. The startup aims to detect cancer and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s in their earliest (and most treatable) stages.

—Washington state’s venture funding numbers for the third quarter of 2009 fell to $144 million, down from $275 million in the previous quarter, as Bruce reported. And one deal in September, the $50 million investment in Calypso Medical, a Seattle-based developer of technology that pinpoints radiation therapy for cancer to minimize side effects, dominated the state’s third-quarter figures.

—Decho, the Seattle-based subsidiary of EMC (NYSE: EMC), formed a partnership with British mobile network operator Vodafone to develop new data backup services for European markets. Financial terms weren’t given. The products will be built using Mozy, the online backup service operated by Decho.

—Redmond, WA-based Bionavitas formed a partnership with Seattle-based Blue Marble Energy to make biochemicals from algae, as Luke reported. Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced, and the companies didn’t say exactly what they plan to make under this alliance.

—Seattle-based Evri formed a partnership with media giant Hearst to power its new website and news aggregator, LMK (which stands for Let Me Know). Evri, a Paul Allen-backed startup that uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to find connections between entities on the Web, is providing the content-filtering software for LMK.

—Omeros, the Seattle biotech company developing a treatment to improve recovery from knee surgery, completed its initial public offering last week, raising $68.2 million, as Luke reported. The state’s first IPO in more than two years was underwritten by Deutsche Bank and Wedbush PacGrow Life Sciences. Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER) opened trading at $10 a share and closed its first day at $8.73, giving it a market valuation of about $186 million.

—Seattle-based Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) participated in a $19 million Series C investment in Engine Yard, a cloud computing and software automation company based in San Francisco. Amazon was a previous investor in Engine Yard, along with Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The latest deal also included new investors DAG Ventures, Bay Partners, and Presidio Ventures.

—Seattle-based PopCap Games raised $22.5 million in its first outside funding round since its founding in 2000. The investment was led by Meritech Capital Partners, based in Palo Alto, CA, and also included participation from investors Larry Bowman and John McCaw. The money will be used to help accelerate PopCap’s global expansion and distribution of its games.

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Amazon Web Services announced it has launched Amazon Virtual Private Cloud, a Web service that helps big companies extend their IT infrastructure into the Internet cloud while addressing isolation and security concerns. Companies can use existing firewalls and security to create an isolated network, and then access the Amazon cloud within that network.

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Verizon Wireless announced today it has successfully tested its fourth-generation wireless network in Boston and Seattle, by making “data calls” involving streaming video, Web browsing, and file uploads and downloads from mobile devices. Verizon’s technology, called Long Term Evolution, is supposed to be much faster than existing 3G wireless networks, and competes with Clearwire’s WiMax system, which has already launched in four cities (including Portland, OR). Boston and Seattle will be the first cities to deploy Verizon’s 4G service.

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Now I know why venture capitalists walk the halls at the University of Washington—you never know who you might run into. My timing was impeccable yesterday as I sat down with Kai Li, the co-founder and chief scientist of Data Domain (NASDAQ: DDUP), the Santa Clara, CA-based data storage company that just got bought by EMC (NYSE: EMC) for $2.1 billion in cash.

Li, who is a computer science professor at Princeton University (he has been visiting the UW for the past year and has some strong Seattle connections), made time for me despite his busy schedule. The deal with EMC has been in the works since June 1, when the Hopkinton, MA-based data storage and management giant launched its bid to acquire Data Domain despite a pending acquisition attempt by rival NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) initiated in May. Many twists and turns ensued, culminating in yesterday’s announcement by NetApp that it had taken itself out of the running, clearing the way for EMC’s takeover, at a bid of $33.50 per share.

Data Domain’s story is a compelling one. Li co-founded the company in 2001, together with Brian Biles (currently vice president of product management) and Ben Zhu (former chief research officer), with the idea of developing advanced “deduplication” software to get rid of redundant data before it gets stored, thereby saving companies storage space, time, and money. Li served as chief technology officer and CEO in the early days of the company, but since 2002 has been a consulting chief scientist and director. Over the next few years, Data Domain gained traction in the data backup and disaster recovery market and went public in June 2007, raising more than $110 million in an IPO.

