In a typical year, research at the University of Washington will spawn about a dozen promising young companies. In the next three years, the school’s new president wants to see that output double—and ground zero for a lot of those startups will likely be a new incubator space unveiled this week.

When renovations are complete, the UW’s New Ventures Facility will have space for about 25 startups, with some 23,000 square feet of space split roughly evenly between laboratories and offices.

The initial floor of office space is finished now, and the first startups are expected to begin stocking its cubicles and conference rooms in the coming weeks. Renovation of lab space will take a little longer—it’s expected to be finished in 2014.

UW officials aren’t waiting to start trumpeting what they say is another big step toward dramatically increasing the entrepreneurial output of the state’s largest higher education center. It coincides with efforts like the new W Fund, an early stage investment pool pegged at about $25 million that will concentrate on companies emerging from public universities in the state.

Young

Michael Young, the UW’s president, said the incubator on UW’s campus should help keep young companies and entrepreneurs in Washington by making sure they don’t have to hit the streets too early, where they might find a need to relocate to Silicon Valley.

“When businesses spin too quickly out of their university geography, the reasons for staying in the state begin to reduce, and all of the sudden sunny climates and higher degrees of venture capital and so forth begin to appeal,” Young said Wednesday. “And that is despite the fact that the real value-add is staying connected with the university for some period of time until it really has proved its worth, and has shown what that market niche is, and has developed that technology that truly is significant and truly is transformative.”

Rhoads

Young speaks from experience, having helped the University of Utah become a national leader in spinning out university research. Linden Rhoads, head of the UW’s Center for Commercialization, said Young’s “assignment” of doubling the school’s startup output will also focus on quality—”not just companies, but successful, thriving companies that will be a benefit to the community and a credit to the university. So really, we look at the applicants with that assigment in mind.”

Startups have to apply for the incubator, and once they’re in, will pay to rent spaces—a typical office setup would be about $220 per month, with a one-year contract. The incubator already has seven startups ready to move in, and is expecting a handful more to join the parade soon.

One of those companies is Envitrum, a startup founded by mechanical engineering students Grant L.S. Marchelli and Renuka Prabhakar. Envitrum turns waste glass that is too dirty to be recycled into bricks that can be used in finish construction, namely building facades. The bricks that Envitrum produces are 95 percent glass, but consume a third less energy to produce than typical construction bricks, while also showing that they’re stronger in tests, Prahakar said.

Envitrum is about two years old, and presently operating on grant funding. ”It’s this great green technology. But the question is, how do we actually make the other type of green?” said Ryan Buckmaster, who’s working with Envitrum through the Center for Commercialization.

As the New Ventures building fills up, that’s the kind of question that people should be asking a lot more often in the next few years.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

When the University of Washington hired Michael Young to be its new president last year, one qualification that stood out was an impressive record of spinning out companies from his previous employer, the University of Utah.

Today, the UW is taking a step toward fulfilling some of that promise by opening its New Ventures Facility, an incubator offering lab and office space for startups based on the school’s research. The incubator will be run by the university’s Center for Commercialization, which recently topped off a $25 million fund for spinning out public university research.

Tech startup incubators have been erupting across the American business landscape in the past few years, as faster, cheaper, more powerful software and hardware makes it very inexpensive to start a new company and investors look for ways to place broader bets on a crop of entrepreneurs. Seattle has a branch of the prominent TechStars program, which is also partnering with Microsoft to organize a separate accelerator program for startups working on the Kinect motion and sound sensor.

The UW plans to talk in detail about the New Ventures incubator at a launch event later today, and I’ll update with more color from the scene. It promises to be a bright spot for the university amid an era of steep cutbacks in money from the state, which is still struggling with lax tax collections following the Great Recession. Tuition has already increased to compensate for less state money, and the UW is likely to soon start charging different prices for in-demand majors for the first time.

UW’s commercialization efforts already have seen several spinouts in life sciences and information technology, including notable names like Fate Therapeutics and Farecast, now part of Bing’s travel search. The Center for Commercialization also has a strong collection of entrepreneurs-in-residence, with folks like Ken Myer and Luni Libes on the roster.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

I think learning the fundamentals of a discipline is the most important thing that students can do to prepare themselves for jobs both today and tomorrow. That discipline may be biology, bioengineering, chemistry, chemical engineering or others. I also think doing research is great preparatory experience. Furthermore, I believe the opportunities offered by the convergence between biology, medicine, and engineering are rapidly increasing.

Thus, courses and research at this interface may be increasingly attractive. At MIT, for example, training at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research or the Broad Institute or the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program may be very helpful. At many universities, there are also special programs or activities that students can be involved in that may be useful. At MIT such programs include the $100K business plan competition. At Stanford they have a Biodesign Program. Finally, summer jobs in companies involved in biotech or pharma or medical devices can offer great experiences.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

In a grand test of whether the Silicon Valley startup accelerator model can help university scientists get promising new technologies to market faster, 21 teams hand-picked for the National Science Foundation’s new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program converged on the Stanford University campus last week. The goal: to review the progress they’d made during an eight-week crash course in entrepreneurship, and share the details of their newly battle-tested business models with a panel of NSF leaders and venture capital partners.

I sat in for the first half of the review session, which took place Wednesday at Stanford’s School of Engineering, and listened to presentations on everything from hydrophobic materials for preventing ice buildup on airplane wings to a method for growing transparent sheets of graphene that could be used in next-generation computer displays. It’s too early to say how many of these innovations will turn up in the marketplace—but it was remarkable to see how thoroughly the traditional walls between academia and business had melted away in the minds of the program participants.

