It was another big week for life sciences news in San Diego, with interesting developments in agricultural biotech, industrial biotech, and genomic sequencing. This is our wrap up of what you need to know.

—San Diego’s Synthetic Genomics spun out a new San Diego-based agricultural biotech, Agradis, with $20 million in Series A financing and proprietary technology that can be used to develop improved hybrid crops such as castor and sweet sorghum. Mexican investor and businessman Alfonso Romo is a co-founder of Agradis, along with J. Craig Venter, Synthetic Genomics’ chairman and CEO.

—TedMed is underway this week at the Hotel del Coronado. Peter Diamandis, the chairman and co-founder of the X Prize Foundation, took the stage yesterday to announce some changes in its $10 million competition in genomic sequencing. The foundation, based near Los Angeles, says the $10 million Archon Genomics X Prize presented by Medco will be awarded to the first team that accurately sequences the whole genome of 100 people within 30 days for $1,000 or less per genome, and at an error rate no greater than one per million base pairs. The prize is intended to open the way to new era of personalized medicine with unprecedented accuracy.

—San Diego’s Illumina, (NASDAQ: ILMN), the market-leading maker of DNA sequencing equipment, said it’s eliminating 200 jobs, or about 8 percent of its workforce. Illumina said a restructuring of its business is expected to add a $15 million to $17 million charge on the company’s income statement, mostly in the fourth quarter.

—In a separate announcement, GenoLogics of Victoria, BC, said it has raised $8 million through a strategic financing in the company by San Diego’s Illumina. GenoLogics said it plans to develop genomics software tailored for cheaper desktop sequencers, to build up its sales and marketing efforts, and develop new applications.

—The MoneyTree Report on third-quarter venture capital activity found … Next Page »

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It has taken about 12 years and more than $275 million in venture capital for San Diego’s Active Network to get into the starting gate for an IPO. We have details on that and the rest of San Diego’s tech news.

—San Diego’s Active Network, which provides online registration services for sporting events and other activities, set a price range for its planned IPO at between $16 and $18 a share. The Active Network aims to sell 11 million shares in the offering, with 8.2 million shares offered by the company and 2.8 million from existing investors.

—Bryan Hertz, the CEO of San Diego-based Telcentris and its VoxOx business unit, offered his perspective on Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Luxembourg-based Skype Technologies. Hertz told me, “It is entirely possible that Microsoft could continue to operate Skype as an independent division (much like Zappos within Amazon). If they are smart, that’s exactly what they’ll do.”

—San Diego-based MIR3, which offers Web-based technology that enables its customers to issue mass alerts and notifications, says it’s expanding its communications platform to integrate social media with its traditional corporate enterprise customers. MIR3 wants to be able to give its corporate users full control of their communications across any device or social network.

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) said it’s helping the X Prize Foundation set the ground rules for a new $10 million X Prize grand challenge to create a medical “Tricorder X Prize.” By offering a $10 million incentive, the X Prize wants to stimulate the invention of a wireless, portable device that could be used to rapidly diagnose medical maladies and injuries—much like the stage prop used in Star Trek.

—San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless formed a partnership with Sacramento, CA-based GridSense to combine their technologies in a way that will enable electric utilities to monitor their distribution networks at a lower cost, improve outage restoration, and improve demand-side load management.

—San Diego-based Proximetry, which has been developing software for the smart grid, named Andres Carvello as executive vice president and chief strategy officer. Carvello was previously the chief information officer at Austin Energy.

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Much of the action this week was taking place downtown, at the 6th annual Convergence Summit hosted by the nonprofit Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. The three-day conference included CEOs, entrepreneurs, investors, executives, and innovators—and we’ve got the highlights of that and other area life sciences news wrapped up here.

—San Diego’s Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), the largest wireless chipmaker in the world, said during the summit that it’s helping the X Prize Foundation set the ground rules for a proposed $10 million Tricorder X Prize. X Prize organizers want a real-life medical tricorder—like the one Dr. McCoy used on Star Trek—that is portable, uses wireless sensors, and has the capability to rapidly diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board-certified physicians.

—Eric Topol, the Scripps Health cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, said during his talk at the convergence summit that he wants to start a new medical school for tech-minded students in San Diego. Topol says medical students should be learning how to handle new wireless technologies and genomics in their practice. Topol was instrumental in founding the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in 2002.

—Exton, PA-based ViroPharma (NASDAQ: VPHM) agreed to pay San Diego’s Halozyme Therapeutics (NASDAQ: HALO) as much as $83 million to license Halozyme’s recombinant human hyaluronidase. ViroPharma wants to develop the Halozyme compound as an experimental injection medication for a rare genetic disorder that causes potentially life-threatening swelling.

—San Diego’s Meritage Pharma said its experimental drug for a little-known condition called eosinophilic esophagitis (EoE) passed a mid-stage clinical trial of 71 children. The study found … Next Page »

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Some big names were on the agenda yesterday at the 2011 Convergence Summit, which is being held in a downtown San Diego hotel under the auspices of the nonprofit Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance. A couple of the speakers actually delivered some interesting news:

—Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs made the first unexpected announcement from the stage during a keynote talk yesterday morning, when he revealed the San Diego wireless giant has been collaborating with the X Prize Foundation to establish guidelines for a $10 million Tricorder X Prize. The underlying concept of the $10 million challenge is to develop a rapid, portable, and low-cost diagnostic tool capable of diagnosing patients better or equal to a panel of board-certified physicians. It’s an idea right out of Star Trek, which I’ve explained in more detail here.

—Following Jacobs onstage was Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, who revealed he plans to start a new medical school in San Diego sometime next year. Topol didn’t provide many details during a conversation with Qualcomm executive Don Jones, who has been driving the company’s multi-pronged foray into wireless health technologies. But he vented somewhat, describing the medical establishment as “sclerotic and fossilized” and “very resistant to change.”

Topol, who founded the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine in 2002 (four years before he joined Scripps in San Diego), is clearly looking to do things differently. He said only a few medical schools are using iPads and are teaching students how to use the Vscan, a handheld ultrasound imaging device that General Electric introduced in 2009. “Medical schools today offer nothing about wireless technologies or genomics,” said Topol, who indicated the medical school he is planning would emphasize the adoption of the latest technologies. While Topol sounded hopeful, he acknowledged that the process of starting a new school is “really difficult” and requires going through years of approval.

—One speaker did not make news in the usual sense. A talk by Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, associate director at the FDA Center for Devices & Radiological Health was billed in the program as “a view into the agency’s oversight of wireless health devices, applications, and services.” But Bernstein didn’t provide much insight into the agency’s slow regulatory process or reasoning for asserting regulatory authority over a broad spectrum of emerging technologies.

Bernstein reminded the audience, which included more than 200 technology entrepreneurs and healthcare executives, that it was 20 years before the cell phone played a meaningful role in a physician’s daily activities and 22 years before surgeons began to use Thomas Edison’s lightbulb to illuminate their operating rooms. In other words, have patience restless wireless health entrepreneurs. It takes decades to adopt new technologies in healthcare.

WLSA CEO Rob McCray and InTouch Health Robot with the FDA's Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein

Bernstein’s presentation itself was the real news, and something of a distraction. The FDA official did not appear personally on stage, but instead used a medical telepresence robot from Santa Barbara, CA-based InTouch Health. Bernstein operated the RP-7 robot remotely from the East Coast, and his visage was limited to the robot’s 15-inch display screen. I was of two minds after Bernstein ended his talk and the robot rolled offstage and down a ramp—the audience watching apprehensively. While it was disappointing that Bernstein didn’t appear personally, it was nevertheless encouraging to see a top FDA official use remote telepresence technology to deliver his presentation without a hitch. And it also meant the agency didn’t have to pay for his trip.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) chairman and CEO Paul Jacobs revealed today that the San Diego-based wireless technology giant has been working with the X Prize Foundation to develop criteria for a new $10 million X Prize grand challenge that is straight out of Star Trek—a “Tricorder X Prize.”

The idea—which is still being distilled—is to offer a $10 million incentive prize to the team that can develop the first diagnostic device that actually works like the ubiquitous medical tricorder of Star Trek fame. Generally speaking, the technology would have to be portable, use wireless sensors, be minimally invasive, and capable of providing rapid, low-cost diagnoses of medical ailments and injuries. Oh, and organizers also want the gadget to be able to diagnose patients better than or equal to a panel of board-certified physicians.

Jacobs announced the proposal during a keynote speech this morning at a wireless health conference in downtown San Diego. The X Prize Foundation officially announced the collaboration in a statement issued at about the same time from its headquarters near Los Angeles.

The X Prize Foundation gained worldwide renown as the organizer of the $10 million prize for the first reusable civilian spacecraft. X Prize founder Peter Diamandis issued the challenge in 1996, and a team led by famed aerospace designer Burt Rutan—with financial support from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen—won the $10 million prize in 2004.

“Part of prize development is to bring something to reality, but part of it also is to change the mindset,” said Jessica Ching, the foundation staffer who is responsible for developing the rules governing the competition. In the case of the X Prize for spaceflight, Ching says the Rutan-designed SpaceShipOne shattered the prevalent notion that only government-backed spacecraft could reach for the stars.

Spock with Tricorder

In a similar way, the Tricorder X Prize is intended to break the grip of conventional thinking in healthcare by extending the reach of health information and services to more people. “Health is important to everybody,” Ching said. Creating the prize, she added, “came from a real need and a desire to push for change.”

For now, however, the more immediate challenge lies in establishing the ground rules for a fair competition.

“It’s got to be really difficult, but not impossible,” said Ching. She estimated that developing guidelines for the Tricorder X Prize would take about six months—a process that Qualcomm is funding—and the foundation would likely formally announce the challenge sometime next year.

“What we have to do is take general characteristics and turn them into an objective set of criteria,” said Don Jones, Qualcomm’s Vice President of Business Development for Health and Life Sciences.

Ching, who also was attending the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance Convergence Summit in San Diego, said that developing a portable medical diagnostic tool would require innovations across many technologies, including medical imaging, microfluidics, and wireless sensors. It also would likely require radical advances in such fields as artificial intelligence and decision systems.

In its statement today, the X Prize Foundation says, “This prize will bring understandable, easily accessible health information and metrics to consumers on their mobile devices, pointing them to earlier actions for care.” Or, as Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs put it during his talk, “Imagine a future where the tricorder is just another app on your phone.”

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Last night Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel, of PayPal fame, gathered eight of his favorite future-oriented organizations and a couple hundred of his wealthiest friends in an auditorium at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts and made a magnanimous offer. For every dollar attendees contribute to the organizations before New Year’s Day, Thiel’s foundation announced, the billionaire investor-philanthropist will contribute another dollar, up to a limit of $1,000 per organization per attendee.

If everyone who attended Thiel’s so-called “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event gives a full $8,000, Thiel could be on the hook for a lot of money. My own rough estimate is that 200 people were on hand—and 200 times $8,000 comes to $1.6 million.

It was a bold, assertive way to promote the fortunes of these unusual groups, which included the Foresight Institute, Humanity Plus, the Santa Fe Institute, the Seasteading Institute, the SENS Foundation, the Singularity Institute, Singularity University, and the X Prize Foundation. But Thiel is known an iconoclast who’s attracted to long bets and radical solutions; he possesses the sort of optimism that often seems to be engendered by (or perhaps engenders) extreme self-made wealth.

In “lightning presentations” of about five minutes each, representatives of Thiel’s chosen groups described their goals. These range from the merely ambitious—harnessing nanotechnology, in the case of the Foresight Institute, or sequencing the human genome more cheaply, in the case of the X Prize Foundation—to the barely conceivable and arguably loony, such as transhumanism (Humanity Plus), reversing aging (the SENS Foundation), and establishing ocean cities that function as independent countries (the Seasteading Institute).

In remarks at the event, Thiel drew a distinction between “extensive” technologies, which “take things that are working and replicate them,” and “intensive” technologies, which try to “take the things that are best in the world and make them qualitatively and dramatically better.” All eight of the groups included in the donor challenge have agendas that, to lay people, may sound “really weird and really strange,” Thiel acknowledged. But he argued that “it may be in the nature of things that are ‘intensive’ that any time you are doing something singular that’s never been done before…it will be seen as weird.”

Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1998, made tens of millions after selling the company to eBay in 2002, and started the hedge fund Clarium, which he still runs. He’s also a major shareholder in Facebook (he was the company’s first outside investor) and is a partner in the Founders Fund, a San Francisco venture firm known for supporting early-stage Web companies. A chess prodigy and a self-described libertarian, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review when he was a student at Stanford University.

This fall the Thiel Foundation announced a new program called 20 Under 20, which will award two-year cash grants of $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20. The program’s goal is to find budding visionaries and give them the resources and mentorship to pursue their ideas without having to wait until after college. “From Facebook to SpaceX to Halcyon Molecular, some of the world’s most transformational technologies were created by people who stopped out of school because they had ideas that couldn’t wait until graduation,” Thiel said in a statement announcing the program.

“The future is not an abstraction,” Thiel summarized at last night’s event. “It is not something that just happens or that other people do. It is something we all participate in helping to create and forge and shape, and if we do that and set our minds to it, we can do a lot more.”

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Recently, the X Prize Foundation awarded a total of $10 million to three companies at the forefront of building the world’s most efficient cars. It was the culmination of a competition that began in 2008 with 111 teams and was pared down to nine finalists. The competition was rigorous: it demanded teams to engineer and design cars that get at least 100 miles per gallon on average and survive grueling real-world safety, emissions, durability and range tests.

The goal of the X Prize Foundation is visionary—to show us how small, innovative car companies can lead the way toward creating highly efficient cars that will transform the way we use energy and dramatically reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

As I listened to members of the winning teams talk about the competition and the challenge, they focused not just on the specifics of the engineering task that was in front of them, but more importantly on the implications for society. They want to fundamentally change the game—to change the way we look at cars in order to have an impact on the big picture issues of creating new economic and environmental opportunities in this country.

The nonprofit X Prize Foundation, with its theme of “Revolution Through Competition,” is representative of a new mindset that focuses on the intersection of engineering and technology to solve seemingly intractable problems.

In early October, on the campus of the University of Southern California, X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis will join a group of scientists, policy makers, educators, entrepreneurs, business leaders and communicators who will converge at the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Grand Challenges Summit to discuss real-world solutions to some of the most pressing and complex issues of our time.

The summit is part of a bold movement in the world of engineering—two years ago, the NAE launched the idea of 14 Grand Challenges in Engineering. The grand challenges are ultimately tied to fundamental societal needs and priorities: sustainability, vulnerability, health, and the joy of living. They cover a wide spectrum of issues—making solar power more economical, providing access to clean water, engineering better medicines, preventing nuclear terror, securing cyberspace and restoring and improving the urban infrastructure, among others.

The grand challenges are encouraging us to tackle issues surrounding the environment, healthcare, and technology, issues that clearly interest professional engineers and issues that will inspire future engineers. We are in a new era in which engineers and technologists work with their counterparts from other disciplines to understand relevant problems, help classify and analyze them, understand the constraints, and help design solutions that will address these problems.

During a time when we see gridlock in the world of politics and experience the uncertainty of a stubborn and difficult economic recession, there is still great potential to actually solve pressing societal issues.

At the X Prize event, there were a host of luminaries from the political world who acknowledged this gridlock and called on innovators to lead the way. U.S. Senator Mark Warner from Virginia, where the Edison2 team based in the town of Lynchburg captured the $5 million X Prize for mainstream vehicles, voiced the sentiments many Americans share.

“We need a few more real engineers,” Warner said. “These are the next great innovators who will lead our country forward.” I could not agree with him more.

I believe that engineering can empower society by creating new tools, devices, methodologies, and ways of thinking, of innovating and communicating. Removing constraints and outside the box thinking are fundamental qualities of the best engineers, and I believe the results of this kind of thinking will be a fundamental driver in technological and societal change.

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Thanks to everyone who made it out to Babson College for the 2010 Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, & Entrepreneurship! We had a great crowd, representing all slices of the innovation community here in New England. And we heard some new, off-the-cuff perspectives from some familiar faces, as well as talks from emerging companies and organizations that are making a splash in healthcare information technology, medicine, startup investing, personal computing, smart energy, and much more.

A top 10 list isn’t enough to capture all the highlights. So here are a dozen takeaways the Xconomy team has from the day, in no particular order.

—Everything I need to know about dating I learned from oneforty founder and CEO Laura Fitton at our Angel Tsunami panel, where she talked about the tribulations of raising early stage funding. “Angel investors are like dudes,” she said. That was a nod to the flakiness of investors who committed to giving her cash but then disappeared completely before the checks ever made it into her hands. Here’s another parallel between investors and boyfriends, she said: “An investor who’s interested in you will act really interested in you,” she says. So if he’s not calling you and is hard to get a hold of, he probably wants no part of the deal.

—Those at our State of New England Biotech keynote chat didn’t seem disturbed by the rash moves made by life sciences stockholders. “What we’ve learned at Alkermes is that volatility is very valuable. So people who buy our stock low have the opportunity to sell it high—again, again, and again,” said company CEO Richard Pops.

—The energy industry is experiencing a bubble just like Internet companies did—and it’s called global warming, our keynote speaker Bob Metcalfe said. How does he know? “Al Gore and I inflated the Internet bubble together, and he’s back,” says Metcalfe, the inventor of the Ethernet and a general partner at Polaris Venture Partners. He also said solving the energy crisis won’t reduce the amount of energy consumed: “We are going to be using more energy, clean and cheap energy in squanderable abundance, if the Internet is any guide.”

—Xconomy CEO Bob Buderi sang a song to the tune of Adam’s Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” on how the New England innovation ecosystem stacks up with the Bay Area. He also … Next Page »

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The Rocket Racing League game coming to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad early this summer is a rare beast: a futuristic video game that’s based on real life.

RRL Games, a wing (or should I say fin?) of the Orlando, FL-based Rocket Racing League, is expected to release its game for the iPhone and iPod Touch this month and for the iPad in June. Judging from previews, it’s a high-octane simulation of the even higher-octane real-world sport of rocket racing, in which pilots fly four-seat, delta-wing airplanes modified with rocket engines that burn liquid oxygen and ethanol.

Rocket racing, which CNN reporter Miles O’Brien has called “a mashup between Stars Wars pod racing and NASCAR,” is the co-creation of investor Granger Whitelaw and X Prize Foundation founder Peter Diamandis, who will give a keynote presentation at the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (XSITE) on June 17. Their Rocket Racing League organization raised a $5.5 million venture round last year to advance its vision of a rocket racing circuit that would take place at airfields around the country, with fans watching military, acrobatic, and test pilots competing in four-lap heats around a 5-mile raceway.

The league is recruiting teams for the competitions now, and the first races are tentatively planned for 2011. But meanwhile, eager fans will be able to experience rocket racing on their Apple mobile devices. In screen shots from the game, rocket planes zoom through course markers that define the race course—essentially virtual tunnels in the sky. In actual rocket races, pilots will have heads-up displays showing them much the same information, and fans will be able to watch their progress from the ground on jumbotrons running augmented-reality software. (You have to watch this video from a demonstration in Tulsa, OK, to fully grok this.)

The organization says that eventually, it would like iPhone- or iPad-toting spectators to be able to race virtual planes alongside the actual ones in real time. But that’s a ways off. In the nearer term, gamers will be able to use the apps to compare race times with their friends on Facebook, as Diamandis explained in the following e-mail interview.

Xconomy: Do you hope that the rocket racing video game will help to generate increased interest in rocket racing as a real-world sport?

Peter Diamandis: In the development of any business, especially a sports league, it’s vital that we give our fans as many ways to get involved and be a part of the action as possible. The RRL game allows our fans to design and pilot their very own … Next Page »

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Most Xconomy events last only an afternoon or an evening. Barely enough time, in other words, to scratch the surface of all the amazing work technology entrepreneurs are doing around New England, in areas as varied as cloud computing, health IT, mobile commerce, smart grid technology, and the future of drug development. But our flagship annual conference, the Xconomy Summit on Innovation, Technology, and Entrepreneurship (XSITE), is different: it’s a chance to gather for a full day with leading innovators and investors from New England and around the country and hear all the details on what they’re doing to turn ideas into great businesses.

We’re pleased to announce that registration is open for this year’s edition of XSITE, which will be held for the first time at Babson College in Babson Park, MA (that’s next door to Wellesley, for those of you not up to speed on your suburban geography). Neighboring Olin College joins Babson as co-host of the event, and we couldn’t ask for a more appropriate venue, given the focus at Babson and Olin on entrepreneurship and engineering that meets real social and economic needs.

Babson president Leonard Schlesinger, a nationally celebrated leader in the field of entrepreneurship, will be on hand to help us kick off the event, and we’ll also hear from keynote speakers like Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, who knows a lot about igniting entrepreneurship and innovation. Other featured speakers will include Rod Brooks, whose startup Heartland Robotics is reimagining the way factory workers do their jobs; Alkermes chairman and CEO Richard Pops, a national leader in biotechnology; and Bob Metcalfe, the Ethernet inventor who has made a mission of promoting “enertech” or the idea of clean, super-abundant next-generation energy technologies. We’ve posted the whole list of confirmed speakers, who already number almost 30, over at the XSITE registration page, where you can buy a ticket to XSITE at our “super saver” rate until April 29.

The theme for XSITE 2009, last June, was “The Recovery Starts Here.” We planned all of our keynote talks and panel discussions around creative ideas from New England tech and life sciences companies for lifting the country out of recession. The theme this year, “Building the Next Economy,” grows directly out of the 2009 conference—but with a crucial difference.

There’s no question now that economic recovery is underway, though it’s been slow to show up in some parts of the country, like Xconomy’s newest home city, Detroit (from whence we’ll have at least one speaker). What’s important now, as we head into this century’s second decade, is the choices we make about the kind of economy we really want. Will it be based on rusty, outdated, and wasteful approaches to energy generation, transportation, healthcare, communications, and consumer-goods manufacturing? Or will it be built around new ideas like using advanced 3D design and prototyping technologies to streamline product development, putting IT and modern communications technologies to work remove the excess costs from patient care, and managing the electric grid and our homes and offices to extract hidden efficiencies?

Obviously, we have a bias here—because we believe, at bottom, that technological progress is what drives exponential growth (that’s where the X in Xconomy comes from, after all) and that innovation is the straightest way out of the economic doldrums and toward a solid, sustainable, rewarding economy.

In addition to our plenary sessions, we’re expanding the conference this year to include four breakout tracks. Three will be the same as last year: Life Sciences, Energy, and Information Technology. The new track will be focused, like our just-announced new channel, on Health IT.

And, like last year, we’ll close out the formal sessions with a raucous XSITE Xpo, a rapid-fire series of presentations by 12 startups in life sciences, energy, and infotech with the audience voting on their favorites. An evening networking party will follow, naturally.

We’ll provide a lot more details about the conference agenda over the coming weeks…but we hope you will sign up early for what’s sure to be 2010′s most XSITE-ing celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.

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As paragliders and hang gliders swooped overhead, the grandson of famed aviator Charles “Lucky Lindy” Lindbergh chose a stunning panoramic San Diego clifftop to announce the formation of a new incentive prize to recognize advancements in electric aircraft technology.

Seattle-area resident Erik Lindbergh says the Lindbergh Electric Aircraft Prize, or LEAP, is intended to stimulate the development of more environmentally friendly aviation technologies, and help the fledgling electric aircraft industry take off. Lindbergh created the prize, which actually consists of awards in four categories, through a nonprofit organization he founded, the Creative Solutions Alliance (CSA), which has partnered with the Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA). The four LEAP awards, which have yet to be funded, will be awarded annually at the EAA’s annual AirVenture “fly-in,” the popular air show held each July in Oshkosh, WI.

Organizers also have arranged for students and teachers from a Seattle-area high school to participate in the process and attend the awards ceremony in Oshkosh this summer. Lindbergh says six students and six teachers from Aviation High School, a project-based magnet school in Des Moines, WA, just south of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, will attend in a bid to develop curriculum and stimulate student interest in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Lindbergh is a founding board member of the high school, which was started in 2004.

In introducing the prize, Lindbergh says it … Next Page »

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It seems as though a number of San Diego tech companies saw the week before the Memorial Day weekend as a time to clear the decks, launch a few online products, and to raise some more capital. We also highlight the emergence of wireless healthcare and add some perspective to San Diego’s homegrown venture capital firms. 

—I got my hands on some data that makes it clear that San Diego’s homegrown venture capital firms now represent a small fraction of local venture deals. Last year, 93 percent of the VCs doing business in San Diego were from out of town; they accounted for 87 percent of the 561 deals and 87 percent of the nearly $1.43 billion that was invested here, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. Data from the National Venture Capital Association shows that just seven San Diego-based VCs have raised new funds since 2005: Avalon Ventures, BSD Venture Capital, Finstere Partners, Mesa Verde Venture Partners, Mission Ventures, Revolution Ventures, and TVC Capital.

—I had a chat with renowned cardiologist Eric Topol, who was named in March as chief medical officer for San Diego’s new West Wireless Health Institute, and who says we are on the cusp of revolutionary change in healthcare. Topol, who also is the chief academic officer at Scripps Health, says wireless technologies can now be used to remotely monitor patients with such ailments as Alzheimer’s, asthma, depression, diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and sleep disorders.

—There’s a new cleantech startup in town: Viryd Technologies, a spinout from San Diego’s Fallbrook Technologies, is developing Fallbrook’s proprietary transmission technology exclusively for use in power-generating wind turbines. Viryd says it has raised more than $2.2 million so far in a $4 million round of equity financing.

—I had never heard of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” until X Prize founder Peter Diamandis told me his foundation is thinking of creating … Next Page »

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It has been almost five years since a team of aerospace entrepreneurs funded by a software billionaire claimed the Ansari X Prize, the $10 million prize competition to develop the first reusable private spacecraft.

Since then, the frustrated space enthusiast who established the X Prize as a way to re-ignite astronautical innovation, Peter Diamandis, has won some prizes of his own. He was the inaugural winner of the 2006 Heinlein Prize for his efforts to deliver humanity to space; a Lindbergh Award in recognition of his pioneering work in creating incentive prizes; and an Arthur C. Clarke Award for innovation.

As the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, based near Los Angeles in Playa Vista, CA, the 48-year-old Diamandis says his goal now is to make the X Prize “the gold standard of incentive prizes that are well-promoted, well-executed, and hit the mark” in terms of targeting technology breakthroughs in such fields as energy, astronautics, transportation, medicine, genomics, and exploration.

In anticipation of his talk at San Diego’s MIT Enterprise Forum, I recently asked Diamandis how the X Prize Foundation has changed since it wrote a $10 million check in 2004 to spacecraft designer Burt Rutan and his investor, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

For one thing, Diamandis says, the foundation has grown almost tenfold—from five people to a staff of 45. The foundation also is working more rigorously now on what he calls “prize methodology,” developing the principles, procedures, and rules for prizes that will drive key breakthroughs in such fields as life sciences, exploration, energy, global development, education, and the environment. Among other things, he says the group has been working with scientists at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop prize methodologies for a possible “Ocean X Prize” in three possible areas:

—Ocean exploration. Since the U.S. deep submergence vehicle Alvin was launched 45 years ago and Russia’s MIR submersibles are over 20 years old, Diamandis says the foundation is considering a prize to create new technologies needed to explore the “Challenger Deep” of the Mariana Trench, 7 miles beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean.

—Ocean floor mapping. Diamandis says we know more about the surface of Mars than about the bottom of the ocean. So a prize for mapping the ocean floor could encourage the development of new underwater mapping technologies.

—Ocean conservation. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a region of the Pacific Ocean where plastic trash accumulates into vast masses of unsinkable drifting litter. The X Prize Foundation is considering a prize that would spur the development of innovative ways to “heal” such garbage patches.

To Diamandis, it is only a matter of time before incentive prizes become as important to innovation as venture capital. Diamandis says he’s heard Rick Burnes say that venture capital also seemed like a “very strange idea” in 1970, when Burnes co-founded Charles River Ventures in Waltham, MA. “Now venture capital is everywhere,” Diamandis says. “I think the same thing will happen with incentive prizes.”

With the success of the Ansari X Prize, similar … Next Page »

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Efforts to build a new technology cluster of algae-based industries in the region—and to make San Diego a center of excellence in algal biotechnology—are coming together in an unusual series of events today.

“I’m calling it algae day in San Diego,” says Rick Halperin, project manager for the regional algae initiative, a virtual organization formed to encourage collaboration among government, business, research, and academic organizations. And it appears that each of those institutions has organized an event today that is focused on different aspects of the economic promise that algae biofuels and related technologies represent for San Diego and Imperial counties.

“It’s all about building a common agenda,” Halperin tells me. “All in all, what’s nice is that we all appear to be pulling together. The common agenda is really about making this region a center for algae excellence.”

Two events planned for today are by invitation-only. But Halperin maintains that they reflect the extent of elite interest that San Diego’s regional algae efforts have attracted, saying, “I don’t think anyone else is gathering leaders at such a diverse high level.”

One of the invitation-only events was organized by Lee Stein of Prize Capital, which works closely with the X Prize Foundation in developing new methods of funding innovation. Halperin says Stein’s work session is intended to finalize terms for a yet-to-be-announced prize competition that is intended to spur key innovations needed by the emerging algae-biotechnology industry.

Halperin describes the other exclusive session as a daylong, closed-door meeting between Shell, the global energy and petrochemical conglomerate, and HR BioPetroleum, a renewable energy technology company based in Hawaii and La Jolla that has been developing algae-to-biofuels technology. Halperin says he’s not privy to the subject of discussion, but the session suggests that conventional energy companies like Shell are closely following emerging technologies that use genetically engineered algae to make gasoline, diesel fuel, and jet fuel.

Other events taking place today are:

—A breakfast panel discussion about cleantech as “an upside driver in a down market” sponsored by The San Diego Venture Group. The 8 a.m. presentation at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla includes Steven Parry, managing director in the Santa Barbara, CA, office of NGEN Partners, Don Wood, managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, CA, and Marianne Wu, a partner at Mohr Davidow in Menlo Park, CA.

—A press conference at 12:30 p.m. at UC San Diego to announce the launch of a multi-institutional science and technology consortium called SD-CAB, the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology. The academic center, founded by scientists at UCSD, The Scripps Research Institute, and other local research institutions, was formed to make sustainable algae-based fuel production and carbon dioxide abatement a reality within five to 10 years.

—A regional algae stakeholders meeting organized by Cleantech San Diego and the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp. that begins at 2:30 p.m. at the Scripps Seaside Forum of UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. Halperin, who helped organize this event, describes it as “a master-planning exercise” for key players and interest groups. He says the session is intended to explore … Next Page »

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At a time when many people are saying the traditional venture capital model is broken, an influential Internet pioneer has developed a fundamentally different concept for investing in innovation.

San Diego resident Lee Stein explained his concept to me in a long conversation last week. He already has given shape to his idea in the form of Prize Capital, an investment firm he founded in 2006 in Del Mar, CA. Last week, the X Prize Foundation identified Prize Capital as the firm that put up the $25,000 award for the “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” contest won by a pair of U.C. Irvine students. But Stein says that wasn’t a true test of the Prize Capital model.

“We sponsored the YouTube prize because it gave us the opportunity to formalize our relationship with the X Prize Foundation and YouTube—and to watch and experiment with online marketing of prize ideas,” Stein says. Establishing an incentive for “crazy green ideas” also reflects Stein’s personal passion for using innovation to help the environment. He is particularly alarmed about global deforestation, and says, “We are living in the era of greatest extinction since the time of Noah.” His environmental ideas are evident at Prize Capital, but before detailing those, a bit of backround.

Throughout his career, Stein has shown a knack for seeing the essential nature of a business, and acting on his insights. Trained as an accountant and lawyer, Stein and his wife formed a financial management firm in 1980 for the Hollywood elite. As he once put it, he realized that many rock bands and film stars had the same gross annual income as a medium-size company—without a CFO or corporate finance department. Their clients included film stars Gene Hackman and Matthew Broderick, and rock bands Journey, Rod Stewart, and Men at Work.

In the early 1990s, when many people viewed the Internet as a playground for computer renegades and cowboy poets, Stein helped to develop one of the first Internet payment systems. He says he remembers thinking, “If we don’t bring commerce to the Internet, it will just go the way of CB radio.” He founded San Diego-based First Virtual in 1994 to provide secure online credit card transactions for consumers. Stein says his validation came almost a year later with the Netscape IPO, which fundamentally transformed the way people viewed—and valued—what was happening on the Internet.

First Virtual’s early investors included GE Capital, EDS and First USA, which was then a fast-growing issue of Visa credit cards. The company went public in a successful IPO in 1996 and was sold in 1998 to MessageMedia, which was itself eventually acquired by DoubleClick. First Virtual’s patents are now held by eBay.

Stein says he began to develop his ideas for Prize Capital about three and a half years ago, after PayPal founder Elon Musk invited him to … Next Page »

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San Diego’s biotech executives may be hearing billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s name more often than they care to. We begin our roundup today with Icahn, who has been increasing his stake in and demanding changes at San Diego’s Amylin Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AMLN), also wants to shake up management at Biogen Idec, which is based in Cambridge, MA, and has a sizable operation in San Diego.

—After pressuring Biogen Idec (NASDAQ: BIIB) last year to sell itself to a big drugmaker, Icahn returned last week to nominate a slate of four new directors for election to the company board.

—On the Amylin front, Eastbourne Capital Management says it also wants to nominate a slate of five new directors for election to the company’s 12-member board. Eastbourne says its slate of new directors won’t conflict with Icahn’s bid to also get five new directors elected to Amylin’s board, but it surely increases the corporate intrigue.

—Video game maker THQ (NASDAQ: THQI), based north of Los Angeles in Agoura Hills, CA, disclosed plans last week to close its wireless game development unit in San Diego and lay off all 31 employees. A few days later, the global game developer announced additional reductions that altogether will reduce fiscal 2010 spending by $220 million and headcount by 600—or 24 percent of its estimated 2,500-person workforce.

—Other layoffs reported last week: San Diego’s Hollis-Eden Pharmaceuticals says its cut 20 employees, or about a third of its workforce; and semiconductor industry equipment maker Cohu revealed it cut 60 jobs, or about 6 percent, of its workforce.

—When the U.S. House of Representatives voted last week to postpone the digital TV conversion that was set for Feb. 17, San Diego’s Qualcomm was forced to delay the expansion of its MediaFlo service as well. In-Stat analyst Gerry Kaufhold told me he estimates that Qualcomm was gearing up to launch its wireless TV service in about a dozen markets on Feb. 18.

—Mike Krenn told me he expects it will be harder to get startup companies funded this year. Krenn started the Venture Pipeline at the San Diego office of the DLA Piper law firm to help screen and scrub startup business plans and advise the firm’s entrepreneur clients.

—As long as diabetes runs rampant in the United States, with more that 20 million people affected, San Diego’s Phenomix figures there will still be a market for the drug it is developing. Phenomix CEO Laura Shawver recently outlined the biotech’s plans for Luke.

—In a sign of the times, a relatively large syndicate of six venture firms came together to provide $13.3 million in Series C funding for SynergEyes, a Carlsbad, CA, startup developing and selling a line of hybrid contact lenses for vision disorders.

—By coincidence, Venrock Associates partner Bryan Roberts, who specializes in healthcare investing, told Luke the venerable firm is putting more care into its syndicate formation. Roberts anticipates the effects of the economic downturn could affect VC firms as well as their portfolio companies.

—Finally, the X Prize Foundation awarded UC Irvine students Kyle Good of Temecula, CA, and Bryan Le of Manhattan Beach, CA, won its $25,000 prize for winning its “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” YouTube competition. Their video “The Capacitor Challenge” called for creating a new type of energy storage device.

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What began in Boston last September as a contest to generate ideas for a new “Energy X Prize” has ended in El Segundo, CA, with two UC Irvine students winning the $25,000 award.

The X Prize Foundation, which organized the competition, identified the winners today as second-year undergrads Kyle Good of Temecula, CA, and Bryan Le of Manhattan Beach, CA. They shared a $25,000 check from Prize Capital, a San Diego fund that put up the money, during a ceremony held yesterday in British Telecom’s U.S. headquarters in El Segundo. (BT is now a corporate partner of the X Prize Foundation.)

The UC Irvine students created a YouTube video for the “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” competition that called for a new type of energy storage medium—the ultracapacitor. Their video, The Capacitor Challenge, was one of three finalists selected in November by the Playa Vista, CA-based X Prize Foundation. As I reported in December, the notion of creating a big cash prize to stimulate work on an ultracapacitor was a puzzling surprise to San Diego’s Maxwell Technologies, which has been selling ultracapacitors for years. Yet Maxwell CEO David Schramm says it would be a breakthrough if someone could develop a device that combines the best energy storage qualities of a battery and an ultracapacitor.

The students’ concept for a new type of ultracapacitor calls for “a real, working energy storing device” that among other things must:
—Exceed the energy density of average lead-acid batteries.
—Fully recharge under one minute and for as many as 500,000 cycles.
—Incorporate non-toxic materials and be completely recyclable.
—Cost less that two times the average price of lead-acid batteries.

Bryan Le, left, and Kyle Good

The competition that was announced at MIT five months ago invited the public to develop a two-minute YouTube video that proposes a new X Prize for Energy and the Environment. The foundation says it got more than 130 videos, and more than 4,200 people voted for the winner. The X Prize Foundation named two other finalists in November. A Cambridge, MA, team headed by Jonathan Dreher called for reducing home energy consumption in their video, Energy X PRIZE: Reduce Home Energy Usage and Alan Silva of Roy, Utah, created a video that proposed developing off-the-grid energy efficient homes, Energy Independence X PRIZE.

The contest became feasible when Prize Capital, a private entity funded by Internet entrepreneur Lee Stein, agreed to put up the $25,000 award. Stein created Prize Capital in 2006 specifically to fund global competitions aimed at discovering innovative solutions to energy and environmental problems.

But winning the “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” video contest doesn’t mean the proposal for a new ultracapacitor will automatically become the next multi-million-dollar X Prize competition. Instead, a spokeswoman for the X Prize Foundation told me, “It’s kind of a good jump start to get a general discussion going on what the next energy X Prize should be.”

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Accelerator’s newest startup could, if it wanted to, make a version of marijuana that wouldn’t give people the munchies. Seattle-based GPC-Rx isn’t going to do that, but it is using sophisticated 3-D computer modeling to help researchers design other drugs to specifically do their main job, without the usual side effects.

This company has its roots in the lab of William Goddard, the noted Caltech chemist. It’s the second time Accelerator has backed one of his inventions (the first was Seattle-based Allozyne). Accelerator isn’t disclosing the amount of money going into the new company, but it’s on the “upper end” of its usual investments, says president Carl Weissman. That means it’s in the neighborhood of $4 million to $5 million.

This idea is one that only a biotech geek can really love. Goddard’s crew has set up proprietary computer models that drug hunters can use to accurately predict how a snake-like 3-dimensional protein structure will look before, during, and after it’s been hit with a drug. It focuses on a particular type of target called G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are blocked by common drugs like antihistamines, antidepressants, and, yes, marijuana. Many of these treatments aren’t very good at distinguishing between subtle differences in the appearance of these targets, which is why they cause side effects. It’s been obvious to pharmaceutical companies for years that if they could get a clearer picture of how the targets appear in 3-D, then they could design better drugs.

“With a lock and key, even subtle differences can make a big difference,” says Bard Geesaman, a biotech entrepreneur recruited by Weissman to lead GPC-Rx as chief scientist. “If you’re a pharmaceutical company, you can make a master key, it unlocks a lot of things, but you get side effects.”

Plenty of money is at stake in these subtle differences. Sanofi-Aventis’ weight-loss drug rimonabant (Acomplia) failed to win FDA approval last year because it had a rare side effect of being linked to suicidal thinking. Since drugs that control weight loss, depression, and allergies represent some of the biggest pharmaceutical markets on the planet, there’s no shortage of competition to come up with a better way to hit these targets, Weissman says. “Every major pharmaceutical company has a program looking at GPCR’s,” he says. (My Boston colleague Ryan McBride also recently profiled the Cambridge, MA-based startup Ascent Therapeutics, which is developing a different class of molecules it calls “pepducins” to hit GPC targets inside cells.)

Geesaman, 41, sounds like a rare combination of scientist and businessman for a task like this. He has a doctorate in systems and computational neurobiology from MIT, and a medical degree in internal medicine from Harvard Medical School. He did a stint as a venture partner at MPM Capital scouting healthcare investments, co-founded an MPM-backed pharma company in Japan, and most recently was executive director of life sciences for the X Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, CA. He got to know Weissman in 2001 when they worked together at Cambridge, MA-based Elixir Pharmaceuticals.

So far, GPC-Rx has no practical way to double-check the accuracy of its computer models with certainty through an imaging technique, Weissman says. Instead, GPC will test its ideas by using the computer’s readouts, developing small molecule compounds to specifically block the targets as they appear, and run experiments in petri dishes to see if they really block the chosen targets exclusively, or whether they still are likely to cause side effects by hitting proteins that belong to the same family.

This is all still a long way from clinical trials, so it will be years before researchers will truly know the answer of whether this will be able to yield a big payoff. If they’re right, we may see antihistamines that won’t make you drowsy, or maybe a new breed of weight-loss drugs without any mood-altering side effect. I can only speculate how long it might be before someone comes up with munchie-free-marijuana.

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Should Hybrid Cars Have Solar Roofs?

Japanese news reports last week said Toyota is designing a plug-in version of its hybrid Prius that would have solar cells mounted on the body to charge the batteries. Technology Review says engineers are testing car-mounted solar arrays as electricity sources for vehicles. Unfortunately, the systems may be too expensive and produce too little power to be practical.

Gene Testing Cost May Be Higher Than its Value

As the California Department of Public Health wrestles with questions of how to regulate companies that offer the public genetic testing services, the Los Angeles Times asks whether such tests are worth the expense. In some cases, the gene associations with disease are so weak that the tests produce both false positives and false negatives. In others, say critics, even an accurate result isn’t very helpful because the tests identify diseases for which no treatment exists.

A Look at Tesla’s Long, Winding Road

Tesla Motors, which is about to open a sales office in California, is building the world’s first high-performance electric sports car. A long feature in Fortune looks at the twists and turns the company has taken in trying to get its zero-emissions muscle car on the road.

The Right Way to Patch Internet Flaws

Last week several companies, such as Microsoft and Cisco Systems, simultaneously released a set of patches designed to correct a security flaw in the Domain Name Server system, which controls Internet addresses. CNET News talks to Dan Kaminsky, the security researcher who found the flaw and kept it secret from the public while steps were taken to correct it. The writer argues that the decisions Kaminsky made are a model for dealing with such potentially high-risk security problems.

Use Your Cell Phone to Find Parking

The City of San Francisco plans a test this fall of a system that monitors parking spaces and allows drivers with smart phones to find empty spots, and even use their phone to pay the meter. The New York Times reports that the system will be tested in a quarter of the city’s 24,000 metered spaces. The hope is that the system will cut down on traffic congestion and air pollution while making it easier for people to get to local businesses.

FCC to Challenge Comcast on Throttling

Comcast ought not to be slowing down the Internet access of users sharing large files, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin says. According to the Washington Post, Martin wants the FCC to prevent the practice, but does not plan to levy any fines against Comcast.

New Technologies Drive Medical Costs Up

High-tech health care devices, such as the da Vinci robot that allows surgeons to operate in tight spaces with minimal incisions, can add a lot to hospital costs. But, as Business Week reports, healthcare experts are beginning to question whether the benefits of such devices are worth the added costs.

U.S. Offers Prize for Greener Jet Fuel

The federal government is giving money to the X Prize Foundation in an effort to kick start the development of renewable sources of jet fuel. The Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration  gave the foundation $500,000, Daily Tech reports. The hope is that private sponsors will raise that amount to $10 million.

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Within five minutes of sitting down to lunch, Jesse Berst has burst my bubble. “I’m not sanguine about Seattle as a big leader in the area,” he says. “I don’t know if we’ll have a cluster here.”

He’s talking about smart energy and cleantech, and he knows a thing or two about the space. As managing director of Redmond-based GlobalSmartEnergy, Berst provides strategic consulting on energy technologies (and market opportunities) to corporations, investors, and government agencies. He is also the executive director of energy and environment prizes for the X PRIZE Foundation, based in Santa Monica, CA (more on that shortly).

Berst, who’s also an Xconomist, made his name in the 1980s and 90s as a technology analyst, and co-founded three successful high-tech publishing companies. Around six years ago, he decided to work full-time on energy and the environment—something closer to his heart. “I got bored with [information technology], plus it was so obvious that energy was going to be the next big industry,” he says.

Most recently, he’s been focused on the “smart grid.” This is an envisioned upgrade to the existing electricity network, and it involves the use of various technologies—smart monitors and sensors, communications, and advanced software and hardware to control the network, which in the United States is run from 130-odd control centers around the country. The goal is to more efficiently and reliably regulate power usage, and Berst says the smart-energy industry is following roughly the same evolution as telecommunications. Now, because of the growing amount of data to be managed, corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have entered the arena. And the main hurdles to adoption are bureaucratic, not technical.

“Most of our projects are in places like Hawaii and New Mexico, places that are more progressive and aggressive about energy,” Berst says. (This was surprising—I had thought the Northwest was pretty progressive in terms of energy.) In his research consultancy duties, Berst says the key question is, where is the money in cleantech? Corporations, banks, and agencies want to know, should we get into the sector? He is currently advising several startup companies, still in stealth mode; the most recent (“today was our first day,” he says) is looking into building smart-energy infrastructure at the community level, in places like resorts.

The other big thing I wanted to talk with Berst about was the X Prizes. Starting last fall, he began consulting for the X PRIZE Foundation, which sets up ambitious innovation awards to advance the state of the art in space, genomics, transportation, and other fields. Recently, Berst’s team submitted recommendations for energy prizes; the areas being investigated include alternative energy generation, efficiency, storage, sustainable housing, and carbon sequestration. The X PRIZE board is reviewing them, but it may be a while before we can tell you any more (watch this space). Berst did say that any eventual prize(s) should be worth more than $10 million, and should “stretch people farther than a venture-based company would.”

A few more take-aways from our discussion:

—Don’t forget the role of mid-size companies in energy and cleantech. We often look at startups and big players, but Berst points out that “real, permanent job growth comes from small-to-mid-size companies that grow up.” Case in point: Areva T&D, a French smart-grid company that has operations in the Northwest and is looking to hire for its global R&D center. (Its parent company Areva has roughly 150,000 employees worldwide, but the point is to follow the Arevas-in-the-making.)

—Large organizations like Boeing and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have some hidden gems of energy-related projects, but they often struggle with commercializing such technologies. Nevertheless, says Berst, “they’re a warehouse of breakthrough concepts.” (Berst serves on the advisory council of PNNL.)

—In smart energy, there is a manpower shortage in the Northwest. “We have to import power engineers,” says Berst, because of a dearth of engineering training programs, which were phased out over the past few decades.

My bottom line? Anyone in the area with a serious interest in energy and cleantech can look to Berst’s group as a tremendous resource in their back yard. If they take advantage, perhaps they can help make Seattle a more energy-progressive place.

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