It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes his son Cam and eight-year-old grandson Alex, had already arrived and were busy setting up for the day—a table of coffee and donut holes for the crew and onlookers, a Subaru converted into a mobile data acquisition center, and several barrels of fuel at the ready.

For Shadle, 68, and his partner and co-owner of the North American Eagle, Keith Zanghi, 55, the day’s engine test was just one stop along a more than 11-year journey to build the fastest land vehicle in the world. The goal: 800 miles per hour.

Shadle and his crew, all based in Washington state, were busy lowering the Eagle, a 56-foot-long tubular car forged out of the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, from the trailer. The nose and tail cones had been removed for transport, reducing the car to 48 feet in length—just short enough to fit inside the trailer. Other crew members busily prepared the steel cables that would anchor the car to two gravel-filled trucks, weighing 80,000 lbs in all, and to a nearby tree with deep roots—a “safety precaution,” the crew said. This setup procedure was nothing new for them.

“We’ve probably been out to this airport maybe 25 times, and we tie up to our favorite tree back there,” Zanghi said. “Luckily it’s not raining. It could be worse.”

For both Shadle and Zanghi, the thirst for speed was born out of a love of drag racing at an early age. And naturally, like any “typical teenager of that era,” as Shadle calls himself, drag racing led to more racing at higher speeds, and eventually, flight.

“For me, it started back when I was just a kid back in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. My uncles were all back from World War II and they got into stock car racing—the old jalopies running on dirt tracks. And of course we used to go to the races, so I’d hang out in the pits and watch my hero uncles,” Shadle said. “My first drag race on a real strip was at an airport. We raced on Friday nights for 50 cents and you could race all night.” Later, in his 20s, Shadle joined the Air Force and developed his career as a pilot.

“Just like Ed, we all grew up with the space program. The Mercury astronauts were my heroes—the Gemini and Apollo [as well]. All I did was build model airplanes when I was a kid,” Zanghi said.

The shared passion for flight, speed, and all the machinery behind them brought Shadle and Zanghi together in the 1990s when they both found themselves on a team working to build a vehicle that could break the land speed record. They were beat out, however, by Great Britain’s Richard Noble and Andy Green, who in 1997 achieved the current record of 763.1 mph with the ThrustSSC.

“At that time, the record was 633 mph, which is about 140 mph below the speed of sound, so we were building a car that was designed to go sub-sonic.” Zanghi said. When the British team broke the record, their car went supersonic. “As soon as that happened, we knew our car was obsolete,” he said.

When their project folded, Shadle and Zanghi decided to team up on a brand new endeavor, and in 1999 they bought the Eagle’s junked F-104 fuselage, without wings, for $25,000. The single-engine supersonic interceptor had its heyday flying with the U.S Air Force from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.

According to Zanghi, the F-104 had the ideal shape for land speed racing. The body was … Next Page »

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Diagnostics company Magellan Biosciences announced today it has appointed a new president and CEO, Hiroshi Uchida. Most recently serving as executive VP, CTO, and a member of the board of directors of blood transfusion technology company Fenwal, Uchida said he plans to improve partnerships and accelerate investments in development projects for Chelmsford, MA-based Magellan, which has products in lead poisoning, food safety, and autoimmune testing.

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GateRocket, a Bedford, MA, company that makes testing and debugging equipment for field-programmable gate arrays or FPGAs, has raised just under $2 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. That comes on top of a $3 million Series A funding round in September 2008 led by New Atlantic Ventures, the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation, and Long River Ventures, and brings the company’s total funding to about $6.5 million.

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Verizon Wireless announced today it has successfully tested its fourth-generation wireless network in Boston and Seattle, by making “data calls” involving streaming video, Web browsing, and file uploads and downloads from mobile devices. Verizon’s technology, called Long Term Evolution, is supposed to be much faster than existing 3G wireless networks, and competes with Clearwire’s WiMax system, which has already launched in four cities (including Portland, OR). Boston and Seattle will be the first cities to deploy Verizon’s 4G service.

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Microsoft confirmed today that the next version of its operating system, Windows 7, will launch October 22.  Rumors swirling since April hinted at an October release date, as opposed to the original release plan of January 2010, but nothing had been confirmed by the Redmond, WA, company until today.  The last version of Windows, Vista, debuted less than three years ago to mixed reviews.  Windows 7 may be part of the attempt by Microsoft to overcome the difficulties of Vista.  Those eager to try out the new system can test it before it launches and decide for themselves.

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Southborough, MA-based uTest, a Web-based service that helps software companies crowdsource their quality assurance processes to freelance testers, relaunched its website today with an emphasis on collaboration tools for its community of more than 16,000 testers. A new forum area allows testers to create personal profiles, exchange private messages, and share their best practices, while a “Meet our Testers” application shows the locations of testers on an interactive global map. “Collaboration has always been critical to successful software testing, as the process often involves multiple teams and multiple projects,” Doron Reuveni, CEO of uTest, said in a statement. “uTest is excited to further extend our leadership in human software testing by facilitating the free exchange of ideas.”

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Micronics has been around since 1996, so it hardly qualifies as a startup anymore. But the Redmond, WA-based biotech company has been moving in new directions over the last few years, and is now getting ready to bring its first diagnostic tests to the market.

The 28-person company has been in the microfluidics business—the design of tools to manipulate very small amounts of liquid (sometimes called “lab on a chip”)—since its inception 13 years ago, when it spun out of research from the University of Washington. More recently, says president and CEO Karen Hedine, the company has shifted into using its knowledge and inventions in microfluidics to create novel diagnostic tools.

Micronics has raised a total of about $25 million in funding, Hedine said, including $9 million in 2008 through private Series B investors and a Series C financing round led by the Southwest Michigan First Life Science Fund.

The company has decided to focus on infectious diseases, Hedine said. Micronics’ first diagnostic product, which it hopes to debut by the end of 2009, will be a small, disposable test for malaria. “We look at targets that are unmet needs,” Hedine said. “A malaria diagnostic is one of the most unmet needs out there.”

Right now, Hedine said, even in a best case scenario like a Western world clinic, diagnosing the disease usually requires several clinic appointments and at least a few weeks to get an answer back from the lab. Micronics hopes to turn those weeks into minutes, and reduce the amount of blood or urine required from a large vial to a few drops.

The malaria tests are aimed for use in developing countries, where the disease is most prevalent. Hedine said she expects Micronics’ customers might include clinics in these areas, as well as charity organizations, governments donating aid, non-governmental organizations, or militaries stationed in countries where malaria is common.

So far, Micronics’ money has come from three avenues, Hedine said: investment financing, revenue from lab equipment and consulting services, and grants or contracts for the development of some of its diagnostic tools. The tools are built on small, disposable plastic cards, and use minute amounts of fluids—for both the sample required from the patient and the chemical reagents needed to process it, Hedine said. They’re designed to run on a “finger-stick” worth of blood, similar to home blood-sugar monitors for diabetics.

After the malaria tests, Micronics plans to release a similar test system for E. coli, which has been a recent culprit in widespread food poisoning scares in the United States, as well as a portable, rapid blood-typing test whose development was funded by the U.S. Army. The company is also working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop similar tests for HIV. Hedine said diagnostic tests for a panel of other STDs are further down the pipeline.

The malaria and E. coli tests will be ready for regulatory testing by the middle of the year, Hedine said, and she hopes they will be approved in time to be released before 2010. “We’re really revolutionizing the way testing is done,” Hedine said.

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This morning, there was news about Bellevue, WA-based Bsquare buying the assets of TestQuest, a Minneapolis, MN-based mobile software firm, for $2.2 million. It made me think about the strategy behind the deal, and whether it signifies a shift in Bsquare’s business.