It all made for an event unlike any demo day I’ve seen before. The I-Corps teams—who hailed from Seattle, Tucson, Pittsburgh, Boston, and everywhere in between—were the antithesis of the hip, young, polished entrepreneurs you see coming out of venture incubators like Y Combinator or TechStars. Instead, these were geeks on a mission: bench scientists who are convinced that businesses can be built around the technologies they’ve invented, and who’ve decided to take the leap themselves rather than wait for a corporate licensee to wander along, as in the old model of university technology transfer.

For most of these scientists, the I-Corps program was their first real exposure to the startup mindset, and they had plenty of self-deprecating stories to share about the lessons they’d learned while talking with potential customers. One University of Connecticut team developing a nanocomposite material for explosives detection had pivoted not once but twice—from a landmine-detector product to an airport security product, then back to landmines. “The most important thing we learned from I-Corps is how important getting out of the building is,” principal investigator Yu Lei said.

It was no accident that that phrase—”getting out of the building”—came up in every presentation I saw. It’s practically been trademarked by Steve Blank, the serial entrepreneur famous around Silicon Valley for his “customer development” methodology, which says that the highest priority for any startup is to gather feedback from potential customers and continually refine its product or its target market or both until it finds a fit. NSF officials tapped Blank to lead the I-Corps program after watching him teach customer development to students in his “Lean LaunchPad” course at Stanford.

The teams chosen for the I-Corps program—each of which consisted of at least one principal investigator with a history of NSF grant-getting, one younger “entrepreneurial lead” (typically a graduate student or postdoc), and one business mentor—first came to Stanford in October for a few days of startup bootcamp. They were then sent home with instructions to get out, talk to customers, and, if necessary, throw out their original business models and start over. Last week’s session was both an opportunity to share what they’d learned and an audition for Phase II of the program, in which a few of the teams will be selected for NSF grants to help them continue their commercialization efforts.

How well did the teams adapt to customer-development thinking? “I think they hit it out of the park,” Blank told me at the review session.

The evidence was in the before-and-after “business model canvases” that each team shared during their presentations. An invention of strategy consultant Alexander Osterwalder, a business model canvas is a template that helps fledgling startup teams envision who their most natural customers are, how they’ll deliver value to those customers, and how they’ll manage costs, revenues, and partnerships. With help from mentors, and with feedback from the more than 2,000 prospective customers they interviewed during the eight-week program, the I-Corps teams redrew their canvases … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and behold…the eighth wonder of the world. No, not King Kong, I’m afraid. But how about a computer that can read and interpret human emotions and mental states?

That would be from Affectiva, a Boston-area startup co-founded by Roz Picard, a 20-year veteran of the MIT Media Lab. Picard (see photo, right) is the founder and director of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group, and she has done extensive work in computer vision, machine learning, and human-computer interfaces, with applications in autism communication, health and wellness, education, marketing, advertising, and other areas.

Picard is speaking at this Thursday’s Xconomy “6×6” event (Six Cities, Six Big Tech Ideas) in Boston. In advance of her appearance there, I sat down with Picard at Affectiva’s offices this week to get a demo of the company’s technology and to talk a little about the future of emotional and gestural interfaces.

One of the demos involved a computer tracking my facial expressions via webcam (and also my heart rate via blood flow to my face) while I watched a series of TV commercials. Based on indicators like raised eyebrows, smiles, or a furrowed brow (see example, below), the software tried to figure out how engaged, interested, amused, or disturbed I was during the course of each ad. It’s hard not to be self-conscious during all this, but I’m pretty sure the computer concluded: this guy hates all commercials. (And since I haven’t smiled since 1995, we’ll enlist my fellow editor Erin Kutz for the live demo on Thursday.)

Affectiva also will be rolling out a new product on Thursday—one that has applications in finance and healthcare, among other industries—but I’ll let Picard speak for that when the time comes.

Meanwhile, I asked Picard whether the field of affective computing would continue to advance incrementally (like speech recognition, say) or whether it would undergo a breakthrough of some kind. “I think it’s going to make some leaps,” she said. “There’s going to be a lot more happening by indirect measurement—nonverbal [cues] that people don’t really think machines can do. That’s going to really progress.”

To me, Picard’s work exemplifies what truly big ideas are about—for the first 20 years or so, they might be more interesting scientifically than commercially. But once the technology and marketplace gets to a certain point, a viable business can be built around them, even as the science continues to advance. And then who knows what will happen?

We’re looking forward to a fantastic 6×6 program and some great networking this Thursday (you can register here). Hope to see you there.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

We got a look at one of Microsoft Research’s latest advanced-interface projects a few weeks back, during festivities for MSR’s 20th anniversary. The company actually prohibited anyone from taking images of one demo in particular, for a projected-touchscreen system called OmniTouch, just because the team was going to present it at an upcoming conference.

Well, that conference is starting—and here are the details about OmniTouch. It’s an advancement of something you may have seen before out of MSR, namely this project called “Skinput” that used sensors and projectors to turn forearms and palms into the equivalent of computer or smartphone touchscreens.

OmniTouch was developed by Microsoft’s Andy Wilson and Hrvoje Benko, and Carnegie Mellon student Chris Harrison, who’s also an MSR fellow.

