Time for an update on Boston’s marketing tech cluster. It’s one of the real strengths of the local entrepreneurial ecosystem. And it looks like it’s getting stronger, with a couple of leaders making news this week. Here is a tale of two companies that have become competitors:

—Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT), the Waltham, MA-based online marketing firm, has seen its stock price jump nearly 30 percent—from about $24 to just over $30—since Facebook filed for its IPO last week (coincidence?). Constant Contact has been positioning itself as a leader in digital marketing for small businesses across e-mail, social media, and Web platforms—especially social campaigns. The company also released some promising stats on its revenues and profits for 2011 and its most recent quarter.

—HubSpot, the Cambridge, MA-based marketing tech firm, said it has hired J.D. Sherman, Akamai’s former chief financial officer (also a former IBM exec). The company says Sherman is being brought in partly to help it prepare for a future IPO. HubSpot has been hiring aggressively and working on new products, while it pares away others (like Oneforty.com, which it acquired last summer). It remains to be seen whether the company will actually make it to an IPO before getting snapped up by Salesforce.com or some other suitor.

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As we wind down the first month of 2012, I thought I’d take the pulse of some of the bigger technology companies around town. In addition to tracking startups and entrepreneurship, this is an important measure of the health and well-being of the Boston tech community.

So here’s a list of 10 well-known public companies, their stock price (as of Friday’s close), most recent financials, and other tidbits. Not comprehensive, of course. But of these firms, you might be surprised whose stock is the highest right now.

Most of these companies will announce their end-of-year financials in the next two weeks…

Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM)
Stock price: $32.01
2011 stats: Q3 profit of $63M on $282M in revenue; coming off $1B+ revenue in 2010.
Recent news: The company has acquired rival Cotendo and is positioning itself as a platform for businesses to reach customers via Web, mobile, and cloud.
Big question: Why doesn’t Akamai own the cloud (like Amazon)?

Carbonite (NASDAQ: CARB)
Stock price: $10.30
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $15.9M (net loss of $7.4M); will announce full-year stats on Feb. 9.
Recent news: Coming off its IPO in August, Carbonite is adjusting to life as a public company.
Big question: Is online backup a big enough growth market?

Constant Contact (NASDAQ: CTCT)
Stock price: $25.11
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $54.3M ($5.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 2.
Recent news: Constant Contact is moving into mobile/social rewards programs with its acquisitions of CardStar and Bantam Networks.
Big question: Can it make a full transition from e-mail to broader online marketing?

EMC (NYSE: EMC)
Stock price: $25.83
2011 stats: Full-year revenue of $20B ($3.4B profit), showing record growth.
Recent news: CEO and chairman Joe Tucci isn’t stepping down this year as planned. (Pat Gelsinger is rumored to be his successor.)
Big question: What is the ultimate future of EMC? In storage, big data, and cloud computing, as EMC goes, so will Massachusetts.

iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT)
Stock price: $32.88
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $120.4M ($14.1M profit)
Recent news: iRobot laid off 8 percent of its staff in October but continues to grow.
Big question: Will consumer robotics ever really take off?

LogMeIn (NASDAQ: LOGM)
Stock price: $41.51
2011 stats: Q3 revenues of $31M ($4.4M profit); full-year stats coming Feb. 15.
Recent news: LogMeIn has been expanding to new devices, markets, and geographies.
Big question: Is this still a lifestyle business?

Monster.com (NYSE: MWW)
Stock price: $7.35
2011 stats: $46M profit on roughly $1B revenue, compared to a $9M loss in 2010.
Recent news: Monster Worldwide had layoffs and is restructuring as it continues to expand globally and move into social/mobile technologies.
Big question: Is there a better job site out there?

Nuance (NASDAQ: NUAN)
Stock price: $27.91
2011 stats: Q3 revenue of $400M, and $1.4B revenue for the fiscal year ($38.2M profit).
Recent news: Nuance acquired rival Vlingo in mobile speech recognition; mobile/consumer and healthcare continue to be its biggest markets.
Big question: Can it compete with the big boys (Apple, Google)?

TripAdvisor (NASDAQ: TRIP)
Stock price: $31.24
2011 stats: $3B+ market cap. Year-end stats coming Feb. 8. (2010 revenue of $486M.)
Recent news: After spinning out of Expedia last month, TripAdvisor is New England’s biggest consumer Web company.
Big question: Will it outcompete Google and others in travel search and content?

Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP)
Stock price: $16.14
2011 stats: Small profit in Q3 on $68M revenue. Full-year revenue expected to be 240M+ with net loss in $10M range (tune in Feb. 14).
Recent news: Coming off its IPO last spring, Zipcar has been expanding carefully in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
Big question: Can it reduce costs enough to make a real profit?

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Big drug collaborations and acquisitions took the spotlight in the New England life sciences news pool this week.

—Coronado Biosciences, which moved from New York to Burlington, MA, this past August, debuted on the Nasdaq stock exchange, with an opening share price of $6.50 on Monday. The company (NASDAQ: CNDO) went public not through a conventional IPO, but by registering all of its privately held shares as common stock.

—Cambridge, MA-based Metamark Genetics and Johnson & Johnson unit (NYSE: JNJ) Janssen Biotech inked a research agreement to validate gene targets that play in a role in the spreading and progression of tumors. Metamark will receive an undisclosed upfront payment and is eligible for up to $365 million in milestone payments.

—Thousand Oaks, CA-based Amgen, which has R&D operations in Cambridge, signed a collaboration agreement with New Jersey-based Watson Pharmaceuticals (NYSE: WPI) to develop and sell antibody drugs that are knockoffs of the originals, known as biosimilars. Amgen (NASDAQ: AMGN) will contribute its research and expertise to making the protein drugs that are produced in living cells, and Watson will put as much as $400 million into the development.

—Excelimmune, a Woburn, MA-based developer of so-called polyclonal antibodies, took in $12 million in financing from a private investor that it did not publicly name. The money will go toward developing Excelimmune’s molecules that aim to combat infectious diseases like Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

—Cambridge-based Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company got access to a new portfolio of small molecule cancer drugs that are designed to block variations of the target in cancer biology known as the PI3 kinase pathway. That came through the acquisition of San Diego-based Intellikine by Millennium’s Japan-based parent company, Takeda Pharmaceuticals.

—My colleague Arlene wrote about Enumeral Biomedical, a New York startup founded on science from MIT chemical engineering professor J. Christopher Love. He developed technology called protein microengraving that measures how the human body responds to infection and disease.

—PatientKeeper, a Waltham, MA-based developer of physician workflow software, pulled in another $6 million in growth funding, from Flybridge Capital Partners, New Enterprise Associates, and Whitney & Company.

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Remember when Sprint (NYSE: S) said it would buy more stock if Clearwire made an offering sometime in the future? Well, the bill’s about to come due: Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR) says it plans to sell $300 million in Class A common shares. The sale’s underwriters also will get a 30-day option to buy up to $45 million more in Class A shares.

Kirkland, WA-based Clearwire said the stock sale will help finance its planned construction of a fourth-generation (or 4G) network based on technology known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Clearwire’s existing network is based around a different kind of technology, known as WiMAX, which is being passed by as LTE becomes standard in the industry.

Clearwire has previously announced plans to build an LTE network along its WiMAX offering, but needed about $600 million to pay for the project. Majority shareholder Sprint cut a financing deal with Clearwire last week to provide up to $1.6 billion, allowing Clearwire to make a debt payment that it had considered skipping.

That lifeline from Sprint included a commitment for Sprint to purchase stock based on its existing 49.6 percent voting interest in Clearwire. Sprint will be buying Class B common shares, Clearwire said in Monday’s announcement. The previously announced deal with Sprint also included a pre-payment of up to $350 over two years for capacity on Clearwire’s LTE network, if Clearwire hits milestones for building the network by June 2013.

J.P. Morgan, BofA Merrill Lynch, and Jefferies & Company will be the joint book-running managers, Clearwire said.

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Startups usually relish disruption. For a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, there’s no brighter badge of honor than being able to say that your company reinvented a product category, sweeping away older competitors’ business models in the process.

But these days, many of the disruptors are being disrupted, as the traditional system of incentive-based stock options for startup employees comes under strain. Part of the turmoil is coming from within, in the form of employees and former employees who own options or stock and are itching to see some financial rewards, even if their companies haven’t yet achieved a traditional “exit” in the form of an acquisition or public offering. And part is coming from outside, in the form of businesses building new marketplaces where employees can turn their shares into cash.

The emergence of a so-called secondary market for employee shares is an increasingly vexing issue for many startup CEOs, who say it’s interfering with their ability to attract and retain talent. But by the time this is all over, these executives and their boards may well be forced to rethink the way they keep employees loyal, the way they govern stock ownership, or both. Today we’ll take a close look at one of the companies behind this change, New York-based broker-dealer SecondMarket.

The story starts with options, which are traditionally doled out to employees of early-stage companies as a form of deferred compensation. These options, which typically vest over the course of four years, are supposed to incentivize employees to stick around and work harder by dangling the prospect of a big payoff if the company eventually gets acquired or goes public. When options vest, it means employees have the right to buy a specified amount of stock, typically at a low price called the exercise price. The presumption is that they can make money once a company is sold or goes public by buying shares at the exercise price and immediately selling them at a higher market price. Employees who leave a company typically must exercise their vested options within 90 days or lose them.

Plenty of Microsofties, Googlers, Yahoos, and alums of other public technology companies have grown rich on their options—and the investments they pour back into the startup ecosystem are part of what makes Silicon Valley go around. But for companies that are still privately held, there’s a growing flaw in the system. Back in the 1990s, when incentive-based stock option packages became common, it was reasonable to expect that a company would achieve some kind of an exit—either an acquisition or IPO—within the four-year time frame, making the notional value of employees’ options very real. But over the last decade, that timeline has been stretched out dramatically, thanks to a myriad of factors that make going public far less attractive. So employees and alums of even extremely successful pre-IPO companies like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, and Yelp are being asked to sit on their stock for much longer.

In classic entrepreneurial style, a few financial firms are now trying to relieve some of the pressure by connecting startup employees and alums with outsiders who’d like to buy their shares. Secondary markets are hardly a new invention: firms like San Francisco-based Industry Ventures have spent at least a decade in the business, typically offering limited partners in venture capital funds a way to cash out before the funds mature. But the idea that startup employees should also be able to sell their shares on the secondary markets is entirely a product of the Facebook era—and the two companies pushing the concept hardest are SecondMarket and its main competitor, San Bruno, CA-based SharesPost.

I’ve spent some time recently speaking with executives at SecondMarket and learning how their business works. There’s been a lot of fuss around the company in the tech and business media; it’s often been cast as a bull in a china shop, upsetting the mechanisms startups use to … Next Page »

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When Progress Software CEO Richard Reidy told me in December about a “major transition” and a “whole new strategy” for the company, he wasn’t kidding. The transition, it turns out, involves himself.

Bedford, MA-based Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS) announced today that Reidy will leave the company once a successor is named; a search is under way. He has been CEO since March 2009 and will continue in that role (and as a board member) until his departure date. He originally joined Progress back in 1981.

Reidy (pronounced “reedy”) presided over the company’s shift from selling many different kinds of business software to focusing on helping businesses be more responsive to market events in real time and manage their transactions efficiently. Progress stock rose fairly steadily from September 2010 until February of this year; the recent trend has been downward, but with some ups.

The company “has undergone a profound and successful transformation over the past few years,” Reidy said in a statement. “We have repositioned and refocused the company in exciting new high growth areas and are executing well. New leadership will help accelerate our strategy going forward.”

We’ll update this story if we get more details about Reidy’s plans and the reasons for the move.

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Burlington, MA-based Demandware, a digital- and mobile-commerce software company, has filed paperwork for an IPO with a proposed maximum offering of $100 million. The offering is being underwritten by Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank. The company plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under “DWRE.” Demandware was founded in 2004 and most recently raised a $22 million Series D financing round that was completed last year. The company made a small profit in 2010 ($309,000) after years of net losses. Investors North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners each own 33.8 percent of the company, while founder and chairman (and former CEO) Stephan Schambach owns 20.6 percent of the firm.

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It’s not every day I get to dine with the CEO of a public company worth $5 billion. Last month I sat down with Andy Ory, founder and chief exec at Bedford, MA-based Acme Packet (NASDAQ: APKT), for an in-depth chat about his company’s strategy and outlook in the area of networking technology.

The setting was The Friendly Toast in Cambridge, MA. Ory has a soft spot in his heart for the Kendall Square area—back in the late ‘80s, he worked at Boston Technology, the voice-mail pioneer whose office was next to where Friendly Toast sits today. (If you ever get a chance, ask him about the story of using the local pay phone for product testing.)

Over a BLT and huevos rancheros (if I recall correctly), we talked about everything from Ory’s startup lessons to big-company concerns and business regulations, from Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype to how Acme Packet is like Cisco back in 1993. (Ory is speaking tonight at a Boston-area event with Founder Collective’s Eric Paley; he will talk about Acme Packet’s story and his broader experiences in building companies.)

Ory is a leading light in the tech entrepreneurship scene. Before founding Acme Packet in 2000, he cut his teeth at Boston Technology and then founded Priority Call Management, which sold to LHS Group for over $160 million in 1999. Over the past decade, he and his team have built Acme Packet into a leader in session border control—technology that helps telecom network operators and big companies manage voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other communications and services over the Internet in an efficient and secure manner.

Yet things have not always been rosy for Acme Packet, which went public in 2006 and now has roughly 700 employees (about 450 in Bedford). The company’s stock fell below $4 in late 2008, before rebounding and rising strongly in the past year and a half, to around $70 in recent months. I wanted to hear about that dramatic comeback too.

Ory didn’t disappoint as either a lunch companion or an interview subject. It helps that he is a charmer and a natural-born storyteller. Consider how he explains where Acme Packet sits today:

“Imagine you were visiting a company back in 1993 called Cisco Network Systems. ‘What do you guys do?’ We make a router. You might say, ‘what’s a router?’ It’s a piece of hardware and software. The reason is enterprises are converting their infrastructure to IP [Internet protocol] because of e-mail. If enterprise A wants to send e-mail to enterprise B, they need a router between them. Well, you might say, ‘what percentage of enterprises are going to do e-mail?’ And they’d say, every single one on the planet. ‘And how many e-mail messages fill up a router?’ To figure out how many routers you’re going to sell. What was really interesting is, when you connect all these networks together, a network effect ensues. Of course I couldn’t say to you, Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Napster—I wish I could have,” Ory says.

“Now let’s fast forward 18 years and you’re visiting my company,” he says. “We make a session border controller. Enterprises and service providers are converting their service infrastructure to IP so they can do voice over IP. When they want to make a VoIP call from one enterprise to another, they need a session border controller to connect those two enterprises. So you’d say, ‘what percentage of enterprises and service providers are going to do VoIP?’ And of course my answer is, every single one. … Next Page »

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Han Solo was once frozen in “carbonite.” Now Boston’s namesake tech company is emerging from a different kind of deep freeze.

When we last spoke this winter, David Friend said his online data backup firm, Carbonite, was in the late stages of filing for an IPO. The man is true to his word.

Boston-based Carbonite has indeed filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC and is officially planning to go public as of today. According to the form, the proposed maximum offering is $100 million, but that doesn’t mean much right now. The company isn’t saying yet how many shares it will offer, or the price range for the offering, but if all goes well, its stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol CARB.

The tech IPO market appears to be thawing in New England after a nearly two-year freeze. In recent months, Connecticut-based travel firm Kayak has filed to go public, and Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar held its initial public offering last month. (Meanwhile, e-mail software firm SMTP took a much less conventional route to its IPO a couple weeks ago.)

But back to Carbonite. The company, led by Friend the CEO, has raised more than $67 million in venture capital to date. It first rolled out its data-backup service for consumers in 2006, and more recently has increased its focus on business customers, who Friend said account for between one-third and one-half of Carbonite’s total revenue. Its main competitor over the years has been Mozy (now part of Hopkinton, MA-based EMC). As of January, Carbonite had about 160 employees in Boston, plus some 200 additional full-time equivalents.

More recently, as of April 30, Carbonite had more than 1 million subscribers (both consumers and business users) in more than 100 countries, according to its SEC filing. The company says it has backed up more than 100 billion files since 2005, restoring 7 billion-plus that might have been lost forever. It currently backs up more than 200 million files a day worldwide.

Carbonite is not yet profitable, but its business is growing. The company had revenues of $38.6 million in 2010 (up from $19.1 million in 2009), and $12.8 million in the first three months of 2011. It incurred a net loss of $25.8 million last year, and $5.3 million in the first quarter of this year. The company says the losses are primarily because of large investments in advertising to acquire customers.

A few other strategic nuggets from the SEC filing: Beyond the U.S., Carbonite plans to roll out a data-backup product for businesses in China over the next year. And it plans to start marketing in Europe in 2012. Another big potential growth area is backing up smartphones and tablet computers. The risks to Carbonite’s business, according to the form, include not bringing in enough new customers, not retaining customers, not gaining widespread adoption on mobile devices and with business users, and data security issues.

If the IPO goes through, a number of investors and company execs stand to gain from it. Menlo Ventures, led by managing director Pravin Vazirani, is the lead investor and owns 31.7 percent of the company. Performance Direct Investments owns 5.8 percent, Crosslink Venture Partners owns 5.7 percent, and First Plaza Group Trust is next in line with 5.4 percent. Among executive officers, CEO David Friend and chief architect Jeff Flowers are tops with 9.7 percent and 8.3 percent of the stock, respectively.

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Vertex Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:VRTX) faces a test today for its experimental drug for hepatitis C virus, telaprevir, as the FDA Antiviral Drugs Advisory Committee meets today in Silver Springs, MD, to review the firm’s application for approval of the treatment. NASDAQ has halted trading of the Cambridge, MA-based firm’s common stock today, according to Vertex. Yesterday the same FDA panel voted unanimously in favor of recommending approval of Whitehouse Station, NJ-based Merck & Co.’s (NYSE:MRK) hepatitis C pill boceprevir, and many industry watchers are expecting Vertex to have similar success today. An FDA staff review released on Tuesday gave Vertex’s hepatitis C pill some high marks as a treatment for the liver disease.

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Looks like Microsoft is officially tired of having people poached by the Silicon Valley raiders setting up shop in its backyard. CEO Steve Ballmer’s new memo on employee compensation changes, in wide circulation this morning, looks somewhat like the Redmond, WA-based software giant’s version of Google’s abrupt companywide raise-and-bonus combo of late last year.

Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is making this move after several years of watching San Francisco Bay Area companies establish beachheads in Seattle to recruit talent. Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has been in the Northwest since 2004 and keeps on growing, saying that it ended 2010 with about 800 people in the Puget Sound area.

Salesforce.com, a direct Microsoft competitor on certain business software, recently moved into expanded offices and has been tied up in a non-compete lawsuit with Redmond over its hiring of a Microsoft employee. Meanwhile, IT infrastructure company Splunk started its Seattle offices with Microsoft veteran Brad Lovering, and two of the first hires at Facebook’s Seattle office were from—you guessed it—Microsoft.

Ballmer’s memo does what we in the news business call “burying the lede”—he starts off talking a lot about rejiggering the review process. Let’s face it: Most employees in any large company will eventually come to hate their reviews, and probably will no matter how you structure them. The real meat of the memo—first reported by GeekWire from what I can tell—is in the take-home pay.

Ballmer’s email, which Microsoft has confirmed as authentic with ZDNet, said the company is “increasing our investment in compensation across the board.” Ballmer called the changes, which take effect in September, “the most significant investment in overall compensation we have ever made.”

Specifically, Ballmer wrote that all employees would see some of their stock compensation converted into up-front cash—probably welcome, considering that a Microsoft stock is still well below its roughly $37 high of a few years ago, and isn’t making anyone rich in the way it did 15 years ago. The changes also would mean possible merit raises for all employees, raises targeted at specific job categories and cities “where the market has moved the most,” and more money overall set aside for raises and stock awards. Also, don’t forget that in 2013, Microsofties are going to have to start paying for part of their healthcare benefits for the first time.

Also significantly, Ballmer ended with a bit of rah-rah that seemed intended to quell the criticism that Microsoft is a lumbering behemoth that can’t get out of its own way enough to do inspiring things: “Through our history, we have been THE place people came when they wanted to make a difference in the world through software, hardware and services. This is as true today as it has been at any time in our history, and the changes we’re rolling out today will help ensure Microsoft continues to be the place that top talent comes to change the world.”

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Interesting news in online travel this afternoon, spanning the Boston and Seattle areas—and plenty of destinations in between. Bellevue, WA-based Expedia (NASDAQ: EXPE) said it plans to split into two publicly traded companies—one will be Newton, MA-based TripAdvisor (which has been part of Expedia since 2004), and the other will remain Expedia, which also owns Hotels.com, Hotwire, and a number of other travel brands.

The company said the split will take the form of either distributing TripAdvisor stock to Expedia stockholders or reclassifying Expedia stock (so Expedia stockholders get a proportionate amount of TripAdvisor stock). The deal is expected to be completed in the third quarter of this year, and is subject to final approval from Expedia’s board and stockholders.

TripAdvisor is based around a huge collection of user reviews about hotels, restaurants, and other businesses, which consumers consult when making travel plans. Its main source of revenue comes from collecting fees whenever users click through the TripAdvisor listings to make a reservation.

Reached for comment today, TripAdvisor provided a statement from its co-founder and CEO, Stephen Kaufer: “I’m excited to announce the planned spin-off of TripAdvisor and the TripAdvisor Media Group from Expedia, Inc. to become an independent, publicly traded company. We look forward to this next stage and to our continued growth and innovation in inspiring and helping travelers plan the perfect trip.”

That doesn’t say much, of course, but the move makes sense for both parties—and isn’t all that surprising. TripAdvisor was acquired by IAC (NASDAQ: IACI) in 2004, back when IAC owned Expedia, and was nominally put under Expedia’s charge; Expedia was spun off later that year. But TripAdvisor, which has been raking in the dough for years ($486 million in revenue in 2010), was never really integrated into Expedia; the two entities remained largely separate.

A little over a year ago, TripAdvisor’s Kaufer told my colleague Wade, in an in-depth interview, that Expedia had pretty much left his company alone since the acquisition. “I love the autonomy that Expedia has given TripAdvisor and the whole media group,” Kaufer said then. “I’ve told my boss and I’m happy to tell the public that when the rules of engagement change and Expedia wants to start micromanaging what we do here, it’s their right. They own the company. But I won’t be CEO.”

Sounds like Kaufer isn’t going to be leaving anytime soon (unless there’s another surprise in the works). We’ll continue to monitor this deal, and see if we can’t uncover more details about exactly why the split is happening, and why now.

The online travel world is also bracing for a possible ruling in the case of Google’s contested acquisition of Cambridge, MA-based ITA Software, whose technology organizes data on flight itineraries and powers airfare shopping sites. Reuters and other news outlets have reported that a decision from the U.S. Department of Justice might be just days away.

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Cambridge, MA-based Zipcar, the auto-sharing company, plans its initial public offering of 8.3 million shares to be priced at $14 to $16 per share, according to an amended filing with the SEC. The company expects net proceeds of $89.2 million, which it will use for repaying debt, expanding the business, and other purposes. Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are the lead underwriters. Zipcar originally filed to go public last June, with an initial target raise of $75 million. The company then closed $21 million in Series G financing from Meritech Capital Partners and Pinnacle Ventures in December, prompting rumors that the IPO was dead.

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Bellevue, WA-based mobile Internet service provider Motricity (NASDAQ: MOTR) has inked a big deal with one of India’s largest mobile operators, Reliance Communications, according to Brier Dudley of The Seattle Times. The news has caused the company’s stock to soar about 34 percent, closing today at $17.42. The recent deal is all part of Motricity’s aggressive international expansion plans, detailed in our interview with founder and chief executive Ryan Wuerch last week.

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Boston-based American Tower, an owner and operator of wireless towers and other communications sites, said today it plans to raise $700 million in a registered public offering of senior unsecured notes due September 2020. The company says the net proceeds of the sale, expected to be about $693.8 million, will be used to finance the recent acquisition of Essar Telecom Infrastructure Private Limited, based in India, as well as “other recent and potential acquisitions.” American Tower (NYSE: AMT) was formed in 1995, and says it currently owns and operates more than 32,000 wireless communications sites in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Peru and India.

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This week saw a long-awaited FDA approval for a Boston-area drug maker, speculation about a possible buyout of a local biotech giant, and some in-depth profiles on other key life sciences players.

—Hospital software maker Picis, of Wakefield, MA, said it is being acquired by Ingenix, an Eden Prairie, MN-based healthcare intelligence and analytics firm. The companies didn’t disclose financials details of the transaction, but Ingenix said it will maintain Picis’ locations in Wakefield and throughout the U.S. and Europe.

—Cambridge, MA-based Momenta Pharmaceuticals nabbed a long-sought FDA approval for a generic version of the anti-clotting drug it developed with Novartis unit Sandoz. The regulatory approval proves that Momenta (NASDAQ: MNTA) can make equivalents of more complex drug mixtures, which pose a greater challenge for would-be generics makers than do more conventional small-molecule pills, Luke wrote.

—Ryan took a look at RainDance Technologies, a Lexington, MA-based company developing next-generation genomic analysis technology. The startup’s first commercial product is a system that conducts thousands of DNA experiments simultaneously, which has caught the eye of research houses and pharma companies.

—Cambridge-based BioScale has flown relatively under the radar while developing a method of measuring biological samples using sound wave technology, Ryan wrote. But the company has caught the eye of another Cambridge biotech player: Millennium, The Takeda Oncology Company, which is using BioScale’s technology to measure cancer-related proteins for its drug research. The access comes as part of BioScale’s beta release of its technology.

—Following last week’s talk of a potential acquisition of Genzyme by drug giant Sanofi-Aventis, Ryan asked readers to weigh in on how much they thought Cambridge-based Genzyme’s stock would be worth in a buyout. Their answers averaged out to $76.29 per share, for a total value of about $20.4 billion. That’s well above the $70 per share that the Sanofi (NYSE: SNY) board authorized the company to offer for Genzyme (NASDAQ: GENZ).

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It was a big news week for the intersection of information technology and healthcare, with our first ever forum completely dedicated to the topic, and a few startups in the space nabbing funding. Headlines from big pharma companies rounded it out for us, too.

—Athenahealth (NASDAQ: ATHN), the Watertown, MA-based maker of electronic health records software systems, announced it has hired IBM’s Managed Process Business Services unit for IT and administrative support. The deal with IBM (NYSE: IBM) will allow Athenahealth to focus on improving the administrative and reimbursement aspects of its products, it said in an announcement.

—Waltham, MA-based drugmaker Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) revealed its royalty rate for exenatide once-weekly (Bydureon), a diabetes drug from Eli Lilly and Amylin Pharmeceuticals that uses Alkermes’ chemistry technology. The Waltham company will take in 8 percent of sales of the first 40 million units of the treatment sold per year, which could bring in about $160 million if Bydureon is priced comparably to an existing twice-daily version of exenatide. Alkermes would also take a 5.5 percent royalty rate on sales beyond those first 40 million units.

—Novartis exercised its option to buy 55,223 more shares of Cambridge, MA-based Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY), for a total of about $1 million. The deal allows pharmaceutical giant Novartis to maintain its 13.4 percent stake in the company, which is developing treatments using RNA interference technology.

—Charles River Laboratories International plans to buy Chinese R&D services firm WuXi PharmaTech for $1.6 billion in cash and common stock, the companies announced on Monday. The $21.25-per-share deal, which is subject to shareholder approval, represents a 28 percent premium over WuXi’s closing stock price on Friday.

—Ryan caught up with the CEO of Cambridge’s Gene Network Sciences, a startup that’s out to match patients with the drugs that best suit them, and help prevent the wasteful spending that results when insurance companies reimburse for treatments that just don’t work. The company formed in 2000 and is widely know for its computer-simulated drug research for big pharma companies, but its new GNS Healthcare subsidiary will attempt to tackle these inefficiencies in the healthcare market.

—We held our first ever event dedicated solely to exploring the role information technology will play in improving the quality of patient care. Our Healthcare In Transition forum featured speakers from … Next Page »

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Art Technology Group (NASDAQ: ARTG), an e-commerce software and service company in Cambridge, MA, announced its plans to sell 25 million shares of common stock at $3.50 a share in an underwritten public offering. Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank Securities will serve as underwriters for the deal, and will have the 30-day option to purchase as many as 3.75 million additional shares to cover over-allotments. ATG, which said the proceeds of the stock sale could go to future acquisitions, paid $17 million in cash in January to acquire InstantService, a Seattle-based provider of SaaS-based live chat services. [Editor's Note 02/09/10: A previous version of the story mistakenly listed the offering as 25,000 shares. We regret the error.]

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Seattle-based Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) said today its acquisition of online apparel and shoe seller Zappos, based in Las Vegas, has closed. The Zappos management team will remain intact, the company said. In a blog post, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh said his board of directors has been “switched out,” and that the deal, worth about 10 million shares of Amazon stock, is valued at $1.2 billion, based on Friday’s closing price.

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[Corrected 9:05 a.m. 9/25/09, see below] In a performance reminiscent of the frothy days of the dot-com boom, stock in Watertown, MA-based lithium ion battery maker A123Systems (NASDAQ: AONE) soared more than 50 percent in its first day of trading yesterday. It’s been years since a New England technology firm burst out of the IPO gate so strongly, and Wall Street’s interest in the company—which hopes to supply batteries for many of the electric vehicles likely to come to market over the next several years—has significantly boosted the portfolios of the major venture investors, strategic investors, and executives who hold shares in the company, at least on paper.

The individual investor whose shares gained the most value yesterday is legendary Boston-area entrepreneur and philanthropist Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, the founder of Sycamore Networks and the donor behind the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. Desphande owns 7.3 percent of A123Systems; at the IPO price of $13.50 per share yesterday, that stake was worth just over $95 million. By the end of the day, when the company’s stock price had climbed to $20.29, Deshpande’s shares were worth nearly $143 million. (See Table 1 below.)

A123Systems’ main venture backer, North Bridge Venture Partners of Waltham, MA, also fared well yesterday. With 9.3 percent of A123′s outstanding shares, the venture firm is the battery maker’s single largest shareholder. Its stake was worth just under $121 million at the offering price and had grown in value by $60 million by the end of the day. [Update: PE Hub has an interesting table today, using investment data from Thomson Reuters, estimating the share values for A123's six largest venture backers. The VC firms' (as yet unrealized) multiples, based on yesterday's closing price, vary from 3.03 to 7.23, according to Thomson's estimates; North Bridge's multiple comes in at 4.35.]

Overall, the company’s eight largest shareholders saw the value of their holdings increase by almost $270 million on Thursday [Updated and corrected: not $365 million as a previous version of this story reported due to a double-counting error in the math]. The company’s total market capitalization increased by $600 million over the course of the day, ending at $1.96 billion. Not bad for a company that has raised only about $352 million in private, dilutive investments. (A123Systems also benefited from $100 million in refundable tax credits from the state of Michigan, a $249 million Department of Energy grant this August, and about $250 million in other government grants and loans, leading PE Hub’s Deborah Gage to comment that “the biggest backers of A123Systems are taxpayers.”)

Here’s a list of A123Systems’ biggest shareholders, drawn from regulatory filings, and the amounts by which their stakes grew in value yesterday.

Table 1. A123Systems’ Eight Largest Shareholders and Their Stakes

* The “Shares Owned” figures refer to shares owned after the offering.

Source: A123 Systems Form S-1, page 124.

Of course, the gains reflected in the table above are on paper only—none of A123′s largest shareholders actually sold shares in the initial offering. But as part of the offering, several A123Systems principals did sell portions of their stakes in the company. Co-founder Yet-Ming Chiang, who developed the company’s battery technology in his laboratory at MIT, sold the most shares—a stake amounting to about $2.8 million at the IPO price of $13.50 per share. Here’s the list of selling shareholders identified in regulatory documents:

Table 2. Selling Shareholders in Yesterday’s IPO

Source: A123Systems Form S-1, page 125.

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