It’s moving week for the companies launching Greentown Labs, the new cleantech incubator in the seaport area dubbed Boston’s “Innovation District” by Mayor Tom Menino.

The space at 337 Summer Street still looks more or less like a construction site, but the companies helping to get the incubator off the ground will be moving in this week, “ready or not,” says Jason Hanna, president and founder of Coincident and a founding entrepreneur of Greentown Labs.

Other media outlets reported that last fall, Promethean Power Systems co-founder Sam White launched a grassroots cleantech incubator near the Cambridgeside Galleria Mall. In December, the group of companies working there alongside Promethean—Coincident, OsComp Systems, Altaeros Energies, and AirVentions—found out that the owner of the building sold it to be redeveloped as a biotech facility. The group incorporated as a nonprofit in January as it searched for a new home.

Boston and Cambridge have their fair share of co-working spaces offering Wi-Fi and desks, but Greentown Labs is designed to have enough room for the physical equipment—and mess—required to build hardware that goes into these cleantech startups.

“It’s going to be dirty,” says Pedro Santos, CEO of OsComp Systems, a startup quietly working to develop a cheaper, more efficient method of producing natural gas after drilling, which is said to cut the cost of gas compression by 50 percent. “It will be safe and clean, but we want it to feel like a machine shop.”

The roughly 14,000 square-foot incubator consists of a large open space for startups to split up and build their products in, at a monthly rent of $25 per usable square foot, says Hanna. Companies can pay another $75 per month to access Greentown’s impending electronics lab and machine shop. Meanwhile, OsComp plans to run its prototype system in the basement. A dedicated desk in the main area costs $275 per month and includes Wi-Fi and access to the conference room; closed-door offices will run about $950 per month, depending on the size.

Dynamo MicroPower, a developer of a sub-microturbine for power generation, and SolSolution, a nonprofit working to get solar installations in schools, will be joining the five Greentown charter companies who moved from the Cambridge incubator space, says Jeremy Pitts, OsComp’s vice president of product development.

And as far as the charter member companies go: Promethean is working on solar-powered refrigeration systems; Coincident is developing a software- and hardware-based system for better integrating cleantech elements and optimizing energy use in the home; and Altaeros is making … Next Page »

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Boston-based nonprofit firm Diagnostics For All announced today that it has nabbed a $3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the UK’s Department for International Development, to put toward developing three diagnostic tests for the agriculture space. The firm will use its diagnostics platform to develop a test for detecting milk spoilage, one for targeting the growth of mold in corn, and a third to determine whether cows are pregnant or ready for breeding to help farmers better manage their herds. Diagnostics For All, a Harvard spinout led by veteran biotech executive Una Ryan, previously focused entirely on tests in the human health field, like a paper-based diagnostic product for measuring liver toxicity in HIV and AIDS patients that the firm plans to begin testing later this year.

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Three months have flown by since Susan Sigl succeeded Ken Myer as the CEO of the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). The 26-year-old organization is the largest statewide association of tech companies and executives in the world, representing some 1,100 members and 125,000 tech employees across Washington, with a staff of just 11. That’s quite a responsibility to inherit. After just a few months on the job, Sigl has settled in, and started talking about her big plans for the future.

Sigl joined the WTIA on April 5, bringing with her a background in venture capital as the co-founder (along with Tom Huseby) of Seattle-based SeaPoint Ventures. After cutting her teeth at PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Sigl was recruited away to a Texas oil and gas startup, a sector she worked in for 18 years. She then became an entrepreneur, or as she put it, a “negotiator-a doer of deals,” supporting a number of a number of early-stage companies across the mobile, wireless, and software sectors. Her resume includes a stint as SnapIn Software’s interim CFO, and working with Zumobi, and Ground Truth as part of SeaPoint’s wireless initiative.

When Sigl was appointed to the position in March, she told Greg that she was struck by the mission of the WTIA: working to support, advocate for, and help tech companies across Washington state thrive. And to her own surprise, she’s found the job to be very close to the startup culture she’s so familiar with.

“It’s interesting, because I’ve never worked in a non-profit for salary before, but the mission and the opportunity is so dynamic. It is surprisingly very much like a regular company; in some respects it is kind of entrepreneurial,” she says. “For me that has been one of the biggest highlights—to walk into a door of a nonprofit and see the same kind of motivation and attitude that you see in a startup company.”

Given that I’m new to the local tech scene, I thought it would be nice to catch up with Sigl and hear more about her experiences and plans for the growing organization. I sat down with Susan last week to chat about her first 100 days on the job, and where she plans to take the organization in the future. Almost immediately the idea of change took hold. The WTIA was founded in 1984, around when Microsoft was preparing to go public, Sigl told me. Back then, the local technology sector was heavily embedded in the rise of the personal computer. Today, however, the industry is different, and the WTIA, in turn, has changed along with it.