In a wide-ranging interview, Li (left) talked about Data Domain’s technical approach, its market strategy, a little bit about the EMC deal, and the broader future of data storage. Here is an edited account:

Xconomy: So how does the EMC acquisition affect you?

Kai Li: I don’t know yet. EMC has been the leader in storage systems in general. They’re bigger than other players in the storage market, comparing with NetApp, IBM, HP, Dell, and Sun (now part of Oracle). EMC is the premier storage vendor for data centers. We haven’t been communicating with EMC because of the definitive agreement with NetApp, so I haven’t talked to EMC yet.

X: How does the deal affect Data Domain’s operations?

KL: EMC has written a letter to Data Domain employees. They said they’ll keep Data Domain …Next Page »

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It was a pretty busy week for deals in the Northwest, with activity in consumer Internet, security software, gaming, and biotech.

—The most talked-about deal in the Seattle startup community was Urbanspoon’s acquisition by New York-based IAC (NASDAQ: IACI), which owns dozens of popular websites like Citysearch and Evite. Financial terms were not disclosed. Urbanspoon, an online restaurant guide and iPhone application, will remain autonomous, said co-founder Ethan Lowry. New-media expert Warren Gouk of Cascadia Capital added some analysis about what the deal means for consumer Internet startups.

—Luke reported that Seattle-based ZymoGenetics (NASDAQ: ZGEN) licensed the rights to eight of its drug candidates to a new startup called Seattle Life Sciences, in exchange for an equity stake in the company. It’s all part of ZymoGenetics’ strategy to cut R&D costs on programs outside its core business, while it looks to push sales of its drug for surgical bleeding and development of its treatment for hepatitis C.

—Bellevue, WA-based Intelius acquired Spock, a people search engine in Redwood City, CA. Financial terms of the deal were not given. Intelius provides identity theft protection and background checks, among other services.

—Seattle-based Wetpaint, a social publishing startup, formed a partnership with MSN Entertainment to create fan sites that will start rolling out this quarter. Financial terms of the partnership were not announced. MSN will use Wetpaint’s software to power social websites where fans can create content and connect with each other.

—Seattle’s Big Fish Games gobbled up Grubby Games, a development studio in Vancouver, BC. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Grubby Games makes titles like Incredibots, Professor Fizzwizzle, and My Tribe. Big Fish says it plans to release a new brand based on Grubby’s technology next quarter.

—Ryan reported that Likewise Software, based in Bellevue, WA, raised $10 million in Series C funding from existing investors Ignition Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Intel Capital. Likewise makes software that helps companies track and secure access to computer networks.

—Seattle-based Geospiza, a bio-software startup, inked a partnership with Carlsbad, CA-based Life Technologies (NASDAQ: LIFE) to help genomic researchers store data and access it in the Internet cloud, as Luke reported. Financial terms were not disclosed. It’s the first time a major gene sequencing company has taken the leap into cloud computing.

—Seattle startup Vigilos closed $1.4 million from Northwest Venture Associates, and is in the process of raising $300,000 more. Vigilos makes security software that helps organizations like the FBI, U.S. Navy, and Washington State Department of Transportation monitor sites remotely.

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Verizon’s schedule for deploying speedy fourth generation mobile phones may be subject to delay. Citing a Deutsche Bank research report issued this morning, GigaOM suggests Verizon won’t make its plan to have LTE (Long-Term Evolution) handsets available by the end of 2010.

The holdup is due to the LTE chip production schedule at San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM). Verizon has said it will have LTE in 20-35 markets by the end of 2010. However, Qualcomm’s LTE chips for data cards won’t be generally available until the second half of 2010, according to Deutsche Bank.

The process of building new chips into phones usually takes up to 18 months after the first chips are out. So LTE chips for handsets might not be available until well into 2011.

