Here a merger, there a merger, everywhere a merger merger… Some small, medium, and large acquisition news today around New England.

—Localocracy, a Boston-based online town common and community platform, has been acquired by the Huffington Post Media Group and will join the AOL (NYSE: AOL) content unit. The news was first reported by All Things D, which said the deal price was less than $1 million. Localocracy is a finalist in the MassChallenge startup accelerator program.

—Zettapoint, a database management firm based in Concord, MA, and Israel, has been acquired by Hopkinton, MA-based data storage giant EMC (NYSE: EMC) for an undisclosed sum. Israel-based news site Globes, which first reported the deal, puts the price at around $10 million and says Zettapoint’s 15 employees will join EMC Israel. (EMC has an R&D center in Beersheva.) Xconomy reported on EMC’s broader acquisition strategy and plans for growth last fall.

—Atrium Medical, a Hudson, NH-based maker of medical devices for cardiology and radiology, said today it is being acquired by Swedish giant Getinge Group (STO: GETIB) for $680 million. Atrium says it will operate as an independent business unit of Maquet Cardiovascular, a Getinge subsidiary, and will be led by current Atrium president Trevor Carlton. The deal is expected to close later this quarter. Atrium was founded in 1981 and has made a name for itself in healthcare device areas such as catheters, artificial heart components, and soft tissue repair.

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The future for most of us is a totally uncharted territory. The noble art of divining doesn’t seem to have made much progress since the days of the Delphic oracle more than 2,000 years ago.

But Recorded Future, an American-Scandinavian startup founded by Swedish entrepreneur Christopher Ahlberg and headquartered in the Boston area, claims to be able to make fairly good predictions on what will happen, by organizing and analyzing information collected from the Internet and presenting the results in useful ways. To quote the company’s own description:

“Recorded Future offers robust tools for temporal and predictive analysis including advanced visualizations, data for predictive modeling, and fine-grain Future oriented alerts.”

The oracle of Delphi was known to be secretive, and Recorded Future has to a large extent embraced the same policy. If you look at its website under the heading “Press” you’ll find the statement: “We don’t grant interviews and we don’t issue press releases.”

There have, however, been some exceptions to the rule. In March, the company’s CTO, Staffan Truvé, gave a presentation of Recorded Future’s technology at a conference organized by students at Linköping University in Sweden.

And Christopher Ahlberg recently granted my colleage Mats Lewan at the Swedish magazine Ny Teknik an interview.

Dr. Ahlberg told Mats that he thinks that today’s search engines have shortcomings when it comes to temporal information: “Google doesn’t understand time. And there are very few systems that understand time. It’s tricky. Internet tends to organize in terms of publication date.”

“It is really not easy to be able to extract temporal information from human texts, especially when it is by journalists who like to write in a colorful way,” says Dr. Ahlberg.
To be able to do that, the software must make sense of vague terms like “early next week,” “on Thursday,” “soon,” “later,” and “towards the end of the year.” According to Dr. Ahlberg, Recorded Future has analyzed thousands of English temporal expressions and is now doing the same for other languages.

For a user, the analysis could result in knowing when a competitor’s new product will hit the market; or help one spot plans for mergers and acquisitions that will influence the stock market. Or maybe just knowing when the market thinks something will happen, and being able to track the rumors in advance, might be good enough for anyone trading in stocks.

The company has funding from Google Ventures and also from another party with a long history of gathering and analyzing information—the Central Intelligence Agency, via its venture capital company In-Q-Tel.

Christopher Ahlberg started out as a researcher in data visualization technologies. In the mid-1990s he started Spotfire, a company focused on analyzing and visualizing business-critical information from large databases. Spotfire had its head office in Cambridge, MA, with several customers in the New England biotech and pharma industry. Tibco, based in Palo Alto, CA, acquired the company in 2007 for about $195 million. Just like Spotfire, Recorded Future has part of its workforce in Sweden, as well as in other parts of the world, like Washington DC.

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Are Americans more social and Scandinavians more interested in making things? These questions came to my mind when we recently compiled our annual list of Sweden’s 33 most innovative startups at Ny Teknik, a Swedish weekly magazine covering business, technology and science news.

The companies in the finished list, as well as those (several hundred) candidates that didn’t make it, seemed to be more geared towards what you might call “hard technology” than those on similar lists from the U.S., where there is a lot of interest in “soft technology.”

“Social” is hot among American entrepreneurs and investors, while manufacturing technology can at most be considered lukewarm.

We, on the other hand, had one company on our final list developing new low-friction coatings for bearings and axles in automotive applications, another focusing on advanced cross-binding agents for polymers, and a third with a highly advanced embossing process for producing holographic signs and stickers. Not to mention the ones that were sorted out during the ranking process, like the guys with a new method for aluminum casting that saves energy, gives better quality in the finished goods, and a more rapid manufacturing process.

I’m not talking about a clean-cut dichotomy. There is a great deal of overlap; biotech and cleantech, especially in the energy field, are clearly attracting a great deal of interest—and money—on both sides of the Atlantic. Still, the difference in focus is evident, but why is that so?

The simplest explanation would be to attribute it to cultural differences, to argue that Americans have more of a knack for making friends and influencing people. While Scandinavians are more concerned with making things. (We, or at least the Danes, gave the world Lego bricks, didn’t we?)

A more reasonable explanation is perhaps that startups tend to reflect the existing enterprise structure. Sweden has still got a large manufacturing industry; with two heavy truck and two car manufacturers there is a nearby market for a startup in low-friction coatings. There is a pool of talented people who have first-hand knowledge of the sector, including investors, consultants, and experienced managers. While in the U.S., the success of Facebook, Twitter, and the like has fostered a herd of new social-media entrepreneurs and investors. In other words, success breeds success.

If this is the real explanation, it also leads to a somewhat depressing conclusion. What our late-industrial societies need is break-out innovations, the ones that not only reflect what we’ve already got, but can grow into something totally unexpected, like Google did a decade ago. Instead, Larry Page exhorts his employees to be even more “social.”

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Michigan is beginning to take a more enlightened approach to economic development, with a stronger level of cooperation between academia, industry and government. It is now recognized that each of these constituencies has a vital role to play in rebuilding and sustaining a robust, knowledge-based economic model.

Mr. Lennart Johansson, the Swedish Consul General to Michigan, articulated the concept well in a recent discussion that I had with him. In Sweden this cooperative approach is called the “Triple Helix Model.” The objective is to create a systematic approach to encouraging and nurturing innovation, one that will ultimately result in economic growth. The model is based on strong interactions between Sweden’s universities, industries, and government. The idea is to move from being solely focused on the production of tangible goods to an economy that is based on the capitalization of knowledge.

I believe that there is a wealth of knowledge to build on in Michigan. Our universities and our companies have long histories of developing deep knowledge in advanced technologies and processes. We also have a very active community of innovators and entrepreneurs. What is needed now is a way to further accelerate the incubation and commercialization of these solutions. I think Michigan has taken some positive steps in a number of areas, but due to the severe negative economic impact that the automotive industry’s troubles have had on the state, much more needs to be done.

I have had the opportunity to work with a number of investor groups and startup companies in various parts of the United States, and around the world, over the past several years. Let me share some of what I have learned.

I have had numerous discussions regarding what it is like to “do business in Michigan.” We need to work hard to ensure that Michigan is perceived as a “good place to do business.” This means that we should actively promote business practices and public policy that encourage businesses to locate here, and prosper as a result. We need to ensure that the government is seen as an enabler in the process, not an impediment. And we need to understand the value that Michigan can bring to helping the companies achieve their objectives.

Some of the areas of value that are well recognized are Michigan’s strong engineering base, deep knowledge in manufacturing process technology, and highly developed logistics infrastructure. All of these qualities are in demand in with new technology startup companies. I have a number of projects with companies and universities in the Boston area, where there is a high level of new technology development, but limited ability to bring the technology to production. Maybe a Massachusetts-Michigan partnership program would be in order.

The other observation that I would share comes from my work with Michigan-based start-ups. Access to early stage funding usually requires that the companies spend a lot of time in other states to find investors. We need to actively promote venture capital interest in Michigan startup companies. It would be nice, if at least some of the time, the money were looking for the opportunity, instead of the other way around.

[Editor's note: To help launch Xconomy Detroit, we've queried our network of Xconomists and other innovation leaders around the country for their list of the most important things that entrepreneurs and innovators in Michigan can do to reinvigorate their regional economy.]

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Quite a few clean energy companies around Boston have a stake in the outcome of the international climate change talks that start this week in Copenhagen, Denmark. If nations set more aggressive goals for greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, after all, they’ll have a greater need for technologies to reduce their carbon emissions.

But only one local cleantech executive, as far as Xconomy can determine, is actually going to Scandinavia to participate in the discussions. It’s Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston-Power, which makes green, longer-lasting batteries for HP laptops and other devices.

As a member of a non-governmental initiative called The Road to Copenhagen, Lampe-Onnerud attended climate change discussions in Brussels, Belgium in two years ago and Oslo, Norway, last year. She’s now heading to her native Sweden to take part in the group’s final conference in Malmö, just across the Oresund Strait from Copenhagen, on December 8 and 9.

Boston-Power is one of 13 corporate sponsors of the Road to Copenhagen meeting, alongside much larger companies such as Cargill, Procter & Gamble, and Whirlpool. Lampe-Onnerud, who trained as a chemist, says her most important job at the Malmö meeting will be to “bring some honesty to the scientific debate” around different options for dealing with climate change. “I have made it one of my personal and professional commitments to be a citizen of the Earth, and this is something I know something about, so I think I should volunteer some time,” she says.

The Road to Copenhagen group—an initiative of the Club de Madrid, a group of former presidents and prime ministers—consists largely of politicians, business leaders, and scientists who are not part of the formal negotiations at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. (That meeting starts today in Copenhagen and continues through December 18.) The group plans to develop a communiqué that will be delivered to representatives at the UN meeting. Its last communiqué, issued just before the 2008 UN climate change meeting in Poznań, Poland, called for a halt to further increases in greenhouse gas emissions globally by 2020 and a 50 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2050—goals that are far more ambitious than the emissions caps set out by the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

Developing a more aggressive, legally binding treaty to take the place of the Kyoto accord—which expires in 2012—was the original goal for the Copenhagen conference. But the U.S. Congress’s failure to pass energy legislation this fall committing the United States to emissions reductions means that President Obama is going to Copenhagen largely empty-handed. Many other nations have also been dragging their feet on climate legislation. In recent days, both the U.S. and China, the world’s leading emitters of greenhouse gases, have set informal reductions targets, but it’s too late for Copenhagen: UN negotiators have already scaled back their goals for the meeting to achieving an interim pact, with more negotiations over a binding agreement to follow in 2010.

Still, Lampe-Onnerud is upbeat (as always—she is perhaps Boston’s most cheerful technology CEO). “I know that there is disappointment in the setup [for Copenhagen], but I am going because I still think the time is now,” she says. “We have to take action, because the climate change threat is more severe than many want to depict. I will go in with a sense of urgency, and with the discipline of a measurable, milestone-driven agenda.”

One item on Lampe-Onnerud’s agenda will be to try to quash schemes for large-scale climate modification to dampen or … Next Page »

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The Baseball World Cup qualification series started this week over here in Sweden, as well as in several other countries in Europe. South Korea, Canada, the Dutch Antilles, and Sweden will meet each other at a field in the Stockholm suburb Sundbyberg. The finals will take place at the end of the month in Italy.

Since baseball lost its place in the Olympic Games, the world championship is supposed to be the most important international baseball event, even if you Americans are more interested in your not-so-global World Series. Even though I root for the home team, I have to admit that Sweden’s chances are slim against both Canada and the big favorite, South Korea. To be honest, what else could you expect when the game is a very small sport in a small country, with just over a thousand registered players. (The actual Swedish expression is “licensed players;” you have to register for a license to get insurance during the games.)

To give a sense of proportion for those of you who are used to the lines outside Fenway Park; the venue in Sundbyberg normally seats just 100 spectators, although it’s been upgraded with temporary bleachers during the championship to 2,436 seats.

Baseball is just a newcomer on the Scandinavian sports scene, with teams trying to recruit players, fans, and financing, and facing fierce competition from well-established team sports like soccer and ice hockey. (Even though Boston author Robert Skole has written a baseball fantasy novel in which an American bomber crew introduces the game to Sweden during WW2.)

In my opinion, the situation for the fledgling baseball league in Sweden mirrors the challenges facing start-ups and entrepreneurs everywhere. You have a great new idea, maybe even a developed product, and you’re convinced of its great qualities, but now you have to … Next Page »

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In the world of cleantech, there’s a lot of focus on alternative energy sources and power generation. But for Seattle’s Powerit Solutions, the name of the game is energy efficiency. Powerit is the North American division of the company, which also has a European division in Sweden (where the company started). It is a leader in energy management and conservation for industry—one of the major strengths of Washington state’s cleantech cluster.

I spoke with chief executive Claes Olsson last week to find out how Powerit is trying to help companies save money and power, and how the firm plans to grow its business globally, all without working on the power generation side of things. “It’s pretty expensive to build up new sources of electricity,” Olsson said. “Energy efficiency is the low hanging fruit.”

The Swedish part of the company has been around since 1994, and the Seattle division since 2002. Olsson joined the company two years later, and in 2005, he said, “that’s when we really got going on the product.” With $6 million raised last month in new funding led by Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal (together with @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners), and an expansion from five employees in 2007 to its current 47 (25 in the U.S.), the company does seem to be on the upswing.

“We have grown immensely,” Olsson said. “Our intention is to continue to grow but be smart about it.”

Powerit makes hardware and software to reduce energy consumption and electricity bills in industrial facilities. Part of the solution is energy efficiency—figuring out where energy is being wasted in companies and reducing it. But another big part is in “demand response,” which means understanding when utility companies’ rates are highest and tweaking a facility’s energy usage to avoid those costly peaks.

For individuals, avoiding those peaks might just mean remembering not to run your dishwasher until the late evening. For large industries, it means setting up an intelligent system to monitor those peaks and dial down expended energy as much as possible. Utility companies will send a warning that rates are … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Powerit Solutions, a maker of energy management and energy efficiency technology for commercial and industrial facilities, announced today it has raised $6 million in new funding. The round was led by new investors Siemens Venture Capital and ArcelorMittal’s Clean Technology Fund, and included existing investors @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners.

Powerit (pronounced “Power I.T.”) says the funds will be used to speed up its growth into industrial markets, as well as solidify its position in energy management and expand product development and sales efforts. The company makes a comprehensive hardware and software system (including wireless sensors) that monitors facilities’ power usage, predicts the timing and severity of energy demand peaks, and automatically reduces the energy load where possible, to provide savings on utility bills.

Energy efficiency for businesses is a big deal these days. Claes Olsson, the chief executive of Powerit, touted in a statement “the impact our Spara technology can have on the way that commercial and industrial facility operators will address power and data management.” He added that his investors “continue to be excited by Powerit’s performance and market strength.” (ArcelorMittal is the world’s biggest steel company, so that would seem to bode well for the prospects of Powerit being used in new construction facilities.)

Powerit was formed here in 2002, but its original technology dates back to engineers at Sweden’s Lund University in 1994. The company’s first customers were in Scandinavia. Much more recently, in 2008, Powerit’s U.S. and European operations officially merged to create one company, with technology installed in more than 2,500 sites worldwide. Its customers include Ikea, Paul Masson Winery, Benton Foundry, Stockholm Airport, and the San Jose Mercury News.

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A Swedish networking organization that promotes innovation and university startup companies said today it is establishing a beachhead in San Diego to serve as a “soft landing” for Swedish technology companies looking for U.S. partners.

It is the first move overseas for Sweden’s Innovationsbro, or “Innovation Bridge,” which is affiliated with Linköping University and is supported by Vinnova, a government technology funding agency. San Diego was chosen above other possible U.S. sites because of the “high knowledge content” and “very interesting development” in the area, according to Innovationsbro director Peter Strömbäck.

Strömbäck says that by establishing a physical presence in the United States for its Acceleratus program, the group intends to help Swedish growth companies that have a great potential for expanding globally. “It’s not an incubator, it’s a soft-landing office”, Strömbäck says in Sweden’s Ny Teknik magazine. “The companies inside the incubator system in Sweden have an overwhelming challenge in getting access to the international market at a suitable time. This will give them an opportunity to get help and support locally when they establish themselves there.”

The San Diego site is expected to host representatives of Swedish technology companies for as long as a year, said Mary Walshok, a UC San Diego associate vice chancellor who serves on the Acceleratus advisory board. Walshok, who helped establish Connect, the San Diego technology networking group, has strong ties with Sweden and received the country’s Royal Order of the Polar Star for her significant contributions to the development of a Connect organization in Sweden.

Walshok said Acceleratus will be managed in San Diego by Tomas Hagenfeldt of Lead, which incubates technology startups in Sweden. The “USA is by its nature a very interesting market for Swedish start-ups,” Hagenfeldt said. “Not only for its size but also culturally and linguistically, and the industrial infrastructure is very similar to Sweden.”

[Xconomy San Diego Editor Bruce V. Bigelow contributed to this report]

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The mobile search and advertising specialist JumpTap, based in Cambridge, MA, says it will open new offices in Madrid, Spain, and Stockholm, Sweden. The expansion is in response to the rapidly growing mobile market in the Nordic and Baltic regions and in Spain, says the company, which has partnership with several mobile operators, including the Swedish-Finnish TeliaSonera and Telefónica Spain.

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Specialty pharmaceutical company Biovitrum of Stockholm, Sweden said today that it has begun human clinical tests of its new anti-hemophilia drug, a recombinant form of a blood-clotting protein called Factor IX that it is developing in collaboration with Waltham, MA-based Syntonix. The company said it had initiated dosing studies of the drug on patients with Hemophilia B, a hereditary condition in which patients lack Factor IX.

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The U.S. ambassador to Sweden, Michael Wood, wants American investors to put their money into Swedish cleantech. This week he presented his case to New England investors and venture capital firms.

“During my two years as ambassador, I have been emphasizing cooperation between Sweden and the U.S.A. in cleantech. I call this my one big thing,” says Wood.

Nearly 40 major investors, state politicians, and venture capitalists gathered at a meeting hosted by Flagship Ventures on Wednesday to hear Ambassador Wood present his list of the 48 hottest cleantech companies in Sweden—a list he has compiled by traveling all around the country since he was appointed in 2006.

“I have found a great number of small Swedish companies with great ideas for alternative energy solutions. On the other hand, in the U.S., there has been an enormous amount of capital raised for investments in cleantech,” the ambassador says. “In Sweden we have ideas looking for money, in the U.S. money looking for ideas.”

The companies on his list range from small start-ups like biopolymer developer Xylophane, wave energy specialist Seabased, and photovoltaic producer Midsummer to established, midsize firms like heat pump producer NIBE Heating. Commercial R&D into alternative energy sources—especially biofuels for heating and automobiles—has been heavily promoted by the government of Sweden, which has ambitious plans to reduce the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.

According to Wood, who spoke with Xconomy after his presentation, the reaction was very positive. Several investors asked to be included in the “cleantech mission to Sweden” that the embassy is organizing in late May. Wood is also planning for a similar event for the fall.

Wednesday’s meeting was attended by representatives of 22 New England-based venture capital firms, according to the embassy. Wood gave a similar presentation in Silicon Valley a year ago. At that time, he had only 30 companies on his list.

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