Microsoft has confirmed it is cutting 800 positions across the company today, in its third round of layoffs this year. About a quarter of the jobs are in the Seattle area, and an unspecified number of employees in Massachusetts are impacted, among other regions. It is not yet clear which product groups and divisions will be most affected. The news was first reported by TechFlash, and confirmed by PaidContent.

Back in January, Microsoft announced 1,400 layoffs and a plan to eliminate up to 5,000 jobs over the course of 18 months. That was followed by a second round of cuts (an unspecified number) in May. But today’s cuts seem to push the total number of job losses beyond the originally stated 5,000—though with the company continuing to hire in some areas as it cuts in others, it is hard to track the exact number. The latest round of layoffs comes on the heels of Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) announcing an 18 percent quarterly decline in profits as compared with the third quarter of last year.

Microsoft is also leaving the door open for additional cuts—a move that seems honest, but could be demoralizing to employees and prospective hires. In a statement given to Xconomy (and to PaidContent first), a Microsoft spokesperson wrote: “Earlier this year, we announced that in order to reduce costs, increase efficiency and prioritize our focus areas, we would eliminate approximately 5,000 positions by June 2010. Today, we are eliminating around 800 positions spread across multiple businesses and locations and have completed our reduction plan sooner than we had anticipated 11 months ago. At the same time, we continue to hire in priority areas, but also understand that continuing to manage our businesses closely, as we always do, can mean additional headcount adjustments.”

The spokesperson added, “We are not breaking out figures by location, but I can confirm that Massachusetts was impacted by today’s job eliminations. We are working with the individual employees to assist them through this transition.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Tech manufacturing exports from Washington state grew for the sixth straight year in 2008, up to $3.5 billion (15th out of 50 states), according to a TechAmerica Foundation report highlighted today by the Washington Technology Industry Association (WTIA). Washington ranked fifth nationwide in consumer electronics exports, which totaled $320 million. The top three tech export destinations for the state were Canada, Taiwan, and the Netherlands. The report did not include software exports.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Venture financing perked up last month, at least for a handful of Seattle-area startups and young companies. VCs and corporate investors poured $76.9 million into five Washington-based companies in September, according to data provided to Xconomy by ChubbyBrain, a New York-based information services company that develops tools for investors, startups, and entrepreneurs. There were also two debt financings worth a total of $8 million.

The total funding of Washington companies, $84.9 million, is up from $51.4 million in the previous month (and that figure included a couple of companies whose headquarters are out of state). But the September increase is largely due to one especially big transaction.

The largest deal by far was Seattle-based Calypso Medical’s $50 million Series E financing, led by Skyline Ventures and Frazier Healthcare Ventures. It’s the biggest venture deal in the Northwest so far this year, and you can read about the story behind the financing here—Calypso has overcome some challenges in the past year. The company makes a medical device that pinpoints radiation in ways that are supposed to help minimize the side effects of prostate cancer treatment.

The September deals were concentrated in medical devices and healthcare, with a few smaller deals in software and tech. The biggest financing in software was Bellevue-based VoiceBox Technologies, which raised about $13 million from corporate investors in Asia, including AutoNavi, Inventec, MiTAC, and the Morningside investment fund. But that money was raised over the course of the past year, with the company officially announcing it in September after a regulatory filing let the cat out of the bag. VoiceBox makes speech recognition systems for cars and mobile applications.

The venture deals (see Table below) were spread evenly among early, mid, and late-stage financings. The only Series A deal was Seattle-based Integrative Diagnostics, which raised $7.5 million for early cancer detection. The company was founded by biotech pioneer Leroy Hood.

In addition to the venture deals, Redmond-based Spiration (which makes a medical device for treating lung diseases) raised $7 million, and Kirkland-based SchemaLogic (which makes software to manage metadata) raised $1 million in a pair of debt financings.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

In football, the expression is “three yards and a cloud of dust.” But at Microsoft, it’s apparently “three screens and a cloud.” That’s according to chief software architect Ray Ozzie, who took part in a keynote conversation with University of Washington computer scientist Ed Lazowska at today’s State of Technology Luncheon, hosted by the Technology Alliance at the Westin Hotel in downtown Seattle.