Things are kicked up a notch from the Skinput project. OmniTouch employs a shoulder-mounted projector and Kinect-ish camera, and can recognize multiple nearby surfaces to do tasks simultaneously. So, you could project a main “screen” on a wall or desktop, and pull up your palm to flip back to a navigation menu, to pick a new video, e-book, or webpage.

The hardware is a little bulky in this prototype version, of course (Microsoft officials demurred when I asked at the MSR anniversary event whether there were plans to incorporate a laser blaster, Predator-style).

Here’s one of the videos from Harrison’s page, which also features a second, more technical video demo, the research paper, and more goodies. The Microsoft page also has details about a project called PocketTouch, which would allow users to interact with devices by tapping them while they’re still in a pocket, for instance.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Market meltdowns, international turmoil, stubborn unemployment—none of the lingering macro-economic troubles seem to be holding back the momentum for venture investing in 2011, according to a report on third-quarter investments from research firm CB Insights.

The latest tally from the firm’s venture capital database shows venture investments reaching $7.9 billion in the quarter across 790 individual deals, setting a pace to possibly register the biggest year for VC in a decade.

That holds true even with a pretty major correction: CB Insights’ researchers didn’t count half of Twitter’s enormous $800 million financing round, reasoning that a reported half of the money went to cashing out stockholders.

Of course, the pace might not hold up in the last quarter of the year, particularly since VCs are reporting some difficulty raising funds from limited partners. But if the current momentum holds, “we are looking at a $30 billion+ year for VCs,” the report says.

Check out the full report for even more numbers. Two more methodological notes: CB Insights only counts investment rounds where a VC participated, so any rounds made up solely by mutual funds, hedge funds, or other non-venture investors also aren’t added to the tally. And state-level activity is determined by the headquarters of companies getting investments, not the home base of the VC firms involved.

BIGGER APPLE
California companies continue to lead the way in venture investments, accounting for about half (48 percent) of the national third-quarter VC dollars in CB Insights’ report.

The notable change is the rise of investments in New York companies, which accounted for 10 percent of venture dollars—doubling their position from a year earlier and virtually tying with Massachusetts, which had 9 percent of the total in the third quarter.

Taking the head-to-head a little further, CB Insights says New York pulled ahead of Massachusetts in both the number of deals and dollars invested “for the first time ever,” with New York registering $831 million on 86 deals for the quarter, compared with Massachusetts’ $710 million on 83 deals.

Washington state companies, meanwhile, maintained their small share of VC financing overall with just 2 percent of the national take—half of Texas’ 4 percent share.

UPS AND DOWNS
Healthcare-related VC investments continued to contract, showing year-over-year declines in both dollars invested and the number of deals, with $1.67 billion spread over 143 deals. CB Insights noted uncertainty around exit opportunities and the regulatory landscape for this sector—public policy for healthcare in particular will continue to look uncertain until the 2012 national elections are decided.

The number of individual mobile investments hit a high point at 13 percent of the total deals tracked, up from 7 percent a year earlier—although in terms of dollars, the share of mobile investments was only two percentage points higher than the third quarter of 2010.

Cleantech saw notable improvement, with funding levels topping $1.2 billion nationally—up from $790 million a year ago and $781 million in the second quarter of 2011.

PLANTING SEEDS
CB Insights’ report also sees an ongoing increase in the number of seed-stage deals by VCs over the past year, rising from 11 percent of all deals in the third quarter of 2010 to 15 percent of deals in this year’s third quarter. “While primarily a tech VC tool, healthcare investors increasingly used seed VC investments in Q3 2011 as well,” CB Insights noted.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Susan Desmond-Hellmann joked to me a couple weeks back in an interview about how UCSF doesn’t quite have the national profile it deserves, partly because it doesn’t have a football team. But this week, at least, UCSF got some major national attention, as the UCSF chancellor got a lot of ink in the New York Times.

Desmond-Hellmann talked to the Times’ Denise Grady about why she has been inspired to invest for the future at UCSF during a down time in the economy, sort of like how the founders of Apple and Genentech dreamed big in the malaise of the 1970s. Desmond-Hellmann has been profiled before, and this piece covers some of her life story, along with what she’s aspiring to do at UCSF. This is a well-written article, as Desmond-Hellmann comes off as the warm, upbeat character that I think many readers who know her will recognize.

This story comes about a week after Desmond-Hellmann gave her “State of the University” talk, in which she sought to rally the 23,000 UCSF employees around the big mission of becoming “the world’s pre-eminent health sciences innovator.” Part of that vision depends on collaborating with other universities, and industry. You can check a condensed, 4.5 minute version of her talk on the UCSF site, or by clicking on the video below.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

How many top-level Microsoft executives have been in the same job for 20 years? By Rick Rashid’s count, he’s the only one. That sort of continuity says a lot about Microsoft Research, the in-house invention factory that Rashid was recruited from Carnegie Mellon to run in 1991.

It’s still growing—up to about 850 PhDs and a total of 1,200 people worldwide, at centers from Beijing to New England. As Redmond lab director Peter Lee said, “the sun never sets on Microsoft Research.”

“If you look at the history of the company, there’s been so much value that has come out of Microsoft research that really it’s now just this pipeline, and no one really questions,” Rashid says. “I mean, no one comes to me and worries about what the pipeline’s going to be in a few years. They look at what we’ve already got and they like that, and they just figure, ‘Well, I guess he knows what he’s doing, he’s been doing it for a long time.’ And I think that’s really the key to making these things work.”