So I pinged Bill Baxter, who founded Bsquare as CEO in 1994 and took it public in 1999. Baxter, who left the company in 2004, is now chief technology officer of Seattle-based Cozi (and an Xconomist). He sent me the following insights about the direction of Bsquare (NASDAQ: BSQR) and the significance of today’s deal, in an e-mail:

“The original plan for taking the company public was to focus on increasing the IP portfolio to increase the value per engagement with OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. We invested heavily in that strategy during the downturn and developed a number of valuable assets. Those assets were to be deployed with our services which included design, development and testing of embedded devices (mobile phones, set-top boxes, etc.). We developed a product called CEValidator which was used to assist us in performing QA [quality assurance] services and then we’d license that product to OEMs at the end of the service engagement, along with other IP.

Having said all that, my departure from the company in 2004 reflected a fundamental change away from that strategy to focus more on the core service business. BSQUARE cut investment in IP and the bulk of revenue shifted towards a service business.

The acquisition of TestQuest (discussions about which started before my departure) is reflective of a continuing focus on delivering testing services. TestQuest offers two things:

1. New technology to automate testing of mobile devices.

2. An existing customer base.

Overall, the investment is not a huge thing for the company. They now have a new office to manage with little or no critical mass. But it was cheap and offers them some benefit. I don’t see how they can sustain the site in Minneapolis. But I do see how they might benefit marginally. It will not change the business in such a way that would make them a more attractive public company. But it should be accretive to the business if they can contain the costs.”

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There’s no such thing as a flawless software application: the only question is how many bugs its developers had time to catch and fix before release, and how many will be discovered by customers. And with software being written today for so many different platforms and operating systems, from servers to desktops to mobile devices to Web browsers, it’s becoming harder and harder for software companies’ in-house testers to try out their creations in every context where businesspeople or consumers are likely to encounter them.

That’s why more software makers are outsourcing all or part of their quality assurance (QA) process to specialized testing firms in places like India and China. And it’s why a new Boston firm called uTest thinks it can make it big by building a global community of thousands of freelance QA testers, available to test software at a moment’s notice in any environment where a program is likely to run.

Need to see whether your new Web service works on the Safari browser for Mac users in Germany? No problem—uTest, which has been serving a couple of dozen pilot customers since April and opened its doors for general business yesterday—has testers there who can try it out. In fact, the company has assembled a network of more than 8,000 testers worldwide—some 10 percent of the world’s entire population of professional software QA testers, according to uTest CEO and co-founder Doron Reuveni.

“QA is a big business,” says Reuveni. “Applications today need to operate in complicated combinations of platforms and networks, and hiring a staff and building an infrastructure for doing software testing internally is not always cost effective. The fact that we have access to such a large community of professional testers has allowed us to take that big business and provide it on demand.”

An “on-demand” approach gets around several of the inefficiencies built into the traditional software testing business, in Reuveni’s view. For one thing, most QA outsourcing deals require a long-term contract. But by doling out bug-finding work through uTests’s software-as-a-service platform, software makers only have to pay testers when they’re actually working toward a new release.

And QA often suffers from its own lack of QA: software companies usually have to pay up on their outsourcing contracts whether or not they’re getting back a lot of high-quality, actionable bug reports. But on uTest’s platform, clients accept or reject each report manually, and are only charged for those they accept. “We like our customers to pay solely for performance,” says Reuveni.

Reuveni and co-founder Roy Solomon started uTest last year to prove that this new, more flexible model could save software companies money and time. They’ve collected $2.2 million in venture funding from the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation and Connecticut-based Mesco Ltd., a private financial advisory boutique that previously funded Greenfield Online, an online community of paid citizen panelists who provide feedback on consumer products. And they recruited their own community of QA testers by putting the word out through Facebook, LinkedIn, and key blogs frequented by QA professionals.

Testers who put in a couple of hours of work each day can make $250 to $300 a week, Reuveni says. UTest makes money by taking a slice of its clients’ per-bug payments. The percentage kept by uTest—like the per-bug fees themselves—varies according to the number of testers assigned to each software release, the type of application being tested, and other factors.

You might think that the pay-per-bug model would give some uTest clients a way to find out about important problems and then evade paying for the bug reports simply by rejecting them. But during uTest’s pilot period over the last few months, the model has worked well, with a very low percentage of reports being … Next Page »

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