Boston-based Novophage has raised $5.7 million in a Series A financing round led by Flybridge Capital Partners. Founder Collective, Boston University, and strategic investors Chevron Technology Ventures and The Kraft Group also participated in the round. The news was first reported by Scott Kirsner of the Boston Globe. Novophage engineers viruses (phages) to combat bacterial contamination in industries like oil and gas, paper, and heating and cooling systems. As part of the financing, Micah Rosenbloom (co-founder of Brontes Technologies) has joined the firm as CEO. Xconomy profiled Novophage back in March 2009, when the company was more focused on therapeutic applications.

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San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics, co-founded by human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter, and the nonprofit J. Craig Venter Institute, are forming a new company called Synthetic Genomics Vaccines.

The startup plans to develop next-generation vaccines, using the latest advances in synthetic biology and genomic sequencing from the Maryland-based Venter institute, and intellectual property and “business acumen” from Synthetic Genomics, according to a statement today. The new vaccine company also has formed a three-year alliance with Novartis, the Swiss pharma giant, to collaborate in the development of influenza seed strains needed for vaccine manufacturing.

The collaboration with Novartis is supported by an award from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority that is intended to lay the groundwork for a more effective public health response to seasonal and pandemic flu outbreaks. The companies did not specify the amount of the award.

Under their collaboration, Novartis and Synthetic Genomics Vaccines plan to establish a “bank” of synthetically created seed viruses, which could be used to produce vaccines as soon as the World Health Organization identifies seasonal flu strains of concern. Currently, the WHO distributes live reference viruses after they have been identified to major vaccine manufacturers like Novartis. By creating the bank, Synthetic Genomics says the partnership could reduce vaccine production time by as much as two months, which would be critical during a pandemic.

The Venter Institute has been working with Novartis for more than a decade to apply its expertise in genomics to the development of new vaccines. Their last collaboration resulted in a technique now known as “reverse vaccinology,” a genomics-based way of finding new targets for vaccines that’s faster than traditional methods. Using advances in synthetic genomics, the companies say it is conceivable that more universal vaccines could be developed to target a broader range of infectious agents.

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Hydro-Photon, the Maine-based maker of handheld devices that use ultraviolet light to purify water, has raised just shy of $2 million in equity, according to an SEC filing. This will put more capital behind the firm’s product, called the “SteriPEN,” which looks like the hunting knife version of a lightsaber.

But this handheld device is designed the kill bacteria, viruses, and parasites in water, using ultraviolet light to destroy the DNA of such invaders in the water supply, according to the firm’s website. Miles Maiden, founder of Hydro-Photon, invented the firm’s main product more than a decade ago and began selling the devices through outdoor gear retailer REI in 1999. The firm says it has tripled in size since 2004, but Maiden wasn’t available at his office when I called for more details this morning.

The names of the firm’s investors are not listed in the SEC filing, but the company does appear to have some experienced executives on its staff and board of directors. Ed Volkwein, the company’s president, is a former senior executive in the consumer electronics division of Royal Philips Electronics and the video game company Sega, according to his profile on zoominfo. Richard Gurin, a director of Hydro-Photon, is a consumer products industry veteran and former CEO of Crayola, the Easton, PA-based maker of crayons and other creative products.

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Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace. Those companies’ products spread over the Internet like a virus. But why hasn’t there been a runaway hit like those in the mobile software world? Why does it take so much longer to build value, and a strong customer base, in mobile companies than in certain Internet startups?

Dan Shapiro had some entertaining thoughts on this yesterday, as he spoke to the Mobile Northwest 2009 crowd in Seattle. Shapiro is the co-founder and CEO of Ontela, a Seattle-based mobile imaging startup, and he’s a veteran of RealNetworks and Microsoft. I won’t do justice to his presentation, but here’s the gist.

Hotmail was one of the first examples of viral marketing. By appending the message, “Get your free e-mail at hotmail.com” (or some such) to the bottom of each e-mail, Hotmail helped pioneer a new method of promotion that was “basically free, highly measurable, and ridiculously effective,” Shapiro said. Its number of new subscribers jumped from hundreds to tens of thousands per day.

Maybe there’s something about the viral distribution model that doesn’t fly in the mobile world, Shapiro thought. In epidemiology, he pointed out, researchers use a parameter called the basic reproduction number to gauge whether a viral outbreak will spread or die out. The corresponding number in the Internet world tells you how many people a given user will “infect,” on average: Shapiro gave some estimates for Facebook (6), Gmail (5), MySpace (4), and Twitter (1.5). He argued that Twitter hasn’t been spreading virally; it has used more conventional marketing through word of mouth and the press.

“Heterogeneity in the target population is the best protection to keep you from being infected by viruses,” he said. That means some people have different levels of resistance, different behaviors, different types of contacts, and so forth, so not everyone will get infected by, say, the latest flu bug.

And that same kind of variety that makes individuals different is exactly why mobile isn’t viral, he argued. He cited some survey stats to explain how fragmented this market really is: There are roughly 500 different types of handsets, about 30 per carrier; about two-thirds of people (65 percent) don’t have a data plan; three out of four people (75 percent) are on a different carrier from you; almost that many (70 percent) don’t have a smartphone. And despite all the attention it gets, 98 percent of mobile users don’t have an iPhone. (iPhone apps are definitely not spreading virally, Shapiro said. He also argued that Tegic’s T9 predictive texting did not spread virally; it was pushed out by carriers and handset manufacturers in a dedicated partnership.)

“We will not see the Facebook, Gmail, or Yahoo of mobile until this changes,” Shapiro said. He added that he’s not advocating one standard mobile platform; he’s just saying how it is right now.

So his advice for mobile entrepreneurs and investors was:

—Be skeptical of anyone peddling viral marketing in mobile.

—Build a business model that doesn’t require big adoption.

—Pick a market segment that’s homogeneous. (Examples: BlackBerry corporate users, Silicon Valley techies.)

—Use ubiquitous technologies like WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) and SMS texting.

—Wait… (“Things are getting better,” he said.)

Afterward, Shapiro said he thinks “Europe holds the future of the U.S.” Over there, wireless carriers have influence, but only about half of consumers get their services directly from carriers, versus about 90 percent in the U.S. “I think you’ll see the carrier role diminish,” he said, when it comes to mobile software.

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Randy Drawas, chief marketing officer at Moscow, Russia-based antivirus company Kaspersky Lab, shared some disturbing statistics with me earlier this week. In 2007, he said, Kaspersky’s researchers detected as much malicious software activity on the Internet as they had in the previous 11 years combined. In 2008, malware volume doubled yet again. And in 2009, the company estimates, more than 30 million unique malware programs will be found in circulation on the Internet, many of them targeting consumers.

In an effort to help Internet users learn about these threats and protect themselves, Kaspersky this month launched a security news site called Threatpost. Based out of Kaspersky’s US headquarters in Woburn, MA, and edited by journalists, the site is designed to provide objective news, analysis, and education about issues like worms and viruses, software vulnerabilities and patches, and spam and botnets.

Kaspersky will be the site’s sole sponsor and advertiser. While Drawas says the Threatpost’s editors won’t overtly hawk Kaspersky products as solutions to readers’ malware headaches, the site “provides us with unique marketing opportunities just the same.”

To lead Threatpost’s editorial operation, Kaspersky has hired two veteran technology journalists: Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher. Naraine is a former editor-at-large for security at enterprise technology weekly eWeek who also blogs about security for ZDNet; Fisher is the former executive editor of the Security Media Group at Needham, MA-based TechTarget and former news editor at eWeek.

Naraine and Fisher launched the site on March 9 to coincide with the SOURCE Boston security conference. The plan, according to Naraine, is to write roughly four original news stories every weekday and to link to six or seven security-related news stories published elsewhere on the Web. In that sense, the site is a conscious imitation of the Huffington Post and other outlets that consist in large part of information culled from other sites. “It’s mostly an aggregation model,” says Naraine. “We really believe in this send-them-away mode—because if we do it right, tomorrow they will come back and see what else we have.”

Personal blogs by both Naraine and Fisher, weekly podcasts, slide shows, guest editorials, and a “watchlist” of security-themed video clips are also part of the Threatpost recipe.

When I spoke with Naraine earlier this week, I was naturally curious about how he plans to maintain the site’s editorial independence, in light of the fact that his employer is in the security business. “Dennis and I are under no illusions about this tightrope we’re walking, being employees of Kaspersky and writing about security,” Naraine said. “Maintaining independence is absolutely critical if this thing is to work. Our big thing was having a full understanding with the company that they have to be hands-off. But what we also understand is that this is a Kaspersky project. They are investing heavily. So obviously, you are not going to see product news from Symantec or McAfee featured strongly—but neither are you going to see overt pimping of Kaspersky products.”

I was also curious about what balance Naraine wants to strike between “educational” content explaining security threats to readers and community discussion and other more collegial or peer-to-peer forms of communication. “Security is a different animal” from other forms of technology journalism, he responded. Most readers “are not looking for a deep journalistic piece about a business model. They come in looking to be educated—’How do I find this patch, how do I disinfect my machine, what is a botnet, what should I be doing to keep my machine immune from falling into these types of attacks?’ Every time a reader comes to a story they must find some sort of information that helps them protect themselves.”

Drawas says Kaspersky will measure the success of Threatpost not simply by its traffic levels or whether it leads to increased sales of Kaspersky’s software, but by by the strength of the community it builds: “How many people join, how many people subscribe to our newsletter or our alerts….This is also an opportunity for [Kaspersky's business partners] to promote what they are doing and provide them with an outlet if they feel that they have something meaningful to share.”

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Hologic (NASDAQ:HOLX), a Bedford, MA-based provider of women’s healthcare products, says that the FDA has approved two of its “Cervista” tests for detecting human papillomavirus (HPV), a major cause of cervical cancer. One of the tests is intended to identify 14 “high-risk” strains of HPV, according to the firm, and the other test is designed to detect two strains that are linked to 70 percent of cases of cervical cancer in the U.S. Late this morning the firm’s stock had jumped 82 cents per share, or 7.75 percent, to $11.40, on the news.

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It may sound strange, but there’s a computer security company just outside Boston where the engineers have declared that the conventional battle against viruses, worms, Trojan horses, and other forms of computer malware is already lost.

Norton, McAfee, and other anti-virus companies may still make millions selling consumers software that promises to keep computers malware-free. But these solutions stop barely half of the malware attacks these days, say the folks at Waltham, MA-based Verdasys. So the only sure way to protect sensitive data—say, when a bank’s customers are online, managing their accounts—is to assume that their computers are compromised, and keep the data out of malware’s reach.

That’s the strategy behind SiteTrust, a new service that Verdasys is launching today for banks, brokerages, and other big companies that serve customers over the Internet—and that are legally liable for losses from online fraud. A privately backed company founded in 2003, Verdasys has served many of these same companies for years with a product called Digital Guardian that keeps sensitive data from slipping outside a company’s walls. SiteTrust is its first foray into the consumer world.

“The leading anti-virus products today are only about 50 percent effective against the current crop of malware, let alone against some of the newer techniques that do a much better job of hiding themselves,” says Bill Ledingham, Verdasys’s new CTO. “A lot of our online-broker customers, given the losses they are encountering, need a new approach. Given that malware is already resident, how do we insert ourselves and protect just the transaction that is happening between the customer and the corporate website?”

In theory, it’s easy to secure the data passing between a user’s Web browsers and a corporate server by encrypting it using established standards such as SSL. But this technique doesn’t work if the user’s PC is infected with malware that’s peeking at the data before it gets encrypted—for example, when a user is typing a password. Based on their experience creating Digital Guardian, which monitors and encrypts all proprietary or sensitive information passing through a desktop, laptop, or enterprise server, Verdasys engineers built a small client-side software package—a download less than 1 megabyte in size—that turns on whenever the user visits a website protected by the SiteTrust service.

This software—which is designed for Windows only, though Ledingham says the company is working on Mac and Linux versions—first spawns a new instance of the user’s Web browser, shutting out malware that may be eavesdropping on processes in other Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari windows. Then it inserts itself into the innermost operations of the user’s computer, creating a secure space around … Next Page »

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