It’s been a busy seven months since healthcare technology executive Jay Deady took over as the CEO at San Diego’s Awarepoint, which specializes in real time location systems (RTLS) technology for hospitals and other healthcare providers.

The company raised about $9 million from its venture investors with Deady’s arrival, and Awarepoint acquired a Charlotte, N.C. software developer, Patient Care Technology Systems, in April for an undisclosed amount. As part of that deal, Deady tells me he has been remaking Awarepoint’s workforce, first by reducing the company’s roster from 72 to 61 in January, and then by hiring new sales representatives and account managers. Awarepoint now has 102 employees, including those from Patient Care.

Awarepoint also has been raising what Deady says will be the company’s final round of venture capital, which he expects to close before August.

So how do the changes reflect the new CEO’s strategy?

Jay Deady

Deady says when he was considering the CEO’s job last fall, he thought Awarepoint had done a great job of developing its healthcare-focused technology. The company’s approach to real-time tracking combines a wireless sensor network (based on the ZigBee standard) with radio frequency identity (RFID) tags to actively track medical equipment, supplies, and people throughout a hospital. He says he also thought Awarepoint had acquired some great customers, including the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., the UC San Diego and UC San Francisco Medical Centers, and had contracts with Phoenix-based Banner Health and Oakland, CA-based Kaiser Foundation Hospitals.

Yet the company was still facing a fundamental challenge: After launching its technology in early 2008, Deady says Awarepoint had acquired about 8 to 9 percent of the RTLS market in the United States. But industry analysts estimate that the total RTLS penetration of the healthcare market amounts to only about 10 to 12 percent in North America, and just 5 percent internationally.

In other words, Awarepoint was having difficulty expanding its business—at least partly because the healthcare market has been slow to adopt wireless monitoring technologies in general.

Deady’s strategy was to use the Patient Care acquisition to broaden … Next Page »

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San Diego’s Awarepoint, which uses a Zigbee-based wireless mesh sensor network for real-time tracking of patients, medical devices, and hospital equipment, has closed on $14 million in debt financing, according to a pair of recent regulatory filings (here and here). Awarepoint said last month it had acquired Charlotte, NC-based Patient Care Technology Systems, although no price was disclosed. The company also named a new CEO, Jay Deady, and raised $9 million about six months ago. Awarepoint has previously raised capital from Silicon Valley Bank, Avalon Ventures, Cardinal Partners, JAFCO Ventures, and Venrock.

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San Diego’ Awarepoint, which developed wireless tags and a computerized tracking system to help hospitals and healthcare providers keep track of ventilators and other equipment, has acquired Patient Care Technology Systems, a workflow software developer in Charlotte, N.C. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Awarepoint has installed its asset tracking technology in 93 hospitals; Patient Care Technology Systems provides its software for managing hospital work flow to 60 customers. Awarepoint says the deal announced today gives it the ability to manage patient discharge information, emergency room activity, and scheduling for diagnostic imaging, laboratory services, patient surgeries and other operations.

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Ember is one of those companies that defies a quick explanation. For starters, it has been around for nine years. And if all goes well, 2010 will be its first profitable one.

It has been a long climb for the Boston-based firm, which makes wireless networking technologies that help consumers and utility companies manage home energy consumption. Specifically, Ember focuses on making chips and software for low-power, low-bandwidth radio networks used for two-way communications. That sounds pretty tech-y, but as I learned when I caught up with the company last month, the technology is getting much closer to mainstream use.

Ember works with utilities, but sells its products primarily to companies like Itron (NASDAQ: ITRI) and Landis+Gyr, which make “smart meters” and other cutting-edge equipment for the electric grid. Smart meters are devices that let utilities predict peak energy usage times and adjust homes’ electricity use so as to conserve energy. Coupled with a smart display or thermostat, the devices also let consumers track how much electricity they’re using in their homes so they can save on their individual energy bills (and live greener lifestyles). What Ember provides, essentially, is the secure communication link between these homes and utilities.

The company was founded in 2001 by MIT alums Rob Poor and Andy Wheeler. Their original vision was to develop software for wirelessly networked sensors and control systems for supply-chain management, commercial buildings, and industrial applications like detecting temperature and fluid flow in oil pipes. (You can read my 2003 interview with Poor in Technology Review here.)

Along the way, Poor and Wheeler left the company to pursue other projects. But over the years, Ember hasn’t made so much of a radical change as some minor shifts in its priorities. First, it evolved into a chipmaker as well as a software maker, and has invested heavily in ZigBee, an open industry standard for wireless networking technology. And in 2006, around the time that Bob LeFort came on as CEO, Ember started to focus on energy management as its main commercial application.

Now that approach finally seems to be paying off, in terms of adoption—and revenue. “It’s the first time we’ve heard people talk seriously beyond small pilots of putting things inside the home,” LeFort says. “It’s not mainstream yet, not millions [of homes], but it’s beyond hundreds and a few thousand.”

Ember had its first profitable quarter in the first three months of 2010, and has followed that up with strong enough growth that LeFort predicts it will be profitable for the year. The company’s quarterly revenues have been in the $8-10 million range, he says, and it expects to have total sales of … Next Page »

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San Diego’s On-Ramp Wireless already seemed to have plenty of momentum before the World Economic Forum of Geneva, Switzerland, included the San Diego wireless startup on its list of 31 companies designated as 2011 “technology pioneers.”

The startup was founded in 2008 to develop a specialized, end-to-end wireless system for low data rate communication across very wide areas—the sort of network needed to monitor electric utility grids, aqueducts, and irrigation systems that extend over thousands of square miles. “The way we frame it is, ‘Many devices talking small amounts of information with low power,’ ” says Joaquin Silva, On-Ramp’s Founding CEO.

Silva says On-Ramp’s proprietary Ultra-Link Processing (ULP) system already is in production in Taiwan—and shipping to customers—and the startup is initially focused on markets in the United States and Asia. “Asia is a really important strategic market for us,” Silva says. “They’ve got a lot of energy problems, their utility infrastructure is being outstripped through growth, and they tend to be early adopters of wireless technologies in general.”

2011 Technology Pioneers

On-Ramp disclosed in a June 14 regulatory filing that it had raised $4.5 million in a combination of equity, rights, and securities out of a planned $18 million in new financing. Silva says On-Ramp has not identified its investors, although Babak Razi and Barak Bussel of Beverly Hills, CA-based Third Wave Ventures have joined the company’s board. (On-Ramp’s board also includes Don Telage of Boston’s Frontier Capital and former Texas Instruments executive Douglas Rasor, who now heads Rasor Advisors in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.) In its initial round of venture capital, Silva says On-Ramp raised $12 million in venture funding from an unnamed angel investor and Gemtek, a wireless semiconductor manufacturer in Taiwan.

When The World Economic Forum identified its 31 technology pioneers for 2011, the Swiss non-profit foundation said the pioneering companies “represent some of the most … Next Page »

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[This post first appeared on the EnergySavvy blog---Eds.]
In May 2008, I left my corporate software job in search of my next challenge. I had spent 10 years developing software in various product roles mostly at Microsoft.

When I left, I had heard of the hyped-up cleantech space and said to myself, “I don’t know anything about it, but if there’s a way to apply software skills to societal goals in a way that can be valuable, count me in.” Then I learned about energy efficiency.

Energy Efficiency Software Challenges Abound

After co-founding an energy efficiency software company, EnergySavvy, in 2008, I’ve been surrounded by interesting software challenges for the last two years. This space has barely had a Web 1.0 (let alone a Web 2.0) and is entering a great modernization phase.

My hope is that this will inspire at least one other software person to think about applying their software skills (h@cker Skillz?) to energy efficiency. So here’s a round up of interesting software challenges. To keep it simple, we’re going to focus in on three areas of high activity: energy monitoring and analytics, energy data, and building analysis.

Energy Monitoring and Analytics

Lots of companies are focused on energy monitoring from real-time smart meter and automation companies like Silver Spring Networks to monthly reporting like OPOWER which compares usage to one’s neighbors. The heart of the idea is if you give more awareness on one’s energy use, you can trigger action.

The challenge is what do you do with energy usage data beside just graph it? Clearly, we as a software community can do better. What about:

* Doing social comparisons aside from just one’s neighbors? How about usage of homes of similar specs such as age and square footage? How about relative to one’s friends or family? In that case you have to normalize for energy prices, energy intensity (energy use per square foot) and wire it up to some kind of social network.

* How about analyzing usage data in aggregate to give users specific goals based on observed achievable savings based on some peer group?

* And what of user interface? Few homeowners are equipped to deal with smart meters, and homeowners often express frustration with the current smart meter tools.

* Most of these monitoring devices completely skip natural gas (let alone oil) usage, so that seems relatively greenfield albeit hard.

If you’re a network protocol hacker, you should check out ZigBee, which is often the protocol of choice for energy monitoring objects in the house. Also, check out OpenEnergyMonitor.

Residential Energy Data

One of the issues of doing residential energy efficiency at scale is identifying where … Next Page »

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Qualcomm’s chairman and CEO says the San Diego wireless company is in the driver’s seat when it comes to setting the agenda for the wireless industry. We’re here to tell you what that means, so you don’t miss the on-ramp.

—When Paul Jacobs was named to head San Diego’s Qualcomm five years ago, the No. 3 son of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs came across as a bit wonky. But Paul Jacobs is getting better at public speaking, as he demonstrated last week in a nearly hour-long presentation at the annual shareholders meeting, where he outlined Qualcomm’s vision for ubiquitous access to the wireless Internet. “We are the ones driving this,” he told the audience.

—I offered some insights into Memjet, a closely held startup developing new inkjet printing technologies, that I collected from some printer industry experts who preferred to remain anonymous. Len Lauer, who resigned as Qualcomm’s chief operating officer about three months ago, now heads Memjet in San Diego.

—Investments by Southern California’s Tech Coast Angels and affiliated venture firms totaled $61.7 million in 2009, down about 18 percent from the $75 million that was invested in 2008. The network of individual investors put money into seven new deals and 17 follow-on deals last year. In 2008, the angels invested in 15 new deals and 16 follow-on rounds.

—Awarepoint, which has developed a ZigBee-based sensor system to keep track of medical equipment in sprawling medical centers, said it has raised $10 million in a secondary venture round headed by JAFCO Ventures of Palo Alto, CA. Awarepoint’s system provides real-time monitoring of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that are embedded in patient wristbands or attached to medical instruments.

—The West Wireless Health Institute named former Cardinal Health strategist Amir Jafri as its new chief operating officer. The institute was created last year with a $45 million gift from the Gary and Mary West Foundation to accelerate the use of wireless technologies in health care and medicine.

—Last year’s inaugural La Jolla Research & Innovation Summit was a two-day extravaganza, but this year the event was held in just one day last week. One highlight: UC San Diego’s Joseph Ford described a new type of solar panel that offers the promise of much greater efficiency in converting sunlight directly into electricity.

—The Founder Institute is recruiting entrepreneurs from San Diego and Orange counties for a second four-month class/startup boot camp, which is scheduled to begin April 6.

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JAFCO Ventures of Palo Alto, CA, has stepped in as lead investor in a $10 million round announced today by San Diego’s Awarepoint, which provides wireless sensor systems to help hospitals monitor the real-time location of equipment and patients. Existing investors Cardinal Partners and Venrock Associates joined in the Series E round.

As I explained last year, Awarepoint uses ZigBee-based devices that plug into ordinary power outlets to create a wireless mesh sensor network that encompasses an entire medical center. The system provides real-time tracking of RFID (radio frequency identification) tags that are embedded in patient wristbands and attached to medical instruments.

Awarepoint says the capital infusion will be used to accelerate its development of new technology and products, and to help the company market its capabilities. The company was founded in 2002. As part of the financing, JAFCO Ventures general partner Tom Mawhinney will join Awarepoint’s board. The Palo Alto venture firm is affiliated with Tokyo-based JAFCO, the private equity firm previously known as Japan Associated Finance Co.

Awarepoint CEO Jason Howe told me last year the company has raise more than $24 million from investors, lenders, and in vendor financing. Awarepoint did not identify a previous investor, San Diego’s Avalon Ventures, as a participant in the latest round, and the company no longer lists Avalon’s Steve Tomlin as a board member on its website.

Tomlin tells me by e-mail this morning: “We do still have an Observer seat and stay actively involved. Avalon is always delighted when our companies attain a level of maturity that they don’t need us on the Board—and, to the delight of our investors and ourselves, it frees Avalon’s partners’ time to engage in more early-stage-oriented activities…”

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San Diego-based Awarepoint says an independent medical laboratory has tested and validated its sterlizable RFID tags, which are designed to provide hospitals real time location tracking information about patients and medical equipment. The tests, which simulated clinical use, were done to show that Awarepoint’s battery-powered Radio Frequency Identity tags can be repeatedly cleaned, disinfected, and sterilized. As Bruce reported last month, the privately held company makes tags that operate with Awarepoint’s Zigbee-based Real-Time Location System (RTLS), which enables tracking the location of thousands of items in the network.

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Stephen Tomlin has a succinct way of explaining the significance of the technology that San Diego-based Awarepoint has developed over the past five years.

Hospitals are just always looking for their stuff, says Tomlin, who is a managing member of San Diego’s Avalon Ventures and a member of Awarepoint’s board of directors. Sometimes medical equipment walks out the door. Sometimes hospital caregivers keep equipment in secretive places, so they’ll know where to find that IV infusion pump when they need one. It wasn’t an issue when times were fat, Tomlin says, because if a hospital couldn’t find the infusion pump, it could always go rent another one.

But as Tomlin puts it, the times aren’t fat anymore, and it’s becoming increasingly important these days for a sprawling medical center to know exactly where all its stuff is. Awarepoint’s technology can provide the answer—even when the stuff consists of thousands of medical items in facilities as big as Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. and the UC San Diego Medical Center, which are both Awarepoint customers.

RFID tag

Awarepoint’s technology appeared promising enough in 2005 for Tomlin to make a modest early-stage investment in the startup from Avalon’s seventh venture fund. At that time, Awarepoint was still refining its Real Time Location System, which uses Zigbee-based devices that plug into ordinary power outlets to create a wireless mesh sensor network that encompasses the entire medical center. The Zigbee network is capable of accurately tracking the location of thousands of items, each equipped with a battery-powered RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. Signals emitted regularly by each tag can be received by 15 to 20 sensors, which collectively pinpoint its location and transmit the information to a data storage system. Awarepoint holds six patents covering its technology, and is only targeting the healthcare market.

“The networks are self-assembling and if they break, they are self-healing,” says Matt Perkins, Awarepoint’s chief technology officer. “When you deploy them in a hospital, you just plug in something that looks like a Glade air freshener in a wall socket.”

Perkins views Zigbee as an ideal technology for healthcare because it is so easy to deploy—or as Awarepoint likes to put it—hospital installations are “minimally invasive.” But as Xconomy’s Wade Roush reminds me, Zigbee also is the technology of choice at Ember, a Boston startup that has focused their chipsets on industrial and energy applications.

The company’s most-recent innovation … Next Page »

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Ember, the Boston-based maker of wireless mesh-networking chipsets for communications between devices such as utility meters and thermostats, will announce today that it has topped off its coffers with an $8 million funding round from a group of venture firms and strategic partners. CEO Robert LeFort says that if government stimulus spending on energy efficiency measures translates into solid demand for Ember’s equipment, as expected, the new round (which brings the total the company has raised to $89 million) should be its last.

Many of the funds Ember has turned to in the past participated in the current round, including Polaris Venture Partners, GrandBanks Capital, RRE Ventures, Vulcan Capital, DFJ ePlanet Ventures, New Atlantic Ventures, and WestLB Mellon Asset Management, along with strategic partners Chevron Technology Ventures and Stata Venture Partners. In the past, Ember has also raised money from STMicroelectronics, Hitachi Corporation, and MIT. LeFort (whom I interviewed at length in January) tells Xconomy that the company has been working to assemble the round since late last summer, but that the global economic slowdown delayed negotiations.

But now investors see the Obama Administration’s economic stimulus package, which includes $17 billion for improvements to the U.S. electrical grid, as a strong plus for the company. Part of the stimulus money will go toward so-called advanced metering initiatives, in which utilities are equipping customers’ homes with new electrical meters that communicate wirelessly with utility control centers and in-home thermostats.

The devices will help utilities by allowing them dial back home electrical usage during peak hours remotely, and they will help customers by showing them exactly how much money they’re saving by conserving energy and switching to more efficient appliances, and the like. Inside almost every smart meter is a radio that uses ZigBee, the industry standard for short-range, low-data-rate radio communications—and the leading maker of ZigBee chipsets is Ember.

So far, California and Texas are the two states with the most smart-metering pilot tests underway. “I’ve heard about up to 20 different pilots going on around the country…of anywhere from 500 to 5,000 homes apiece,” says LeFort. “It’s very encouraging that people are spending real money, either to deploy or to do detailed investigations, with statistically significant samples, of how the technology will work.”

Research firm In-Stat predicts that sales of ZigBee-enabled devices will increase from their 2007 level of 7 million units to nearly 300 million units by 2012. The stimulus money won’t necessarily boost of Ember’s chipsets above the levels already expected, since “the utilities are saying they’re already going as fast as they can go,” says LeFort. “But we’re getting added emotional support, if you will, from the stimulus. The administration is saying, ‘keep on the path you are on, and if there are areas to accelerate, let’s leverage those.’”

Since a radio is needed on both ends of a wireless message, Ember is able to sell its chipsets both to manufacturers of wireless meters and to makers of programmable thermostats—essentially home energy control panels that display how much energy consumers are spending or saving. Later on, the company also expects to supply radios for smart plugs, devices that fit into electrical sockets and communicate with the control panels to conserve energy.

All of that prospective business reassured investors enough to make it possible to raise the latest $8 million. The money will be used “to support volume customer deployments and take us into maturity, meaning financial sustainability,” says LeFort.

It’s been a long road for Ember, which got its start in 2001 selling wireless temperature sensors to factory and refinery owners. “One of the questions has always been, is there a killer app out there” for wireless mesh networking, LeFort says. “It was always a fragmented market, and it was always a question of are you going to be able to get the volume up there. And then about two years ago, the utilities got behind ZigBee as the technology of choice for getting information into the home. Our investors see that it’s not a matter of if anymore, it’s a matter of when. Of course, if you’re a startup, when is an important question, because you have to have enough oxygen to get to the promised land. But we are finally past the point of asking whether there is a big enough market.”

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Perhaps because they operate in heavily regulated industries, electric and gas utility companies are not usually regarded as centers of innovation. And to some critics, the utilities operated by San Diego’s Sempra Energy seem to operate in stodgy defiance to anything shiny and newfangled.

But it’s a bad rap to Hal Snyder, who oversees strategy and program development as vice president for customer programs at both San Diego Gas & Electric and Southern California Gas Co. Both utilities are owned and operated by Sempra, and account for more than half of the company’s profits. Snyder and other utility executives talked with me at length about some of the technology advances they have underway and the innovations needed to change the way energy gets distributed in Southern California.

“We have been involved in fuel cell projects, sustainable energy community projects, and photovoltaic solar panels installed in various places,” Snyder says.

In July, SDG&E became one of the first utilities in the country to begin the full deployment of so-called … Next Page »

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