Microsoft is joining several other notable corporate names throwing their support behind full marriage rights for gay couples in Washington state, a move that could give a final push to gay-marriage efforts at that state Capitol this year.

The companies—including RealNetworks, Concur, and Paul Allen’s Vulcan—announced their support for a possible state gay-marriage law on Thursday. The Seattle Times has a copy of the letter the firms sent to state officials.

Microsoft further explains its position in a blog post by its head lawyer, Brad Smith, who says that granting full rights to same-sex couples would reflect the company’s values and be “good for our business and good for the state’s economy.”

“As other states recognize marriage equality, Washington’s employers are at a disadvantage if we cannot offer a similar, inclusive environment to our talented employees, our top recruits and their families. Employers in the technology sector face an unprecedented national and global competition for top talent,” Smith wrote.

Smith noted that gay marriage is legal in six other states, including Massachusetts and New York. California’s gay-marriage laws are still tied up in court, after one federal judge overturned a previous gay-marriage ban.

In a short statement on its Facebook page, Vulcan said supporting gay marriage “is part of our company’s core values, which include appreciation and support for employees with diverse backgrounds. We believe that everyone has the right to be valued on their merits and contributions, not on their sexual orientation.”

Microsoft’s support for gay marriage in Washington is hugely significant.

Legislators in Olympia are now just one vote shy of being able to pass a bill legalizing civil marriages for same-sex couples, and one of the state senators representing parts of Microsoft’s hometown of Redmond, Republican Andy Hill, has been among the undecided.

As a humongous publicly traded corporation with tens of thousands of employees, Microsoft also has to sound a bit of a cautious note, saying that it respects the views of employees who might disagree with the company’s embrace of gay marriage rights.

“We’re not asking anyone to change their views to conform to the company’s position,” Smith wrote.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

When Paul Allen and company discussed their vision for a new kind of private space launch on Tuesday, they made a few nods to an audience member who knows something about the subject: Former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi, the only private citizen to fly in space twice.

While Allen said that he’s planning to wait some time before journeying beyond Earth himself—even on one of his own Stratolaunch vehicles—Simonyi said he’s actually lobbied the Microsoft co-founder to take the leap.

“I’m urging him to take weightless flights,” through parabolic airplane trips that allow passengers to briefly experience zero-gravity. “Do it step by step, that’s how I did it.”

Seats on a spaceflight when Simonyi went were being quoted in the neighborhood of $25 million-$35 million, but the cost now has risen to above $60 million. Asked if he’d fly on a launch from Allen’s new company once it gets up to speed with possible human crews, Simonyi said he’d be game “if my wife agrees and if the price is right.”

“I think it’s very audacious. I think it’s doable,” Simonyi said of Allen’s project. “The people are all within their sphere of competence, and integrating it together, I think, will be a successful project.”

“It’s a whole different (thing) than what I’ve been flying on, which was a legacy vehicle that had practically 50 years of history. It was a second-generation for the soviets, the Soyuz,” he said. “So this is much more advanced, and the training requirements will be minimal compared to the training that I had to go through.”

So, of course it has to be asked: What’s it like to be in space? “It’s an amazing thing,” Simonyi said.

“What was it the first time that one flew on an aircraft, and looking at the fields and the houses and the city from the air? It’s a whole different experience. And space is not unlike that. It’s just that it’s like a super wide-angle lens, and you see so much.

“Things change very fast. Daytime is only 45 minutes, and then you see a fantastic sunrise or sunset, which itself plays out 16 times faster than on Earth because you are doing 16 orbits a day.

“You know, one minute you are over Australia and 15 minutes later you are on the West Coast. You make radio contact from amateur radio, and soon you are talking to somebody—first you are talking to Seattle, and when you finish the conversation, you are in Florida. It’s just amazing.”

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated 12:20 pm Pacific with correction]
Redfin, the Seattle-based online real estate brokerage, says it has raised $14.8 million led by new investor Globespan Capital Partners. Redfin says the new round of financing, which pushes its total venture tally to about $46 million, will be used for R&D spending and expansion into new markets. At present, the company operates in about 20 individually listed markets, including Chicago, Dallas, L.A., and Long Island in New York.

Previous investors were back for the new round, including Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group and Vulcan Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Greylock Partners. Globespan managing director Venky Ganesan is joining the Redfin board as part of the deal.

Redfin takes a different approach to the online real-estate market than Seattle’s Zillow (NASDAQ: Z). In Zillow’s case, it makes money from online advertising, professional subscriptions, and per-click fees charged to lenders who offer online mortgage quotes. Redfin is more like a traditional real-estate business model, making varying amounts of money on home sales, but offering discounts over typical commissions. Redfin has its own agents, but also partners with brokers around the country. Redfin says it also gets a cut of any lender fees generated by users it sends through Zillow’s Mortgage Marketplace. [This paragraph has been updated to correct references to the kind of fees charged in the Zillow Mortgage Marketplace.]