“It’s morphed, as you can imagine in that period of time as a technology sector has morphed, so we now in the last three and a half or four years have moved from being an organization that represents the software industry in the state to really the whole tech sector,” Sigl says. “We cover mobility, and gaming, and entertainment, and digital media, and e-commerce, and cloud computing—you know, pretty much if you can label it, it’s under our umbrella. It’s huge, and that’s what makes it pretty fun.”

Sigl further discussed some of the biggest expansions in the tech industry, and how that has changed the role of the WTIA moving forward. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity as always:

Xconomy: When you spoke with Greg a few months ago, you mentioned that one of your primary goals in your new position would be to broaden the WTIA’s sponsorship and membership. The WTIA is already the biggest tech trade association in the U.S.—what would this widening entail?

Susan Sigl: We are the biggest in the country, however in terms of penetration within our own state for membership, we probably have about 10 percent of our market. And I don’t think it works like in a typical private company analysis where’d you say ‘who else has the other piece of the market?’ I think the market is out there—it just isn’t in the fold yet. So there’s a lot of upside. And then, of course, that doesn’t even account for other tech sectors. There’s just a lot of upside to grow the organization and that’s really exciting to me. And of course that’s not just the membership, but the sponsorships, and just the involvement. We have a very sizable board—we have a 40-person board—and it represents some of the top tech leaders in the state. And there are just so many powerful elements to the organization that really have the capacity to have it expand its mission and achieve its mission. And I think there’s no limit to … Next Page »

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Stories of drugmakers, deals, health IT companies, and even some nonprofits made it a busy life sciences news week for us.

—Waltham’s Avila Therapeutics is on a quest to outdo well-known Boston drugmaker Vertex Pharmaceuticals when it comes to treating hepatitis C, Luke wrote last week. The company’s drugs rely on forming covalent bonds to shut down targets on virus-infected cells, preventing the virus from mutating and escaping, which could give it an edge on the Vertex drug that has varying degrees of effectiveness on different mutations of hepatitis C, Avila’s CEO said.

—Dossia, a Cambridge, MA-based nonprofit electronic health records provider, rolled out its system to another two of its founding companies. Computer chip maker Intel and mail system provider Pitney Bowes will offer some of their workers the Dossia system, which is sustained by subscription fees and is designed to lower overall healthcare costs for corporate clients.

—Speaking of electronic health records, Athenahealth is looking for some opinions on the matter and announced a partnership with Cambridge’s doctors-only social networking site Sermo to get just that. Financial terms of the partnership between Sermo and Watertown, MA-based Athena (NASDAQ:ATHN), a maker of Internet healthcare software, weren’t revealed.

— Millipore shook things up this week when it announced plans to accept a bid from Germany’s Merck KGaA, which offered to buy the company for $107 a share, or $7.2 billion. Thermo Fisher had previously made an unsolicited $6 billion bid for the Billerica, MA-based life sciences equipment supplier, according to media reports.

—Stealthy Guilford, CT and San Francisco-based startup Ion Torrent Systems opened up a bit to discuss its digital DNA readout technology, leaving plenty of genomic science bloggers buzzing. And the machine from Ion Torrent, which is advised by a Harvard genomics pioneer and supported by a Seattle partner, costs … Next Page »

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Jon Carson describes the newest offering on his website, BiddingForGood.com, as the idea he is most proud of in his “entire startup life.”

“It solves a real problem. It makes something efficient,” says Carson, whose previous entrepreneurial efforts include a keg delivery startup he ran while at Babson College, and FamilyEducation Network, a Web portal he sold to Pearson Education.

The “something” Carson aims to make more efficient is the process of requesting items from businesses for charity auctions or fundraising events. Both sides have complaints about the process, he says. Most merchants—typically restaurants and hotels—solicited for donations to charity auctions have no way of efficiently organizing and responding to the myriad requests they get for things like gift certificates and complimentary stays. Charities often submit their requests with missing information and in turn complain that they never hear back on their queries, Carson says

Cambridge, MA-based BiddingForGood, which Carson describes as an eBay for charity auctions, is trying to improve this situation with the release of its Auction Item Request System (AIRS). The system creates forms that a charity seeking a donation can fill out on a business’ website, detailing specifically what it wants for its auction, and all of its contact information. The AIRS system responds immediately with an automated e-mail confirming the company’s receipt of the donation request, and later on with an e-mail either approving or denying the solicitation. It’s being used by businesses such as Boston’s Liberty Hotel, The Four Seasons, retailer Brooks Brothers, and San Francisco’s Aquarium of the Bay.

If the BiddingForGood website is the eBay of charity auctions, then the AIRS segment of the business is the OpenTable of donation requests, Carson says, transforming what was previously a loose leaf tracking process to a centralized database. Donors can track the groups they’ve aided, the dollar value of their donations, and the exposure of their products at the auctions.

BiddingForGood is giving its AIRS product to businesses for free, because it’s solving a problem for BiddingForGood, too, Carson says. It helps the startup consolidate the list of nonprofits and auction donors out there, a pool it depends on for its revenue stream (more on that in a moment). “The market is very fragmented,” Carson says, explaining that most charity auctions are run by volunteers with high turnover. His sales team can chase after potential customers when they request an item using the AIRS system, which also advertises BiddingForGood’s other services and allows users to directly request information on the company.

Originally named cMarket and backed by Canaan Partners and Morningside Technology Ventures, the company started in 2003 as a way to more efficiently execute silent auctions for charities. It originally hosted online versions of real-world silent auctions, often a week or so before the actual charity event in order to open them to a wider pool of bidders. The startup eventually noticed … Next Page »

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Two Seattle-based companies were awarded part of a $500,000 grant by Facebook today. The companies, Sortuv and Vittana, are two of the 20 startups and nonprofits receiving money through fbFund, a new program designed to help startups that make social websites and software.  Sortuv is a search engine designed around plain questions rather than keywords, while Vittana is a nonprofit facilitating direct microloans to people in developing countries.  As part of their award, each company will spend 10 weeks at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, CA, learning about how to grow and improve their business from investors, entrepreneurs, and Facebook developers.

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A tiny nonprofit organization in Richland, WA, has developed a simple, elegant fix for one of the big health problems in the developing world. A group that calls itself Sign has found a way to properly treat broken bones that people suffer in car accidents—like how it’s done in the U.S.—but without any of the expensive equipment we take for granted in emergency rooms.

The organization, formally called Surgical Implant Generation Network, has developed an “incredible device” that few people are aware of, says Paul Labarre, a technical officer with Seattle-based PATH, a nonprofit developer of global health technologies. Sign has an FDA-approved surgical nail that stabilizes broken bones, and can be fastened into place with bone screws by any physician with a little training.

This sort of procedure happens all the time in U.S. emergency rooms, so we barely stop to think about it. Such a pin placement usually costs $1,200, and holes need to be drilled for screws to anchor it in place—a procedure that requires an X-ray imaging machine that costs $150,000, says Jeanne Dillner, Sign’s CEO. The nonprofit has a different idea. Its system is designed so doctors can place the nails inside the bone just like in the U.S., and drill holes to properly align the stabilizing screws based on feel, without the help of an expensive machine that doesn’t exist in many parts of the developing world. The organization makes the nails at a cost of about $100 apiece, and donates them all, Dillner says.

“It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of other global health issues,” says Labarre. “But it’s a big challenge.”

This is already making a big impact, Labarre says. Sign, founded in 1998 by Lewis Zirkle Jr., a Richland-based orthopedic surgeon, has already trained about 3,000 doctors in 49 countries in how to use its patented nails, and the procedures have been performed more than 40,000 times. And that only represents a tiny slice of the problem. As many as 50 million people in the developing world suffer traumatic injuries in automobile or work accidents each year, according to World Health Organization estimates. Usually, those patients end up laying in a hospital bed for months while the break never properly heals, Labarre says. Even more eye-popping is this stat: road traffic accidents alone kill more people between the prime ages of 15 to 44 than HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria combined.

I wouldn’t actually be too surprised. I recently got back from a mountain climbing trip to Mexico with two college friends, and without a doubt, the most harrowing experience of all was having to drive on that country’s back roads and even the major highways. Maybe that’s why PATH’s stats on car accidents grabbed my attention. (For the record, our rental car made it back to the Mexico City airport unscathed.)

PATH is well-known for its efforts to implement high-tech and low-tech solutions to global health problems. It gets more money and attention for its efforts to develop novel vaccines, or solve malnutrition problems with things like fortified rice. Even though PATH hasn’t gotten any funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation or government sources to improve trauma care, it is exploring ways to help amplify what groups like Sign are doing, Labarre says.

The inspiration behind Sign came when Zirkle was traveling in Indonesia in the late ’80s to train physicians there on bone-fixing techniques, Dillner says. He found a patient who was lying in traction for three years with a broken bone, because he couldn’t afford a modern implant, and the hospital couldn’t afford it either. Zirkle, the son of the founder of Spokane, WA-based Key Tronic (NASDAQ: [[ticker: KTCC]]), obviously has some entrepreneurial blood, and he decided to go on a business mission. He aimed to persuade big medical device companies that make modern bone pins, like Stryker (NYSE: SYK) and Smith & Nephew (NYSE: SNN), to help him make low-cost implants for broken bones.

“The light bulb really went on for Dr. Zirkle,” says Dillner. “Everything he did for training wasn’t going to be effective unless he could produce a low-cost supply of implants.”

It turned out that none of the big companies were interested, Dillner says. So in 1999 he Zirkle decided to develop the implants himself, in a nonprofit organization. Since the start, Sign has been heavily bankrolled by Zirkle himself, and other orthopedic surgeons in his network, who now support 20 employees and an annual budget of $2 million, she says.

Sign has grown to the point that its devices helped 15,000 people recover from trauma last year, and it wants to triple that annual number in the next three to five years, Dillner says. “Our goal is that a doctor in Nairobi can provide the same quality of care for a fracture patient as a doctor can at Harborview,” she says. (Harborview is the main trauma center in Seattle.)

Sign is now branching out with a second kind of simple device that can help patients with hip fractures in the developing world, Dillner says. Her organization is getting help here from PATH, which has bioengineers that are doing repeated stress tests that mimic the gait of a person walking with one of the implants. This could be the difference between being crippled and being able to walk for huge numbers of patients, Dillner says.

PATH’s Labarre was charged with starting up this trauma program about six months ago, and he sounds fired up. The organization is brainstorming now about ways to get Sign’s devices more broadly used, and to set up sustainable business models for companies in developing countries to run with other promising ideas. A couple examples include encouraging greater use of motorcycle helmets, and prosthetic devices for people who lose limbs.

“We really want a small portfolio of projects here because we see a dire need,” Labarre says. “This has been largely ignored, and if it continues to be, we’re going to continue to see an increase in traumatic injuries.”

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It is nice to see that a nonprofit like Diagnostics For All (DFA) can actually garner attention and interest from both the MIT and Harvard communities by winning the MIT’s 100K competition and Harvard Business School’s Business Plan Contest. Just a year ago George Whitesides and I were repeatedly told that if we stuck to our nonprofit strategy it would be hard to realize our goal of bringing healthcare solutions to the poor. We were told by many that we would not get the attention that is needed to launch such an effort. We were told that the best students would never work for a nonprofit instead of a for-profit opportunity. But when I heard DFA being discussed on NPR a couple of weeks ago I realized that I am glad we did not listen to the people who told us that “nonprofit” was a “nonstarter.”

About two years ago George and I went for a long walk to talk about ways we could position his paper-based diagnostics technology towards the developing world. The technology seemed perfect for use in developing nations because paper is a very flexible, inexpensive substrate for manufacturing and it can be disposed in a safe manner after it is used. The paper diagnostic approach allows us to format existing, proven assays for just a fraction of their current cost. The technology also allows DFA to create brand new tests that would otherwise not exist. This paper invention is a pure example of a true platform technology. But George had tried to position some other technologies towards the developing world, and they always get repositioned for the U.S. and Europe first. The developing world then turns into a secondary effort or side project. He was fairly frustrated with this outcome and so was I. We wanted to see if we could figure out how to keep it centered on products for poor people first.

We decided that the best way to do this is to create a nonprofit enterprise where all of the paper technology, IP, and creative minds would reside—we’d just eliminate any for-profit objective in favor of a complete focus on nonprofit. We realized that the business model and financing model would be “different” but everything George and I do tends to have an element of uniqueness so we are very comfortable—at times more comfortable—with “different.” Fortunately Isaac Kohlberg who heads the Office of Technology Development (OTD) at Harvard also agreed that the nonprofit was the way to go and Harvard supported our concept of a nonprofit as the central entity to advance this technology. We formed a type of collaboration with Harvard and worked together in organizing the basics of the organization. We also benefited from some initial pro-bono support from the local community on legal, science, and business matters.

Honestly, most of the credit for our short-term success should be given to the students who have been relentlessly dedicating their time towards advancing low-cost technologies in George’s lab. George is the first to say that the students never get enough credit. I tend to agree but I am admittedly biased since once upon a time I was a post-doc student in George’s lab as well. But there is no question that without the lab there is no technology or DFA. I was also impressed with the quality and commitment of the Harvard and MIT students who came together to do the hard work on the DFA business plan. I believe these students were more motivated than other teams; they were driven by the mission and purpose of DFA.

We still have a long way to go before we can really claim victory for DFA. Our goals go well beyond winning business plan competitions. We need to see our technology and approach make a difference in the poorest of areas before we can celebrate. But it is nice to know that the best and the brightest have been supportive of our initial efforts even if it is in the structure of a nonprofit. Thank you Harvard and MIT! I am extremely hopeful.

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