Ozzie was speaking about the evolution of cloud-based software to serve three key device categories: phones, laptops, and TV-sized monitors. He and Lazowska (an Xconomist) touched on many other aspects as well, including Microsoft’s leadership and culture, the past, present, and future of computing, and even Boston versus Seattle (which suits Xconomy’s mission particularly well since we’re in both cities). The event was a big deal, especially because Ozzie doesn’t make a lot of public appearances around town, but there was also plenty of other high-profile news and activity from the lunch. Here’s a quick recap, including an edited account of the Q&A with Ozzie.

Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Technology Alliance (also an Xconomist), made the opening remarks and introduced Gov. Chris Gregoire, who kicked things off with a few comments about the region’s technology leadership. “On a national scale, I’m very excited that science and technology is back in a big way,” she said. “The innovative spirit that is the lifeblood of the 21st century economy is going to happen in our state.” Gregoire cited the importance of such technologies as the smart grid, broadband access, and healthcare software, and stressed the need to improve education from early childhood through graduate schools. Lastly, Gregoire singled out a few Washington companies, including Modumetal, Insitu, and Verdiem, saying “This is the future of our great state…It is not going to happen without all of us working together. We will get through this terrible downturn in our economy.”

Next up, Marty Smith of the Seattle-based Alliance of Angels announced his group had just closed a $4 million-plus seed fund yesterday, to make “sidecar-type investments.” The Alliance of Angels funded five companies that were acquired last year—Cleverset, Shelfari, Insitu, SnapIn Software, and Coffee Equipment Company. And one of these, SnapIn Software (acquired by Nuance for an estimated $180 million last August), was named the Alliance of Angels 2009 Company of the Year, Smith announced. SnapIn, based in Bellevue, WA, was backed by Frazier Technology Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, Hunt Ventures, and Oak Investment Partners.

Jeremy Jaech, chair of the Technology Alliance and CEO of Seattle-based Verdiem, followed with an eye-opening rundown of benchmarking stats comparing Washington state with its top technology peers around the country: Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, California, New York, Colorado, and Utah. Jaech, who’s also an Xconomist, pointed out that Washington ranks 4th among its peers in terms of its share of total U.S. venture capital investment (behind California, Massachusetts, and New York), which is encouraging. Washington also ranks in the top 5 in the strength of its engineering workforce, but suffers in education rankings such as 8th grade math proficiency, high school graduation rates, number of bachelor’s and graduate degrees awarded, and state spending on academic research. The most urgent recommendation from Jaech’s team? Boost investment in undergraduate and graduate science and engineering education.

Then it was time for the keynote. The UW’s Lazowska introduced Ray Ozzie by telling the story of how the latter showed up in Seattle in 2005 (when his startup Groove Networks was acquired by Microsoft) and gave a three-hour lecture on collaborative software in Lazowska’s class on the history of computing. I’m not going to do justice to Ozzie’s background here—he’s the main creator of Lotus Notes, among other things, and was a developer at Data General, where Craig Mundie also worked—but let’s just say I’ve long been fascinated by his story of discovering the PLATO mainframe at the University of Illinois in Urbana. (In part because that’s where I did my first computer programming as a high-school kid in 1983. And also, props to a fellow Illini alum.)

Here’s a condensed and edited version of the Ozzie conversation:

Lazowska: In Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, he talks about the importance of serendipitous timing. What is it about people born in 1955 for computing—Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and you?

Ozzie: Timing is a huge, huge factor. Something else in Gladwell’s book is pretty …Next Page »

Comments (12) | Reprints | Share:        

Xconomy will be off today in honor of the birthdays of George and Abe. (And while we’re at it we’ll probably lift a belated glass to Charles as well.) For those of you embarking on school-vacation-week adventures, bon voyage! To the rest, we’ll be back tomorrow with all the high-tech and life-sciences news you can handle.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

[Updated Jan. 28, with information on Intellectual Ventures' patents (see below)]
If its volume of new patents is any indication, Microsoft is going to be just fine. The Redmond, WA, software firm blew away the rest of Washington state in terms of the number of patents it was granted last year. That’s according to IFI Patent Intelligence, based in Wilmington, DE, which recently released a national survey of patent grants for 2008. Xconomy obtained the figures for Washington state, as well as Massachusetts and California. (See the list of Washington’s top 25 patent winners below.)

Patent awards are, of course, just one measure of an organization’s competitiveness and inventiveness. It’s hard to draw definitive conclusions about a company’s ability to innovate based on its number of patents, say—imagine trying to compare a biotech company with an electronics firm, or a young software startup with an established powerhouse. But it’s still a key measure of an organization’s investment in its intellectual property.

Microsoft’s tally (2,030) is greater than the rest of Washington’s top 25 combined. It was good enough for fourth place nationally, behind IBM (4,186), Samsung (3,515), and Canon (2,114), and ahead of Intel (1,776). In Washington state, Sharp Laboratories and the University of Washington were a distant second and third, respectively.

A few other notables. Boeing is fairly low on the list (16th), in part because the figures only count patents awarded to each organization’s operations in Washington; patents awarded to offices or operations outside the state are not included in this list. Amazon ranks pretty low as well (12th), and Bellevue-based Intellectual Ventures, the invention company, is in 8th place, listed as “Searete.” Lastly, there was a seemingly random tie for 5th place between forestry firm Weyerhaeuser (which just closed two of its Washington mills this week) and biotech company ZymoGenetics (which just bought back the rights to its lead cancer drug candidate today).

Without further ado, here’s Washington state’s top 25 patent winners in 2008:

1. Microsoft — 2,030
2. Sharp Laboratories of America — 144
3. University of Washington — 47
4. Battelle Memorial Institute — 33
5. (tie)
Weyerhaeuser — 28
ZymoGenetics — 28 …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

OK, no big surprise here. In the fourth quarter of 2008, venture capital investment in Washington and Oregon fell to $142 million, down 45 percent from $260 million in the previous quarter and a 68 percent drop from $450 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. For the year, venture investment in Washington state dropped below $1 billion for the first time since 2005, with $906 million invested in 93 deals—down 35 percent from the $1.4 billion invested in 124 deals in 2007.

That’s according to a Dow Jones VentureSource report released over the weekend that seems to confirm that VC firms are getting hit hard by the economic downturn, along with everyone else. What’s more interesting, though, is to look at which companies landed the top investments, and which venture firms were most active.

First, some more context. On the national front, venture funding for new companies declined by 30 percent in the last three months of 2008, with $5.5 billion in 554 deals. That’s as compared to $7.9 billion in 718 deals during the fourth quarter of 2007. For the year, there was an 8 percent decline, with $28.8 billion being invested in 2,550 deals across the country.

There were still bright spots in the Northwest. Using the survey data, here are the five biggest tech and life sciences venture deals in Washington during the fourth quarter. They span Web marketing, software, energy and cleantech, and drug development:

—BlueKai, an online marketing firm based in Bellevue, WA, received $10.5 million from Battery Ventures and Redpoint Ventures.

—EnerG2, a Seattle-based energy storage startup, secured $8.5 million from OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital. Xconomy broke the news of the deal here.

—Qwell Pharmaceuticals, a Seattle developer of small-molecule drugs, raised $7 million from Arch Venture Partners and the Wellcome Trust. Xconomy broke the story here.

—Datacastle, a Seattle information-security startup, raised $5.3 million led by the Australian venture firm CM Capital Investments.

—Kashless, a Seattle startup focused on “recommerce” software, raised $5 million led by RRE Ventures.

As for local venture firms, the most active in the fourth quarter were OVP Venture Partners and Madrona Venture Group—each with three investment deals in Washington—according to Dow Jones VentureSource. Next was Arch Venture Partners, with two deals, and then a large number of firms with one deal each.

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

2009 is barely a week old, and already the Washington and Oregon tech industries have seen massive new layoffs in the struggling economy. A quick recap of the latest bloodletting (see the updated Xconomy Seattle layoff litany here):

—Agilent Technologies (NYSE: A) cut 120 jobs at its plant in Liberty Lake, WA. The Santa Clara, CA-based maker of instruments for electronics and life sciences companies has nearly 20,000 employees worldwide. The layoffs are effective January 30.

—Seattle-based software firm Attachmate has laid off 120 employees, or 10 percent of its staff, as reported by TechFlash. It is not clear yet how many jobs are being cut in Seattle. Attachmate is a Seattle-area icon that helps businesses manage and deliver IT services. It has some 65,000 customers, according to its website.

—Intermec (NYSE: IN), an Everett, WA-based maker of technologies for radio frequency identification and mobile computing, has laid off 7 percent of its global workforce, or about 150 people. The cuts are mostly in sales, general, and administrative areas.

—ON Semiconductor (NASDAQ: ONNN), which operates a 500-person chip manufacturing plant in Gresham, OR, is laying off 10 percent of its worldwide staff, or about 1,500 jobs. The Phoenix, AZ-based company is reportedly closing its Oregon plant for at least four weeks in the first half of this year.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

In a report released Tuesday, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation named Massachusetts the nation’s leading state when it comes to the structural economic factors that make the state’s businesses competitive in the “New Economy”—defined as global, entrepreneurial, knowledge-based, rooted in information technologies, and innovation-driven.

Massachusetts hung onto its #1 ranking from the foundations’ 2007 report, with a score of 97 on an index aggregating some 29 measures, from the educational attainment of the workforce to the quantity of exports, the amount of job churn, the penetration of broadband Internet access, venture capital activity, and the number of patents issued to local inventors.

Washington state, meanwhile, climbed from the number-four spot in 2007 to the second-place spot in this year’s report, with a score of 81.9. Maryland (80), Delaware (79.3), and New Jersey (77) were close behind.

The top-ranked states, according to an announcement from the Kauffman foundation, are rich in “knowledge jobs” requiring at least a two-year degree. They all show above-average levels of entrepreneurship, have large numbers of citizens who use the Internet, and benefit from large numbers of skilled immigrants, both from other states and from other countries.

Massachusetts’ New England neighbors Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont fared well in the rankings, placing 6th, 11th, 13th, and 19th, respectively. Washington’s neighbor Oregon came in 15th. The five lowest-ranking states were, in reverse order, Mississippi, West Virgina, Arkansas, Alabama, and Wyoming.

“To succeed in the New Economy, states face a new imperative to boost the competitiveness of their economies—not just relative to each other, but to other nations,” Robert Atkinson, president of ITIF and primary author of the report, said in the announcement. “If they are going to meet the economic challenges of the future, states will need to overhaul their familiar approaches to economic development.”

Of course, having picked Boston as our first home city and Seattle as our second, we here at Xconomy could have predicted the study’s results. But California, home to our third bureau in San Diego, may have some catching up to do. It dropped from 5th place in the 2007 report to 8th place this year, with a score of 75.

Here’s the complete rundown:

* Rounded to nearest integer.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Wade wrote today about Cambridge, MA-based Akamai’s second quarterly “State of the Internet” report, which details such trends as broadband connections by state and country, number of Internet-connected devices, and amounts of attack traffic and malware. In terms of Internet connection speeds, South Korea is tops with 64 percent of all connections (to Akamai’s content distribution servers) having a speed of 5 megabits per second or greater. Within the U.S., which comes in sixth globally, Delaware is tops, with 66 percent of its Internet connections being 5 megabits per second or faster.

At the opposite, “narrowband” end of the spectrum, Wade wrote, “the state of Washington tops the list, with 21 percent of all Internet connections taking place at the glacial speed of 256 kilobits per second or less.” And things in Washington seem to be getting worse, not better: it was one of four states on Akamai’s “narrowband top 10″ list where the percentage of slow connections actually increased in the second quarter of 2008, compared to the first quarter. (Perhaps the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—which is known in part for its programs to improve Internet connectivity in U.S. libraries—can do something about its home state.)