Although the housing meltdown was clearly a bad time for anyone involved in the real estate sector—and, basically, everyone else—Redfin appeared to have bounced back nicely as of last year, when CEO Glenn Kelman told TechCrunch that the company was on pace for a $30 million revenue year. Redfin had previously said it was profitable at a run rate about half that size.

Zillow, of course, went public earlier this year—the only Seattle-area tech company to pull off an IPO while the window was seen as open. GeekWire’s John Cook says Redfin has been discussed as a possible IPO candidate, but that’s apparently not immediately in the cards.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

Patricia Beckmann has covered lots of bases in biotech—science, venture capital, entrepreneurship, and state officialdom. But once an Immunoid, always an Immunoid. So I’m excited to have her join Xconomy as one of the speakers at our next big Seattle life sciences event, “The Immunex Impact,” on Dec. 1.

For those who may have lost track, Beckmann is now the executive director of the Oregon Translational Research and Drug Development Institute (OTRADI) in Portland. Like the name suggests, its goal is to help researchers in Oregon translate their biological ideas into valuable new medical products. You can read more about Beckmann’s career and the Oregon initiative in this Science profile from earlier this year.

Beckmann’s enduring claim to fame comes from her scientific contributions at Immunex to the blockbuster autoimmune disease drug etanercept (Enbrel). That product, first approved in 1998, is on track to be the world’s third-best selling drug with $8 billion in worldwide sales in 2014, according to Thomson Reuters. But Beckmann has done a lot of interesting things since then. She managed life sciences investments for Paul Allen’s Vulcan for a while in the 2000s, followed by a stint at the Seattle-based Accelerator. There, she was the founding chief scientist of Homestead Clinical, a Leroy Hood project that was shut down for a while but has since been reborn as Integrated Diagnostics.

We have a great lineup of Immunex vets who have agreed to tell a short story about one of their best memories from their Immunex days. We’ll start things off with a keynote chat between co-founders Steve Gillis and Chris Henney, and then Beckmann will join Stewart Parker, Dave Urdal, Janis Wignall, Steve Graham, and Doug Williams in the “short stories” part of the program.

Patricia Beckmann

Beckmann admits to having once received the fabled “Pons and Fleischmann” award for dubious achievement in science, and she hinted that she might have something to say about that during the event. The award was just one symbol of Immunex’s famously irreverent scientific culture, which encouraged people to try risky things that might fail in the lab. Pons and Fleischmann inspired the award after they were celebrated for discovering cold fusion in the 1980s, at least until other scientists learned that wasn’t really true.

Anyway, this event will be held from 6 pm to 8:30 pm on Dec. 1 at the Institute for Systems Biology’s new headquarters in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. Tickets have been going fast, and it’s possible at this rate that it will sell out a week or two in advance. So get your tickets now, and get ready for a fun evening of networking and reminiscing with the people who built Seattle’s signature biotech company, and who are continuing to make things happen in the Northwest life sciences community. See you there Dec. 1.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

As we dive into a new week in Seattle, Amazon Web Services‘ big cloud computing crash is still reverberating. The server-farm failure took out countless small sites and apps that rely on Amazon’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) market-leading service, and the company got low marks for its communication while attempting to fix the problem over several days. I talked to a cloud-computing expert and an entrepreneur about one interesting element of the outage: Why some big-name companies, with enough resources to protect themselves, were still taken down by Amazon’s problems. It was also fun to see Seattle startup BigDoor quoted in a New York Times story on the Amazon outage.

Elsewhere in Seattle-area tech and innovation news:

—Zillow had been making public overtures toward an initial public stock offering in the past few months, and made good on those hints by filing paperwork for an IPO—the first by a Seattle-area tech company since mid-2010. I talked to investors and entrepreneurs in the region to see what they made of the move and of some of the idiosyncracies in Zillow’s preliminary pitch. There’s a long way to go before any Zillow stock actually hits Wall Street, but early stage tech folks were feeling pretty bullish about what the filing means for the near future and a warming investment market. Just a few days later, RFID maker Impinj filed its own papers for an IPO—at up to $100 million, it’s nearly twice the size of Zillow’s target. PopCap Games also has targeted this fall as its preferred time to go public.

—I took a closer look at some of the inventions being cooked up over at Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue, WA-based invention and patent company started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Plenty of people already know about IV’s TerraPower nuclear reactor, Photonic Fence mosquito-killing lasers, and of course the cookbook on steroids, Modernist Cuisine. But in this tour of Intellectual Ventures Lab, we got up close with some under-the-radar projects—ones that haven’t generated big headlines (yet), but are still showing huge potential. Two of the projects are in the arena of global health, a topic that Intellectual Ventures investor Bill Gates knows well—lab head honcho Geoff Deane says Gates’ ideas on major problems inform some of the projects.

—Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) made sweeping changes to its pay system, including a bigger bonus budget and shifting more money into cash rather than stock. This was a clear response to all the Silicon Valley companies moving into the Seattle area with the express intent of hiring engineers and other tech talent— Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Zynga, Twitter, and others have branch offices or … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Even in his hometown, Paul Allen can seem like an enigma. His influence is everywhere, from sports teams to politics to real estate development. But because of his famously private ways, Allen is only occasionally seen and very rarely heard.

That made last Friday’s long public interview at Town Hall an interesting event. It was part of the publicity tour for Allen’s new autobiography, “Idea Man,” which already has garnered significant national press coverage. With that backdrop, many in the audience surely had a good idea of the headline material from the book itself: High school and startup days with Bill Gates, and semi-shocking tales of his co-founder’s ruthlessness in business.

So perhaps the most revealing thing about this appearance was the sense you could get of Paul Allen as an actual person, not some impossibly rich abstraction who builds crazy-looking museums, owns enormous yachts, and loses vast sums of money on investments.

“As everybody knows, I’m a pretty private person and I don’t do a whole lot of this. So I may not be here next year,” Allen said with a faux-sarcastic tone, drawing laughs from the audience.

I did sense that people weren’t quite sure what kind of guy he’d be at the beginning. Would he be stilted and geeky? Off-putting and too private? But the audience warmed up to Allen pretty quickly, helped along by his humorous asides and generally relaxed bearing.

Seattle is forever stuck with a little-brother mindset, not wanting to rocket past its slower small-town roots but also carrying a chip on its shoulder about not quite measuring up as a great American metropolis. People who live here want their representatives to be world-class, iconoclastic, giving, and not too stuffy. I thought Allen gave them some of what they were looking for.

The main message that came through, one that others have found in the book, is that Allen sees himself as a big-picture creative thinker—I guess the title “Idea Man” gives that away pretty quickly. In his Microsoft days, he portrays that quality as the necessary leavening element to Gates’ hard-driving, relentlessly focused business sense and work ethic.

“I basically get very, very excited about the creative process and creating things and having ideas,” Allen told interviewer Todd Bishop, of GeekWire. “When you see those ideas realized, it’s just a wonderfully rewarding thing.”

Although the autobiography is pretty clearly aimed at getting more credit for the success and innovations of Microsoft’s early days, Allen acknowledged that big ideas aren’t much use without the right team of people to make things happen. He also said there was a bit of luck involved in Microsoft’s genesis, … Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The Seattle tech scene got its first entrant in what looks like a coming wave of initial public offerings when Zillow made its intentions official, filing paperwork with federal regulators Monday for a future stock sale. In its filing, the online real-estate listing and mortgage database said it would seek about $52 million from the stock market—not a huge sum for an IPO, but significant for the area’s entrepreneurship and investing community nonetheless.

Zillow has seen increasing competition in the online real-estate sector, including vocal San Francisco-based startup Trulia, which recently boasted that it was assembling an “IPO-ready management team.” HitWise reported that Zillow’s traffic ranked No. 3 among real estate websites, one spot ahead of Trulia and just behind Yahoo—where Zillow’s listings appear under a partnership.

There was plenty more action elsewhere on the Seattle tech beat:

—PopCap looks like it’s also ready to hit the public markets. The Seattle casual game company recently went on a media and investor blitz in New York, talking up its growth, revenue, and position in the hot gaming market. We gleaned a lot of interesting bits from the various interviews that PopCap gave, including an assertion that it generated $100 million in revenue last year, an increase of about 20 percent from the year before. The company’s leaders also discussed difficulties in getting investors to understand the difference between its development compared to a console game publisher, and the attractiveness of hitting the public market before social-game giant Zynga.

—Speaking of Zynga, I headed over to the San Francisco company’s new Seattle office to look at the digs and hear some remarks from founder and CEO Mark Pincus on the company’s plans for its new Northwest beachhead. In one word: Hiring. The maker of addictive Facebook-based games like “FarmVille” and “Mafia Wars” was not shy at all about inviting techies in the packed crowd to send in their resumes—Pincus gave out his e-mail address and spent quite a bit of time talking one-on-one with people afterward about jobs.

—Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen continued drumming up interest in his new autobiography, “Idea Man,” with an interview on 60 Minutes that delved into some of the early Microsoft stories and Bill Gates arguments detailed in the excerpt published recently in Vanity Fair. For a guy who hasn’t … Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

When you’re one of the richest people in the world, your autobiography gets the deluxe publicity rollout. Exhibit A is billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, whose new book, “Idea Man,” is about to hit the market.

The first excerpt, adapted in Vanity Fair, caused tons of headlines, mostly for its depiction of a heated fight with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer—Allen accused them of trying to dilute his stake in the company while he had cancer, just before he left day-to-day duties behind.

Now comes the follow-up interview with 60 Minutes, which teased the segment today with a small story and video on its website. The interview was conducted by Lesley Stahl.

Among the glimpses we’re seeing now: Allen says the book was motivated not by revenge, but a desire to air his side of some major events in business and technology. “I just felt like it’s an important piece of technology history, and I should tell it like it happened,” he said.

Asked whether he and Gates will eventually have a bit of a showdown over what’s in the book, Allen said: “I don’t know about screaming, but I’m sure it’ll be a heated discussion.”

He also talks fondly about Gates visiting him while Allen was sick a second time with cancer. This goes to an element of the Vanity Fair excerpt that I thought was missed by a lot of the first-day coverage: Despite any sour feelings about old fights, it’s clear that Allen has some still-glowing feelings for his old partner. Like any good relationship, it’s complicated.

“There’s a bond there that can’t be denied, and I think we both feel that,” Allen said.

CBS said Stahl also digs into Allen’s recent wide-ranging patent suit against an array of big tech companies, and reports that Allen found the negative reaction “surprising, because I invested a huge amount to develop these ideas.” (60 Minutes also apparently got to check out the Octopus.)

Allen will be giving a live interview in his hometown as well, later this month at Town Hall Seattle. GeekWire’s Todd Bishop, who has covered Microsoft for years dating back to the days of the printed Seattle P-I, will do the questioning.

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Vanity Fair got the first-excerpt scoop on Microsoft co-founder and Vulcan head honcho Paul Allen’s new book, “Idea Man,” and one element in particular is drawing most of the attention today: Allen’s depiction of a past rift with longtime friend and co-founder Bill Gates over Allen’s holdings in the company.

The Wall Street Journal has a nice follow-up story, based partly on a glimpse at the book provided to two of its reporters, that delves into the reaction among inner-circle Microsofties to that and some of the other Allen recollections.

The semi-sensational, rich-guy fight is doing its job in generating public relations buzz around Allen’s new book—after all, he’s setting off on a worldwide promotional tour. And I guess it makes perfect sense to choose a very Gates-centric portion for the first leak, because to the wider world, Paul Allen is often That Other Guy from Microsoft, who hasn’t worked at the company in a long time.

I do agree with other commentators that the vibe you get from reading today’s excerpted recollections is Allen seeing himself as a bit of a thinker and big-brother type to Gates’ hard-charging, brilliant entrepreneur: “Each time I brought an idea to Bill, he would pop my balloon … And he was right. My ideas were ahead of their time or beyond our scope or both.” But there’s also a bit of humility woven in there that I didn’t expect.

Allen clearly is still in awe of Gates’ mental prowess from their school days, even while he’s amused by the social oddities that Gates’ focus could produce.

I was particularly struck by Allen confronting his own intellectual limits at Washington State University, not exactly an Ivy League school, upon being totally perplexed by a blackboard full of equations: “It was one of those moments when you realize, I just can’t see it. I felt a little sad, but I accepted my limitations. I was O.K. with being a generalist.” I guess it’s worked out for him so far.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Paul Allen, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, has been investing in biotech companies and basic neuroscience for many years, and now he’s set up a new program to put more money to work for scientists pushing the boundaries in those fields.

The Seattle-based Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is announcing today it is bankrolling seven research teams around the country with three-year grants worth a combined $9.4 million. This is the first round of grants for “Allen Distinguished Investigators” in what could become an ongoing program, according to Sue Coliton, a vice president at the foundation. The idea is that Allen will support cutting-edge research projects that haven’t been able to secure traditional funding from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, yet have great potential to advance science, and enable the development of new medical technologies and products, Coliton says.

“Paul is really interested in asking big open questions in science,” Coliton says. “Our hope is these will lead to new knowledge in science that can be built on. We hope for breakthrough ideas, discoveries.”

The inaugural batch of Allen investigators come from MIT, Stanford University, the University of Washington, Caltech, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Much of the work they are doing reflects Allen’s longstanding interest in neuroscience, which he has been supporting in a big way since he committed $100 million in 2003 to establish the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. But the grants being announced today stretch beyond neuroscience, and will also support development of new laboratory tools that could see broader use.

While Allen is best known as the co-founder of Microsoft and for making investments in technology companies (including a few high-profile flameouts like Charter Communications), fewer people realize he has a longstanding interest in life science investing too. Allen is well familiar with the high-risk, high-reward character of biotech, through his investments in a number of well-known companies, including Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN), Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN), South San Francisco-based Cytokinetics (NASDAQ: CYTK), and Brisbane, CA-based BiPar Sciences (acquired a year ago by drug giant Sanofi-Aventis), to name a few. Last month, he bet another $20 million on Seattle-based Omeros (NASDAQ: OMER). Through getting to know biologists over the years, Allen has picked up the basics of what the NIH will pay for, what venture capitalists will support, and all kinds of interesting things that fall through the cracks.

“A year ago, I started searching for programs with potential for major breakthroughs but which had struggled to find funding through traditional sources,” Allen said in a statement. “The inaugural Distinguished Investigators are working on some of the most exciting research in biology and neurology and I’m proud to be able to help keep that work going.”

The Allen Distinguished Investigator program got started about a year ago, when Allen himself sent an e-mail around to a number of scientists he stays in touch with, says David Postman, a spokesman for Vulcan, Allen’s investment company. Before long, the Allen Foundation put together a request for proposal, and got back 120 applications for projects to pick from. The foundation sought help from scientists to vet the projects, but Allen himself made the final decision on who got the grants, Coliton says.

Allen plans to keep tabs on the progress of the grant winners, and bring them together once a year to talk about their results, Coliton says. After about 12 to 18 months of seeing how the program works in practice, the foundation plans to take a closer look at whether the program will become an ongoing, enduring sort of thing. “It will evolve over the next couple of years,” Coliton says.

With that, here are the seven original grant winners, with a thumbnail description of their work:

—David Anderson, Caltech, $1.6 million.

Anderson, one of the original advisors to the Allen Brain Institute, has secured funding to “localize, identify, characterize, and turn on” neurons in the mouse brain associated with attack and aggressive behavior.

—Edward Boyden, MIT Media Lab and McGovern Institute for Brain Research, $1.3 million.

Boyden’s team will attempt to develop “new devices for creating real-time electrical maps of the brain in three dimensions,” according to the foundation.

—Michael Dickinson, University of Washington, $2 million.

Dickinson plans to use the grant support “to develop new instruments to expand the body of knowledge in the field of measuring and quantifying complex group behavior in the relatively new field of study called “ethomics.” I must admit that was a new “omics” to me; you can read more about it in this paper in Nature.

—Christof Koch, Caltech, $600,000.

Koch plans to look at neural networks that enable worms (C. elegans) to move.

—Jennifer Nemhauser, University of Washington, $1.4 million.

Nemhauser, according to the Allen Foundation, plans to “reverse engineer a cell-to-cell communication system from plants, construct a modular molecular signal processing toolbox for synthetic biology, and to use the toolbox to genetically engineer the single celled organism S. cerevisiae, to exhibit multi-celled behavior.” S. cerevisiae is a form of yeast used in baking and brewing.

—Mark Schnitzer, Stanford University, $880,000.

Schnitzer, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, will seek to use his new money from Allen to “develop miniaturized, mass-producible, fluorescence microscopes that can create real-time imaging of neurons in the brain.” If he can do that, the plan will be to look at what’s going wrong at the neural and cellular level in schizophrenia.

—Tony Zador, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, $1.6 million.

Zador’s lab will study “the use of viruses to transport bar-coded nucleotides across synapses and map the connectome of a living animal.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The worst kept secret in the local biotech real estate market is now official: The Institute for Systems Biology is moving to Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood, into the modern building once occupied by Merck’s Rosetta Inpharmatics unit.

Leroy Hood, the biotech pioneer who heads up the Institute for Systems Biology, told me back in March that he had set his sights on the Rosetta building for his future growth plans. Now the Institute has signed a lease there on 140,000 square feet of space at 401 Terry Avenue North, which has enough room to house 330 employees starting in the spring of 2011.

The nonprofit Institute for Systems Biology has been bursting with growth the past couple of years, and outgrew its labs and offices near Gas Works Park on the north side of Lake Union. The Institute lives mostly off its ability to win competitive federal research grants—which can be a tenuous existence—but the Institute has gotten financially strong enough over the past couple years to make a move on a bold property like the former Rosetta building that was developed by Paul Allen’s Vulcan Real Estate.

A turning point for the Institute came in June 2008 when it secured a five-year, $100 million commitment from the government of Luxembourg to test Hood’s vision of “P4 Medicine,” which stands for predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. In January, an independent review of research institutes around the world said the Institute for Systems Biology produced the highest impact scientific publications of any U.S. research center from 2003 through 2007. And in March, the Institute said it received a $6 million gift from an unnamed California venture capitalist to further its research in personalized medicine, biofuels, and global health.

The Institute’s annual budget has grown to about $50 million this fiscal year, and it expects to have about 500 employees within 10 years.

“The Terry Avenue North building more than doubles our current space, permits us to consolidate employees under one roof, and provides easy access to some of the most effective research institutions in Washington state,” Hood said in a statement. “It will also enable us to acquire new faculty with critical skills in systems science (biology, medicine, technology and computation/mathematics), as well as provide the space for future growth and the creation of new strategic partnerships.”

Leroy Hood

For those who follow the local real estate scene, this puts the Institute closer to the heart of the action, at least in billionaire Paul Allen’s vision for the future of the city. The Institute will be walking distance from Seattle Biomedical Research Institute; PATH, the nonprofit global health catalyst; the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center; Novo Nordisk‘s inflammation research center; Amazon‘s new headquarters; the University of Washington’s branch campus loaded with stem cell researchers, and the Accelerator, the biotech startup machine that maintains close ties with the Institute for Systems Biology.

It’s a homecoming in a way. Hood was a co-founder of Rosetta Inpharmatics in 1996, along with Stephen Friend and Lee Hartwell. Friend led the operation from its beginnings at an office park in Kirkland, WA, took it public, and sold the company to Merck in 2001 for more than $600 million. Merck lavished resources on the Rosetta operation for years, saying its insights into gene expression and computation could help the pharma giant screen out winners from losers early in the drug development process, and possibly help researchers get the right drug to the right patients. Merck set up Rosetta in the multi-million facility developed by Vulcan and Schnitzer West in 2004, and eventually employed about 300 people there. But Merck pulled the plug on its Rosetta operation as part of global budget cuts in the fall of 2008, announcing plans to move some of its researchers to other locations, and close the Seattle facility.

I’m scheduled to talk with Hood later this morning and will update this space shortly after.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

It’s a shame I’m moving away from this neighborhood. South Lake Union in Seattle, I mean. Because just three blocks away from my soon-to-be-former apartment, the next big startup experiment is about to begin.

TechStars, the seed-stage investment fund and mentorship program started in Boulder, CO, and now in Boston, is about to open in Seattle on August 16—one month from today. The 10 teams have been selected, and the office space at 511 Boren Avenue North is in its final stages of preparation.

The office is smack-dab in the middle of the newly opened Amazon.com campus, which should provide plenty of cross-fertilization opportunities between the incoming tech startups and the e-commerce giant. (The building is owned by a holdout who wouldn’t sell to Paul Allen’s Vulcan.)

I got a quick tour of the TechStars space from Chris DeVore of Founder’s Co-op (see photos below). Founder’s Co-op, the local seed-stage fund, will be moving from its office on Eastlake into the TechStars office as well. So will TechStars Seattle director Andy Sack’s new company, RevenueLoan. Together, the organizations and their companies will comprise about 60 people spread out among two floors (2nd floor and basement) and a total of about 14,000 square feet. DeVore and the team are currently arranging for things like broadband access, via a local microwave tower (Comcast doesn’t serve the building—probably a good thing). Ah, startup life.

The best part: a previous tenant was planning to have a speakeasy of some sort in the basement, so there’s a great bar and cocktail party area (see second photo below). Even better, possibly, is the fact that the bunker right next to the office is apparently some wealthy individual’s private man cave, complete with sports car(s), no windows, and security cameras outside (no photos of that space yet, unfortunately). Suffice to say, the parties on this block should be something special.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Young people get a bad rap in the media. They slack off, don’t vote, and have no money and no voice in society (except for a few outliers like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg). If they are being asked about business or some serious issue, many are afraid they’ll say something dumb on the record. Some actually do.

Every once in a while, I talk to a twenty-something like Kristen Eddings who has a rare combination of drive, focus, and poise. Eddings called the other day to pitch me on an event she’s orchestrating on June 3. Her goal is to rally 500 people in their 20s and 30s from around Seattle for what’s being called “A Party With a Purpose.”

The idea is that Seattle has a talent pool teeming with youthful idealists who want to make a difference for global health, but don’t really know how. Undergrads at the University of Washington often get pumped up by inspirational global health books like Tracy Kidder’s “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” but good luck trying to execute on that vision if you’re under 30. If you want to make decisions at a place like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, go ahead and get your MD/PhD, toss in a master’s in public health, and spend a few years overseas working for the World Health Organization. Do all that, and then maybe you can get a good job when you’re 40 and already have a mortgage and kids in school.

OK, I exaggerate a little, but it’s not far off the point Eddings was trying to make. She’s a Seattle native. She’s 25. She has a bachelor’s degree in international affairs from Seattle Pacific University. She’s a program assistant at the nonprofit Washington Global Health Alliance. That doesn’t exactly put her on speed-dial with the president of the WHO.

But there’s that focus and fire. A few minutes into our phone call, I tried to tell her politely that she has a fine idea for an event, but that it’s not really a story. She had this to say:

“It’s not really a story about an event. This party is the beginning of a young people’s global health movement. This is going to be viral. It’s going to be a big deal.” Eddings added: “Young people feel they have something to contribute, but they cannot get a job in the field. This is a way that more of them can contribute.”

OK, she got my attention.

So who is this young woman? She caught the global health bug on a summer abroad experience in Sierra Leone, the tiny nation in west Africa, where … Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:          

The most incredible things happen when scientists with a common interest have an opportunity to simply talk with one another. On a bone-chilling December night, 50 Seattle researchers from more than 10 different institutions with dramatically different backgrounds gathered to share drinks and conversation about their work. They discovered surprising connections, initiated new collaborations and found that many of them were exploring similar problems. The first Global Health Dialogues took place. The outcome may be groundbreaking new approaches to some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Serendipity, where one randomly stumbles on something critically useful while looking for something else, and synchronicity, where important ideas are ‘in the air’ at the same time, are two important aspects of research that are not often discussed. Sometimes researchers just lack the final piece of the puzzle needed for success. Or perhaps they need to alter their perspective slightly to see a way around a problem. Or maybe several scientists, working on very similar topics, just happen to randomly connect, to synchronize, resulting in a large flow of information that often solves very difficult problems.

In many ways, synchronicity is a major aspect of the work being undertaken at such organizations as Infectious Disease Research Institute, Seattle Biomedical Research Institute, PATH, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle Children’s Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Labs, along with the major research universities in the state, UW and WSU. Their scientists may be researching different approaches to global health, but they often face similar hurdles getting a drug or therapy to the market.

But they are usually working inside their own silos, often unknowingly in parallel with other institutions. Scientific specialization creates increasingly narrow viewpoints separating researchers from others. Collaborations are critical but are hampered by these divisions.

One way to break silos and permit the flow of useful information is to exploit serendipity and synchronicity.

Let me provide some personal examples of this potent combination.

In an Xconomy article written in May, I showed, using only information that I could find online, that the Seattle area had more researchers with more funds working in more non-profit biomedical institutions than almost any other city in the U.S.

It turns out that this was an idea that was also … Next Page »

Comments (4) | Reprints | Share:          

Seattle-based Vulcan Capital, Paul Allen’s investment firm, has confirmed today that president Chris Temple has left the company by mutual agreement. The news was first reported by TechFlash. Temple joined Vulcan Capital in 2008 and was promoted to president last May. In an interview with Xconomy at the time, Temple said the job was “rewarding, but it can also be challenging.” The firm says it is conducting a search for a new leadership position, and that Temple will continue to serve as a Vulcan designee on the boards of Charter Communications and Plains All American.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

[Updated 11/16/09 6pm. See below] Microsoft co-founder and renowned technologist Paul Allen has been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, as of early this month, according to an e-mail message sent from Allen’s sister, Jody Allen Patton, to employees of Seattle-based Vulcan and its affiliates this afternoon. The message was sent to Xconomy and other media outlets by a Vulcan spokesperson.

Doctors say Allen has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, which is a relatively common form of lymphoma, and he has begun chemotherapy, according to the e-mail. The message pointed out that Allen “beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.” That form of cancer is different from Allen’s current diagnosis, which is classified as a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is an umbrella term for cancers in which white blood cells of the immune system start growing out of control, according to the National Cancer Institute. The disease is the fourth most commonly diagnosed cancer in the U.S. each year, following lung, bladder, and melanoma tumors, according to the American Cancer Society. About 66,000 new cases are expected to be diagnosed this year in the U.S., and about 19,500 people are expected to die from the disease. Diffuse large B-cell lymphoma is the most common subtype of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, accounting for 30 percent of all newly diagnosed cases, according to an expert review published by the Lymphoma Research Foundation.

Vulcan spokesman David Postman wouldn’t comment on any specific questions about the stage of Allen’s disease, how early it was detected, whether it is an aggressive or slow-growing form of lymphoma, or where he is getting treatment.

Those questions are key to determining what kind of prognosis Allen has. His form of cancer is generally considered an aggressive, fast-growing lymphoma and requires immediate treatment, according to the Lymphoma Research Foundation’s description, authored by Carol Portlock of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Julie Vose of the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, NE, and Bruce Cheson of Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C. The first sign is usually when the lymph nodes swell in the neck, armpit, or groin—other symptoms include night sweats, unexplained fevers, and weight loss, according to the summary from Portlock and colleagues.

A common treatment for the disease is a regimen of chemotherapy combined with Roche and Biogen’s targeted antibody drug rituximab (Rituxan), which kills excess B-cells of the immune system. The combination treatment can lead to a cure in a large number of patients. “Even when a cure is not possible, treatment can often keep the disease away for many years,” Portlock wrote.

“Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat,” the Vulcan message stated. “He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.”

Here is the Vulcan e-mail in its entirety [added 11/16/09 6pm]:

.

To employees of Vulcan and affiliates:

I want to let you know that Paul was recently diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

He received the diagnosis early this month and has begun chemotherapy. Doctors say he has diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a relatively common form of lymphoma.

This is tough news for Paul and the family. But for those who know Paul’s story, you know he beat Hodgkin’s a little more than 25 years ago and he is optimistic he can beat this, too.

Paul is feeling OK and remains upbeat. He continues to work and he has no plans to change his role at Vulcan. His health comes first, though, and we’ll be sure that nothing intrudes on that.

We would ask you to respect Paul’s privacy and not discuss this outside of the office.

If you have any questions, please ask your EC member.

Thank you in advance for what I know will be all your good thoughts for Paul.
Jody

.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:          

Veratect, the Kirkland, WA-based company that tracks emerging health threats like swine flu, has raised $4.2 million out of $5 million debt financing, according to an amended regulatory filing today. The filing doesn’t say who invested, but the company’s list of directors includes William Savoy, the former manager of billionaire Paul Allen’s Vulcan investment portfolio and Lee Huntsman, the executive director of the Washington Life Sciences Discovery Fund. A spokesperson for the company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Kirkland, WA-based Digeo, a 10-year-old home entertainment company backed by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has been sold to Arris, a broadband communications firm based in Suwanee, GA, for about $20 million in cash.

Digeo is known for its high-definition digital video recorder, called Moxi. The acquisition gives Arris expertise, intellectual property, and talent in video networking and multimedia services delivery. Arris will gain about 75 Digeo employees (mostly engineers) in Kirkland, which will raise its R&D costs by about $3 million per quarter, the company said.

“Arris delivers the market position necessary to take the Moxi vision to the next level,” said Digeo’s CEO, Greg Gudorf, in a statement. “I am extremely pleased that the Digeo team will continue to drive the evolution of the Moxi platform.”

But observers point out that the purchase price means a substantial loss on the investment for Allen. PaidContent reports Digeo’s total funding was more than $110 million. In an interview with TechFlash, Gudorf said fewer than 10 Digeo employees would lose their jobs in the acquisition, and that he will stay with Arris during the transition. The news of Digeo’s layoffs was first reported by the Seattle Times.

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

Paul Allen, the Seattle-area billionaire who co-founded Microsoft, has agreed to sell 24 licenses for wireless spectrum in Washington and Oregon to AT&T, according to a report by Bloomberg News, which cites filings with the Federal Communications Commission. The price of the sale, which has not yet been approved by the FCC, is not disclosed.

A unit of AT&T called Mobility II is acquiring the licenses from Allen’s Vulcan Spectrum, based in Seattle. The spectrum covers airwaves in the 700 megahertz frequency range—the former “UHF” television band freed up for wireless use this year. According to Bloomberg, AT&T (NYSE: ATT) wants the licenses to support its introduction of “long-term evolution,” a next-generation wireless broadband service that competes with the WiMax service from Clearwire (NASDAQ: CLWR). Vulcan still owns licenses for other parts of the wireless spectrum in Seattle, Portland, and other areas.

Back in May, managing director Steve Hall of Vulcan Capital, Allen’s venture organization, told us that the investments in wireless spectrum fit into a broader focus on the mobile industry. Vulcan invested in two spectrum auctions, Hall said—one in 2003 (where the licenses in question come from) and one in 2008, deploying about $130 million in total. “We saw the scarcity of spectrum, running against what we believe demand is for appliances, devices, smartphones, iPhone,” Hall said at the time. Vulcan’s view, he added, was that infrastructure was “the best way to play.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:          

The early afternoon sun was bearing down on us, and it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit the other day when J.D. Sitton walked behind his office, squinted, and pointed to the future of his company.

Sitton, the CEO of Kennewick, WA-based Infinia, showed me a device resembling a satellite dish that has attracted some deep-pocketed investors, including Paul Allen and Vinod Khosla. Their hope is that Infinia’s dishes will finally turn solar energy into a workhorse for meeting more of the world’s electricity demand. If Sitton and his backers are right, he’ll be running a multi-billion dollar company five years from now. If he’s wrong, Infinia will be written off as just another costly pipe dream.

“We didn’t want to just launch a company in a cute little industry,” Sitton says. “We want to launch a company that can build a major global industry.”

Solar power has been talked up since the 1970s as one of the main ways the U.S. can wean itself off foreign oil. The field has picked up renewed momentum lately as a way to meet growing demand for electricity while reducing carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. But the current breed of photovoltaic systems, or solar cells, are notoriously heavy, expensive, and inefficient at converting the sun’s energy into electricity, so solar still amounts to a drop in the bucket, generating less than 1 percent of the world’s electricity, Sitton says. If Infinia can help spark a new market for converting solar heat (instead of light) into electricity, then it will have a chance to reach some of the projections of enthusiasts, like Greenpeace, who want to see 15 percent or more of the world’s electricity coming from solar, Sitton says.

Infinia says it already has $2 billion worth of orders for its solar power generation product in hand, which it expects to start rolling out commercially before the end of September 2010. So we shouldn’t have to wait 20 years to find out if this is for real.

“Solar has got to step up in a much bigger way,” Sitton says. “We have to prove it can be done.”

Here’s how this is supposed to work. That satellite dish I mentioned earlier? It has a little motor attached to it that keeps it in the right position to capture as many direct rays of sun as possible during daylight hours. Like any dish, it uses mirrors to reflect something, in this case, sunlight, back up to a focal point. That’s where Infinia has the business end of its device.

It’s a Stirling engine, made to convert that concentrated heat from the sun into mechanical work. It’s like a steam engine, except it doesn’t need water—it powers its internal piston through the expansion and contraction of helium. The heat moves the piston, which generates electricity. These engines are thought to be attractive for this kind of work, partly because they are highly efficient at converting heat into electricity, and they don’t require water, or oil. They are supposed to be able to last 25 years with zero maintenance, Sitton says.

Infinia has been around as a company longer than that since the 1960s, mostly working on Stirling engines to make them reliable, long-lasting, and efficient, Sitton says. Before 2005, when it settled on its solar strategy, Infinia worked mostly on Stirling engines for a number of different applications, including artificial hearts and exploration vehicles for outer space.

The most important question any investor today asks is how much power gets generated by one of these Infinia units, and at what cost. The short answer is … Next Page »

Comments (22) | Reprints | Share: