Seattle-based Impinj, a 10-year-old RFID tech firm founded by University of Washington professor Chris Diorio, filed registration papers for an initial public offering today. The company said it was seeking up to $100 million. Impinj’s numbers were a little up and down in the past few years: The company went from about $25 million in revenue in 2008 to about $21 million in 2009, before bouncing back to about $32 million last year. Impinj also isn’t profitable, showing a loss of about $11 million for 2010. The company, a survivor of the post dot-com hype around use of RFID for supply-chain tracking, is backed by a number of VC firms, including Madrona Venture Group, Samsung Ventures, and Unilever Technology Ventures. Underwriters for the IPO are listed as Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, with Needham & Co., Pacific Crest Securities and Raymond James.

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It’s pretty impressive what a couple of engineers have built here in the Back Bay. But truth be told, the engineers themselves aren’t all that impressed yet. That’s because they have their eyes on a bigger goal: running a billion-dollar e-commerce company.

I’m talking about Niraj Shah and Steve Conine, the co-founders of Boston-based CSN Stores, which just might be the world’s biggest online-only retailer focused on home goods. The company, which owns more than 200 websites including Cookware.com, Strollers.com, BedroomFurniture.com, Luggage.com, and EveryFaucet.com, is New England’s largest e-commerce firm, not counting big retail brands like Staples.

CSN Stores has gotten a fair bit of press lately—after years of no press—because of its strong revenue growth and bootstrapped culture. (The company has taken zero venture financing to date.) But its story also holds important lessons about navigating a very competitive market, using technology as a unique tool, and maintaining its culture through its growth. There are also a few rumors swirling around this company—about how it plans to rebrand itself with a more consumer-friendly name, and how it might be raising a growth financing round to go really big (more on those below).

The company started in 2002 and has been profitable basically since its inception. CSN Stores had $380 million in revenue in 2010—an increase of more than 50 percent over the previous year—and it is on pace to grow by about 50 percent again this year, Shah says. The firm just opened a new distribution and customer care center in Utah that will employ about 300 people, adding to the company’s headcount of some 750 worldwide. Shah, the firm’s CEO, says the firm will have more than 1,000 employees by year’s end.

An obvious parallel in terms of growth would be Amazon.com, the Seattle e-retail giant that started out as a bookseller. In fact, Shah says, “We’re Amazon for the home.” He notes that CSN has watched what Amazon has done in the areas of customer focus and user interfaces. But he’s also careful to point out the differences between the companies—a key one being CSN’s focus on home products and its “specialized supply chain” for items like furniture. By shipping directly from manufacturers, CSN has managed to offer a large selection without having to stock its own warehouses (at least up to now).

“We’re at a point in our life cycle, if we do it right, we should be able to grow consistently over the next [few] years,” says Conine, CSN’s chairman. “Look at how fast Amazon grew in the early years. We have the potential to do something similar, and to emerge as a new e-commerce brand.”

Indeed, if CSN gets really big, its main competition will come from … Next Page »

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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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ThingMagic is a 10-year-old technology company whose core idea seems as fresh today as when it first started. The bad news: that means it may have been too far ahead of its time. The good news: times are changing.

The Cambridge, MA-based firm was founded by five MIT Media Lab alums, who had the goal of “adding magic to everyday objects”—hence the company’s name. This “magic” came in the form of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, which enable wireless communication by way of tiny electronic chips that can be embedded in things, accompanied by readers and software to make sense of what each tagged item is, and track its whereabouts. The big vision was to create an “Internet of things,” so people could retrieve information about the objects around them—everything from product inventory on shelves to stuff in your home, office, or car.

Sounds a bit far out even today, right? Well, it was far more so in the early 2000s, and the evolution of RFID ever since has been quite a rollercoaster ride. To make a long story short, the technology was strong but its business use was overhyped, so it got stuck on the adoption curve. Tech companies based around RFID have come and gone, but some have endured, such as Alien Technology, Impinj (which I wrote about here), and ThingMagic, which all have raised a fair amount of venture funding.

In July 2008, my colleague Wade wrote an in-depth piece on ThingMagic, focusing on the company’s progress in shrinking its RFID readers (its main product) down to a size where they could be put into places like offices and hospitals—a big step toward realizing the Internet of things. Around the same time, Mark Roberti, the founder and editor of RFID Journal told me that it would be another two to three years before the RFID market would take off, because end users were still figuring out the physics and economics of tags and readers.

Well, it has been two years, and I’m wondering what has changed in the RFID world. To get some answers—and an update to the company’s story—I recently sat down with ThingMagic co-founders Yael Maguire and Ravi Pappu, and director of marketing Ken Lynch, to talk about what lessons they’ve learned over the past decade. We met at the company’s new digs at One Cambridge Center in Kendall Square.

“After 10 years, we’ve seen literally hundreds and hundreds of ideas for using the technology,” says Maguire, the company’s chief technology officer. “It may not be ubiquitous, but in most cases it’s caught up with people’s imagination. People are focusing on how to deploy it.” Pappu, who runs product development and implementation, puts it this way: “The story is changing from RFID on everything to RFID in everything. That’s always been the vision of the Internet of things.”

It’s certainly in ThingMagic’s interest to promote all the new ways RFID is being used. But beyond any PR spin, there’s something real going on. Yes, there is the recent news that Wal-Mart plans … Next Page »

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Philips Electronics North America is laying off 96 employees at its supply chain solution center in Auburn, WA, according to a notice from Washington State’s Employment Security Department. The staff cuts are effective on March 20, 2009, when the facility will shut down.

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Lowell, MA-based MicroLogic, which developed the wireless technology behind the LoJack theft recovery system for vehicles and has recently focused on wireless tracking of heavy construction equipment, will be acquired by the StarTrak Systems division of Alanco Technologies (NASDAQ: ALAN), the Scottsdale, AZ-based company announced today. StarTrak makes cellular- and satellite-based systems that track “cold chain” equipment such as refrigerated trucks, trailers, and shipping containers. The terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.

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Anytime a biologist needs a shipment of something that must be kept cold, like a blood sample or biotech drug, it comes in a polystyrene (Styrofoam) box. Usually from the East Coast. Usually two or three days after the order was placed.

This all strikes Mickey Blake as pretty wasteful and inefficient. So she’s starting a business with partner Pete Kegel that she thinks will appeal to biologists’ desires to save time, money—and the world. I met Blake, a longtime sales rep for Bioline, last week at the University of Washington’s South Lake Union campus, where her new company, S3, was pitching its wares at a science fair.

This business is still in its earliest days, having made its first bio-supply shipment to customers in August. The company has secured warehouse space in Everett, where it will keep 3,300 square feet of inventory, with 21,000 square feet of backup space, for some of those lab supplies that scientists at the UW can tap for same-day delivery. She’s ordering the supplies in bulk, so she can save some cash on shipping, and pass it on to the labs—which are scrounging for pennies amid budget cuts. But the part that really caught my attention is the Greenbox, a recycled, reusable box for shipping those refrigerated products that she hopes will make polystyrene boxes in landfills a thing of the past.

“Polystyrene does not hold temperature very well, it’s not sustainable, and it’s expensive,” Blake says.

Like a lot of new environmentally-conscious products, the rub here is that customers need to pay more upfront to save money over the long run. A typical polystyrene box costs $12 with cooling gelpacks, gets used once, and is tossed in the trash, says Steve Skallerud, vice president of sales and marketing at Entropy Solutions, a Minneapolis-based thermal shipping company that makes the Greenbox used by distributors like S3. The Greenbox, made of recycled materials, costs $109, but it can be used 100 times or more, meaning it should cost $1.09 per shipment, he says. It’s supposed to withstand heat and cold better because of proprietary nanotech insulation in the lining of the box. Entropy introduced the boxes about a year ago, and already has signed up Wal-Mart’s specialty pharmacies, CVS Caremark, and Abbott Laboratories as customers, Skallerud says.

S3 plans to use these boxes exclusively, and is taking on the responsibility for picking them up at the lab when it delivers new shipments. S3′s model is really to serve as a West Coast distribution hub for big lab vendors like Qiagen, Mediatech, Sigma Genosys, and Corning, Blake says. It makes its money by taking a 3-6 percent cut of the sales it delivers.

If the Greenbox is really going to be re-used 100 times—which sounds to me like a big if, given the behavioral inertia behind trashing these boxes—then S3 might have a pitch that will resonate. Janis Wignall, a longtime science education specialist with Amgen and Immunex (and a friend of Blake’s) told me she’s hopeful that this will catch on with the labs. She remembers being at Immunex in the 1980s, and seeing those polystyrene boxes stack up in junk piles at the end of the hallways, come Friday each week. She’s hoping that the Greenbox will make the economics of a new shipping model compelling enough to force people to switch to a more environmentally-friendly model.

“I hated the polystyrene boxes,” Wignall says. “It was a problem 20 years ago, and it’s still a problem today.”

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