We’re happy to announce that there’s now an easier to way to read Xconomy on your mobile phone. Go to http://m.xconomy.com for the new mobile-friendly version of our site, which we’ve simplified for easy navigation on small screens.

All the usual content is there: our Boston, San Diego, and Seattle news stories, along with Xconomist Forum posts from all three cities, not to mention subject-specific pages for our infotech, life science, startups, energy, and deals stories. But it’s all designed to look super-clean and load quickly on a mobile device.

The truth is that no website designed with desktop browsing in mind fares well on the screen of a mobile phone. iPhone owners might demur, but even with the iPhone’s Safari browser, you have to do a bunch of zooming and panning to make your way around a regular Web page. If you’re on the go and you just want to catch a few blog posts, you don’t want to mess with all that, or with the nifty tabs, menus, and image maps that make many sites more functional in full Web browsers but just get in the way on mobile devices.

That’s why there’s a crop of companies—some of them in Xconomy’s own home towns—devoted to helping publishers optimize their content for mobile devices. We found a great one in Providence, RI, called Mofuse. Funded in part by the Slater Technology Fund, which uses money appropriated by the Rhode Island legislature to help promote technology entrepreneurship in the Ocean State, Mofuse is already helping thousands of organizations go mobile, including Fox News, Harvard Business School, Chicago Public Radio, as well as great blogs like Mashable and ReadWriteWeb. (See Mofuse’s press release about our partnership.)

We hope you enjoy the mobile site, and welcome your feedback, suggestions, and bug notes. Because our office mobile armory is limited to a few iPhones and Blackberrys, we’re especially eager to hear how the site looks and functions on other platforms. Please post a comment below, or write me at wroush@xconomy.com.

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Behind the stubborn economic clouds, there may be a few hints of blue sky. A few companies, in other words, are hiring rather than firing—and a new report from StartUpHire, a Vienna, VA-based job board that specializes in advertising open positions at venture-backed startups, has the lowdown on which ones (see the lists below).

As measured by the number of open positions tracked by StartUpHire, Xconomy’s home regions are among the top six fastest-growing job markets in the country. (The San Francisco Bay Area is at the top of that list, followed by Boston, New York, Southern California, the Washington DC-Baltimore region, and Seattle.) There are more than 700 positions open at venture-backed startups in the Boston area, according to the company. The number of openings tops 500 in Southern California, and in Seattle there are 258 positions open.

“This information from StartUpHire is a strong indicator that even in the current economic climate startups continue to provide tremendous growth opportunities and are a collective force in regional and national job markets,” Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said in a StartUpHire announcement. Nancy Saucier, executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association, added that she expects venture-backed companies “will help lead the way to a robust job growth recovery.”

The fastest growing companies, as measured by job openings in the second quarter of 2009:

Boston
Acceleron Pharma
Acquia
CambridgeSoft
E Ink
Gomez
ITA Software
Kronos
Senior Whole Health
Turbine
Zipcar

[lists continue on next page]

…Next Page »

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Seattle-based Verdiem has some encouraging news today from around the country—and its own backyard. The maker of energy-saving software for personal computers is announcing results from trials performed by the city governments of Seattle, Chicago, and Honolulu. These customers have been using Verdiem’s product over a period of months to a year, in an effort to make their PCs smarter about shutting down when they’re not being used, while also allowing the computers to do things like turn back on when software patches need to be installed.

Verdiem’s PC software package, called Surveyor, now includes a dashboard feature, also announced today, which lets corporate and government customers monitor PC energy costs and carbon emission savings more effectively through the use of charts and graphs.

Energy costs and emissions from PCs are surprisingly high, mainly because there are so many of them (about a billion worldwide). According to a 2008 report from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative, PCs account for more than 30 percent of all IT energy costs—more than servers, data centers, or printers. What’s more, companies, organizations, and individuals waste some $4 billion a year by leaving PCs, laptops, and monitors on when they’re not being used.

All three cities involved with the Verdiem announcement reported significant PC energy savings:

—The City of Seattle has deployed Verdiem’s software on more than 8,000 PCs across 30-plus city departments, and reduced PC energy consumption by some 35 percent. “The results we are achieving with Seattle-based Verdiem in reducing the City’s PC energy consumption demonstrate, in a very tangible way, how we can collectively save on energy costs and protect our planet,” said Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels in a statement.

—The City of Chicago started using Verdiem’s software in February of this year, and says it has reduced its PC energy consumption by 37 percent and has eliminated more than 350,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.

—The City of Honolulu deployed the software on 1,700 PCs starting in July 2008, and saved the city $30 per PC per year, reducing PC energy costs by more than 30 percent. Honolulu has the highest energy rates in the country (30 cents per kilowatt-hour), so its city government has extra incentive to reduce its electricity consumption.

Verdiem was founded in 2001 and is backed by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and NCD Investors, among others. It appears to be moving full steam ahead under new leadership: the company announced its incoming CEO, Jeremy Jaech, six months ago. Jaech was the co-founder of software giants Aldus and Visio, and was also involved with Trumba, a Seattle startup. When he took the helm of Verdiem back in December, he told me that big companies and other organizations are where the real energy and emissions savings are—and where Verdiem’s biggest opportunities lie. “It’s a simple concept with a quick ROI,” Jaech said. “Companies are starting to get really interested.”

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Two weeks ago, Xconomy published our first iteration of what we call the Seattle Layoff Litany. It’s a document that tracks tech and life sciences job cuts in the Northwest. Here is a quick update about three local companies that have gone through layoffs since then (one is unconfirmed). I thought it was especially interesting that each company has spawned successful entrepreneurs who are active in new ventures that we’ve written about extensively in the past month or two.

1. Hubspan

This is unconfirmed, but Xconomy has learned from a source familiar with the company that Seattle-based Hubspan, a maker of business-to-business integration software, laid off 11 employees (roughly 20 percent of the staff) across sales, marketing, and services and development, on November 14. E-mails sent to company representatives were not returned, and one person with apparent knowledge of the situation would not comment. My point here is not to muckrake, but rather to keep up with the facts.

Hubspan co-founder and former CEO Rick Luebbe now leads the Seattle energy-storage startup EnerG2, which we profiled last week.

2. CarDomain

Seattle startup CarDomain, a social-networking site for auto enthusiasts, cut 16 jobs (about half its staff) on November 18. “Although we are growing overall traffic and member engagement year-on-year, the economy and the automotive industry have taken a significant turn for the worse, leading to very pessimistic industry projections of advertising budgets and a protracted recovery period,” said CEO Rajan Krishnamurty, in a statement to TechFlash.

CarDomain was founded in 1998 by Alex Algard, who went on to become CEO of WhitePages.com, and more recently a limited partner in Founder’s Co-op, the Seattle-based peer-to-peer seed stage fund that we profiled last month.

3. Jobster

The Seattle-based office-networking firm Jobster cut some 15 positions (38 percent of its staff) on November 13, as reported by TechFlash. Founded in 2004, Jobster is backed by the likes of Ignition Partners, and once had about 150 employees. It is now down to about 25.

Former Jobster employees Dave Lefkow and Justin Esch, who left in 2007, have since made their name with a new startup called Bacon Salt, which they’ve been promoting using social media, to great effect.

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It’s a reality of life in the risky high-tech world: even in good times, many startups go extinct. But when the economic environment turns harsh, as it certainly has this autumn, natural selection starts to speed up—with smaller, less established ventures as the first casualties. Even the companies fit enough to survive tough times find that cutting staff is the quickest way to conserve cash.

While Silicon Valley has probably suffered the most job losses so far, Xconomy’s home cities of Boston, Seattle, and San Diego are definitely feeling the pain. So we decided it was time to start tallying up the damage in each of those regions—1,363 layoffs in Boston, 1,382 in San Diego, and 920 in Seattle just since June. But those totals are just today’s snapshot—as we hear about additional company shutdowns and reductions-in-force, we will keep updating our Layoff Litany lists, and we’ll provide a running total at the bottom of each list.

We aren’t the first tech blog to weigh in with layoff trackers—TechCrunch and CNET are both doing a good job—but they’re attempting to track the entire high-tech universe. Here at Xconomy we wanted to focus on the economic picture in our own communities. A tip of the hat, however, to CNET’s Rafe Needleman for giving us the idea to publish these lists using Google Spreadsheets.

Please click on the links below for the city-specific layoff lists. Somewhat arbitrarily, we have limited our lists to layoffs announced in or after June, 2008. If you have corrections or additions for the Xconomy layoff trackers, please contact us at editors@xconomy.com.

Boston Tech Layoffs

San Diego Tech Layoffs

Seattle Tech Layoffs

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The economics headlines can sound awfully abstract, until people start losing their jobs. We’re seeing a lot more talented tech and biotech workers heading to the unemployment lines, and frankly, with the dwindling cash reserves at many companies, we expect to see more to come.

Rather than talk about the latest half-percentage point increase in unemployment rates, we’ve decided to tally up the total job losses at tech companies located in Seattle. Our initial analysis, which dates back to June 2008, shows this region’s companies have shed 920 workers. The most prominent example of the global downturn hitting home came last month, when pharmaceutical giant Merck axed 7,200 jobs worldwide, and decided to close down its Rosetta Inpharmatics operation in Seattle with 300 workers. Some of those folks will land on their feet—about 100 are estimated to be offered transfers to Boston—but it’s a painful setback for the Northwest.

Below you’ll find our Seattle Layoff Litany, where we are following layoffs in both technology and life sciences firms (we’ve also done a layoff tally for our other cities of San Diego and Boston, and you can find an overview to all our layoff trackers here).

The most recent layoffs are listed first. Today’s total of 920 layoffs is likely to grow, so scroll down to the bottom of the spreadsheet for the running total. One note: To explore the “More Info” links in the table below, please right-click or command-click on the links, then select “Open Link in New Tab” or “Open Link in New Window.” Due to a quirk in Google Spreadsheets, clicking on these links directly will cause a new Web page to open inside the spreadsheet window.

If you have corrections or additions to the list, please let us know by writing editors@xconomy.com.

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Andy Sack’s favorite coffee drink is a 12-ounce, single-shot, non-fat latte. But if you’re meeting with him to pitch your latest technology startup idea, be advised that he’s probably on his second or third cup already. These days, his schedule is filled with meetings and networking—most of it pretty informal. “I’ll have coffee with anyone,” he says.

On Tuesday morning, he sat down with me at Louisa’s Cafe near Lake Union in Seattle. It’s where Sack hosts his weekly “open coffee” hour, drawing a regular crowd of entrepreneur types looking to network over coffee and pastries. (”They don’t have the best coffee, but they have the best blueberry scones,” says Sack—and he’s right.) I wanted to get the full story of Founder’s Co-op, the startup fund run by Sack and fellow Web entrepreneur Chris DeVore, as well as hear feedback from the community. Back in June, I reported on the background and motivation behind the half-year-old venture. Then, just a week ago, Luke reported that Sack and DeVore have raised a new round of funding and announced 14 limited partners in the fund, all of them tech entrepreneurs who are well-known in Seattle innovation circles.

It’s a unique model, and Sack began by clarifying the terms of the new financing. The fund is $2.5 million, with each limited partner (LP) putting in $150-200K, which buys each of them a stake in all of the startups to be funded. They will meet as a group six to eight times a year. “It’s a peer-to-peer, seed-stage fund,” says Sack. “Chris and I are the decision makers—it’s not a democracy. As a group, the LPs provide deal flow and help guide our investment strategy.” Crucially, they will also provide mentoring and connections for the portfolio companies, which Sack says will typically be made up of small teams of young, first-time entrepreneurs (usually just two people).

The peer-to-peer aspect is a big part of what makes Founder’s Co-op different from the Y Combinator and TechStar incubators of the world (we’ve covered those here and here). The firm’s limited partners include Ben Elowitz and Kevin Flaherty of Wetpaint, Andy Liu and David Niu from BuddyTV, Adam Brotman from Corbis and Barefoot Yoga, and Geoff Entress, formerly of Madrona Venture Group. I asked a few of them about their involvement in the fund, and what’s special about it. “The model is special because it really helps entrepreneurs jump start their businesses,” says BuddyTV’s Niu. “They don’t have to worry about some associated startup infrastructural costs like phones, Internet, etc. if they move into the co-op’s office. In addition, they can access a wide range of ideas and experiences from Andy [Sack] and other LPs who have successfully started their own companies and want to give back to other local entrepreneurs.”

As for why he joined, Niu touts “the opportunity to work with Andy and the other LPs. I have a great amount of respect for what they have accomplished individually, and I think pooling their collective experiences will be a formidable asset that portfolio companies can tap…Of course, there is much less certainty and a higher chance to see failure when you invest in something early stage and unproven. At the same time, you can have an outsized positive influence and guiding hand to hopefully channel them towards success.”

Kevin Flaherty of Wetpaint echoes the sentiment about Sack and the other partners. “They all have miles of experience in the startup world. Being able to experience how they evaluate potential investments is a great learning opportunity for me. From a purely financial standpoint, there is a great need in the Seattle startup community for this type of investment. Matching that need with good insight provides a great opportunity for a solid rate of return,” Flaherty says. “We’ve already seen less venture interest in certain types of businesses and renewed focus on certain business metrics that for a while were undervalued. That being said, I expect there to be significant startup activity that is uniquely suited for Founders Co-op. Two folks in a garage are perfect for the fund.”

I also gathered some reactions from people outside the co-op—local angel investors and …Next Page »

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My last memory of Andrew Chien might be wrestling with him on the living room floor circa 1981. Growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, his family and mine were friends. Chien grew up to be a professor of computer science at his hometown University of Illinois, then a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and now a vice president and director of research at Intel. Our meeting yesterday, at the 2008 Intel Research Seattle open house, was much more civilized than our last encounter (when I was about 10 and he was a teenager).

Besides his expertise in distributed computing and corporate research, Chien is interesting to Xconomy because of his connections to various innovation communities, on the West Coast and elsewhere. He has lived in San Diego for the past 10 years or so, but his Intel office is in Hillsboro, OR, and he also spends a fair bit of time at corporate headquarters in Santa Clara, CA. “Intel is very distributed,” he says. “I have global responsibilities, including in China and India.” When we talked, he was getting ready for a business trip to Taiwan.

From his global perspective, Chien has some keen insights into East Coast and West Coast innovation. “The Boston community was built on the backs of Route 128 defense contractors, which gave birth to the Digitals of the world, and then biotechs came out of universities,” he says. San Diego has some similarities to that model, Chien points out. “I’m amazed by Qualcomm and the wirelesss diaspora that came out of it. Qualcomm came out of the defense industry—Route 15 companies, which were heavily defense contractors—and there’s materials and radio expertise which is quite different from what you see in Silicon Valley.”

“The other interesting thing in San Diego,” he continues, “is there’s been really interesting crossover between information theory and communications, with life sciences. All that [information theory] methodology is spilling into the bio space…Bioinformatics really started at the level of blueprints. Then it moved rapidly to gene regulation, control loops, and systems. Those systems don’t operate in the traditional way that systems operate in electrical or mechanical engineering, because they’re statistical. Bringing those [mathematical] techniques to bear on biological systems to understand how they work, that synergy is powerful…The number of information theorists per capita in San Diego is high.”

I asked Chien what Intel Research is doing in the field, and he mentioned nucleic acid sequencing (e.g., DNA and RNA). “It’s all in the broad vein of the ‘X-dollar genome,’ which is getting cheaper and cheaper. Most techniques today, like 23andMe and Affymetrix, are based on optical sensing,” he says. “For Intel, optical is interesting, but it’s not the sweet spot for our interest…The grand dream is, can you move to a basis of electrical sensing.” If so, he says, you could do a huge amount of scaling up that’s possible because of the infrastructure built up around silicon chips. “The very broad vision of where this goes is not for medical or scientific research, but for sequencing as broad-based sensing—for instance, environmental sensing [e.g., food or water testing for safety] at low cost. It’s a long-range research effort.”

On that note, I asked Chien about his broader vision for Intel Research. “We call it ‘Essential Computing,’” he says. “About two and a half years ago, when I started at Intel, we took a hard look at where computing is going. The big change is that computing is moving from work-oriented tasks to social and communication-oriented applications, including health and well-being.” Essential computing, as Chien explains, will “simplify and enrich our lives.”

The effort rests on two main pillars or technological thrusts, he says. The first is “new functionality” that will allow computing devices to sense and be aware of everything from your emotional state to who your friends are. To some extent, that’s happening already. The second pillar is motivated by what Chien calls “the dirty secret of the IT industry—our technology is hard to use. It often lets us down. We need to make technology something you’d depend on” for sensitive communications with people important to you, he says. In the end, it’s about making computing devices simpler and easier to use. “It’s like your wristwatch,” Chien says. “It’s got to become that integrated and that reliable.”

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It’s been one month to the day since Apple simultaneously released the iPhone 3G, pushed the 2.0 version of the iPhone firmware to all iPhone owners, started distributing native iPhone applications through the App Store, and launched its MobileMe communications service. Of all these changes, the most momentous, in the context of the mobile industry as a whole, was probably the introduction of the App Store.

Until the appearance of third-party applications that ran natively on the iPhone, the device was just a super-cool combination phone and iPod with an excellent Web browser. (Unless, of course, you dared to jail-break your device, void your warranty, and install apps not approved by Apple.) But now it’s a full-fledged mobile computer. You can do almost anything on your iPhone that you can do from a Mac or a PC, provided you’re willing to use the tiny on-screen keyboard. In fact, you can do a lot more, since any program that runs on iPhone can tap into its built-in camera and microphone, its motion-sensitive accelerometer, and its GPS chip. That pushes the state of mobile technology forward immeasurably, and it’s an advance that companies like Google, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, and Sony-Ericsson are now struggling to catch up with.

Here at Xconomy we’ve been saying for a while now that we want to showcase developers in our Boston and Seattle home regions who are contributing to the iPhone revolution with their own apps. Turns out that was easier said than done, since Apple made developers sign Draconian non-disclosure agreements that prevented them from showing their apps to outsiders until the launch of the App Store. Even now, there’s no quick way to figure out where the makers of the roughly 1,500 apps featured in the App Store are located.

But for you, valued reader, we will go to any length. Below is our first pass at a catalog of organizations in the Boston and Seattle areas that have created iPhone apps. With one exception, the programs listed are all native applications available from the App Store.

You’ll notice that the Seattle area is much better represented in our lists than Boston. There are at least three possible reasons for that. 1) We just haven’t found all of the Boston-area mobile app developers working on software for the iPhone. 2) Boston is indeed one epicenter of the mobile industry, but the area’s wireless companies tend to cluster around infrastructure technologies and mobile marketing rather than consumer-facing applications. 3) Seattle, by contrast, is one of the world capitals of consumer applications development, especially in the gaming and productivity areas.

We’re sure we haven’t found all of the Boston and Seattle companies working on iPhone apps, so we’re counting on you to help us add to these lists. Please send additions to editors@xconomy.com and/or leave a comment below.

iPhone Apps from Companies in Boston

Local Picks—TripAdvisor (Newton, MA). Category: Travel. Contains restaurant recommendations for 410,000 restaurants in Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, and more locations, drawing on more than 1.5 million user reviews at TripAdvisor.com. Free.

iChing—Neutrinos, LLC (Brighton, MA). Category: Entertainment. An electronic version of the ancient practice of reading divinations by tossing gold coins and consulting the text of the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes. $9.99.

iQ—Neutrinos, LLC (Brighton, MA). Category: Games. An iPhone version of the classic game 20 Questions, with features that allow users to add their own secret answers and trivia. $2.99.

GPSTwit—Raizlabs (Boston, MA). Category: Social Networking. A client for the Twitter short message broadcasting network that automatically tags ‘tweets’ with the user’s location. Contacts can see the user’s status as well as their location on a map. Free.

Otis—Wonder Warp Software (Cambridge, MA). Category: Games. This puzzle game has elements of Tetris, Chain Shot, and Jawbreaker; the object is to clear the board by clicking on boxes of like color. It’s harder than it sounds. $3.99.

RunKeeper—Raizlabs (Boston, MA). Category: Healthcare & Fitness. This application uses the built-in GPS in the new 3G iPhones to enable runners, hikers, walkers, cyclists, etc., to track all of their daily outings, including duration, distance, speed, pace, and plot the corresponding route on a map. $9.99.

SnapMyLife—Mobicious (Needham, MA). Category: Photography. Allows users to take geotagged photos and upload them directly to …Next Page »

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Pacific Northwest venture deals are making a comeback of sorts. Second-quarter investment numbers for Washington are up compared with the same period last year, according to data released over the weekend by Dow Jones VentureSource.

In the second quarter of 2008, there were 25 venture deals in Washington worth a total of $302 million—an 8.7 percent increase over the $278 million invested in the second quarter of 2007. This bucks the national trend in which many regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New England, reported substantial declines compared with the same period last year.

The second-quarter tally in Washington was also a 39 percent increase over the $217 million invested in the first quarter of this year. However, the current pace of 50 deals (worth some $519 million) done through the first half of the year still lags 2007’s year-end total of 114 deals worth $1.3 billion.

Investments in biotechnology, medical devices, software, and Internet led the way, with Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences Oncology raking in $40.1 million for the top spot (the deal closed on June 30). Also making a splash was Wetpaint, a consumer-Wiki website based in Seattle that raised $25 million, and ReliOn, a fuel-cell energy company based in Spokane, WA, which raised $23 million—the latter reflecting a national trend of increased investment in energy and utilities.

Here’s a roundup of the top 10 Pacific Northwest VC deals in 2Q08, along with the investors:

1. Light Sciences Oncology (Bellevue, WA)—$40.1million
Investors: undisclosed

2. Wetpaint (Seattle, WA)—$25.0 million
Investors: Accel Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Fidelity Ventures, Frazier Technology Ventures, Trinity Ventures

3. ReliOn (Spokane, WA)—$23.0 million
Investors: Buerk Dale Victor, Chrysalix Energy Management, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Oak Investment Partners, PCG Asset Management, Robeco Group

4. Talyst (Bellevue, WA)—$20.0 million
Investors: AIG Global Investments, Ignition Partners, OVP Venture Partners

5. Immune Design (Seattle, WA)—$18 million
Investors: Alta Partners, Column Group, Versant Ventures

6. Pelago (Seattle, WA)—$15.0 million
Investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Reliance Technology Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, T-Venture Holding

7. VLST (Seattle, WA)—$15.0 million
Investors: Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, MedImmune, MPM Capital, OVP Venture Partners

8. NexPlanar, formerly Neopad (Hillsboro, OR)—$14.5 million
Investors: BlueRun Ventures, Intel Capital, InterWest Partners

9. Fate Therapeutics (Seattle, WA)—$12.9 million
Investors: Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock

10. Verdiem (Seattle, WA)—$12.0 million
Investors: Catamount Ventures, Falcon Technology Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Phoenix Partners, Westly Group

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Tired of city rankings yet? OK, I’ll be brief. So the July/August issue of Men’s Health, out this week, ranks Seattle #1 in “most environmentally conscious” drivers. Not that surprisingly, the Northwest did well in the survey overall: Portland, OR, and Spokane, WA, also made the top 10. The analysis of 100 American cities took into account gas consumption, annual mileage, vehicle efficiency, air quality, and mass-transit usage.

My colleague Luke and I have certainly done our part—we both recently ditched our cars. But how are local companies doing on greening up transportation, energy, and other technologies?

Startup activity in the cleantech space is certainly one good measure. According to DowJones VentureSource data for 2007, Washington state came in third in VC investments in cleantech (behind California and Massachusetts), with $175 million. It was dominated by a few big Seattle-based company deals: biodiesel maker Imperium Renewables raised $117 million in equity, but canceled its IPO at the end of the year; Targeted Growth, an agricultural biotech company, raised $22 million; Powerit Holdings landed $7 million; and Propel Biofuels raised $4.75 million.

(For a sense of what a larger cleantech cluster looks like, see the MIT Entrepreneurship Center’s energy map of New England here. Of course, it takes a lot of driving to visit all those companies.)

There is also some anecdotal evidence that local employers have contributed to the greening of Seattle. Microsoft and a few other companies run employee shuttles throughout the area. And roughly 70 percent of biotech giant Amgen’s staff in Seattle use something other than a single-occupancy vehicle to commute, says company spokesperson Carol Pawlak. Amgen runs a shuttle service from downtown, subsidizes bus and ferry transportation, and arranges van pools.

Xconomy doesn’t do that yet, but at least Luke and I will be getting our exercise.

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The tech scene here is on the move. In comparison to other U.S. cities, Seattle has had the largest growth in tech jobs, and has moved up to #9 (from #10) in total number of tech workers. By comparison, Boston ranks #6 in number of jobs gained and #4 in total tech employment.

That’s all according to the American Electronics Association’s “Cybercities 2008″ report that compiled stats from 60 cities. The AEA rankings were based on labor stats from 2006, the most recent data available, and were not normalized to population. In terms of raw number of tech workers, the top five metro areas were New York, Washington DC, San Jose/Silicon Valley, Boston, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

In 2006, the Seattle area had a net gain of 7,800 tech jobs, a 7 percent increase over 2005, for a total of 127,700 jobs. The average wage for those jobs was $96,200 (#5 nationally, compared to $95,100 for Boston—no slouch itself). Seattle ranked first in software publishing (thanks largely to Microsoft) with 42,600 jobs, ninth in telecom with 18,800 jobs, and ninth in manufacturing of measurement and control instruments with 6,400 jobs. The area had a total of 4,900 high-tech establishments—as compared to 8,200 in Boston—according to the survey.

Some (including me) have questioned whether the 2006 growth stats are still relevant in 2008. The experts I’ve talked to say the answer is definitely yes—at least for the Seattle area. “My sense is there has not been a slowdown,” says Seattle-area Web entrepreneur and Xconomist Andy Sack. “I saw the article on the #1 fastest growing… and my thought was, well that explains why recruiting has been and continues to be so difficult.”

A word of caution, though—echoing University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska’s Xconomist post from yesterday. “Future growth depends on our ability to make high-tech careers attractive to our children,” said J. D. Hammerly, a vice president at Battelle Seattle Research Center, in an AEA press release. “We need to spark more excitement and enthusiasm for technology, sciences, and math. These skills are critical to prepare young students for an increasingly technical world, providing them with the foundation to become highly paid tech workers.”

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“Only one is a wanderer. Two, together, are always going somewhere.” It’s one of my favorite lines from my favorite movie—Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and now it’s true of Xconomy. By introducing our Seattle site this week, we’ve become a real network. Adding Seattle to our original Boston presence gives us the chance to show that the original idea behind the company—to create a series of hyperlocal technology news sites, each committed to covering the innovation scene in its community, but together building a broader understanding of the way technology is shaping the modern economy—has the legs to go somewhere.

We could not be happier about our starting position in Seattle. To handle our coverage there, we were fortunate enough to be able to hire top-notch journalists Greg Huang, an old friend and Technology Review colleague with his very own PhD in electrical engineering and computer science, and Luke Timmerman, a veteran life sciences reporter who’s even more famous among the West Coast biotech set than we thought. But as we worked to help Greg and Luke get set up in their Pill Hill office and launch the Seattle pages, I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of envy over the adventure they’re beginning.

Seattle is not only a culturally sophisticated and visually stunning city, but a fantastic place to write about the business of science and technology. (Which is why we picked it, of course.) The city seethes with innovation; it seems powered equally by caffeine and new ideas. Speaking personally, I see it as one of about three places in North America with enough big technology companies, cool startups, great research hospitals, great academic institutions, and tech-focused venture investors to keep me happily busy as a technology journalist (the other two being Boston and the San Francisco Bay area).

The fact that the Seattle software economy has not one but at least three major “anchor” companies—Microsoft, Amazon, and RealNetworks—makes a huge difference. A tech writer could easily spend a year simply chronicling the array of Pacific Northwest startups led by executives who cut their teeth (or made their first fortunes) at one of those three outfits. Recent examples include Pelago, maker of a combination friend-finder and mobile travel application called Whrrl; RSS software company Attensa; health-oriented social networking site Trusera (which Greg has already profiled); mobile search and advertising company Medio Systems; mobile applications developer Webaroo; online real-estate value estimator Zillow; real-estate search site Redfin; Imperium Renewables, a biofuels developer; HDTV DVR maker Digeo; and video search provider Delve Networks (known until last week as Pluggd), to name just a few. In the gone-but-not-forgotten category, there’s the once-popular personalized newspaper service Findory and voice-over-Wi-Fi company TeleSym. There are also plenty of older, more established, but still interesting companies that basically orbit one of the three anchor companies, such as Bellevue, WA-based embedded Windows software maker BSQUARE.

There’s another related category of companies and organizations around Seattle—you might call it the Microsoft Aura. These aren’t Microsoft spinoffs exactly, but they are definitely part of the software giant’s legacy, and are an indispensable part of the Seattle area’s economy and culture. There’s the radical Bellevue-based software engineering venture Intentional Software, headed by Charles Simonyi, the former head of Microsoft’s applications software group; the “invention factory” Intellectual Ventures, also in Bellevue, and founded by former Microsoft CTO (and current Xconomist) Nathan Myhrvold; the Seattle-based image licensing company Corbis, owned by Bill Gates himself, which controls the digital rights to a good fraction of the world’s …Next Page »

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Just a quick follow-up to Bob’s post. Yes, today marks the start of Xconomy’s coverage of the Seattle and Pacific Northwest tech-business scene. Our goal is to bring you “hyperlocal” reporting on the most compelling innovation news—the deals, entrepreneurs, investors, companies, and technology—on the ground as it happens. We want to help grow a community of readers and innovators who are keenly interested in local high-tech and life-sciences business and its global impact.

I’m joined in Seattle by veteran journalist Luke Timmerman, who’ll be covering biotech both here and in Boston, and distinguished sales and marketing executive David Caffey, our vice president and managing director of business development for the West Coast. You can read more about us, and our mission, here.

Xconomy has had a relatively smooth ride (for a startup, anyway) since its launch last summer in Boston. But for me, a newcomer to the Seattle area after 15+ years in Boston, things started out a little bumpy. One of the coldest and wettest early Junes on record… What might be the Mariners’ worst season in history… And local giants Starbucks and T-Mobile, which until now have monopolized my coffee and cellphone plans from afar, couldn’t even get along (come on guys, is free Wi-Fi that big a deal?)…

But things are turning around. The sun has come out, there’s still a lot of baseball to be played, and the coffee is fresher than ever (hello Espresso Vivace and Le Panier). As I’ve been going around talking to some of Seattle’s key innovators and investors, I’ve been reminded again just how fun and vibrant the innovation community here is—and why Xconomy chose Seattle as one of the first nodes in what we hope will soon be an extensive network of websites covering key high-tech clusters around the country. We believe that world-class journalism focused squarely on these innovation communities—which are key drivers of the economy—can only help make them stronger. And lead to some truly great stories.

So hello, Seattle. To the folks I’ve met already, thanks for being so welcoming to an East Coast transplant still fine-tuning his balance of sunshine and caffeine. And to the rest of you, we look forward to hearing what you think—about our site, about the business of technology, about the people and companies you think we should be covering, and about anything else that’s on your mind. Drop us a line any time at editors@xconomy.com.

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Accelerator has given birth to its newest company. Investors in the Seattle-based biotech startup machine, affiliated with Leroy Hood’s Institute for Systems Biology, have sunk $200,000 into a company emerging from the lab of Bill Goddard, a renowned chemist at the California Institute of Technology.

The company, called GPC-Rx, is developing a computational technique to select conventional drugs that can be made faster and cheaper and that bind more specifically with a desired target on cells, therefore causing fewer side effects. It’s the eighth company Accelerator has backed in its five-year history, and the second time it has backed Goddard, a co-founder of Seattle-based Allozyne.

Details on the new company’s strategy are being closely held for now. If the company passes preliminary tests, then much more money, and information, is expected to come forward in a couple months, said Carl Weissman, Accelerator’s CEO (and an Xconomist). There’s no word yet on what targets Goddard is aiming at on cells, or even what diseases he’s aiming to treat.

Goddard, 71, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, with legendary enthusiasm. Wearing his trademark beret, he reportedly arrived at his lab at 3:00 a.m. the day he met to discuss his ideas with Accelerator’s in-house science expert, Pat Gray. After dinner, around 8:00 p.m., Goddard asked to be dropped off at the lab so he could go back to work.

“He apparently gets two hours of sleep a night,” marveled David Schubert, Accelerator’s chief business officer.

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Ever since I came back to Seattle in 2003 to help get Accelerator up and running, I have been barraged with rhetoric about something euphemistically referred to as the “Funding Gap.” Everywhere I went seeking interesting emerging biotechnologies, or to tell the Accelerator story, people I met constantly lamented the Funding Gap. So I started asking, “What do you think the Funding Gap is? What do you think caused it?”

Venture Capitalists (VCs) seem to think the Funding Gap is the funding it would take to move technologies far beyond the level of development they normally encounter in academia. VCs are demanding that these technologies be “de-risked” before they warrant venture investment, and of course they think this should be accomplished using other people’s money. (On another day I will tackle the term “de-risk” which is yet another word completely made up by VCs in order to have a credible sounding excuse to tell an entrepreneur that their idea is not ready for investment; or, to justify to their Limited Partners (LPs) why they should put money in their next fund even though all of their previous funds are smoking holes…) VCs are happy to blame the Funding Gap on everything and everyone (but themselves), from recalcitrant academic ivory tower scientists to bureaucratic technology transfer offices to the NIH to the public markets…

Too easy.

VCs that spew this propaganda either need to admit that they are no longer in the “venture” business, where there is—by the very nature of the activity—risk; or, they need to find mechanisms and models that will enable them to invest earlier and pull some interesting emerging technologies forward.

Talking to academics (including tech transfer officers) about the Funding Gap is no more satisfying. For them it is the great chasm between their hair-brained schemes and the easy folding money that their colleagues/rivals made back in 1999 for founding any “company” whose name ended in “omix.”

“What do you mean that my thought-experiment describing an as yet undiscovered target isn’t sufficient proof-of-concept to warrant venture capital investment? If you would just give me a few million dollars, we could go back to the lab, discover the target, make a great drug to inhibit it, and solve everything from constipation to hair loss to toenail fungus!”

Academics are just as scattershot in their assignment of blame for the funding gap, including cuts in NIH budgets, jealous unimaginative grant reviewers, the economy, and other things (anything but their own lack of focus or commercializable development). But most of all, they attribute it to myopic, greedy, cowardly, sheep-like VCs. (That last one may be right…)

Again, too easy.

Academic investigators need to face facts. If you have a great technology, with reasonable and lucid proof-of-concept, addressing a significant unmet need, and that can be protected as proprietary; and, if—and this is the big IF—you have reasonable expectations in terms of valuation and risk-sharing, then you will be able to attract venture funding. Plenty of it. Even in Seattle.

And I can prove it.

Accelerator has been in operation since 2003. In the five years we have been operating, we have invested in seven companies. Between day one and the day we closed the seventh investment, we have never been capital constrained. That is to say that we have …Next Page »

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