Qualcomm marketing director Michael Mamaghani said in San Francisco last week he expects the commercialization of LTE devices to happen in 2012 or later.

LTE represents an upgrade in 3G UMTS technology to 4G mobile technology. Verizon, AT&T, Motorola, and Samsung have generally shown more interest in LTE, while Sprint and Intel are advancing with rival WiMax (’Worldwide Inter-operability for Microwave Access’) technology. Intel has developed its own WiMax chipset.

Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia, the world’s largest mobile phone producer, last week harshly compared WiMax to Betamax, the early video format that was superseded by VHS in the 1980s.

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Sun Microsystems (NASDAQ: JAVA) has laid off 24 workers in Bellevue, WA, effective May 30, 2009, according to a notice from the Washington State Employment Security Department. Meanwhile, Exide Technologies (NASDAQ: XIDE), a maker of batteries and other energy-storage devices, has closed its facility in Sumner, WA, and has laid off 43 workers, effective immediately.

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Think the super-rich don’t have problems? Try fending off friends and relatives who always want to borrow money, or raising spoiled brats who don’t take responsibility for their actions. Not to mention the more obvious financial questions of how to manage such hefty portfolios—especially in economic times like these. (Granted, some of this might be viewed as insensitive at a time when local food banks are running out of food.)

Enter Tiger 21, an exclusive network for the very wealthy that is opening in Seattle this month. Its goal is to provide a support group for people of high net worth to talk about their investments, portfolios, and problems. Local entrepreneur and investor Andy Sack of Founder’s Co-op will be chairing the Seattle chapter of the national group. Last month, I sat down with Sack and Lewis Haskell, the managing director who runs Tiger 21 west of the Mississippi. I’m a little under-qualified to speak on the problems of the wealthy, but Sack and Haskell filled me in nicely.

First, some background. Tiger 21 was founded in New York in 1999 by Michael Sonnenfeldt. Sonnenfeldt had recently sold his interest in Emmes & Company, a real estate holdings company, for tens of millions, and was looking to build a safe haven for people in similar circumstances to meet and talk. The confidential network has grown into a big business. Besides New York, Tiger 21 has existing chapters in some of the country’s wealthiest places—San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Dallas, and Miami. It has about 170 members who have an average net worth between $30 million and $50 million.

And that’s the catch: to join Tiger 21, you have to have at least $10 million, exclusive of houses, cars, and other properties (how they verify this, I’m not sure). And it costs $30,000 a year to be a member. All members sign confidentiality agreements.

Sack’s connection with the group is through its founder. Back at MIT around 15 years ago, Sonnenfeldt was Sack’s mentor at the Sloan School of Management, and the two have invested together. Seattle brings some unique challenges to the very wealthy, Sack says. They might be overexposed because the community is relatively small. “The network of support is not as high, or as sophisticated, in Seattle,” he adds.

With the likes of Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Nathan Myhrvold, Steve Ballmer, Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, Craig McCaw, and Jim Jannard (founder of Oakley eyewear) in the area, you’d think Washington state would have such a support network in place already. But what Tiger 21 provides that other wealthy social networks don’t is a focus on members sharing how they manage their financial lives, says Haskell.

As for its future Seattle members, Sack and Haskell have been recruiting for about 10 openings. I’m guessing they’re not taking unsolicited applications. Sack says members have to have an interest in learning, and be willing to be open with their peers. And, he added, “There’s a ‘no asshole’ rule.”

Stay tuned for what goes on behind Tiger 21’s closed doors in Part 2—Eds.

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Seattle-based ExtraHop Networks announced it has released its software product to help companies manage their network operations and applications support. The startup says its software helps info-tech organizations monitor their software applications environments by examining tens of thousands of network transactions at any given time. ExtraHop was founded in early 2007 by veterans of Seattle’s F5 Networks, and is backed by Madrona Venture Group and other private investors.

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Want wireless power? Better network privacy? Automated elder care? You’ve come to the right place.

That place is the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, which I had the opportunity to attend yesterday afternoon. I had gotten a sneak preview the day before from lab director David Wetherall, and just before hitting the demos, I also sat down with Intel’s vice president and director of research, Andrew Chien, for an overview. For the open house, Wetherall noted that Abel Weinrib, Intel’s vice president and director of the corporate technology group, was in attendance, along with representatives from Intel’s business units, and many Seattle-area researchers and industry types.

Then it was time for the fun stuff. Wandering around the sixth floor of Intel’s building near the University of Washington campus, I got a technology-packed tour from the lab’s associate director and principal engineer, Anthony LaMarca. I’ll give just a few of the highlights here. (All photos courtesy of Cheryl Miller at Intel.)

—First, I took in the latest progress in home-monitoring systems for elder care. These include sensors like radio-frequency identification tags on kitchen utensils, which then communicate with a computer to infer when a person is eating, drinking, taking proper medications, and so forth. I covered this area several years ago, and wondered just how far the tech implementation has come. “It’s gone from a vision to something much closer to reality,” said Wetherall. “We’re doing real trials, and sorting out the business value proposition too. We find many parties stand to gain if you do it the right way…Families like it, organizations like it, insurance companies like it. It helps with auditing, as well as providing appropriate care.”

The lab is working with the Veterans Administration on home tests. Home monitoring is related to a broader theme within Intel Research—what it calls “richly communicative” everyday sensing and perception. “Our insight was it was practically impossible to get the deployment right,” says Chien. “And to translate it to a business model was not going to fly.” Chien says the researchers set a “90-90″ goal: it should work for 90 percent of activities, for 90 percent of your day. “It’s a coverage goal, and it is really central to achieving large-scale commercialization of the technology,” Chien adds. “This is a second generation of sensing and perception…It’s one of our largest efforts.”

—James Landay, a professor of computer science and engineering at the UW and the previous director of Intel Research Seattle, showed me another example: a monitoring device to help you keep track of your exercise and activity levels, and even what kind of transportation you’re using on a daily basis (walking, biking, driving). An accelerometer and other sensors in the device connect to a processor, which uses your cell phone as a display. Landay says his team is in the process of porting the technology over to the iPhone (which has an onboard accelerometer), and possibly to phones that will run Google’s Android system, because the latter might be a more open platform.

—Intel research scientist Ben Greenstein showed me the “trustworthy wireless” project, which is about improving privacy for users of wireless devices. On a monitor was a map of Seattle showing all the locations his laptop had been broadcasting signals that anyone could use to figure out his identity and where he lives (with software available on the Internet). Another monitor showed exactly what information is sent out when his laptop tries to find a wireless network, or when he opens an e-mail while connected to a network. Greenstein pointed out one nefarious use I hadn’t thought of: a corporate spy might be able to figure out connections between companies and anticipate certain deals just by hanging out in their vicinity. “They might work out if something’s going down,” he says. To defend against this, Greenstein’s software goes in and limits the information being sent out by a device, by working at different levels of the wireless device and network.

—Who knew that Intel works this much on robots? Principal engineer Josh Smith, who did his Ph.D. at MIT with Neil Gershenfeld, showed me a few “personal robotics” projects, including a robotic arm and hand with springy actuators to make it softer, safer, and more adaptive to manipulating objects in its environment (see top photo). Electric-field sensors and a video camera allow it to recognize objects and tell when it is gripping a cup or an apple, say. “Manipulation is the big, hard problem for robotics now,” Smith says. If home helper robots ever take off, I’m thinking Intel wants to be the one to supply their brains.

—Lastly, the most visually striking (and technically speculative) demo was one on “wireless power.” This is the idea that you could potentially charge your phone or laptop without plugging it into a wall socket. Wouldn’t that be something? I didn’t believe it when I first heard about the research at MIT last summer, which was published in the journal Science. (Doing power transfer via electromagnetic radiation has efficiency and safety issues.) But the new idea, which is based on magnetic fields, has held up so far. Alanson Sample, a graduate student in electrical engineering at the UW, showed a demo of a light bulb being turned on by 60 watts of power transferred from one magnetic coil to another, about two feet away (see photo, left). It works by setting up a resonance between the powering coil and the remote coil connected to the light bulb, which gives you an energy efficiency of about 75 percent. Alanson said he’s working on setting up magnetic loops to fit on a laptop. A visitor from laptop-maker Lenovo seemed very interested.

All in all, Intel seems convinced it is getting its money’s worth from its UW research collaborators. “We are the eyes and ears in the community,” says Intel’s LaMarca, who adds that if there’s an interesting idea in the innovation community, the lab makes sure Intel hears about it. On the UW side, the partnership seems to be going well, too. “We’re very excited about the lab being here, and having our faculty members run it,” says Hank Levy, chairman of the department of computer science and engineering at UW. “The lab changes focus every couple of years, but it also keeps some continuity.”

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Carriers Upgrading Long-Distance Networks

Telecommunications carriers are upgrading their networks by replacing equipment designed to carry 10 gigabits of data per second with 40 gigabit equipment. GigaOm reports that 23 companies have purchased 40-Gb equipment since Nortel started selling it in April. The need to upgrade the core is being driven by the increase in high-bandwidth fiber closer to homes and more demand for high-bandwidth services such as high-definition video.

Floating Farms Could Replenish Fish Supplies

Conventional fishing is predicted to wipe out commercial stocks of fish by 2050, leading researchers to consider fish farms to replenish the stock. As New Scientist reports, researchers worry that placing a giant fish cage in one spot would cause a build-up of fish feces, and leave the cages vulnerable to strong storms. So an MIT scientist is developing self-propelled mobile fish farms that wouldn’t stay in one place long enough to cause environmental damage and could drift with storm waves.

Measles Vaccine Does Not Cause Autism, Study Finds

Public health officials are hoping that a new study will encourage parents to get their children vaccinated against measles, which has seen a resurgence this year. The Columbia University study found that there is no link between the measles vaccine and autism; a fear of such a link has led parents to refuse to vaccinate their children, says Scientific American. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 131 cases of measles in the first seven months of 2008, more than double the annual number of cases in 2001 through 2007.

Candidates Have Big Differences on Energy

Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes subsidies, earmarks, and heavy regulation regarding energy, while Democrat Barack Obama wants a stronger federal role in developing renewable energy, according to a report from the research firm New Energy Finance. CNET News reports that the firm dug through voting records and public statements to determine each candidate’s positions on energy policy. It found, for instance, that McCain wants to scale back the government’s role in promoting ethanol, while Obama would continue it.

Which Cars Will be Hot in the Next Four Years?

Depending on whether John McCain or Barack Obama is the next president, different cars could turn out to be more popular, says TheCarConnection.com, which takes a tongue-in-cheek look at the candidates car preferences. If Obama is president, the site predicts, a Honda Accord biodiesel or a subcompact like the Ford Fiesta would be in line with his energy policies. If it’s McCain, think about buying a Toyota Prius hybrid, a Honda Civic GX that burns natural gas, or Chevrolet’s plug-in hybrid, the Volt.

New Grants Hope to Stimulate Bio Research

The National Institutes of Health plan to dole out $42.2 million in “Eureka” grants to fund “exceptionally innovative research.” The Chronicle of Higher Education says the grants are a response to critics who say the NIH tends to fund only safe research with predictable results.

Small Turbines May Not Pay Back Their Costs

Plenty of people, from Jay Leno to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, are interested in generating local electricity with small wind turbines perched on rooftops. At about $5000 per turbine, the machines may produce so little energy that they’ll never recoup the cost, reports the New York Times. At the same time, big turbines are getting larger and more powerful, and may soon compete with natural gas for cost efficiency.

Algae Fuel Company Wins $3 Million in Funding

Researchers at Arizona State University, who have developed a method of producing jet fuel from algae, have received $3 million to start a company to commercialize the technology. The startup is a collaboration between Heliae Development and Science Foundation Arizona, the Cleantech Group reports. Separately, University of Virginia researchers are developing ways to commercially produce algae more efficiently.

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Fluke Networks, an Everett, WA-based maker of wireless network technology, said in a statement it has acquired the intellectual property of Viola Networks including its NetAlly product line. Financial terms weren’t disclosed. Viola had raised more than $12 million in venture capital since 2004, from firms that include Evergreen Venture Partners, M/C Venture Partners, Polar Communication and Concord Ventures, according to Private Equity Hub.

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Nobody’s going public these days, but the acquisitions market is certainly heating up. A day after Boeing announced its purchase of Bingen, WA-based Insitu, Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) is getting into the act. The San Jose, CA-based networking giant announced it is buying Pure Networks, a privately held company based in Seattle. The deal is worth some $120 million (for all shares of Pure Networks) and is expected to be completed in the first quarter of fiscal year 2009.

Pure Networks makes software and tools for managing home networks, such as diagnostics for why your wireless Internet connection is running slow. It currently partners with Linksys, which was bought in 2003 by Cisco for $500 million, to help consumers set up and secure their home Internet and various networked devices more easily. The company’s “innovations will provide Cisco and Linksys with a key underpinning to take home networking to the next level of ease of use,” said Ned Hooper, senior vice president for Cisco’s corporate development and consumer group, in a statement.

The employees of Pure Networks will stay in Seattle and be integrated into the Linksys team, according to the statement. As Xconomist and Clarion Group partner Eddie Pasatiempo pointed out last week, that stage—deal integration—is the real test of any acquisition’s success.

And speaking of home networks, the cable to my building has been down all morning. Heard that, Comcast?

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January, 2008: French bank Societe Generale discloses that it has lost $7.1 billion, thanks to unauthorized trading by a single employee, Jerome Kerviel, who apparently breached various controls on access to the bank’s computer systems.

March, 2008: UCLA Medical Center fires 13 workers and disciplines a dozen others for snooping in the confidential medical files of celebrity patients including Britney Spears, Farah Fawcett, and Maria Shriver.

April, 2008: Financial comparison shopping site LendingTree discloses that several former employees gave mortgage lenders passwords they needed to access confidential loan-request data from LendingTree customers.

May, 2008: Walter Reed Army Hospital discloses that personal information for 1,000 former patients may have been breached by someone using a peer-to-peer file sharing program on a hospital computer.

July 9, 2008 (yesterday): The Washington Post reveals that Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and about 2,000 other clients of a McLean, VA, investment firm had their names, birthdates, and social security numbers exposed to the open Internet by an employee using the LimeWire peer-to-peer file sharing program on a company computer.

Hackers aren’t the only threat to computer-system security and confidentiality rules, many security professionals say. The common elements in each of these recent, high-profile data breaches were rogue insiders with inappropriate levels of access to their organizations’ IT systems. And while you might think it would be easy to control who gets access to these systems—the LendingTree debacle, for example, could have been avoided if the company had simply invalidated the former employees’ passwords when they left the company—the reality is that many big organizations are overwhelmed by the problem of managing their employees’ network access.

Or so says Kurt Johnson, vice president of corporate development for Courion, a company in Framingham, MA, whose “identity management” software helps large organizations automate the once labor-intensive task of administering thousands of computer accounts. “You want to make sure that information gets into the hands of the individuals who need it, but there have to be controls and security over who should get access. You can’t have one without the other,” says Johnson. “Courion’s goal is to enable organizations to increase security with tighter controls—but without requiring more bodies to do the administration.”

The privately held company, which has 130 employees spread across offices in Massachusetts, Georgia, Texas, California, New York, and the U.K., offers a menu of software products—upgraded just two weeks ago—that can be matched to an organization’s specific needs. PasswordCourier—the product that helped to launch the company in 1996—is a basic self-service password management system that helps employees who have forgotten their passwords to obtain a new one after brief, online challenge-and-response session. ProfileCourier allows users to set up the authentication questions used in these sessions—for example, “the name of your favorite childhood pet.” AccountCourier automates the creation and deletion of user accounts; it knows, for example, that ex-employees should have their passwords revoked. CertificateCourier manages the public-key-encrypted digital certificates that many companies use to manage access to internal websites and applications, and ComplianceCourier lets managers quickly review who is using which corporate applications and purge users who’ve been granted improper access. (In that last area, Courion’s product overlaps with those from Ecora, a Portsmouth, NH startup that makes software for tracking and auditing configuration changes in corporate IT systems.)

The company’s newest product, RoleCourier, automates the whole process further by letting organizations define standard job roles that involve access to a predefined set of applications or networks. New collections specialists in a big corporation’s finance department, for example, might be …Next Page »

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For Keith Schorsch, it all started with a tick. In the summer of 2004, the former senior executive at Amazon was on the East Coast for a family reunion when (unbeknownst to him) he was bitten. Back in Seattle, he came down with a bull’s-eye rash and flu-like symptoms. Then one night, at a Mariners game, the left side of his face became paralyzed. The doctor on call diagnosed him with Bell’s Palsy. Thirteen weeks, 11 doctors, and an immeasurable amount of pain and suffering later, Schorsch finally got the correct diagnosis: Lyme disease.

Even then, it was only because a friend had suggested he get checked for Lyme. (It’s not common in the Pacific Northwest, probably because there are so few bugs.) And then things got worse. After antibiotics treatments—and what he felt was not enough follow-up care from his doctors—Schorsch suffered from exhaustion and memory loss, then blew two discs in his back. He decided to take matters into his own hands, making it his full-time job to research alternative treatments and connect with others online who had similar ailments.

That’s the idea behind Trusera, the Seattle-based online health network that Schorsch is launching to the public today. The name is meant to convey a “new era of trust and truth,” says Schorsch. His site is an advanced social network that allows users to find and connect with others around specific medical issues and healthcare experiences. “We’re not a message board, we’re not a pity party, we’re technologists and marketers building a platform for people who want to take control of their health care,” says Schorsch.

It’s an intriguing combination of Web 2.0, healthcare, and social networking, and Schorsch’s own story shows the need for such a platform. These days it can be extremely difficult to find relevant—and reliable—health posts amidst the chaos of blogs and message boards. “There’s a missing piece of health care today—connecting to people who’ve been through it,” Schorsch says, pointing to a stat that there are 800 million doctor visits in the U.S. every year. “Think of the amount of experience people have just from those visits,” he continues. “There’s a lot of power in being informed by people who’ve been there. We’re building a platform to allow people to share that.”

Trusera began as a modest outfit in January 2007. “We started out in Keith’s attic,” says Jude O’Reilley, employee number two and now director of marketing and product management. “Sort of the inverse of guys in the garage,” says Schorsch. Last summer, after securing $2 million in angel funding, the company moved to new digs on the edge of Capitol Hill, near the Central District, and now it has grown to 15 people: about a third are from Amazon, with others from Microsoft, Starbucks, and the like. The Trusera site has been in open beta testing since March.

On a recent visit to the company, the startup’s energy was palpable. The first thing I noticed was the unusual …Next Page »

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Bradford Networks of Concord, NH, a developer of software for managing enterprise network access, announced that it has raised $8 million in Series B funding. The round was led by New York-based Updata Partners and also included Lexington, MA-based Windspeed Ventures.

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Microsoft has joined the MIT Kerberos Consortium as a founding sponsor, nudging the organization closer to its goal of establishing Kerberos as a universal authentication platform for computer networks, MIT officials announced today. A representative of the software maker will join counterparts from Sun, Google, and Apple on the consortium’s executive board. Although Kerberos was originally developed for MIT’s Project Athena back in the 1980s, the consortium itself was founded last September.

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