Investors have certainly questioned the business value of having a standalone research organization. But Rashid says that over the years, from Bill Gates to Steve Ballmer and beyond, the company’s executives have seen value in keeping the lights on.

And that’s how Rashid sees the value of a research stable: You can’t stuff its work into a product roadmap or financial timeline. But one day, your company will need to tap into the work that it’s doing.

A prime example, Rashid says, is the Kinect motion-sensing camera for the Xbox—probably the best-known example of a product that came out of the research arm. When executives came calling, Microsoft Research already had been plugging away on the elements that would make it possible. It turned out, he says, “frankly, better than anybody really expected. I had no idea what we really could do in that space.”

“So research, in some sense, is about being ready when someone comes to you with a problem or with an opportunity. It’s not about reacting to a problem or an opportunity, because you’ll be too late,” Rashid says. “And that’s really been incredibly successful for us. We built groups in speech recognition and 3D computer graphics and computer vision before there was any part of Microsoft that really cared about any of those things. But when the company needed it, we were there.”

At anniversary celebrations around the globe today, Microsoft showed off some more new ideas that its researchers are producing, from a more efficient search-indexing technology called “Tiger,” to some cool augmented-reality software and sensor systems, which made a stack of virtual blocks rise off a table and even beamed an image of a person onto the surface via the Kinect camera, a la Princess Leia’s “help me, Obi-Wan” moment in Star Wars. (GeekWire’s Todd Bishop was at the Redmond event too, and captured some from-the-bleachers video of the presentation).

One thing they actually refused to let the outsiders photograph was called OmniTouch—Microsoft is apparently demonstrating it again at a conference in the near future. It’s a setup that turns movable surfaces, including your hand or a notepad, into a touchscreen interface like a tablet computer or smartphone screen. The hardware is still a prototype right now, but principal researcher Andy Wilson said miniaturization of the bulky shoulder-mounted camera-and-projector setup could easily follow: “Maybe it’s a kind of thing that’s on a lapel, or maybe on some future Bluetooth headset kind of thing.”

The explosion of real-world data capture, and the ability to crunch those numbers cheaply and quickly, is perhaps the biggest driver of new-frontier research that Rashid sees right now. It’s making formerly arcane and difficult pursuits much easier, and spreading computer science know-how to all kinds of areas of life.

“Those kind of technologies are really going to change the way we think about doing everything: the way we do science, the way we do urban planning, the way we do medicine,” Rashid says.

One very current example of widespread technology that has been given a big boost by big data is language processing, a key feature in today’s upgrade of Microsoft’s new “Mango” version of its Windows Phone system.

“We’ve been doing speech recognition for a long time. Just in the last few years it’s gotten really pretty darn good. You look at something like Windows Phone Mango which has a really good speech engine built into it,” Rashid says. “My 12 year-old—I gave him a Windows phone—that’s how he uses it. Any program he wants to run, he just says the name of the program and it just goes there. He’s just decided the speech interface is the fastest way for him to do things.”

After 20 years, Rashid doesn’t seem to be particularly near the end of his run. Asked how much longer he could be doing this job, he demurred. Although he joked that he wouldn’t be making the 40th anniversary presentation, it seems there are too many surprises to pack it in just yet.

“Some of the stuff you hear about it, and you say ‘wow,’” Rashid says. “I remember when David Heckerman, one of our researchers, first started telling me about some of the work he and his people had been doing with the AIDS community, and some analysis of how the AIDS virus attacks the immune system. My first reaction was, ‘Wow, I didn’t know we were working on that. And my second reaction was, ‘Why are we working on that?’

“Now, some of that work’s actually in a vaccine trial. Not only that, if you go to AIDS conferences, you see a lot of references to the work that’s being done at Microsoft Research—which, again, pretty weird. But it makes sense in that the field of computer science now interpenetrates with almost every other field of science. You almost couldn’t not do that.”

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

—TechStars has upped its game in the incubator wars by adding a $24 million fund that will help it offer startups in the competitive program another $100,000 in financing, on top of the small stipends that founders get for the 12-week entrepreneurship bootcamp. The new money, which won’t take effect until next year’s classes, signals that the Y Combinator approach of offering significant seed-stage money may become a competitive need for top-tier incubators.

—Ben Elowitz of Wetpaint explained how being obsessed with the smallest details in TV gossip content can help build a more meaningful distribution system for online media—and might even have some benefits for more hard-core journalism down the road. After being featured as our Xconomist of the Week, Elowitz also saw his startup featured as one of the media partners in Facebook‘s new “open graph” initiative.

—Intel continued fulfilling its pledge to invest more in research initiatives after shutting down its previous standalone labs earlier this year. This time, it was the unveiling of a new research center focusing on “pervasive computing,” the idea that devices and areas of the home and other buildings will be connected, backed by powerful computing, and able to learn by observing human interactions with the environment.

—Startup Weekend is announcing a new board of directors, bringing in notable names from entrepreneurship around the country to help build the nonprofit’s international education mission. The board will now be made up of Kauffman Foundation president Carl Schramm, entrepreneur and educator Steve Blank, venture capitalist Greg Gottesman, investor Brad Feld, Great Kansas City Community Foundation head Laura McKnight, and Kauffman entrepreneurship manager Nick Seguin.

—Speaking of Startup Weekend, community-education startup TeachStreet is hosting an education-focused version this weekend at the UW. The event features some big names, like keynote speakers Vinod Khosla and Mitch Kapor.

—A new art-buying startup called MyArtMatch is officially taking the covers off its website today, offering users a way to curate virtual art collections and even make real-life purchases of prints. The startup is led by founder and CEO Bruce Worrall, who previously worked at digital-art startup Gallery Player.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

You reach for the peppers, dicing them to the perfect size for your famous homemade stir-fry. As the knife does its work, cameras mounted around your kitchen are watching. They log your knife technique and the size of the dice, while sensors at the stove relay the temperature when you add them to the mix.

All the information is beamed to a computer that crunches the data, essentially learning the recipe—and then storing it online, so it can help your cousin in Florida make sure he’s nailing the steps the next time he busts out the wok for a dinner party.

As crazy as that might sound, the march of cheap, powerful, connected, and increasingly smart gadgets means scenarios like this could be just over the horizon. And a rebooted research partnership at the University of Washington is aiming to decode the path to those experiences.

It’s called the Intel Science and Technology Center for Pervasive Computing, a project that brings $2.5 million per year in direct funding from Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). The center is headquartered at the UW, and will be co-led by Dieter Fox, a professor in the UW’s computer science department. Anthony LaMarca, a scientist at Intel, is the other leader. Check out the video below, via Intel, for a glimpse at the vision for the new center.

Fox tells me that the program has at least a three-year commitment, with an option for two more years of funding if Intel wants to continue the investment. The results of the research are intended to be made widely available as published papers and open-source software, Fox says.

Although the UW will be the center’s hub and will have nine people working on the project, researchers from Stanford, UCLA, Cornell, the University of Rochester, and the Georgia Institute of Technology also are part of the core research team. Among the other UW researchers is Shwetak Patel, an expert in sensor networks who just won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”

Fox says the new Intel team is designed to iron out a few wrinkles seen in other types of collaborative research—being small enough to be nimble, but large and diverse enough to tackle wide-ranging subjects like that super-connected smart kitchen.

“Intel put actually quite a bit of trust in the team, where they say, ‘OK, we’ll bring together the best people in the field, and they’re going to do very interesting research.’ And they did not say we should work toward something that could, say five years from now, be a product that Intel could sell,” Fox says.

What Intel does gain (other than some nice press, of course) is insight into the next wave of computing platforms—things that could run on some nice Intel chips.

And that kitchen scenario I sketched out above isn’t just a writing exercise. It’s an example of one practical area that Intel’s research money is targeted toward. Fox says the targets will help the team focus its efforts, which is one key when you bring together researchers from fields as different as low-power sensors and camera-based interfaces.

The new Intel center is a rejiggered strategy for the company’s outside research spending. It previously sponsored standalone labs that collaborated with universities, but switched earlier this year to this new kind of embedded approach, partially to save money on overhead and staffing.

The UW-based Intel center and its counterparts across the country are the keys to a $100 million Intel program to bankroll research at universities. The other centers already announced are working on visual, secure, embedded, and cloud computing research.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

University of Washington professor Shwetak Patel, best known for his work on developing sensor networks that can be used to monitor power use in buildings, has been named a MacArthur Fellow—the award commonly known as the “genius grant,” which comes with a $500,000 cash prize that recipients can use however they want.

Patel, 29, is well-known around the Pacific Northwest innovation community as a researcher, teacher, and entrepreneur—last year, his company Zensi was purchased by Belkin for undisclosed terms. Now, a lot more folks are going to learn about his work.

There’s a bit of theater involved in the MacArthur Fellow awards. Winners are nominated without their knowledge by someone who is asked to serve as one of the award’s rotating board of nominators. If all goes as planned, winners don’t know they’re even up for consideration until someone from the foundation calls to deliver the news. (Patel was nominated by Henry Levy, chairman of the UW’s computer science and engineering department.) The money is paid out quarterly over five years.

In July, Patel was also named a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow, after being nominated by the university. That honor noted that Patel’s sensor research was being used not just for energy efficiency, but also in “elder care, home safety, and the creation of new approaches for natural user interfaces.”

Patel was traveling as the awards were announced and couldn’t be reached for any comment. Ed Lazowska, the UW’s Bill and Melinda Gates chairman of computer science and engineering, called Patel “an incredibly creative young person” and “the sweetest guy in the world.” Patel works jointly for the computer science and electrical engineering departments, and leads the school’s Ubiquitous Computing Lab.

“The ‘sustainability sensing’ that Shwetak is doing will have huge impact. You can determine exactly how much power each device in your home is consuming, from a single inexpensive device that you plug into any wall outlet,” Lazowska wrote in an email tonight. “He also has extremely low power sensors whose batteries can last for decades—you can toss a few under your refrigerator and it alerts you if your ice maker starts leaking on your hardwood floor, before damage is done.”

As Jeremy Jaech recently wrote in an Xconomy guest column, “Patel’s sensors are hidden inside a wall or under a water heater to detect and alert a homeowner, or an insurance company, when a sensor detects water leaks, fire or carbon monoxide. These sensors will be able to save the lives of many homeowners, and save insurers hundreds of millions of dollars; water damage claims now surpass fire claims and natural disasters and are very expensive to settle.”

This is the second MacArthur Fellow connected to the UW’s computer science and engineering department—Lazowska notes that Yoky Matsuoka was named a fellow in 2007 for her work in neurorobotics.

Here’s a video from the MacArthur Foundation about Patel, which is from this profile page about him.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

One of the scariest things as a parent is to learn that your child has a disease that has no cure. This happened six years ago when my son William was born prematurely at 30 weeks and developed hydrocephalus. It was a big Greek word for a condition that had little medical research and its only treatment required brain surgery. The treatment, a shunt, has the highest failure rate of any medically implanted device. Nearly 50 percent fail within the first two years. So my poor boy had five brain surgeries in three years. This was no way to live.

As a Microsoft executive used to data at my fingertips, I was scared by the lack of scientific knowledge of the brain and hydrocephalus, and the lack of viable treatment options in development. I’m accustomed to having market “influence” in technology, but this is a whole different arena, and I was intimidated at first on how to positively change the scientific research ecosystem for hydrocephalus. But with a small dose of bravado, a large quantity of ignorance and most importantly a sick child who I loved, I was determined to change the state of research for hydrocephalus which only receives a few million dollars in federal research funds each year.

I am not sure if there is one blueprint for increasing the amount of disease research funding. There are lots of stories worth understanding like Pat Furlong’s. She is a mom of two fatally ill children, who has increased funding for a disabling genetic disease called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. And there is Michael J. Fox, the actor who used both his money and fame to increase Parkinson’s disease awareness and research along with former U.S. Representative Morris Udall.

I was a former Microsoft executive when I went to the first hydrocephalus workshop held by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in September 2005. There were 180 researchers, clinicians, government staffers and voluntary health organizations. The scientific medical content was too much for my computer-science oriented brain to process. But I met people and listened. I was overwhelmed on how to tackle this problem by myself. I needed a team — like the strategic consulting company McKinsey — that I had worked with at Microsoft. I didn’t have this option.

So I contacted a friend, Charles Hill, with the University of Washington MBA program. In January 2006, he gave me an opportunity to speak to the Executive MBA students. I described the dearth of hydrocephalus research. I asked who would join me in “boiling the ocean” and setting a strategy to “move the needles.” One student, John Smith, said, “I have a five-year-old son with hydrocephalus. I’ll help.” We formed a team with several of his classmates with the mission of changing the state of hydrocephalus research.

The team developed a three-part plan: to form a North American clinical research network that would pool patient data to create better treatments; push Seattle Children’s Hospital to form a center of excellence; and join the board of directors of the largest patient advocacy organization – the Hydrocephalus Association (HA).

Five years later, the Hydrocephalus Clinical Research Network (HCRN) now includes seven children’s hospitals and affiliated universities in the U.S. and Canada. HCRN has reduced the post-surgical infection rate by more than 35 percent. Seattle Children’s, spurred by a group of dedicated parents doing fundraising led by my wife Lori, hired two hydrocephalus researchers and is beginning to develop a significant hydrocephalus research program that spans from its Center for Integrative Brain Research to its clinical practice by participating in HCRN. I also joined the board of HA in 2006.

HA is now twice the size when I joined ($1.7MM). I became chairman in 2009. In three years, it has gone from being a national support organization to the largest private funder of hydrocephalus research. HA used that bully pulpit to encourage the NIH to spend more time, effort and money on hydrocephalus research. Funding has doubled, but it is still not enough. In 2008, I met with Story Landis, the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). It is the largest funder of brain research in the country. I shared what I was doing about hydrocephalus research and pressed for more effort from NINDS.

Last week, I was appointed to the NINDS Advisory Council for a 4-year term. It is an 18-member panel set up to advise Director Landis on research grants and policy strategy. I’m officially a “special” government employee. I’m no longer running a startup or managing a division at Microsoft. But I tell my son William that daddy is doing everything he can to try to find a cure for hydrocephalus!

Comments (15) | Reprints | Share:          

At Wayne State University, labs aren’t just a sterile space for solemn experiments. For students in the school’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development (IMSD), it’s a chance to work directly with their instructors, get a taste of the scientific life, and gather some up-close career advice in the process.

“The laboratory setting is almost like a kitchen,” says Joseph Dunbar, WSU’s associate vice president for research and the program’s director. “They can ask questions, interact … there’s not as much of a chasm between students and faculty. They see what’s possible, and it gives them confidence to talk about their careers in an intimate fashion.”

Last month, the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year grant of more than $3 million to support the IMSD program, which seeks to nurture student interest in scientific careers by providing them with opportunities to participate in behavioral and biomedical research projects.

Dunbar says the original idea behind the program was getting more ethnic minority students to work on scientific research projects. Wayne State was a natural fit for the program: When the IMSD program started in 1978, many students came from auto industry families and were the first in their familes to go to college.

“In metro Detroit, you had multiple generations of families working for the auto industry, and you’d grow up, go to high school, and then go to Mr. Ford or Mr. GM for a job—that’s just how it was done,” Dunbar says. “But those jobs are probably never coming back, and we know that America’s next move forward probably involves science and technology.”

At Wayne State, the program has supported more than 700 students so far. As of 2010, 390 undergraduates in the program had gone on to complete bachelor’s degrees, 64 had obtained master’s degrees, and 68 had gone on to complete doctorates. Some of the post-IMSD careers have been noteworthy. Eric Ansorge, who did research at WSU on heart failure through the program, is now an Army major in charge of a large biomedical research program. … Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share:          

Deb Roy doesn’t strike me as a Jersey Shore kind of guy. Yet he can tell me exactly what viewers are saying about the estimable Deena Cortese during any episode, or how many people are annoyed by Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino and are tweeting about him (no, I haven’t been—too busy getting my GTL).

I’ll spare you the sordid details, but Bluefin Labs won’t. The Cambridge, MA-based tech company, which Roy co-founded in 2008, is all about understanding social-media conversations around TV programs and ads. Not just what’s being said and the sentiment behind it—as many other companies are tracking in various fields—but also the precise demographics of who’s saying it, what else they’re saying (and watching), and how their profile and comments are correlated with other people and programs, in an aggregate sense.

Bluefin Labs has gotten its share of press for its technology approach. But the company seems to be coming into its own as a business, and it has been garnering interest from TV network executives and big brand marketers as of late. So I sat down with Roy, Bluefin’s CEO, to learn more about the company’s history and approach.

Roy is a professor on leave from the MIT Media Lab. He’s an expert in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data mining, among other things. His company, which now has north of 30 employees, has deep computer-science research in its DNA (for better or worse). Based largely on its technology and team, it has raised more than $7 million from Redpoint Ventures, Acacia Woods Ventures, Lerer Ventures, and other investors.

My first order of business: where did the name come from? Well, the story of Bluefin Labs (not to be confused with Bluefin Robotics, another MIT startup) goes back to Roy’s research at the Media Lab, where he has been a faculty member since 2000.

As he puts it, his research program was “built on understanding the relationship between words and context.” (Roy is known for having recorded a quarter-million hours of video of his young son’s early life, in part to understand how a computer might learn human language.) Around 2007, a PhD student of Roy’s, Michael Fleischman, was working on a project to analyze video footage of baseball games and audio of announcers talking about the games—a convenient (and fun) database for associating words and context. Conceptually, the goal was to teach a machine to understand what a “fly ball” or “home run” looks like, for applications such as video search.

A program director at the National Science Foundation happened to see an article about the baseball research. He called Roy and suggested he apply for a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant. Roy had no business experience—it was a “part of my brain I didn’t know existed,” he says—but he and Fleischman (who “has entrepreneurial blood running through his veins,” Roy says) wrote up a proposal. And in 2008, they were awarded a $100,000 SBIR grant. They had 48 hours to pick a name for their company, so they named it after a sushi bar in Porter Square (Blue Fin) where they had dinner. The name stuck.

Bluefin Labs started out by analyzing other types of sports programs, like football. Social media was taking off, so Roy and company ran a test with the National Football League to track what people … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Some news from the world of life sciences equipment makers today. EMD Millipore, the Billerica, MA-based subsidiary of German pharmaceutical and chemical giant Merck KGaA, has agreed to acquire Seattle-based Amnis for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year.

Millipore was bought by Merck KGaA for $7 billion-plus in cash in March 2010 and combined with EMD Chemicals, a New Jersey-based Merck subsidiary. Last week, EMD Millipore named Robert Yates, a diagnostics veteran from Roche, its new president. He succeeds Bernd Reckmann, the Merck exec who replaced Martin Madaus (another Roche vet) as head of Millipore after the acquisition last year.

Meanwhile, Amnis has taken an interesting path to this point. The Seattle firm, which spun out of the University of Washington in 1998, makes an imaging device that provides detailed images of large numbers of cells—potentially enabling researchers to detect trace amounts of cancer in a blood sample, or determine whether a drug will hit a particular protein target. The company’s customers include academic researchers and big drugmakers. According to today’s release, Amnis has 40 employees and generated sales of $14 million in 2010. The company’s investors include CVF, MedVenture Associates, OrbiMed Capital, and WRF Capital.

“The combination of Amnis with EMD Millipore will greatly accelerate development of novel applications in imaging flow cytometry, enhance our customer support, and accelerate product development,” said Amnis co-founder and CEO David Basiji, in a statement. No word yet on whether the company’s Seattle office will remain intact or if employees will be moving.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Here in Boston, we like to tout our universities, our faculty, our students. The academic community is one of the crowning strengths of the New England economy, not to mention a major driver of its global impact. But what have universities done for the local startup and business innovation community lately?

I’m not going to give a full answer here—it’s one of the broader themes I’m exploring around town—but I’ll give you a piece of the puzzle.

Harvard University’s Office of Technology Development has what it calls an “Accelerator Fund” that has been chugging along for four years now, and it has achieved some notable results. As of last month, the $10 million fund has given out $5.2 million in grants, which have supported more than 30 projects over five annual cycles. It’s still early to add up the returns on this investment, but already it has led to more than $10 million in partnership money for the university, and several startups that have received outside venture funding. (The Harvard office declined to give specifics on licensing revenues to date.)

What’s more, the model apparently has proven successful enough that the team is about to begin raising a much bigger fund, in the $20 million to $30 million range. And unlike in the past, when Harvard developed a laggardly reputation when it came to commercializing its research, universities around the country are starting to look at the school as a possible role model for technology transfer and startup development practices.

The Accelerator Fund, which Xconomy wrote about in early 2008, was created to help Harvard scientists commercialize their inventions by forming industry partnerships, licensing technology, and starting new companies, primarily in life sciences and biomedical fields. As technology development head and senior associate provost Isaac Kohlberg puts it, “The pipelines of Harvard were empty.” The school “suffered from a branding issue with stakeholders about the role of technology development,” he says.

Kohlberg and his team, which includes Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer of the Accelerator Fund, were brought in to overhaul Harvard’s tech transfer and development offices. Kohlberg joined … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

What do running a farm, being a mobster, and taking orders at the drive-through at Dunkin’ Donuts all have in common?

They’re all experiences simulated on Facebook, thanks to game developers Zynga (maker of Mafia Wars and Farmville) and a much newer startup, PartingGift, which operates in a Massachusetts area not exactly known as a tech hub: Hyannis on Cape Cod.

Haven’t heard of the Dunkin’ Donuts game? Called On Your Mark, it debuted on the first of this month and lives on Dunkin’ Donuts’ Facebook fan page. The game interface pushes an image of a coffee cup along a virtual coffee assembly, with stations for flavor, sweetener, milk, and brew, with a virtual customer’s order. The player is responsible for correctly filling the order in the allotted one minute. The orders become bigger and the cups move faster as the players hit higher levels of the game. Ten players a day have the chance to each win $10 gift cards to Dunkin’.

On Your Mark does more than waste hours of the players’ time and earn the game developer money in the process, though, says PartingGift founder and CEO Brad Crowell.

“The whole game platform was designed with research in mind; there’s a strong data-collection component that’s part of our platform,” Crowell says.

See, On Your Mark starts off by asking the player to input their favorite Dunkin’ Donuts beverage to make at the virtual drive-through.

“We are looking to figure out what people’s preferences are in terms of beverages—that’s sort of the starting point of being able to understand what we can do with those preferences,” Crowell says. “We’re working with Dunkin’ on multiple games, building on that sort of information.”

He says he got the idea for the company four or so years ago, after automakers like Ford released online apps where consumers … Next Page »

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:          

CyPhy Works, the Boston-area robotics startup led by iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, has raised an additional $1.2 million in equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The investors in the round weren’t disclosed, but John Simon and Anita Jones are listed on the form as directors of the company, which was originally called The Droid Works. General Catalyst is an existing investor in CyPhy, which is still in stealth mode but is reportedly working on flying robots (UAVs), among other things. The startup previously raised $1.75 million early last year and won a $2.4 million government research grant in late 2009 to study UAVs.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-venture-capitalist, said something interesting in last weekend’s New York Times magazine interview. It wasn’t his “there’s no tech bubble” spiel, or even his prediction that we’ll all be riding around in self-driving cars in 10 to 20 years, thanks to Google.

No, it was that he singled out “wearable computing”—portable devices like a pendant around your neck that record “everything around you all the time”—as a Next Big Thing. (Like Twitter, Facebook, or the iPhone, this could either be the greatest thing since sliced bread, or the downfall of humanity—or both.)

Now one Boston-area startup is taking the mechanics of the idea a step further. MC10, based in Cambridge, MA, is developing flexible (“conformal”) electronics that can bend, stretch, and wrap around to conform to surfaces in the natural world, like the human body. That’s a far cry from the guts of today’s computers, which are based on rigid silicon circuits that are laid out on flat surfaces.

The three-year-old company has garnered increasing attention for its efforts, raising a $12.5 million Series B round led by Braemar Energy Ventures last month. (North Bridge Venture Partners was the original venture investor in 2009.) MC10 also has a deal with Reebok to develop a wearable product that’s very hush-hush (probably electronics integrated into footwear or other apparel for monitoring performance). The startup has also collaborated with Massachusetts General Hospital and other institutions to develop a new type of balloon catheter, equipped with sensors, to assist with heart procedures. Next up: wearable power and newfangled image sensors.

“We’re trying to change the world by reshaping electronics,” says Dave Icke, CEO of MC10. Icke is a semiconductor industry veteran who was previously an executive with Advanced Electron Beams and Teradyne.

The idea of flexible electronics isn’t new. But unlike other approaches over the past decade, such as using organic semiconductor materials or microwires (which tend to be slow), MC10 uses high-performance silicon circuits, which means the devices could be as fast as the computers you’re used to using. The trick is in exactly how the silicon is laid out and combined with stretchy materials. Imagine little islands of silicon linked by springy interconnects—“like a Slinky in between,” Icke says—with the whole thing deposited on a pre-stretched polymer. Depending on the application, the team adjusts the thickness of the islands and the interconnects so as to minimize the strain on the circuitry.

MC10's silicon-based photovoltaic cells could be used for portable or even wearable, personal power generation (image: John Rogers, UIUC)

MC10’s technology is based on research done in the lab of John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who is a co-founder of the company. Rogers, a former postdoc with chemist George Whitesides at Harvard University, was the winner of the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize announced last month. And the glue for the whole team is Carmichael Roberts, the general partner who led North Bridge’s investment; Roberts also worked with Whitesides as a postdoc, and he knew Icke from a previous company. (Icke, for his part, had gone to business school with North Bridge’s Jamie Goldstein.)

That’s all well and good, but making a living as a hardware startup is no easy task, especially when you’re selling a new technology. So MC10 has identified a couple of potentially lucrative markets for the next phase of its growth. One is portable (or even wearable) power generation—a set of projects supported by existing government contracts. Imagine a flexible sheet of solar-cell material that coats or is woven into the surface of a tent or an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to absorb sunlight and store electricity. People have been talking about designing such a material for years, but MC10’s (see photo above) just might be good enough to make it work.

“Instead of having a bolt-on rigid box that gets attached to a roof or vehicle, [people could] integrate those efficient materials into a tent or awning, or into vests and clothing,” Icke says. … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share: