A young FBI agent named Leah Marx arrives in Los Angeles and receives a tip in 2010 about brutal conditions at Men’s Central Jail downtown. Such complaints have gone nowhere for years, since they pit the allegations of inmates against the word of jail deputies. But she finds informants, including a wily bank robber, Anthony Brown, who is facing life in prison and is willing to help. She reflects on a family tragedy that informs her perspective and fuels her sense of mission. Meanwhile, an ambitious young jailer named James Sexton works his way through the ranks, trying to overcome his image as a “brass baby,” the son of a prominent law officer, while navigating a complicated agency where loyalty is a prime value. That jail was notorious for violence and neglect, and outside investigations had rarely gained traction. By entering Men’s Central Jail, the FBI was challenging a department that had long resisted oversight. The series is reported and hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Goffard, best known for his work on Dirty John. Topics in this episode include: Operation Pandora’s Box, Anthony Brown informant, James Sexton, Los Angeles County Jail scandal, FBI investigation, Sheriff Lee Baca.…
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Biotech , Pain , Regenerative Medicine Luke Timmerman wrote: Biogen Idec’s scientists have a vision for regenerative medicine, and it has nothing to do with what’s been written and said about embryonic stem cells. Deep in Biogen’s pipeline, on the verge of entering clinical trials, are a pair of regenerative medicines that the company hopes will become trailblazers in the world of neurological diseases. I got the rundown on one candidate for multiple sclerosis back in August . Yesterday I gathered more about the other contender, neublastin, for neuropathic pain . This second candidate grabbed scientists’ attention a year ago, when Biogen researchers published experimental data in Nature Neuroscience with collaborators at the University of Arizona and Tufts University. They found that when rats suffered damage to a bundle of nerves that feed into the spinal cord, then got neublastin injections, the nerves grew back into the spinal cord and, importantly, restored the rats’ ability to feel sensations in their paws and perform complex movements like grabbing onto objects. After a half-dozen shots over 11 days, the effectiveness endured for six months. This ability to restore function came after studies had already shown neublastin can relieve chronic neuropathic pain in animals. If anything like this can be repeated in people—always a big if—the business opportunity would be big. An estimated one in 100 people in the U.S., or about 3 million people, suffer from nerve dysfunction that causes neuropathic pain. This is the mysterious kind of pain many people suffer, like back pain, that doesn’t respond to conventional analgesic or narcotic pain relievers. Pfizer’s gabapentin (Neurontin) became a $2.4 billion drug in 2003 largely from treating this type of pain, even though it was never explicitly approved by the FDA for that purpose. “There’s a high level of excitement here. This is beautiful biology,” says Al Sandrock, Biogen’s senior vice president of neurology R&D, and an assistant clinical professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. “These are admittedly high-risk programs, but if we succeed in restoring nerve function, there are not many other people who are working on this.” Biogen has been eyeing this field for more than a decade. The company got an exclusive license to develop neublastin from NsGene, a Danish company that discovered the protein in 1998 from research into a family of proteins called glial-derived neurotrophic factors (GDNF). These proteins work to help keep nerve cells alive. Neublastin is particularly interesting, because it interacts with cells that sense pain and temperature changes, Sandrock says. When these “sensory neurons” get injured, people feel neuropathic pain, Sandrock says. One leading theory is that these pain-sensing cells turn hyperactive, which might explain why people feel back pain when sophisticated imaging tools like MRI can’t detect an obvious tissue injury. Another is that when these sensory neurons get damaged, the normal feeling of “touch” gets converted erroneously into a pain sensation, Sandrock says. Injecting a genetically engineered copy of the neublastin protein may work against this condition …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS…
cleantech , energy , Solar Luke Timmerman wrote: The global cleantech industry stayed on a bull run despite a shaky economy in 2008, but the momentum is bound to slow down this year. That was the key finding from a report released yesterday by Portland, OR-based Clean Edge, a consulting firm. The three major clean energy sectors—solar photovoltaics, wind power, and biofuels—saw their combined revenues climb to $115.9 billion last year, a 53 percent boost from $75.8 billion in the previous year, according to Clean Edge’s annual report on industry trends. A decade from now, the firm predicts that the industry will triple again. But not without some pain along the way, starting this year. “Clean energy industry revenues will be level or down slightly in 2009,” says Ron Pernick, Clean Edge co-founder and managing director, on a conference call yesterday with reporters. With IPOs nonexistent, tight credit markets, a global recession, and at least a few months before the federal stimulus plan makes an impact, “2009 will be a year to get through,” Pernick says. One of the factoids from the 22-page report that caught my eye: Wind power is the leading clean energy sector, with $51.4 billion in global revenues last year, followed by biofuels with $34.8 billion, and solar power at $29.6 billion. Once you get past all the facts about the macroeconomic trends, this report included five specific trends to watch for in the years to come. Here they are: — “The grid goes online.” Clean Edge envisions more integration of information technology and energy this year, with all sorts of appliances like commercial refrigerators and residential washing machines being connected through the Internet to make them more efficient. (Seattle-based V2Green, acquired last year by GridPoint , was cited as a leader in this sub-sector.) — “Technologies Save Clean Energy for a Rainy (or Calm) Day.” The facts that the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun doesn’t always shine—yet people need consistent juice—mean that someone needs to figure out how to better store energy for rainy days. The market for grid energy storage is worth an estimated $2.4 billion. One of the key headlines in 2008 came out of Oregon’s Built Environment and Sustainable Technologies Center, which assisted Oregon State University researchers in getting a $725,000 grant from the Bonneville Power Administration to research storing power from wind turbines. — “New Clean Energy Markets Emerge Around the Globe.” Countries like Serbia and Aruba started joining the cleantech industry in 2008. Even in this category, the Northwest has a local connection, through Portland, OR-based Iberdrola Renewables’ acquiring a 1.6 gigawatt wind portfolio from a Romanian company. — “Grid Infrastructure Grabs the Spotlight.” This is the transmission problem—how do you get immense wind power from the Great Plains to the cities where most Americans live? Transmission capacity “is the biggest short to medium term barrier to the continued rapid growth of utility-scale wind or concentrating solar power,” said Tom Starrs, CEO of Solar Energy Ventures, a solar and smart grid consultant in Portland, according to the report. — “Micropower Shows it is No Small Thing.” Microturbines, solar cells, fuel cells, geothermal energy from small, regional “micropower” grids only provide 6 percent of U.S. electricity, but that share will continue to grow, according to Clean Edge. The report didn’t single out any Northwest links to this trend, although we identified several players in this space in our cleantech cluster stories from last week. One example: Seattle-based AltaRock Energy raised $26 million in August from Vulcan Capital and Google, among others, to create geothermal energy reservoirs rather than rely on having to discover natural heat-energy sources. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
1 The Death of the Focus Group? At Invoke Solutions, Apple Vet Makes Market Research User-Friendly, for the Surveyors and the Surveyed
IT , market research , product development Wade Roush wrote: Focus groups are such a standard part of our market-driven culture that they’ve long since become the subject of parody . Decision-makers are seen as being afraid to act without consulting them; surely, no political party would pick a candidate, no legislator would introduce a big policy initiative, and no movie studio would green-light a big-budget film without focus-grouping it first. But while they may be ridiculed, the truth is that business organizations—especially consumer product companies—still spend quite a bit of money on focus groups. Such ensembles are considered a crucial way to identify products people will buy and weed out bad ones before they’re brought to market. The rise of the Internet, however, has created faster, cheaper alternatives to the classic eight-people-around-a-table-and-a-whiteboard scenario. Since 2000, Waltham, MA-based Invoke Solutions has been one of the companies running online surveys that, in effect, let market researchers assemble focus groups that are hundreds or thousands strong. Until recently, Invoke’s surveys were still real-time affairs, conducted at scheduled times. Groups of researchers huddled in control rooms, administering questions, interacting with participants directly, and watching the data pour in. Last year, though, Invoke introduced a new “asynchronous” survey system called Engage that allows volunteers to participate in market studies at any time they choose. And in January, it enhanced the system with new reporting and analytics software that lets Invoke’s clients view and explore the results, via instant PowerPoint presentations and other types of visualizations, as they come in. Invoke’s president and CEO Ben Cesare, who came by Xconomy’s office a couple of weeks ago, says the response to the new reporting software has been “thrilling.” Within 60 days after Invoke rolled out the Engage Analytics tool, 120 Fortune500 clients were already using it, says Cesare, who joined the company in 2005 and became CEO a year later. The veteran of Apple Computer, Psion, and Agile Software says he’s “not a research guy”—meaning he isn’t steeped in the strategies of giant market-research firms like TNS or Ipsos. But he says he does understand “innovation that works, capturing the information that matters. That’s what I really care about, and that’s what attracted me to Invoke.” Cesare (pronounced like “Caesar”) argues companies need to embrace market research systematically, the same way they’ve embraced enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM). In fact, he’s got his own three-letter term for what Invoke does—RDM, for research data management. During his visit, Cesare gave me the basic download about the venture-funded, 55-employee company (which raised a $7 million round one year ago) and its latest accomplishments in the young discipline of RDM. But I started out asking him about the competition—the old fashioned focus group. A greatly abridged version of our conversation follows. Xconomy : What’s wrong with focus groups? Ben Cesare: The problem with focus groups is that they are time-consuming and expensive and they give you a small sample size. You could spend a month and a half flying around to six cities and talk to eight people in each city and then find that only three of those eight do all the talking. Are you going to make a call based on the opinions of 18 people? We’ll put you in front of 1,000 people over a week at a fraction of the cost, and all the answers will be believable. There’s no groupthink, no bias in the room. You’re not traveling. X: So why do companies keep doing them? BC: You know the old saying—nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. There’s a lot of safety in the same old stuff. People will say, “I have to do my focus group, I have to look those eight people right in the eye.” I submit the opposite. My point of view is that people will …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
wireless , South Korea , regulation Bruce V. Bigelow wrote: Qualcomm said today the Korean Fair Trade Commission has made allegations about “the lawfulness of certain business practices.” The company says the allegations, set forth in a case examiner’s report, relate to Qualcomm’s integration of multimedia technologies into its chipsets, which are widely used in cell phones, along with “rebates and discounts provided to its chipset customers.” The San Diego wireless giant says the report does not indicate what specific remedies the commission is seeking. Qualcomm says it believes its actions in Korea have been lawful and it plans to respond to the commission’s allegations in coming months. Qualcomm said in 2006 that commission officials had “visited” its Korean offices, seeking information about its dealings with Samsung, LG and Pantech Co. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
startups , VC , Awards Gregory T. Huang wrote: Entrepreneur resource site Seattle 2.0 has announced it is hosting a startup awards ceremony on May 7 at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle. Nominations are open from now until March 25 in 10 categories including best startup, best venture capitalist, best angel investor, and best startup technologist. Finalists will be selected by a panel of judges, and winners will be determined by community voting, said Seattle 2.0 creator Marcelo Calbucci. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Biotech , Stem Cells , Politics Randall Moon wrote: The Obama campaign, and subsequently his administration, had been hinting for a long time that it would allow researchers to use federal funds to study human embryonic stem cell “lines” which had, under the policies of President Bush, been legal to study only with private funding. Considering the relatively small number of scientists actually working with human embryonic stem cells, and the even smaller number who will use federal funds anytime soon to study some of these additional cell lines, one might wonder if the media attention focused on President Obama’s decision has been disproportionately intense-especially since therapies based on human embryonic stem cells are still largely theoretical, and are years in the future. My personal view is that media outlets likely have a set script for covering stem cell research, which would explain how they reacted within hours of the policy change, with variations on the following theme: Researchers and patients were quickly interviewed, expressing hope that greater access to stem cell lines would accelerate the process of developing therapies for myriad diseases. Opponents of stem cell research had at least equal time, and they claimed either that this policy decision would increase the number of human embryos destroyed, or that adult, not embryonic stem cells showed the most potential for becoming effective therapies. The first claim by opponents conveniently overlooks the reality that if excess and thus unwanted embryos are not used to generate stem cells, then they are going to be destroyed by IVF clinics as medical waste. Tens of thousands are destroyed annually at IVF clinics, with no apparent outcry. Given this scenario, making life-affirming and potentially life-saving stem cells would seem to be the pro-life alternative. The claim that there are numerous effective therapies derived from adult stem cells is misleading, and virtually every scientist agrees that human embryonic stem cells are still the “gold standard” for stem cell research. True, it will be years before new FDA-approved cell-based therapies are widely available, but that is no reason not to study both adult and embryonic stem cells. In following these established scripts to outline well-known and opposing positions on human embryonic stem cells, the media have largely missed an opportunity to comment on the broader implications of President Obama’s policy decision. I interpret this larger message to be that complex societal debates, such as how to deal with human embryos, will be suitably viewed through the prism of ethics and prevailing morals. In contrast to much of the past decade, however, reaching a final policy will ultimately be driven by scientific evidence and intellectual debate rather than by political calculus. The rediscovery of science as the starting point for making policy is major news that will have far-reaching impact throughout society. Thus we may soon live in a country where the Environmental Protection Agency might actually be allowed to use science to support the preservation of habitat and species. We might be entering a time when it is acceptable to note that the world has a finite capacity to sustain an ever-expanding human population. If this keeps up, we might see the day when evolution, sans creationism, is taught in science classes nationally. A cloud is lifting, though it could settle in and once again obscure the collective vision of society in the future. Until then, I for one am happy to dance in the warm light of reason and logic once again. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
deals , VC , healthcare Gregory T. Huang wrote: Enclarity, a healthcare IT company based in Aliso Viejo, CA, announced today it has closed a $5.5 million Series C round led by Bellevue, WA-based Ignition Partners and Boston, MA-based Bain Capital Ventures. The funds will be used for R&D and product development. Enclarity makes software that helps companies manage healthcare provider information and records. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
survey , Software. Internet , Communications Juha-Pekka Tikka wrote: A survey released today by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ) says San Diego is the best midsize city in the United States for remote working. The nationwide survey commissioned by the Redmond, WA, software giant found that U.S. employers generally support remote-working programs, although just 39.4 percent have a policy that details how their employees can work from home. Microsoft says interest in remote working has been spurred by higher energy costs and the current economic crisis. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Life Sciences , bioassays , pharmaceuticals Wade Roush wrote: Seahorse Bioscience , a North Billerica, MA-based maker of instruments for studying mitochondrial function in cells from people with various health problems, announced yesterday that it has acquired BioProcessors Corp. , a Woburn, MA, company that makes automated cell-culture equipment for pharmaceutical research. Seahorse didn’t say how much it paid for BioProcessors, but it did reveal that it has raised $6 million in new venture funding from a group including Commonwealth Capital, Oxford Bioscience, Flagship Ventures, Life Sciences Partners, FLIR Systems Inc, Healthcare Ventures, New Science Ventures and HLM Venture Partners. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Stem Cells , funding , Life Sciences Bruce V. Bigelow wrote: [ Updated at 2:30 pm with additional commentary. See details below ] After President Barack Obama signed a new executive order yesterday that clears the way to resume federal funding for stem cell research, we asked some local Xconomists and other biotech leaders for their reaction. The president’s order reversed eight years of federal funding restrictions imposed by President George W. Bush, who opposed embryonic stem cell research. William Rastetter, co-founder and chairman, Apoptos —The executive order will give U.S. researchers the same flexibility and latitude as other investigators outside of this country to research and develop stem cell therapies and cures for many life-threatening diseases. Certainly, given its potential, it must be ethical and correct to develop such therapies and cures with frozen embryos (from in vitro fertilization clinics) that otherwise would only be discarded. By not funding and doing embryonic stem cell research in this country we have only delayed the discovery of techniques for improving and extending human life. Drew Senyei, managing director, Enterprise Partners Venture Capital —This is the right track to separate science and the state, just like we have mostly with religion. We live in a pluralistic society and we have to honor all reasonable viewpoints while safe-guarding our humanity. Stem cells are just one manifestation of the state trying to control scientific discovery. We should let the data be our guide. Duane Roth, CEO, San Diego Connect —The President’s executive order on embryonic stem cell research is an important step in allowing research in this new and exciting technology to advance. The possibilities for this technology range from cures from some of the most devastating diseases to tissue regeneration to gene therapy. Advances in the field have exceeded my expectations, and the work done in California under the voter-approved Proposition 71 has placed California researchers at the very forefront globally. The Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine is about to begin construction on a new state of the art building to house our local experts in stem cell science from the Burnham, Salk, Scripps, and UC San Diego. They are poised to be leaders in advancing the technology and will be in a perfect position to leverage additional federal funding through the National Institutes of Health. Joe Panetta, president and CEO, Biocom —President Obama’s decision to overturn the ban on funding stem cell research is a milestone for our industry. We can now move forward at an important time when the President and Congress have also chosen to increase the NIH research budget by an additional $10 billion over the next two years. We now have an opportunity to steer a good portion of these dollars to research involving embryonic stem cells. This decision will make us more competitive with the rest of the world, it will encourage American scientists to remain in the United States to do their work, and encourage new scientists to enter the field. It will create new stem cell technologies in research institutes and universities, fueling the creation of new companies that will develop new stem cell therapies, and it will encourage companies that develop tools for such research to grow and expand. This decision by the President is a boost to our industry, especially after he recently mentioned his support for scientific innovation and entrepreneurship in his address to a joint session of Congress. Comments (1) | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
1 Haute Secure Scores $1.6M, Second Ave Invests in Fanzter, LookStat Gets Funded, & More Seattle-Area Deals News
Roundup , deals , VC Gregory T. Huang wrote: It was a very quiet week for deals in the Northwest, with just a trickle of activity in software, security, and biotech. —Seattle-based Haute Secure, a software firm focused on computer security against malware, raised about $1.6 million in Series A funding . Investors in the round included Silicon Valley firms Baseline Ventures and Sherpalo Ventures. —LookStat, a Seattle-area startup that makes software for analytics and workflow automation for the microstock photography industry, has received an investment from Founder’s Co-op , a Seattle-based seed-stage fund. (The news was mentioned in passing by investor Andy Sack at a financing talk.) The amount of the investment and the closing date weren’t announced, but Founder’s Co-op tends to invest between $250,000 and $500,000 in early-stage tech companies. —Luke reported that Seattle-based VPDiagnostics received a $2.9 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to run a clinical trial of its MRI technology for determining a patient’s risk of stroke. The technology is based on 15-plus years of research at the University of Washington. —Seattle-based Second Avenue Partners renewed its investment in Fanzter , a Collinsville, CT-based new media company. The $2 million Series B financing round was led by Steamboat Ventures. Fantzer, which was also backed by Seattle investors Curious Office Partners and Rich Barton (from Zillow), runs a celebrity website called Coolspotters.com. —Seattle startup TrafficGauge, a provider of road traffic information in real time, was acquired by Networks In Motion , a mobile navigation and search company based in Aliso Viejo, CA. Financial terms were not disclosed. TrafficGauge first rolled out a mobile traffic map in Seattle in 2003. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
1 Paul Graham on Why Boston Should Worry About Its Future as a Tech Hub—Says Region Focuses On Ideas, Not Startups
people , Internet , Entrepreneurship Robert Buderi wrote: For entrepreneurs and investors alike, it was a sad day back in January, when Y Combinator founder Paul Graham announced he would stay in Silicon Valley year round and give up splitting his startup incubation activities between Mountain View and Cambridge, MA, where Y Combinator has traditionally held forth each summer. On his website, Graham explained that the change had “nothing to do with startups,” but that he had decided California was the best place to raise his about-to-be-born child. That didn’t stop him from a candid assessment of the Boston innovation scene, however. “Boston just doesn’t have the startup culture that the Valley does,” Graham wrote. “It has more startup culture than anywhere else, but the gap between number 1 and number 2 is huge.” Since that time, I’m happy to report, Graham’s wife Jessica Livingston (a Y Combinator partner) has given birth to a healthy son, George. And Graham himself is back at work, at least to the point that he hosted an angel investor conference last week. He also took time to answer some questions I had e-mailed him earlier, asking for a more detailed view on the differences between the New England and Silicon Valley innovation cultures. As you will see, he cleverly outmaneuvered me on my last question, about raising kids to be themselves and not to constantly compare themselves with others. But far more important than that, his answers hold some hard truths for Boston area investors and students. He called Cambridge “the intellectual capital of the world,” brimming with ideas. But when it came to Internet investing, entrepreneurship, and even the mindset of students, well, that was another story. So here are the questions, and Graham’s e-mailed answers, unedited except for clarifying questions, correcting minor typos, and the like. “Sorry if these answers are rather long,” Graham writes. “These are questions I’ve thought a lot about.” Xconomy : You mentioned in your post that there was a vast difference between No. 1 (Silicon Valley) and No. 2 (Boston). Can you describe some of the specifics behind this observation–how so, why so? Paul Graham : The biggest difference between Boston and Silicon Valley is the way startup culture pervades the Valley. The Valley is for startups what LA is for movies. It’s the main thing people care about here. Boston is for startups what New York is for movies. People do make some movies there, but it’s not the city’s main focus. A lot of other things follow from this. The startup community is much larger in the Valley, large enough that it makes a qualitative difference. Among other things, this makes it much easier for us to run YC [Y Combinator] here. The 4 YC partners aren’t the only ones who advise the startups; we also bring in all kinds of experts from the community to advise them; and it is much easier for us to do this in Silicon Valley because that’s where most of the experts are. When we were in the summer in Boston we were always trying to talk people from the Valley into visiting Boston for a vacation. We managed to talk Paul Buchheit into it. And fortunately Mitch Kapor sometimes comes to Boston in the summer, so we were able to get him. But it was always a stretch. Another difference is that because the Valley cares so much about startups, people here are always half a step ahead. All the lawyers know what the latest standard terms are for various types of deals. The investors are less frightened by new ideas, because the ideas are less new to them. The founders feel less lonely, because there are three other groups of guys in the same building starting startups. I love Boston as a town. If I didn’t have kids I’d rather live in Cambridge than anywhere else. Cambridge is the intellectual capital of the world. Really. In fact, a large part of the reason Boston is weak in startups is probably that it’s good at other things. The focus of Boston is ideas, and it seems hard for a city to have two foci. X : Do you think Silicon Valley’s advantage is more true for the Web-based sector you focus on? Are there areas, perhaps life sciences or medical devices, where Boston might be better for startups? PG : Boston may well be a better place for biotech and medical startups. Or not; I have no idea. That is a completely different world from the one YC operates in. There’s no room for seed firms there, because the startups are so expensive to start. X : Even when it comes to Internet startups, are there some things Boston investors or entrepreneurs are better at, or are strong at—maybe more conservative management, say? PG : Honestly, nothing comes to mind. Occam’s razor says the reason Boston founders …Next Page » Comments (13) | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Biotech , cancer , vaccines Luke Timmerman wrote: Flameouts are the norm for any company that dares to try to stimulate the body’s immune system to fight cancer cells. Cell Genesys , Genitope , Favrille , and Antigenics have been added to the long list of companies that have stumbled in this promising field that hasn’t yet produced a single FDA-approved therapy. One of the sector leaders, Seattle-based Dendreon (NASDAQ: DNDN ), is awaiting critical results next month which could validate, or crush , its immune-booster for prostate cancer, Provenge. Given the hundreds of millions of investor dollars that have been sunk already into these active immunotherapies—sometimes called “cancer vaccines”—why would anybody listen to another startup pitch? Maybe I’m a glutton for punishment, but since Seattle-based CG Therapeutics has recruited two Dendreon veterans to its board, attracted capital from prominent Seattle investor Robert Arnold, and hired a new CEO, I figured it couldn’t hurt to hear the story. CG Therapeutics’ new CEO is Denise Harrison , who got her biotech experience as chief financial officer of Seattle-based Illumigen Biosciences. That company was sold in December 2007 to Lexington, MA-based Cubist Pharmaceuticals. She’s getting some advice in this first go-round as a CEO from two new board members: Reiner Laus , the CEO of BN Immunotherapeudics and former vice president of R&D at Dendreon, and Julie Eastland , the chief financial officer of Seattle-based VLST and a former vice president of strategic planning at Dendreon. CG has fixed its sights on a hormone that inspired the company name—hCG. Scientists have known for decades that this hormone plays a key role in early development, when it protects the fetus from being attacked by the immune system (it’s the thing that confirms when a woman is pregnant, turning the test kit blue). Researchers later came to understand this hormone can appear later in life, playing a more nefarious role. It offers that same brand of protection to tumor cells, cloaking them from an immune system that might otherwise kill them like an invading virus. The company’s scientific team, led by Immunex veteran Tom Hopp, say they have designed a method to lift that protective veil from tumors. Their drug CG-201 aims to do this by taking some synthetic peptides that train the immune system to recognize hallmark signatures of hCG, and fuses them to a diphtheria toxin like the one found in the common DPT childhood immunization. This is supposed to make the hormone look like a foreign invader the immune system should attack. By knocking out hCG, the company scientists hope they can attack the tumor’s support network on multiple levels. Besides offering protection from the immune system, the hormone is also thought to play a role in cancer by nourishing tumors through helping grow new blood vessels, and by allowing tissues to break down near the tumor that allows it to spread through the body, Hopp says. An earlier version of CG-201 showed some positive signs, but not enough to move ahead in development, and besides, that intellectual property now belongs to Portland, OR-based AVI Biopharma, Harrison says. So CG’s scientists cooked up a new version on their own, which they say has been shown to be 10 times more potent, and longer-lasting, than the earlier one in rabbit experiments. It’s now ready to go into clinical trials. Except there’s one big catch. …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Mobile TV , Digital TV Conversion , wireless Bruce V. Bigelow wrote: The digital broadcast center for Qualcomm’s MediaFLO mobile TV service is a hushed, dimly lit room in San Diego that is dominated by 24 flat-screen, rear-projection screens mounted along one wall. The engineers in the room face these ever-changing displays at work stations equipped with even more flat-panel screens, so the darkness is illuminated by a mosaic of streaming video images and computer-generated data. I recently took a tour of this sophisticated, high-tech facility to get a feel for what it takes to broadcast TV programs to mobile devices nationwide. Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM ) began developing the underlying technology for this ambitious business more than seven years ago. In 2007, when Qualcomm announced it was ready to begin its mobile TV service , the company said it had spent $800 million over the previous five years. Today MediaFLO is transmitting full-length TV programs and movies, along with occasional live broadcasts of news and sports to wireless handheld devices in 65 markets throughout the United States. As impressive as the technology is, though, MediaFLO has yet to gain wide acceptance, and Qualcomm still faces significant risks from rivals who hope to gain ground on the San Diego telecom giant. Qualcomm had planned to significantly expand its MediaFLO service to an additional 40 U.S. markets immediately after Feb. 17. That was when TV stations across the country had been expected to shut down their analog broadcasts on UHF Channel 55 in a long-planned conversion to digital technology. But Qualcomm’s plans for MediaFLO, which uses the same spectrum as Channel 55, were set back after the government postponed the nationwide digital TV conversion date until June 12. The extent of Qualcomm’s efforts to develop the technology can be seen on the screens of the company’s network operations center. Some displays continuously monitor …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
Life Sciences , consulting , management Wade Roush wrote: The old joke about management consultants is that they’ll look at your watch, tell you what time it is, and hand you a bill for $50,000. But if you’re a healthcare company and you hire Scientia Advisors , here’s what’s more likely to happen: they’ll look at your watch, notice that it’s running slow, take it apart, fix it, put it back together, and tell you how—if you tweaked the design—you could make millions selling a different kind of watch. Not literally, of course. The Cambridge, MA-based consulting firm works only on life-sciences strategy questions, not timepieces. But after a recent visit to Scientia, I came away feeling like it was one of the most unconventional consulting firms I’d ever seen. Do you expect your consultants to spend months learning about your business? Forget it—Scientia will send people who already understand your industry, and they’ll spend only 5 percent of their time on site, according to Harry Glorikian, the firm’s co-founder and managing partner. Are you used to consultants who finish an engagement by doing a big PowerPoint show, handing over a few thick three-ring binders, and leaving you to ponder how to use the information? Forget that too. Glorikian says Scientia’s goal is to give clients the data and context they need to make a strategic decision about their problem, then and there. “We want to be able to walk in and not have to learn a lot from the client to be able to add value,” Glorikian told me. “We bring a lot of knowledge that our clients are not used to consultants having.” In that respect, the 30-person firm takes its cue from Glorikian himself. Prior to founding Scientia in 2006, the Boston University MBA graduate spent 20 years in the healthcare and life sciences business, including senior management stints at X-Cell Laboratories, Signet Laboratories, and Applied Biosystems (NYSE: ABI ). Co-founding partner Arshad Ahmed worked on healthcare, life sciences, financial services, and other areas for Boston Consulting Group, Integral Inc., and McKinsey spinoff Potomac Partners. The third co-founder, Amit Agarwal—who runs Scientia’s West Coast operations from Palo Alto, CA—also has a deep background in the consulting and financial services worlds. And among its crew of consultants, the firm counts both youngsters with fresh science and business degrees and industry veterans from places like Millennium Pharmaceuticals and the dialysis division at healthcare giant Baxter. Scientia’s signature style, according to Glorikian, is to bring a deep understanding of the markets and technologies relevant to its clients; to build its own data from the ground up, rather than relying on market research purchased from other companies; and to analyze markets using proprietary software tools, mostly developed by Ahmed. It’s a style that seems to be working so far. In the two and a half years since Agarwal, Ahmed, and Glorikian started the company, it has only had one consulting proposal turned down by a potential client. “One customer said, ‘You’re the most cost-effective firm I’ve ever used,’” says Glorikian. “I said, ‘You’re calling us cheap!’ And he said, ‘No, you don’t understand. When I ask you guys a question, I usually get an answer. If I ask another firm the same question, I get back a project.’” The clients coming to Scientia usually need answers fast. The typical customer, Glorikian says, is a company looking to expand into a new market, or get rid of products that aren’t selling well, or take a cyclical business and transform it into something less beholden to economic shifts. Scientia can help clients understand which markets hold the biggest opportunities, and how those opportunities match up with their existing capabilities. I asked Glorikian to walk me through a real example. (He left out identifying detals to protect the client’s confidentiality.) “We had a Fortune 50 company come to us and ask us to look across a number of industries to determine what areas they should be playing in,” he recounted. “So we took them through a number of screens. One of them was for simple things like the size of the market, its growth rate, and profitability; you obviously don’t want to be in low-growth, low-profitability markets. Then we did a quick spin of their R&D groups to understand their competencies. And then we went back and …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
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Mobile Mapping , wireless , Web 3.0 Juha-Pekka Tikka wrote: In Finland I am a reporter for Ilta-Sanomat, Helsinki’s second-largest newspaper. I write about Finland’s Nokia a lot, so I may have a different perspective on Qualcomm , the San Diego-based chipset maker. For us Finns, Nokia is a larger-than-life, close-to-home success story. We speak the same strange language and it’s our only global giant. In the United States, which is the leading market for mobile phones, Nokia lost its No. 1 ranking in cell phone sales when the clamshell design and thinner cell-phones became popular. Then came the iPhones. Nokia wants to change this situation and resume its leadership position in the U.S. market. Nokia (NYSE: NOK ) got new hope to fulfill its ambitions last month, when Qualcomm and Nokia announced a joint “Plan to Develop Advanced Mobile Devices.” A statement issued by the two companies on Feb. 17th didn’t provide many details about this collaboration. Qualcomm’s Steve Mollenkopf says in the statement, “This new level of cooperation would bring exceptional leaps in mobile performance to people around the world.” Only last year Nokia and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM ) settled a nasty patent fight. In Finland, Qualcomm was viewed by many as being very aggressive in its licensing demands. But this new collaboration benefits both organizations: Qualcomm gets its first deal with Nokia, the world’s largest maker of mobile phones; Nokia gets a fresh opportunity to reclaim its leadership in the U.S. market. Their mutual goal is to research and make the next-generation phones, which means iPhone killers. One place where this collaboration may be playing out …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
wireless , 3G , Broadband Juha-Pekka Tikka wrote: San Diego-based Leap Wireless (NASDAQ: LEAP ) today is launching its Cricket unlimited wireless service in the greater Philadelphia area. That’s the second major market the low-cost wireless provider has entered since January, when Cricket began service in Chicago. The company, which announced its move yesterday, is now forecasting 5.3 million subscribers this year. At the end of 2008 it had just 3.8 million subscribers in 29 states. Cricket provides unlimited, low-cost 3G wireless voice and broadband services, with monthly rates that range from $30 to $60. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
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1 How to Make a Better Lightbulb, Biofuel, or Energy Storage Technology: Xconomy Forum Adds Voices of Leading Entrepreneurs
cleantech , Biofuels , energy Luke Timmerman wrote: Lots of creative entrepreneurs are popping up in the Northwest cleantech business, so we invited three of them to explain their ideas at our upcoming Xconomy Forum, The Rise of Cleantech in the Northwest , on March 26. These new special guests will offer up expertise in biofuels, energy storage, and conservation—some of the region’s key strengths we identified last week in our lists of alternative energy players here in Washington , Oregon , and British Columbia. The forum will still feature the stimulating panel discussion that we announced previously with Michael Butler, Jeremy Jaech, Jesse Berst, Mark Aggar, and Linden Rhoads. The added trio of speakers will come immediately after the panel, introducing the audience to their business ideas in quick 2-minute bursts just before the networking portion of the evening. The new special guests are: —Kirt Montague, CEO of Mercer Island-based Prometheus Energy . This company uses proprietary technology to take methane gas from municipal landfills, cow manure, and coalbeds, and turn it into liquid natural gas fuel. —Chris Wheaton, chief operating officer of Seattle-based EnerG2 . This University of Washington spinout company is developing novel materials to help increase the efficiency of storing energy from hydrogen and solar cells, and even to make “ultracapacitors.” Greg got the exclusive story for Xconomy in November when this company raised $8.5 million from OVP Venture Partners and Firelake Capital Management. —David Grieger, CEO of Seattle-based Vu1. Grieger, the former chief marketing officer for Russell Investments in Tacoma, joined his current company in January. Vu1, pronounced like View One, aims to make a new type of light bulb that has the energy efficiency of a fluorescent bulb without containing mercury that can contaminate landfills. The forum will start at 6:30 pm (doors open at 6 pm) on March 26, at the offices of K&L Gates at 925 Fourth Avenue, Suite 2900, in downtown Seatle. As a reminder, the discounted early-bird registration price of $95 expires this Thursday, March 12. We look forward to seeing many of the regular Xconomy readers there, as well as plenty of new faces. Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
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Software , products , Social Networking Gregory T. Huang wrote: In the burgeoning software hub of Portland, OR, one company is breaking new ground today. Jive Software , a maker of “social business software” that helps employees communicate with each other and manage their work information, is releasing a new product called SBS 3.0. The software is targeted to businesses, and its goal is to let corporate teams from inside and outside a given enterprise connect and collaborate more easily and effectively. Jive’s new software combines its business collaboration product with its online-community offering into one package that it can sell to companies. The idea is that giving employees better access to a full suite of social tools will help them stay better connected to key departments and collaborators, thereby saving the company money and time in the long run. “Enterprise software has been a boring category for 20 years, and Jive is here to change that,” says Sam Lawrence, Jive’s chief marketing officer. You’d expect to hear something like that from an experienced marketer like Lawrence. Yet in this case, he is talking about a bold strategic move by a small company that has its sights set on becoming something like Facebook for the office, putting it on a competitive collision course with Microsoft, IBM, and a slew of startups that aim to help employees get better at collaborating. Jive has evolved to this point from its founding in 2001, before the days of social networking. Its early forays into social software involved online forums and instant messaging, and were focused on support— things like getting customers to help each other rather than call a company with time-consuming questions. By 2005, a lot of Web 2.0 and social software applications were becoming available, and Jive shifted its focus to helping employees communicate within their company and between companies—on things like who is responsible for which parts of a project, or how an R&D department is connected to other teams like marketing and sales. In the past few years, Jive has signed up customers like Intel, Nike, Electronic Arts, SAP, and VMware. The company raised $15 million in funding from Sequoia Capital in 2007. “Having them in our corner is a big, huge thing for us,” Lawrence says. Here’s how the new product works. Customers get a dashboard view that shows …Next Page » Comments (3) | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
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IT , Software , innovation Wade Roush wrote: Henry Chesbrough, the UC Berkeley business professor who wrote the influential 2003 book Open Innovation , argued that companies need to do a better job of incubating, cataloguing, and licensing the knowledge and inventions they have in-house, and of bringing in intellectual property from outside, if that’s what’s needed to jump-start product development. But while many companies would like to adopt Chesbrough’s principles, most lack a systematic way to track their ideas and figure out which ones are worth implementing and selling. By borrowing a few ideas from the worlds of social networking and hosted Web 2.0 services, a new Norwegian startup called Induct Software thinks it can help solve that problem. Today, Induct named its CEO. It’s David Burns, a Boston-area resident who was also the founding CEO of Norway’s Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a maker of search software for large enterprises. In one of the biggest technology acquisitions of 2008, Microsoft bought FAST last January for a whopping $1.3 billion—a deal that “made people sit up and say, ‘Hey, Norway can have some IT success,’” according to Burns. With Induct, he says, “We’re trying to push the big green ‘copy’ button and do it again.” His appointment coincides with the opening of Induct’s Boston office and the international launch of its Web-based “Innovation Community” software, which has been tested only in Norway so far. Burns and Induct’s founder and chairman, Alf Martin Johansen, took some time out from their pre-launch rush this week to show me how their portal, called Innovation Community, is supposed to work. The main idea is to help companies set up customized online communities where employees can record ideas, upload illustrative media, collect comments and survey responses, and then shepherd the strongest concepts through a process of decision-making and implementation. Everything’s accessed via a Web browser, and both the software and the content generated by users is hosted on servers at Induct, which charges a subscription fee (about $15 per user per month). You might think of it loosely as a Facebook or a MySpace for innovators—but with product ideas, rather than personal profiles, as the central objects of attention. Burns puts Induct’s value proposition to customers this way: “You have an accounting system, and a cash management system, but when it comes to innovation, you have a bunch of hodgepodge pieces. Our solution is to say, let’s take the best pieces from a book like Open Innovation , and implement a management system that’s seamless from the beginning of the innovation process to the end, and that’s open because it’s Web-based.” Induct’s software is open both in the sense that it’s built to encourage participation by everyone involved in the innovation process—even people outside a company, if they’re given the right passwords—and in the sense that it’s easy to tinker with. For example, companies can quickly upload customized checklists of criteria that they think should be used to evaluate ideas, then invite users to fill out survey forms ranking incoming ideas using those criteria. Burns says the Induct system is a response to what Johansen, who was also the chief financial officer at FAST, gleaned in interviews with hundreds of companies in Norway. He found that they had adopted a variety of tools to manage innovation, including groupware, wikis, and social networks, but that departments and divisions were often using incompatible systems. Many companies hired consultants to help them get a handle on their innovation processes, but often these consultants would leave their clients with “a PowerPoint presentation and a three-ring binder full of recommendations” rather than a long-term solution, Burns says. Johansen thought there could be a market for a centralized innovation management platform—a Software-as-a-Service offering that would have some of the collaboration features of groupware like Microsoft’s Groove or IBM’s Lotus Notes, some of the document-management features of enterprise content management systems like EMC’s Documentum, and some of the community features pioneered by open-innovation organizations like Innocentive. The challenge, Burns says, was that “no two companies, or even divisions or departments for that matter, have exactly the same innovation process. Each one defines their own innovation types and subtypes, and each one in practice was using a different ranking algorithm or scorecard in the evaluation process.” So Johansen and a team of four programmers in Norway came up with a system that’s extremely customizable. At its core is a system for …Next Page » Comments | Permalink | Share | E-mail…
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