What’s going on here? Is it that more people are coming online, but starting with slow connection speeds? Are the Internet service providers with the most market share providing a lower standard of service? Is there inherent geographical bias in the data from Akamai’s servers? It’s hard to say, because Akamai didn’t release its raw data, but the full report is available here. Of course, if you live in Washington, you may want to go grab a coffee while you download the 1.5-megabyte PDF file.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The global network of 34,000 content distribution servers built by Cambridge, MA-based Akamai allows the company to gather massive amounts of data on Internet usage—information that it distilled and published for the first time back in May. Now the company has published its second quarterly “State of the Internet” report, detailing trends such as the number of Internet-connected devices and broadband connections in each country and providing a fascinating overall picture of the Internet and its growing pains. While the number of people and organizations using the global information network continued to increase, for example, so did the volume of attack traffic and malware.

In addition to statistics collected by Akamai’s servers, the report brings together numerous published reports of incidents around the Internet—such as the repeated Internet outages in Vermont in May and June as equipment failures, fires, and bridge construction damaged a fiber ring owned by Level 3 Communications, and the bizarre story of the Epilepsy Foundation website, which was hacked by attackers who posted hundreds of flashing images designed to induce seizures in visitors with photosensitive epilepsy.

But the most valuable part of Akamai’s report is the data from its own network—information that can’t be found anywhere else. While China was the largest source of attack traffic in the first quarter of 2008, for example, Akamai found that Japan leaped into first place in the second quarter; some 30 percent of all worms, viruses, and denial-of-service attacks originated from Internet addresses there. (China fell to third place, while the United States hung on to its second-place status, generating 22 percent of attack traffic.)

The number of unique Internet Protocol addresses detected by Akamai’s network—each address representing a separate Internet-connected device—grew 5 percent in the second quarter, to some 346 million worldwide. Nearly 30 percent of those addresses were in the United States, and about 10 percent were in China, with Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Canada, Spain, and Italy next in line. But when IP addresses are measured per capita, the Scandinavian countries continued to lead: Sweden leads the world with 0.42 unique IP addresses per citizen, followed by Norway, Iceland, and Finland. The United States is in seventh place with 0.34 IP addresses per person.

Akamai also tracks the speed at which the citizens of various countries can access the Internet. South Korea held on to its lead in this area, with 64 percent of all Internet connections boasting a speed of 5 megabits per second or more. The United States places sixth globally in broadband penetration, with only 26 percent of all connections beating 5 megabits per second, though the number of broadband connections here is increasing fast (the 26 percent figure is a 29 percent improvement on the first quarter).

Within the United States, two of the smallest states, Delaware and Rhode Island, continued to have the largest proportion of citizens enjoying broadband: 66 percent of all Internet connections in Delaware exceed 5 megabits per second, and 43 percent in Rhode Island. New York, Connecticut, Oklahoma, Nevada, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia round out Akamai’s “Top 10″ list of U.S. states with the largest percentage of broadband connections. At the opposite, “narrowband” end of the spectrum, the state of Washington tops the list once again, with 21 percent of all Internet connections taking place at the glacial speed of 256 kilobits per second or less. (Greg has more to say about that over at Xconomy Seattle.)

Akamai’s full report is available here. How quickly you can download the 1.5-megabyte PDF file will depend, of course, on where you live.

Comments (3) | Reprints | Share:        

Pacific Northwest venture deals are making a comeback of sorts. Second-quarter investment numbers for Washington are up compared with the same period last year, according to data released over the weekend by Dow Jones VentureSource.

In the second quarter of 2008, there were 25 venture deals in Washington worth a total of $302 million—an 8.7 percent increase over the $278 million invested in the second quarter of 2007. This bucks the national trend in which many regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and New England, reported substantial declines compared with the same period last year.

The second-quarter tally in Washington was also a 39 percent increase over the $217 million invested in the first quarter of this year. However, the current pace of 50 deals (worth some $519 million) done through the first half of the year still lags 2007’s year-end total of 114 deals worth $1.3 billion.

Investments in biotechnology, medical devices, software, and Internet led the way, with Bellevue, WA-based Light Sciences Oncology raking in $40.1 million for the top spot (the deal closed on June 30). Also making a splash was Wetpaint, a consumer-Wiki website based in Seattle that raised $25 million, and ReliOn, a fuel-cell energy company based in Spokane, WA, which raised $23 million—the latter reflecting a national trend of increased investment in energy and utilities.

