A Boston-area security tech company and the University of Michigan are involved in one of the most ambitious—and potentially controversial—transportation projects of our time. It could have major impact on federal legislation, and almost everyone you know.

Picture this: You’re driving in your car, approaching an intersection. Maybe you’re speeding a little, going 40 mph in a 35 zone, say. Unbeknownst to you, another driver is racing down the cross street and is about to run a red light (probably texting or something). This could spell disaster. But instead, your car picks up a wireless signal from the other vehicle. A beeping sound or flashing light on your dashboard alerts you to slow down, so you hit the brakes. Disaster averted.

Now let’s take it a step further. Maybe the alert is hooked into your car’s control system, so if you don’t put on the brakes, your car does it automatically. And maybe that’s fine with you. But you might be a little worried about giving up that kind of control in life-and-death situations. After all, computers get hacked and software crashes. Not to mention, you might not want your car broadcasting its speed and location out there for all to see (especially not the cops, since you were speeding).

This scenario isn’t the future. It’s happening already—at least the driver-alert part. In six cities around the U.S., trials of about 100 drivers each are underway to see how people react to in-car alerts (such as collision warnings, do not pass, and vehicle stopped ahead). But the next step is bigger. In Ann Arbor, MI, some 3,000 cars will be equipped with onboard wireless devices for communicating with each other and signaling to drivers when there’s an imminent hazard. This 12-month pilot study, which was announced recently and starts next August, is being led by the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI) through a $14.9 million contract from the U.S. Department of Transportation. The state of Michigan has been heavily involved as well.

The goal of the federal initiative is, ultimately, to save lives. In the U.S., auto accidents are the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 34; more than 30,000 people are killed on the nation’s roadways each year. The hope is that with new early-warning systems in place, a sizable fraction of would-be victims could be saved—some say 80 percent of non-alcohol-related cases—especially when high speed is involved.

The idea of wirelessly connected cars isn’t new, of course. The field of vehicle telematics has been around for years, with applications in fleet management, tracking, and safety. But advances in GPS location technologies, wireless communications, sensors, hardware, and algorithms are enabling smarter, better-connected vehicles to be tested on a bigger scale. And recent breakthroughs such as autonomous road-racing vehicles and Google’s self-driving car are starting to propel the technology into the mainstream.

Nevertheless, the Michigan study raises some serious real-world concerns. “This is a massive system with tremendous security and privacy implications,” says Ed Adams, the chief executive of Security Innovation in Wilmington, MA. And that’s exactly where his software security firm comes in.

Security Innovation developed the mobile software being used in the U-M study to … Next Page »

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First of all, the name is Ginger.io, not Gingerd. The latter is how the company was incorporated; but the former is its real name.

And real is what Ginger.io is becoming. Since graduating with the most recent class of TechStars Boston startups, the MIT Media Lab spinoff (from professor Sandy Pentland’s research group) has been heads-down working on its product—software that helps healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies monitor the behavior of patients via their mobile phones.

The startup has been busy fundraising too—and it is naming its investors today. Ginger has closed $1.7 million in first-round financing led by Silicon Valley-based True Ventures. Also participating were Kapor Capital (Mitch Kapor’s VC fund), Romulus Capital, and a number of angel investors, including Bill Warner, Walt Winshall, James Joaquin, and Ty Curry. All together, Ginger’s investors and advisors represent a pretty interesting mix of people with experience in big data, healthcare, and mobile software.

Here’s the idea. A mobile phone can provide crucial information about its owner’s activity level, location, and communication patterns—all in real time, more or less (assuming the person opts in). That information could be valuable to drug makers and hospitals looking to track the results of clinical trials, market medications to certain types of patients, or design new therapies for things like diabetes, obesity, or brain disorders. The data alternatives—behavioral self-reports, surveys, and the like—are famously unreliable by themselves. With this in mind, Ginger is not one of the dozens of startups developing consumer apps for tracking one’s own health and wellness (though that’s sort of where the company started). No, this is a business-to-business play.

But here’s the bigger idea. What’s really valuable is not so much the data as the insights and patterns that can be gleaned from that data. If Ginger’s software knows how you behave on a “normal” day, for example, it can figure out when your behavior changes—maybe you’re stuck in bed, or not calling your usual friends—and correlate that with indicators of problems such as doctor visits. If the software tracks a population of patients taking a drug, and some respond in an expected way but others don’t, the pattern might suggest a way to target the drug more effectively.

“If you’re a pharmaceutical company, to know a segment is behaving differently and doing better on that drug, that can help you market that medication,” says Anmol Madan, co-founder of Ginger.io and a Media Lab PhD.

What’s more, the company is harnessing its tools in computer science, machine learning, and data analytics for a much deeper purpose. “It’s about understanding people,” says Frank Moss, the former Media Lab director and software technologist who serves as an advisor to Ginger (he’s also an Xconomist). “I think it’s going to be revolutionary.”

Moss is talking about Ginger’s potential to “discover the principles behind … Next Page »

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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.

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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.

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Cambridge, MA-based MC10, a startup that designs stretchy, bendy electronics for various applications, said today it has completed its Series B financing with an additional $2.25 million from New York-based Windham Venture Partners. That brings the total round to $14.75 million, with North Bridge Venture Partners and Braemar Energy Ventures having previously invested.

Windham is known for its investments in life sciences, medical devices, and diagnostics. MC10 says the venture firm’s expertise “will boost MC10′s commercialization efforts across medical device and healthcare applications.”

Three-year-old MC10 is working on a number of health and wellness devices for consumers and healthcare providers, including “electronic skin” that can measure a person’s heart rate, activity level, and hydration, and a balloon catheter equipped with sensors to assist with heart procedures. The company, led by CEO Dave Icke, is also working on other kinds of devices such as portable, flexible solar cells and mini image sensors.

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Waltham, MA-based Affectiva, an MIT Media Lab spinout, said today it has raised $5.7 million in Series B financing led by Kantar (WPP) and Myrian Capital. The company says it will use the money to develop and market its various software products for emotion recognition. Its technology includes computer vision and machine learning algorithms that estimate emotional states based on facial expressions (via webcam), as well as biometric sensors and software that track things like excitement, engagement, and anxiety. Affectiva was founded in 2009 by MIT scientists Roz Picard and Rana el Kaliouby; the company is led by CEO Dave Berman.

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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 »

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San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless says it has formed a partnership with Sacramento, CA-based GridSense that will combine On-Ramp’s low-power wireless networking technology with GridSense’s TransformerIQ technology. In a statement today, the companies say that combining their technologies will enable electric utilities to monitor their distribution networks at a lower cost, improve outage restoration, and improve demand-side load management.

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A really interesting variety of startups made their initial pitches to the broader investing crowd yesterday at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network’s First Look Forum. The 12 presenters represented a wide array of sectors, from food to retail to software services and—seriously—nuclear fusion power. “I don’t think we could have imagined a more diverse slate, in every sense of the word, than what we have today,” NWEN executive director Rebecca Lovell said.

The event itself was the culmination of a long coaching process that readies a select group of companies and entrepreneurs for their turn in front of the investor audience. And there’s a real emphasis on showcasing many different kinds of businesses—which is notable in an investing scene (and media landscape) that can seem dominated by techies.

Each of the 12 companies on display had five minutes to give a pitch (with slides), and then five finalists were grilled by a panel of venture capitalist judges: Mark Ashida from OVP Venture Partners, Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners, and Bill McAleer from Voyager Capital.

The winner was Guide Analytics, a mobile-connected bracelet and monitoring system that keeps track of edema, a swelling that can lead to hospitalizations, particularly in heart patients. Chief executive Deborah Kessler’s previous work includes time at Rosetta Informatics and NASA—”My advisers tell me I’m supposed to say, ‘I am a rocket scientist,’” she quipped. The device itself boasts low manufacturing costs, even though it has a battery, transmitters, and sensors. Investors did question whether relying on elderly heart patients to have a new smartphone for transmitting critical medical data was asking too much. Kessler said it was possible, however, to work with patients who have a lower-end cell phone. The company won a year of free office space from Martin Selig Real Estate.

I put together these snapshots from the four other finalists, and you can check out the longer list of participants over at NWEN.

—Snuggle Cloud is a private, one-on-one social network for couples—especially those in long-distance relationships. Co-founders Emily Marshall and Kiran Gollu were actually in separate long-distance relationships themselves. Their idea is that, although Facebook is hugely popular, people are not going to post a bunch of lovey-dovey stuff in the wild where anyone else can read it. Snuggle Cloud is … Next Page »

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A rehab-robotics startup out of MIT is getting a second lease on life. And if the company succeeds in reaching the masses with its latest effort, a lot of stroke patients might just feel the same way.

Myomo, a Cambridge, MA-based rehabilitation and medical tech firm, announced this week it has rolled out version 2.0 of its powered robotic elbow brace that helps people with neurological impairments move their arms. The idea is simple, and it seems to work: stroke patients can wear the sleeve-like device to regain some range of movement and to strengthen their muscles over time. The technology works by picking up electrical signals on the skin when a patient is trying to move a partially paralyzed limb; the robotic system then provides a small amount of force to help the person extend or bend their elbow, to do things like pick up a plate or hold onto a walker. (More on what’s new with the system below.)

This is a classic story of a new technology that has been hard to sell—and the ups and downs of a young company that has taken its lumps but has lived to fight another day. Xconomy first wrote about Myomo in 2007, when the startup received FDA approval to market its first product, and again in 2009, when the firm pulled back and focused on research and development after slow sales. Myomo went down to four employees at the end of 2008, but is now back up to 12 full-timers.

“This is the path of perseverance,” says Myomo CEO and co-founder Steve Kelly. “We’re on track to ship more units this year than in the entire history of the company.”

Why should Myomo fare any better this time around? Let’s start with the latest incarnation of its product. Kelly and executive vice president Ela Lewis say the previous version was more of a “clinical product,” whereas the new version is more of a true “assistive device” that patients can use at home. The current product is streamlined and more portable. It has two electrode sensors (for biceps and triceps) instead of one. It includes wireless networking that connects to a mobile phone via an Android app that lets patients track their progress—range of motion, how many movements they’ve done, and so on. And it will include a structured program for clinical and home use, complete with video-game mechanics … Next Page »

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If you’re lucky, you probably only worry about your feet when something goes wrong—if you break a toe or sprain your ankle, say. In daily life, most people don’t marvel at the natural machinery that lets them navigate icy sidewalks, step over obstacles, or go up and down stairs with nary a second thought. (I’ll resist the urge to make a non-football Rex Ryan joke—moving right along.)

But for lower-leg amputees, including the still-growing number of soldiers injured by explosive devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, life isn’t so easy. Conventional artificial limbs are still pretty crude, and walking with a prosthetic foot tends to be painful, tiring, and limiting compared to the real thing.

Enter iWalk, the Cambridge, MA-based company that has been developing a new kind of powered prosthetic foot and ankle for the past five years. Earlier this month, the startup confirmed it had raised a $15 million Series C venture round from new investor Sigma Partners and existing investors General Catalyst and WFD Ventures. (The company declined to comment on how much total investment it has taken, except to say the figure is much less than the “nearly $40 million” reported by the Boston Globe, which broke the news about the latest round.)

The cash infusion marks an important transition for the company, from doing mostly research and clinical testing to building out its technical platform and ramping up product development. “Turning theory into a functional and durable device is a real challenge,” says Tim McCarthy, iWalk’s chief executive. “What our investors see in the technology is the fact that we’ve been able to bridge that gap.”

McCarthy (see photo below) joined iWalk as CEO in December 2009, so he’s been on the job for just over a year. He previously spent seven years as vice president of sales and marketing at Ossur Americas, an orthopedics and prosthetics firm. His leadership seems to be paying off, as iWalk delivered its first five commercial “PowerFoot BiOM” units to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center earlier this month. The prosthetic foot and ankle uses robotics technology (sensors, algorithms, and a spring-like actuator) to help propel an amputee forward while automatically adapting to different types of terrain and walking speeds.

iWalk was founded in 2006 by MIT Media Lab professor Hugh Herr, who is a double amputee (both legs below the knees) from a mountain climbing accident when he was 17. Herr serves as chief scientific officer at the firm and previously worked with McCarthy on a prosthetic knee when the latter was at Ossur. [Disclosure: Herr was my postdoctoral research supervisor at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab from 2000-2002; you can read about some of our work on animal locomotion here.]

Knowing Herr’s scientific interests, I can tell that iWalk, which has 20-plus employees, has plans far beyond prosthetic feet. In fact, the company wants to apply its … Next Page »

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A pretty big merger in defense tech this morning. Waltham, MA-based Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) announced it has agreed to acquire Sunnyvale, CA-based Applied Signal Technology (NASDAQ: APSG) for $38 per share—about $490 million in cash. The deal is slated to close in the first quarter of 2011, and is not expected to have a material effect on Raytheon’s earnings.

Defense contractor Raytheon made the acquisition to complement its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies, said CEO and chairman William Swanson, in a statement.

Applied Signal, which makes communications, analytics software, and cyberwarfare technologies primarily for government agencies, will be integrated into Raytheon’s Space and Airborne Systems business unit. Advanced sensor systems will be a particular area of interest for the two companies as they move forward together.

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Ember is one of those companies that defies a quick explanation. For starters, it has been around for nine years. And if all goes well, 2010 will be its first profitable one.

It has been a long climb for the Boston-based firm, which makes wireless networking technologies that help consumers and utility companies manage home energy consumption. Specifically, Ember focuses on making chips and software for low-power, low-bandwidth radio networks used for two-way communications. That sounds pretty tech-y, but as I learned when I caught up with the company last month, the technology is getting much closer to mainstream use.

Ember works with utilities, but sells its products primarily to companies like Itron (NASDAQ: ITRI) and Landis+Gyr, which make “smart meters” and other cutting-edge equipment for the electric grid. Smart meters are devices that let utilities predict peak energy usage times and adjust homes’ electricity use so as to conserve energy. Coupled with a smart display or thermostat, the devices also let consumers track how much electricity they’re using in their homes so they can save on their individual energy bills (and live greener lifestyles). What Ember provides, essentially, is the secure communication link between these homes and utilities.

The company was founded in 2001 by MIT alums Rob Poor and Andy Wheeler. Their original vision was to develop software for wirelessly networked sensors and control systems for supply-chain management, commercial buildings, and industrial applications like detecting temperature and fluid flow in oil pipes. (You can read my 2003 interview with Poor in Technology Review here.)

Along the way, Poor and Wheeler left the company to pursue other projects. But over the years, Ember hasn’t made so much of a radical change as some minor shifts in its priorities. First, it evolved into a chipmaker as well as a software maker, and has invested heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for wireless networking technology. And in 2006, around the time that Bob LeFort came on as CEO, Ember started to focus on energy management as its main commercial application.

Now that approach finally seems to be paying off, in terms of adoption—and revenue. “It’s the first time we’ve heard people talk seriously beyond small pilots of putting things inside the home,” LeFort says. “It’s not mainstream yet, not millions [of homes], but it’s beyond hundreds and a few thousand.”

Ember had its first profitable quarter in the first three months of 2010, and has followed that up with strong enough growth that LeFort predicts it will be profitable for the year. The company’s quarterly revenues have been in the $8-10 million range, he says, and it expects to have total sales of … Next Page »

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None of this would have happened 10 years ago. Where to begin?

Last month, I walked into a room of about a dozen robotics experts and technology startup investors. It was one of the sessions at the MassTLC Innovation “unConference” in Boston. The discussion centered around how to build a successful robotics company. But it was some of the newer context around this question that turned the session into a watershed moment I won’t soon forget.

Two main takeaways: First, robotics companies around Boston have come a very long way since 2000, when I was a postdoc in a robotics group at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. That sort of academic research is still going strong, but the bigger story of the past decade has been the business success of robotic vacuum cleaners, bomb-disposal units, and surveillance drones, and how that has helped pave the way for a new generation of companies.

My second takeaway is that the business community thinks there is a new threat to Boston’s competitive position in robotics—and its name is Google. I’m not usually one to fan the flames of Boston vs. Silicon Valley arguments, but in this case the discussion hits close to home, so I wanted to see if there’s much truth to it.

The Boston area, of course, is home to numerous robotics companies—iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT), Boston Dynamics, Harvest Automation, Heartland Robotics, Kiva Systems, iWalk, and CyPhy Works, just to name a few. Many of those companies were represented in the unConference session, along with investors from CommonAngels, Founder Collective, and General Catalyst. Historically the region has had lots of expertise, both in universities and industry, in key technologies underlying robotics such as sensors, actuators, control algorithms, artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data storage.

Yet 10 years ago, most early-stage investors (angels and VCs) wouldn’t think of touching a robotics startup. The development costs and business risks were too high, and the technology infrastructure—onboard processing power, wireless communication, programmable chips, sensors, algorithms—wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Now things have changed, certainly in investors’ minds, … Next Page »

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Pelican Imaging in Mountain View announced a $10 million Series B round led by Globespan Capital Partners, with participation from previous investors Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and In-Q-Tel. Pelican makes optics, sensors and software algorithms for smart phone cameras, enabling a thinner camera with higher quality images, and will use the new money to commercialize the technology. Barry Schiffman, a co-founder of Globespan, will join Pelican’s board.

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As a reporter, you can tell when the innovation economy tide is turning, when a particular sector is rebounding, or when certain companies have turned the corner. How? Because all of a sudden CEOs want to talk on the record, PR people are your best friends, and marketing and real estate guys chat you up about the field at random events.

That’s the feeling I’m getting about radio frequency identification (RFID) these days—and I’m getting it from both coasts. The field of RFID comprises tags, readers, and software that, together, enable wireless communication via tiny embedded chips so people can gather information about everything from the location and status of product inventory on shelves to runners in a marathon. A couple of months ago, I profiled ThingMagic, a 10-year-old Boston-area RFID company founded by MIT Media Lab alums, whose time appears to have come, thanks to fortuitous changes in the market.

ThingMagic’s sister company in the Northwest is Impinj, a 10-year-old Seattle RFID tech firm founded by University of Washington professor Chris Diorio. Impinj is a bigger company than ThingMagic—and has raised much more venture capital—but both startups survived the RFID-for-retail-supply-chain-tracking hype around 2003-2004 (and the ensuing crash) and lived to tell the tale. The firms have worked together on RFID reader technologies, with Impinj selling its reader chips to ThingMagic. Now they and a few other survivors and competitors, including San Francisco Bay Area-based Alien Technology, are poised to make some bold moves.

I spoke with Impinj CEO Bill Colleran by phone last week to hear about the company’s progress, and some interesting new challenges ahead. One thing that grabbed me was how much the competitive landscape in RFID was decimated by the early hype and glacial adoption of the technology—plus the economic recession. That now leaves Impinj with relatively few competitors. “There’s been a shakeout along the way,” Colleran says. “We’re in a great position to grow as this industry takes off.”

And take off it apparently will, across sectors like consumer electronics, automotive, healthcare, and apparel and other retail applications—finally. “RFID has experienced a resurgence in the last year or so,” says Colleran. “The common theme is the technology has continued to move along—performance is dramatically better, and cost has come down…It’s a maturing of the technology and ecosystem. We’re seeing wholesale adoption.”

That’s easy to say, of course, but here are some stats to back it up. Impinj says it will ship as many RFID tag chips in the second half of 2010 as it has in the previous five years … Next Page »

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Last week, Waltham, MA-based defense contractor Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) unveiled its latest prototype “exoskeleton.” This is a powered robotic suit that a soldier or worker could strap on in the field to enable them to load heavy equipment faster, carry supplies or munitions using less energy, or—let’s face it—just look ultra-cool. Raytheon said in a statement that the new robotic suit is “lighter, stronger, and faster than its predecessor, yet it uses 50 percent less power.” The device is powered by high-pressure hydraulics and gives its wearer some degree of super strength.

In the demo, which took place at Raytheon’s Sarcos subsidiary in Salt Lake City, UT, an engineer wearing the suit (which includes arms and legs) punched through some boards, did pushups, and lifted weights with little effort. The news was reported fairly breathlessly by media outlets including CNET, Wired, Scientific American, and the L.A. Times. And I understand why—it’s a sexy technology that conjures up visions of “Iron Man” and mythical references to superhuman strength. Plus it’s far more accessible than all the top-secret stuff Raytheon does that is actually useful for the military—radar systems, cybersecurity, missile defense, and so forth.

But I wondered how much progress has really been made in exoskeletons—in the fundamental robotics, sensing, control, and energy technologies necessary to make a robot suit powerful, safe, and reliable to move around in. Raytheon declined to be interviewed for this story, but I did some digging around.

After all, I’ve been following the field since 2001, when I worked in the old Leg Lab at MIT, which was home to robots that could walk, run, hop, and keep their balance. Back then, the main problems with designing a robotic exoskeleton were how to make it powerful without being clunky, how to control it safely, and how to supply enough energy to it.

In 2002, I attended a private meeting of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program on “exoskeletons for human performance augmentation” (from which I still sport a nifty backpack, though it doesn’t give me super strength). The program manager was Ephrahim Garcia, a professor at Cornell University, who later handed it off to engineer John Main. At the time, about a dozen universities and research groups were competing to build exoskeleton technologies for DARPA, and Sarcos had one of the designs that eventually won out. A couple years later, I visited Sarcos (which Raytheon acquired in 2007) and got a tour of the Utah lab and an early demo from its leader, Steve Jacobsen, for a photo essay in Technology Review.

My first impression from the demo last week was that not much has changed in the field in the past decade. That’s a bit surprising, since other kinds of robots—Predator aerial drones, PackBots, Roombas—have become increasingly sophisticated as they’ve been commercialized and deployed by the military. As it turns out, though, my first impression of the Raytheon device was not entirely correct.

“They’ve clearly demonstrated increases in strength,” says Hugh Herr, a professor who leads the biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab, which works on things like smart … Next Page »

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One day in my high school Spanish class, a kid who I was told had autism started hitting himself on the head repeatedly until our teacher sent him to the nurse. Looking back, I wonder whether he understood how abnormal his behavior was. But 17 years later, I’m encouraged by the growing cluster of outfits in the Boston area that are developing a host of new treatments and medical tests for people like my former classmate.

Autism spectrum disorders—which are brain disorders that make socializing difficult, among other symptoms—are a growing health concern in the United States. And it’s viewed as a huge potential market for drugs and diagnostics. There are an estimated one in 110 children in the country who have autism spectrum disorders, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. To date, there are neither approved drugs nor any easy ways to diagnose autism. Yet there have been discoveries at MIT and other research centers in the Boston area in recent years that have given people hope of improved treatments for autism—and reasons for investors to pump capital into startups focused on advancing these treatments.

“What we’re hoping to do is step into a complete void out there in terms of proven medical treatments for the condition,” says George Evans, the chairman and chief executive of Beverly, MA-based Cellceutix, which is seeking capital to advance its experimental compound for autism.

In the Boston area, which is rich with renowned academic centers and biotech companies, there are clusters of companies in almost every kind of disease: cancer, autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular conditions, and on and on. However, there appear to be a particularly high proportion of recent entrants in the area’s budding autism cluster, which tells me that I probably would have had trouble compiling much of a list of such firms back, say, in the early 1990s.

Here’s an alphabetized list of startups and research organizations in the Boston area that are trying to address the unmet medical needs of people with autism:

Affectiva
Waltham, MA

This MIT spin-off is developing the “Q Sensor,” which detects electrical signals on … Next Page »

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When Charlie Schliebs looks at Detroit today, he sees his hometown of Pittsburgh about 30 years ago, when the steel industry collapsed. Then, Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh helped turn things around by stepping up to the challenge of redefining themselves as a training ground for a new, tech-based economy.

That’s why Schliebs, a managing director at iNetworks, a health-care/life sciences venture capital firm headquartered in Pittsburgh, believes that creation of a new $10 million to $20 million iNetworksMichigan Fund, vetted by a top researcher at Detroit’s Wayne State University, is a perfect fit for his company.

“We’re not afraid of the Rust Belt,” Schliebs says. “I mean, we’re from Pittsburgh. So, we’ve looked at Detroit as a city that’s had its kick in the gut 30 years later than Pittsburgh…So, Detroit’s a kind of natural thing for us.”

The new fund, which Schliebs says has a target of $10 million, with a maximum of $20 million, will be run by Greg Auner, director of the Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems (SSIM) program at WSU.

Auner’s SSIM program includes five interconnecting laboratories with about 100 participating faculty, graduate students, undergrads, and staff scientists. Their goal is to take their research—approximately 80 percent of it biomedical—and translate it into real clinical settings as well as private companies.

For example, SSIM has produced a hand-held probe that can determine during surgery whether tissue is cancerous. A prototype is being tested and evaluated at Children’s Hospital in Detroit.

Auner says that despite “many, may offers” to take his talents elsewhere, he made a decision long ago to remain in Detroit, where his roots run deep. He believes he can help establish Southeast … Next Page »

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The vines are standing in straight rows along the irrigation pipes at Camalie Vineyards, high on the side of Mt. Veeder, in Napa Valley. For each vine a smaller pipe, thinner than a soda straw, runs from the pipe into the earth and down to the roots.

Here and there you can spot some yellow containers just on top of the vines. They are the nodes in a wireless sensor network, which among other things monitors the irrigation system and the soil moisture, and relays the information to a computer with a Web interface.

“The Internet has taken root in the environment,” says Mark Holler, owner of Camalie Vineyards and founder of Camalie Networks, the startup that developed the sensors plugged into the yellow containers and the software that runs them. The nodes themselvess and their communications and networking technology come from San Jose-based Crossbow, which was acquired by Memsic of Andover, MA, early this year.

The climate here is semi-arid. This means that that the harvest per acre is far lower than in the floor of the valley. And water for irrigation can be a big part of the cost of growing grapes. Some of the water comes from the vineyard’s own well, but at the end of the season Holler usually buys water that is driven up in tanks from the valley.

On the other hand, this means that the vines can produce a higher-quality grape that fetches a much higher price. The wineries pay about $100 per ton for “ordinary” Napa grapes, but Holler, the former technical director of neural network research at Intel, can get $6000 per ton for his Cabernet Sauvignon grapes. In other words, the harvest from Camalie is worth a great deal, even though vineyard is quite small—just about 4.4 acres—and the annual harvest only around 12 tons in total.

To get grapes of this really high quality, the wines have to be kept a bit thirsty. In the science of viticulture, this is defined as a certain level of “leaf water potential.” At the same time, if the vines get too thirsty—if their leaf water potential is too low—the plant will wilt.

This is where the yellow containers come into play. Each container is a node in the sensor network, with a wireless transmitter, a solar cell, a battery, and interfaces for up to four different sensors. The network is self-organizing; hook up the sensors you want and … Next Page »

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