Here’s a roundup of the top 10 Pacific Northwest VC deals in 2Q08, along with the investors:

1. Light Sciences Oncology (Bellevue, WA)—$40.1million
Investors: undisclosed

2. Wetpaint (Seattle, WA)—$25.0 million
Investors: Accel Partners, Duff Ackerman & Goodrich, Fidelity Ventures, Frazier Technology Ventures, Trinity Ventures

3. ReliOn (Spokane, WA)—$23.0 million
Investors: Buerk Dale Victor, Chrysalix Energy Management, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital, Oak Investment Partners, PCG Asset Management, Robeco Group

4. Talyst (Bellevue, WA)—$20.0 million
Investors: AIG Global Investments, Ignition Partners, OVP Venture Partners

5. Immune Design (Seattle, WA)—$18 million
Investors: Alta Partners, Column Group, Versant Ventures

6. Pelago (Seattle, WA)—$15.0 million
Investors: Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Reliance Technology Ventures, Trilogy Equity Partners, T-Venture Holding

7. VLST (Seattle, WA)—$15.0 million
Investors: Amgen Ventures, Arch Venture Partners, MedImmune, MPM Capital, OVP Venture Partners

8. NexPlanar, formerly Neopad (Hillsboro, OR)—$14.5 million
Investors: BlueRun Ventures, Intel Capital, InterWest Partners

9. Fate Therapeutics (Seattle, WA)—$12.9 million
Investors: Arch Venture Partners, OVP Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, Venrock

10. Verdiem (Seattle, WA)—$12.0 million
Investors: Catamount Ventures, Falcon Technology Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Phoenix Partners, Westly Group

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Despite a near complete shutdown of the IPO market, U.S. private equity fundraising remained reasonably strong throughout the first half of this year—185 funds brought in $133 billion, coming in just under last year’s record pace, according to a new report from Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst. The venture capital segment performed particularly well, with 72 funds taking in $11.5 billion, up 15 percent from the $10 billion raised by 62 funds in last year’s first half.

In Washington, four private equity funds raised $532 million, representing less than half of one percent of the total. But that was up sharply from the $66 million raised by two funds a year earlier.

It’s possible to take a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty view on the overall private equity figures. The total of $132.7 billion was just 3 percent off the record $137.2 billion raised by U.S. private equity firms in the first half of 2007. Pretty good for a down economy. At the same time, Dow Jones reports, it was the first year-over-year falloff in fundraising since 2003. So the party could be breaking up.

The biggest downturn in dollar terms came in the buyout/corporate finance category, which fell from $107.5 billion in the first half of 2007 to $85.5 billion in 2008. The Funds of Funds and Secondary categories also saw significant declines.

Still, the drops were almost offset by the venture capital and mezzanine funding categories. The venture segment showed gains in both the numbers of funds and dollars raised. And mezzanine fundraising set a new first-half record with $24 billion raised by seven firms—compared to just $2.3 billion last year. Almost all of it came from the $20 billion GS Mezzanine Partners V LP fund, but even without including that deal the category saw a large percentage gain.

Washington fared best in the venture capital category, where three funds—the $250 million Madrona Venture Fund IV, the $240 million Maveron Equity Partners IV, and the $2 million Founder’s Co-op fund—raised $492 million, about 4 percent of the total. That was up more than seven-fold from the $66 million raised by two funds a year earlier. The state’s only other contribution to overall fundraising this year was $40 million garnered by Unitus Equity Fund II in the buyout/corporate finance category.

European private equity firms, meanwhile, saw strong gains in the year’s first half, with $61 billion invested in 80 funds, compared to $52.5 billion last year. “The differing fortunes of European private equity funds are an indication that limited partners are shifting some attention away from the U.S., where the economy is seen as particularly weak and where many of LPs are over-concentrated,” Jennifer Rossa, managing director of Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst, said in a statement.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Tired of city rankings yet? OK, I’ll be brief. So the July/August issue of Men’s Health, out this week, ranks Seattle #1 in “most environmentally conscious” drivers. Not that surprisingly, the Northwest did well in the survey overall: Portland, OR, and Spokane, WA, also made the top 10. The analysis of 100 American cities took into account gas consumption, annual mileage, vehicle efficiency, air quality, and mass-transit usage.

My colleague Luke and I have certainly done our part—we both recently ditched our cars. But how are local companies doing on greening up transportation, energy, and other technologies?

Startup activity in the cleantech space is certainly one good measure. According to DowJones VentureSource data for 2007, Washington state came in third in VC investments in cleantech (behind California and Massachusetts), with $175 million. It was dominated by a few big Seattle-based company deals: biodiesel maker Imperium Renewables raised $117 million in equity, but canceled its IPO at the end of the year; Targeted Growth, an agricultural biotech company, raised $22 million; Powerit Holdings landed $7 million; and Propel Biofuels raised $4.75 million.

(For a sense of what a larger cleantech cluster looks like, see the MIT Entrepreneurship Center’s energy map of New England here. Of course, it takes a lot of driving to visit all those companies.)

There is also some anecdotal evidence that local employers have contributed to the greening of Seattle. Microsoft and a few other companies run employee shuttles throughout the area. And roughly 70 percent of biotech giant Amgen’s staff in Seattle use something other than a single-occupancy vehicle to commute, says company spokesperson Carol Pawlak. Amgen runs a shuttle service from downtown, subsidizes bus and ferry transportation, and arranges van pools.

Xconomy doesn’t do that yet, but at least Luke and I will be getting our exercise.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

By now you’ve seen the 2008 Milken Institute “State Technology and Science Index.” Washington ranks fifth, behind Massachusetts, Maryland, Colorado, and California. Not too shabby? Let’s take a look under the covers.

At the outset, it’s important to acknowledge that all such rankings have a huge bogosity quotient—they’re highly sensitive to the precise criteria that are evaluated, and they’re subject to gaming. Still, there are probably some things to be learned.

The Milken index has five components:

—Risk Capital and Entrepreneurial Infrastructure, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Technology and Science Work Force, where Washington ranks 4th.

—Research and Development Inputs, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Technology Concentration and Dynamism, where Washington ranks 8th.

—Human Capital Investment, where Washington ranks 16th.

Each of these, in turn, has between 10 and 21 sub-components, listed at the bottom of the Web pages. There’s a huge wealth of detail available—I urge you to take a detailed look.

For now, though, let’s not spend any time on the first and second components, where Washington ranks 4th among the states (in both cases, up several notches from the most recent previous ranking, carried out in 2004). Or even on the third and fourth, where we rank 8th.

Instead, let’s focus at the other end—”Human Capital Investment”—where we rank 16th, by far our worst performance.

Don’t take solace in the fact that we’re in the top third of the states. Yes, we beat out North Dakota, Montana, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, Louisiana, Alabama, Tennessee, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Arkansas. But that’s not the competition. Every state that you’d think of as a tech competitor—and many that you wouldn’t—dominated us.

Here is our ranking on a few of the sub-components:

—Average Math SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Average Verbal SAT Scores: 25th among the states
—Recent degrees awarded in science and engineering per 1,000 civilian workers: 35th among the states

Here’s the message, in a nutshell: Our state is doing an outstanding job at competing nationally and globally in the 21st century economy. But we’re doing it by importing talent from elsewhere. This includes me, and it probably includes you.

Our K-12 system is failing our kids—it’s not preparing them for, or teaching them to aspire to, 21st century careers. And our higher education system also is failing our kids—there is insufficient investment in bachelors-level education, and even within that, insufficient investment in science and engineering.

In other words, we’re failing our kids. We’re creating 21st century jobs, and they’re going to other people’s kids.

Ask your state legislator what he or she is planning to do about this. If you don’t, who will?

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

As if its sports teams’ bragging rights weren’t enough, Massachusetts has now topped the state rankings in science and technology prowess. Meanwhile, Washington placed a respectable #5.

That’s the word today from the California-based Milken Institute’s 2008 State Technology and Science Index. The rankings are based on 77 indicators across five broad categories: R&D inputs, risk capital and entrepreneurial infrastructure, human capital investment, technology and science work force, and tech concentration and dynamism. (You can get the full state list here, and the full report here.)

A whopping four New England states placed in the top 10, with Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island also represented—and all three have improved their positions from 2004, the year of Milken’s last state survey. Washington is up one spot from sixth place, while Massachusetts maintained its dominance at the #1 position.

The report notes that Massachusetts scores “well ahead” of the competition, and attributes this to its world-class research institutions, cutting-edge firms, and ability to attract and retain a highly skilled work force.

Everyone loves a Top 10 list, so here it is, with notable changes in parentheses. The release said these states are “in the best position to succeed in the technology-led information age.”

1. Massachusetts (held position since 2004)
2. Maryland (up 2 spots)
3. Colorado
4. California (down 2)
5. Washington (up 1)
6. Virginia
7. Connecticut (up 3)
8. Utah
9. New Hampshire (up 3)
10. Rhode Island (up 1)

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

I feel the need to start off with a disclaimer, because when you start pouring A-1 sauce on sacred cows people tend to get a wee bit irrational. Let me state for the record that I do indeed believe that global warming is a real threat. I also think that our over dependence on foreign oil is a bad thing that imperils our nation’s economy. I also believe that cleantech is an investment area of great promise with new technologies that will profoundly change our world for the better.

That said, the cleantech field—as it currently stands—is a disaster in the making, with dumb money chasing dumb investments and with shoddy science experiments being grossly over-hyped as panaceas for all that ails our environment, gas tanks, and wallets.

We all know the score—basically, we have is a planet warming from CO2 emissions, record fuel prices, near or at peak oil, exploding demand from China and India for natural resources, not to mention suburban sprawl, polluted rivers and soil, etc, etc. The hope is we may be able to fix it with behavioral changes and technology.

Cleantech is the umbrella term for the technology part of this hope. It’s generally thought of as products or services that “…improve operational performance, productivity, or efficiency while reducing costs, inputs, energy consumption, waste, or pollution.” (Thanks Wikipedia.)

The issue I have with cleantech lies in the solutions that are being focused on, and who is doing the focusing. Let’s start with the latter and look in this column at cleantech and the VC community. You know, the guys quoted in all those BusinessWeek and Fortune articles portraying themselves as the saviors of the Earth—much like Capt. Planet and the Planeteers.

According to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree survey, venture capitalists invested $2.2 billion in cleantech companies over the last year. That’s a mind boggling 45 percent jump over 2006. I have seen business plans that were laughed at a couple years ago now become the object of bidding wars by top VC firms.

Beyond the hype and money, why are the VCs flooding into cleantech? I reckon some of it is driven by a combination guilt complex/God complex for the “sins” they committed in acquiring their wealth. I won’t mention any names (mainly because it’s such a huge list), but it appears these personal pathologies factor into their drive to save the Earth with their bigger brains and purer hearts ***cough***.

Now, there are great venture capitalists patrolling the cleantech space—Rob Day of @ventures comes to mind—but they belong to a very short list. The biggest problem is that most VCs are not equipped to handle industrial plays like energy. They don’t understand the engineering, the science, the value chain, or how the public policy world works. And, even worse, they don’t seem to be taking the time to access the right people to do the due diligence for these questions either.

These days, I am watching some HBS drop-out, who sold an online dog food company back during the bubble days, in a mad scramble to blindly pull the trigger on deals that need expertise in materials science and mechanical engineering to even read through the business plan. Seriously, some of the bizarre claims being made by some entrepreneurs in their projections would make any power industry engineer simply laugh out loud. Yet the checks are flying out of investment firm after investment firm to these start-ups.

Getting beyond the scientific and technical feasibility issue, try to find a VC that understands manufacturing. Good luck. I hypothesize that the reason so many photovoltaic companies have gotten funded is because if a VC by some miracle does understand manufacturing, he almost always understands it in terms of the semiconductor field. The reality is that building a physical object is extraordinarily different from …Next Page »

Comments (5) | Reprints | Share: