Source: OSA

A new JOSA B paper describes a revised theory of the four-wave-mixing process for terahertz (THz) generation from two-color laser ionized gas. The authors carefully discuss the role of various mechanisms and make suggestions that should stimulate further research efforts in the THz community. To know more, email us.

Source: Wired.com

More than a third of American adults don’t have a fast internet connection at home, leaving some 80 million adults and 13 million children at a distinct disadvantage in a wired world, according to an FCC report released Tuesday.

Source: The New York Times

A Silicon Valley company is claiming a breakthrough in a decades-old quest to develop fuel cells that can supply affordable and relatively clean electricity. Google, Bank of America, Wal-Mart and other large corporations have been testing the devices, which will be formally introduced on Wednesday.  Read more here.

Source: Wired.com/greentechmedia

Intel CEO Paul Otellini Tuesday announced an ambitious $3.5 billion plan that, ideally, will lead to more technical  jobs and start-ups in the U.S.

Read More here.

Source: The quincy cove

At today's event, attended by hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders, Governor Patrick declared February 23 "Massachusetts Entrepreneurship Day," and officially broke ground on the new Cambridge Innovation Center space which, thanks to new growth and high demand, will be nearly doubling its size by summer 2010. The Cambridge Innovation Center is the largest grouping of start-up companies under one roof on the East Coast with 240 tenants, most of them startup companies.

"Entrepreneurship and innovation are such vital components of the state's economy, and the administration's continued support of these areas is admirable," said Senator Karen Spilka, Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Economic Development. "Together with the Senate President, I have been focusing on ways to create a more business-friendly environment and foster entrepreneurship through our economic development proposal. With all of the state's leaders so focused on growing businesses and growing jobs, we are well poised to create a strong future for innovation and growth here." To read more, click here.

Source: Government Technologies

No amount of brainpower or world-class technology could save Silicon Valley last year from the wrath of the recession.

In the San Francisco Bay Area's high-tech hub, the economic downturn caused jobs, patents and venture capital investment to decline in 2009, according to a study released in February by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and Silicon Valley Community Foundation. The survey, titled the "2010 Index of Silicon Valley," also shows office vacancy at its highest rate since 1998 as the focus has shifted from software to green energy, the media, biotech and medical devices.

With the loss of 90,000 jobs between the second quarters of 2008 and 2009, the cutting-edge innovators of Silicon Valley "could not insulate ourselves from the larger economic downturn," said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture president and CEO, and Silicon Valley Community Foundation CEO Emmett Carson, in a joint statement. To read more, click here.

Source: Photonics.com

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 5, 2010 - SPIE Photonics West completed its debut at the Moscone Center in San Francisco last week with the final attendance count at 18,327, a record for the event.

The new venue was a hit with attendees, and provided welcome room for growth. Both the Photonics West exhibition, with 1142 exhibiting companies, and the BiOS exhibition, with 178, were larger than in past years, said SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics.

Technical and exhibit attendance were up, and attendees said the event provided indicators of strength in the biomedical optics and photonics sectors of the economy. Conference chairs reported seeing high-energy discussions and high-quality presentations in the technical sessions where some 3600 papers were given, and poster receptions were well-attended, with 2200 attendees at the BiOS session. Course attendance was also high in the more than 60 presented on optoelectronics, photonics applications, and professional development. To read more, click here.

Source: photonics.com

PHILIDELPHIA, Feb. 18, 2010 - When a tissue biopsy is sent to a lab to be analyzed for cancer it can take hours, days or even a week to get the results. Now, a new analysis technology developed by researchers in Temple University's Center for Advanced Photonics Research could possibly tell whether tissue is cancerous or normal in a matter of seconds.

"If you get cancer, the diseased tissue changes chemical composition," said Robert Levis, chair of chemistry and director of CAPR. "If we can measure the tissue's chemical composition, we can tell if it's healthy tissue or abnormal." 
Levis and his group have pioneered a method in which an ultrafast laser is used to vaporize materials, molecules or tissues. Once in gas form, an electro-spray mass spectrometer weighs the materials' bio-molecules.

Vaporizing a sample on a plate with the femtosecond (one quadrillionth of a second) laser releases the molecules into the air, regardless of size or vapor pressure. The molecules are engulfed by the electro-spray, much like a hose spray can engulf a flower petal. The electrospray is a water methanol solution ejected from a hypodermic needle by a high voltage, and this ultimately places a charge on the molecules. A small capillary tube opposite the needle charged at -5,000 volts pulls the tiny positively charged droplets into a vacuum and then into the mass spectrometer. To read more, click here.

Source: photonics.com

MIDDLEFIELD, Conn., Feb. 16, 2010 - Optical metrology instruments maker Zygo Corp.'s board announced today it has unanimously rejected a buyout offer from laser-optics materials maker II-VI Inc., saying it is only beginning to see the benefits of its recent initiatives to refocus on its core optical and metrology markets, and Zygo's new CEO should be allowed to do the job he was hired for last month.

Pennsylvania-based II-VI made the offer of $10 per share on Jan. 5. Zygo named optics industry veteran Dr. Chris L. Koliopoulos as its president and CEO on Jan. 19; he became board chairman on Feb. 12.

"The board strongly believes Zygo's shareholders will be best served by keeping the company independent and pursuing its long-term strategy," said Koliopoulos.

To read more, click here.

Source: Xconomy

You could say I blew into the wind power event that Cleantech San Diego organized here last week. The canapés were gone by the time I arrived, but the show was just getting started. I got there in time to hear keynote speaker Jim McDermott of energy investment fund U.S. Renewables Group describe a somewhat stormy outlook for renewable energy companies developing wind projects.

In surveying the windswept landscape, McDermott sees plenty of opportunities for wind energy developers. "There's a huge amount of class 3 wind out there," he says, referring to the basic level of wind energy required if providers want to pour power into the electrical grid. "There's even still some class 4 and 5 out there, particularly in the offshore markets."

In the United States, McDermott says about 300 megawatts of wind power were under development in 2008-which dwarfs the amount of biomass, geothermal, solar, and every other type of renewable energy under development. But with the collapse of the capital markets and the massive downturn, McDermott says there's also been a tremendous amount of carnage. To read more, click here.

Source: Information WeekBusiness executives are reading about cloud computing and asking when their companies are going to get on board. CIOs must do three things to respond to those requests and to help business units take advantage of cloud computing without putting them at undue risk.

First, don't be dismissive of the cloud. Business units will simply bypass IT if it doesn't provide guidance. Second, advise business leaders on cloud risks and risk-mitigation strategies. Third, when the decision to use a cloud service is made, establish realistic and balanced service-level agreements.

Insurance companies need to drive awareness about the security risks inherent in mobile and desktop platforms, especially with sensitive financial and customer data. David Berlind announces Cloud Connect, a TechWeb event being held at the Computer History Museum in Mountainview, CA January 20-22nd, 2009. Some of the most influential cloud players discuss the future challenges and opportunities in Cloud Computing on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Insurance companies need to drive awareness about the security risks inherent in mobile and desktop platforms, especially with sensitive financial and customer data.
Establishing an SLA is just one aspect of protecting your organization. What's needed is a step-by-step assessment-to-implementation process, helping business managers balance risk, fiscal impact, and flexibility. If the decision for a given IT service goes in favor of a cloud approach--software as a service, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service--you need to figure out how to proceed and what to do if and when things go wrong. That's the core of not only an SLA, but of good governance.

Getting the answers to the following questions will help you determine if cloud computing makes sense, evaluate providers, determine if you need an SLA, and, if so, how to craft a strong agreement.

1. What's the use case? Why are cloud services being considered?

Say you need to develop quickly a specialized, temporary application for a boat dealership, one that scales up and then, just as quickly, gets decommissioned. That's a great use case for cloud computing. There's little capital expense needed and, with the right service provider, the app can be deployed effectively. But not every use case is appropriate for cloud computing's current level of maturity. Something that can be quickly accomplished using your internal IT infrastructure might not make sense to push out to the cloud.

2. What are the risks and benefits?

If you're going to live in the clouds, bring a parachute. In addition to evaluating the benefits, be realistic about worst-case scenarios, such as if the application isn't available, performance bogs down, or there's a security breach.

It's useful to classify these scenarios by their relative probability, as well as by their impact on the business. For example, an enterprise application that many are reluctant to provision into a cloud environment is ERP, where there's a high impact of failure regardless of the probability of failure, which is never zero. Read more here

Source: Information WeekVirtualization has created its share of heroes in IT. A few years back, after a division of a Fortune 1000 financial company virtualized 800 servers over a 12-month period, the IT team was bathed in ROI glory: lower cooling costs, a smaller footprint, and cost savings on capital equipment and licensing. Life was good.

Fast forward to last year. Those 800 virtual servers had ballooned to 1,000, with no clear picture of the overall configuration, no tracking of the life cycle of each virtual machine, nor any record of how they grew so rapidly. A review of the team's procedures found a complete breakdown in protocol for provisioning computing power, blamed on a lack of management tools and poor organization. The team had to bring in consultants to help get the operation back in order.

Bay Area Internet Solutions Roger Boyce, CEO of Evident Software, discusses application virtualization. As companies take many servers and make them look like one, it's very difficult to measure the changes. Evident provides unique insights into the operation of those new appli Distributed teams managing software development for parallel releases
Bay Area Internet Solutions
Welcome to the back side of the virtualization wave.

It's rare to find anyone in IT who doesn't acknowledge the benefits of server virtualization. The core concept, of leveraging the power of the underlying hardware by logically provisioning the system into multiple virtual sessions, has existed since the age of the mainframe. But it was VMware's success virtualizing x86 servers that catapulted this technology approach into the distributed world. Today, you name it, and we'll try to virtualize it. iPhones running a hypervisor? Seriously. Why not?

Server virtualization is hurtling along--54% of the 391 business technology pros we surveyed expect at least half of their production servers will be virtualized in 2011. Companies are beginning to consider desktop, storage, and even infrastructure virtualization. Yet most IT operations don't have the management to effectively support server virtualization, let alone a big push into new areas.

More than half of the survey respondents who've embraced virtualization rely on the built-in tool provided by their hypervisor vendor, whether its VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, or someone else. This leaves them with two sets of tools to manage--one for the physical servers and one for the virtual environment. Only 10% of organizations have invested the time and money to implement a server management system that provides a single framework. The rest either use legacy tools that don't adequately handle a virtual environment, or they're doing nothing at all. Read more here

Source: Optics.orgA collaborative project could fundamentally change the way that devices based on photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are designed and manufactured in Europe. Backed by €3.75m from the EU's Seventh Framework R&D programme, the EuroPIC consortium aims to facilitate easier access for small businesses to PIC components and technology.

"PICs are analogous to electronic integrated circuits, processing information signals imposed on optical wavelengths, typically in the visible spectrum or near-infrared," David Robbins of consortium member Willow Photonics, UK, told optics.org. "EuroPIC will address InP-based PICs operating at ~1550 nm. Such devices will benefit a wide range of photonics applications, including high-capacity optical telecommunications, [optical] access networks, radio-over-fibre links and sensors."

However, if PICs are to achieve greater market penetration, SMEs must first overcome the high cost of entry when it comes to R&D and manufacturing. The hope is that the design and manufacturing approach being investigated by EuroPIC will ultimately transform the economics of PICs, stimulating demand through easier access to generic InP chip fabrication processes.

"This model follows the example seen in CMOS, but is a completely new one in this sector," said Robbins. "It would provide European companies and institutes with cost-effective access to the required production methods and tools, and bring particular benefits to the new Eastern European member states, where little or no investment in photonic fabrication infrastructure has taken place."

The key change in methodology is to clearly separate out the different functions within the process chain, removing the need for a deep knowledge of the entire InP fab to be held at every stage. In effect, the fab will be application-blind. Read more here

Source: Optics.orgThe first infrared-emitting germanium laser has been created by researchers in the US. The development could be an important step towards creating optical components such as lasers from silicon - which like germanium is an indirect-gap semiconductor - rather than direct-gap materials such as indium phosphide. The breakthrough could lead to cheaper and more efficient optical communications systems and even optical computers.

One way of making computers run faster is to use light to transfer data rather than electrical currents. The simplest way to do this would be to make the lasers from silicon, because they could then be integrated directly with other chips. However, today's commercial diode lasers use comparatively expensive direct-gap semiconductors, which cannot be easily integrated with conventional silicon chips.

Semiconductors emit light when electrons transfer from a higher energy conduction band to recombine with holes in the lower energy valence band. The energy of electrons within these bands also varies according to a property known as crystal momentum. For each band within a material, electrons adopt the lowest energy crystal momentum - and the recombination of electrons and holes with different momentum is forbidden by quantum mechanics. Read more here

Source: Yahoo! NewsMONDAY, Feb. 15 (HealthDay News) -- Harvard researchers report what they say is a major advance toward the long-sought goal of a genetic test that can distinguish between aggressive prostate cancers that require urgent treatment and slow-growing tumors that can safely be left alone.

Today, many men diagnosed with prostate cancer are treated with radiation or chemotherapy even though most of those cancers will grow so slowly that they are not dangerous. It is the cancers that metastasize -- spread outside the prostate gland -- that typically are life-threatening. Read more here

"For the first time, we showed in a mouse model that when you take a gene out, you get metastasis and when you put it back in you don't get metastasis," said study author Karen Cichowski, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of genetics at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital. "It looks like the entire pathway is driven by this one gene, the cascade that drives metastasis."

Studies of human prostate cancers have shown the same effect, she said: "We have looked at the genetic pathway in a large number of human tumors, and have found it to be deregulated in more advanced prostate cancers."

The finding could lead to better treatment of prostate cancer, because the molecule whose production is governed by the gene can be a target of drug therapy, Cichowski said.

The molecule, designated EZH2, is an enzyme, and "enzymes are always good potential therapeutic targets," she said. "Many companies are working to develop EZH2 inhibitors."

The Brigham and Women's program is one of a number being carried out in competitive fashion at several U.S. medical research centers. They are looking at a cluster of genes whose connection with prostate cancer was first described in 2002 by Jer-Tsong Hsieh, a professor of pathology and urology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

Source: Mass High TechAs health care spending in China explodes, and the cost of developing drugs there remains low, local life sciences instruments and services companies are expanding their investment in the country.

As the downturn drags on, constraining capital for smaller biotech companies and hospitals domestically, local firms are seizing opportunity in China, which is set to become the third largest drug market by 2011, according to research by Norwalk, Conn.-based consultancy IMS Health.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government's commitment to research and development, fueled by a stimulus bill worth $856 billion and a health reform initiative worth $125 billion, is boosting the interest of foreign companies.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Waltham, announced last week that it would launch a second demo lab in China by the end of 2010. Thermo has a first facility in Shanghai, a city that boasts major outposts of seven of the largest global pharmaceutical companies.

This time the maker of mass spectrometers and other instruments will locate in Beijing, close to universities and scientific institutes.

"The Chinese government is pouring millions into food safety and air quality monitoring programs, and we are benefiting from that," said Marc Casper, president and CEO of Thermo Fisher. Thermo booked 4 percent of its revenue in China in 2009, but Casper believes the size of the Chinese business will double in the next five years. To this end, the company recently decided to move the headquarters, and four top executives, of its environmental instruments division to China. Thermo hired 225 workers across its Chinese and Indian businesses last year, and expects similar job growth in 2010.

As sales of capital equipment to hospitals and other traditional customers remains slowed by the recession, Casper said there are entirely new business avenues to explore in China. Read more here

Source: Mass High Tech

As health care spending in China explodes, and the cost of developing drugs there remains low, local life sciences instruments and services companies are expanding their investment in the country.

As the downturn drags on, constraining capital for smaller biotech companies and hospitals domestically, local firms are seizing opportunity in China, which is set to become the third largest drug market by 2011, according to research by Norwalk, Conn.-based consultancy IMS Health.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government’s commitment to research and development, fueled by a stimulus bill worth $856 billion and a health reform initiative worth $125 billion, is boosting the interest of foreign companies.

Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Waltham, announced last week that it would launch a second demo lab in China by the end of 2010. Thermo has a first facility in Shanghai, a city that boasts major outposts of seven of the largest global pharmaceutical companies.

This time the maker of mass spectrometers and other instruments will locate in Beijing, close to universities and scientific institutes.

“The Chinese government is pouring millions into food safety and air quality monitoring programs, and we are benefiting from that,” said Marc Casper, president and CEO of Thermo Fisher. Thermo booked 4 percent of its revenue in China in 2009, but Casper believes the size of the Chinese business will double in the next five years. To this end, the company recently decided to move the headquarters, and four top executives, of its environmental instruments division to China. Thermo hired 225 workers across its Chinese and Indian businesses last year, and expects similar job growth in 2010. Read more here

Source: Xconomy

Doing your business computing on cloud systems owned by companies like Amazon sounds like a great idea, on the surface of it. Who wouldn’t want to rent computing resources just for the time they’re needed, rather than shelling out for expensive on-premises equipment that might sit idle half of the time? The problem is that most big companies have already invested millions in their data centers, and have painstakingly assembled the right set of operating systems, enterprise applications, and virtualization technologies to support their businesses.

CloudSwitch, a venture-funded startup in Burlington, MA, has built software that gives companies a way around this dilemma, allowing them to try cloud services without having to abandon their legacy systems. In a nutshell, the software erases the boundaries between on-premises and off-premises computing systems, at least from the user’s point of view, making cloud systems into nothing more than a temporary extension of existing resources. It’s like adding a room on to your house just for the weekend, when you’re having guests over.

When we first profiled CloudSwitch back in June 2009, its executives weren’t saying much about how the software does this, or exactly why it’s a money-saving proposition. But recently the company has been testing its software with beta customers and talking more openly about the product. And last month I got a briefing from John McEleney, CloudSwitch’s CEO, and Ellen Rubin, its co-founder and vice president of products, on the company’s progress since the summer—which already “feels like a decade ago,” McEleney says. Read more here

Source: Information Week

Google on Thursday confirmed that it has acquired social search start-up Aardvark, a company founded by ex-Google employees.

"We have signed a definitive agreement to acquire Aardvark, but we don't have any additional details to share right now," said a company spokesperson in an e-mail.

Aardvark is a matchmaking service for questions and answers. It allows users to submit queries and then connects the searcher to friends or associates who are likely to have the best answer.

By acquiring the company, Google is deepening its already substantial commitment to social networking -- an interest evident in the launch of Google Buzz earlier this week -- and is expanding beyond algorithmic problem solving toward services with more of a human component.

And a greater emphasis on people might be just what Google needs: The company's focus on data, automation, and scalability has meant that the people-oriented side of its business, such as customer service, often comes up short.

In a blog post last week, Aardvark's CTO Damon Horowitz acknowledged the company's debt to Google. The paper in which Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page describe their PageRank algorithm, he said, was the inspiration for a paper that Aardvark submitted to an upcoming technical conference, "Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine."

Speaking at an event called TEDxSoMa in January, Horowitz sounded like the ideal candidate to help turn Google into a social network. "The primary goal for technology should not be replacing human intelligence," he said. "It should be facilitating human interaction."

Google's last social networking acquisitions, Zingku and Jaiku, occurred in September and October 2007. Read more here

Source:Defense Tech briefs

Laser-based directed-energy weapons (DEW) are important components for future Army missile defense systems. The diode-pumped, rare-earth (RE)-doped, solid-state laser is a very promising path towards achieving a DEW-sufficient level of average power from a reasonably compact device. Even so, the extreme pump power densities, combined with the inevitable non-radiative losses in the pump-lase process, introduce severe thermal loading in the gain medium. Regardless of the sophistication of the heat removal technique and its efficiency, the gain medium itself is the bottleneck for non-distortive heat removal due to the low thermal conductivity of known gain media compared to that of heat-sinking materials. To read more, click here.

Source: Digital Communities

As state and local governments know too well, choosing open source software is kind of like being Lewis and Clark: There are a lot of unknowns, and policies for governing the open source "wilderness" aren't well defined -- if at all.

This is finally starting to change, thanks in part to leadership from San Francisco and the California state CIO's office, two of the first governments to adopt formal policies for the usage of open source software within state and local agencies.

The content of their policies are similar, but San Francisco's goes a step further than the state. Adopted Jan. 21, San Francisco's policy mandates that city agencies always consider open source options when buying new software. By contrast, the open source policy letter issued in January by California's Office of the State Chief Information Officer set a definition of open source software and designated it an "acceptable practice" -- bringing its usage by the state "out of the shadows," in the words of Chief Deputy CIO Adrian Farley. To read more, click here.

Source: Xconomy

There’s a quilt hanging on the wall at PatientsLikeMe, made with different patches of fabric from members of the firm’s online community of multiple sclerosis patients. “We have it hanging in our office because it represents so much of what our site is about—individual experiences that, when pulled together, give you a very powerful collective view of patients living with MS,” says PatientsLikeMe co-founder and president Ben Heywood.

The Cambridge, MA-based firm has stitched together a growing business by facilitating peer-to-peer interactions among patients on its social networking site, and selling anonymous data from its members to customers in the research and pharmaceutical markets. The number of patients on the site grew impressively from about 25,000 in December 2008 to more than 55,000 as of early this month (not like the eye-popping number of people on Facebook or Myspace, but significant for the healthcare field, according to Heywood). The jump in users and the overall size of its business has caused the company to expand its workforce to from 20 employees a year ago to 30 employees today, says Heywood.

Yet patient social networking sites remain in search of a solid footing in healthcare. Heywood says that PatientsLikeMe generates the kind of real-world data on the health of patients that can’t be found anywhere else. He might be right. Traditional clinical databases used to track the health of patients might not offer the type of personalized information that a patient would share among her peers on a site like PatientsLikeMe. The company’s big challenge, though, is to convince more paying customers of the value of the data its members generate. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the healthcare industry is generally loath to break from convention and adopt new technologies. Read more here

Source: InformationWeek

n what it describes as an effort to organize the world's social information, Google on Tuesday turned Gmail into a social communication hub by joining it with a new service called Google Buzz.

The company also updated its Google Mobile Web page and launched a Buzz Web app for iPhone and Android devices to make it easy to post Buzz updates and access Buzz posts from mobile phones.

"The first thing you want to do when you see something exciting is you want to share it," said Bradley Horowitz, VP product marketing Google, at a media event at Google's corporate headquarters. "We think it shouldn't be so much work to find exactly the right audience for the content you want to share."

Social communication, Horowitz argues, has become a problem. "Increasingly it's becoming harder to find the signal in the noise," he said.

Google aims to deal with the social information explosion the same way that it has dealt with the information explosion on the Web, by helping users filter it and find the most relevant content.

Google is also aiming provide more value than social networks like Facebook by positioning social communication a productivity tool rather than an entertaining diversion. "I enjoy many social sites myself," said Horowitz, "but there are not many I find useful."  Read more here

Source: Forbes.com

One of the biggest initiatives Margaret Hamburg has announced since she became head of the Food and Drug Administration is a new push to make FDA's doings more transparent to the outside world. Yesterday's bad news for Seattle-based Cell Therapeutics represents one way in which the regulator fails to  make sure investors have information they need.

Cell Therapeutics (CTI) shares  fell 40% to 60 cents  yesterday after an briefing document prepared by the FDA raised multiple problems with the company's drug, pixantrone, and the quality of the clinical trials Cell Therapeutics is using to argue for its approval as a treatment for non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. The biggest shocker, though, related to an agreement called a "special protocol assessment" which the company had told investors it had but which the FDA now says is no longer valid.

Special protocol assesments, or SPAs, are important for every drug company, from the tiniest fleaspeck biotechnology company all the way up to Pfizer. They are agreements between a company and the FDA that a clinical trial, if conducted as planned and successful, should produce enough data for a drug to be approved. This reassures companies that they are not going to pour $40 million into a late-stage study only to have the FDA say it did the wrong trial. SPAs also ease investor fears, helping smaller companies raise money. Read more here

Source: Mass High Tech

Companies making machines that rehabilitate muscles with limited motion, perform surgery and help find new drugs are among the hottest in the robotics industry.

Medical robotics— including surgical and rehabilitation robots —is the hottest sector in the industry, according to David Barrett, associate professor of mechanical engineering and design at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham.

On the rehabilitation side, Hocoma AG, a Switzerland-based company with its U.S. headquarters in Rockland, has developed robotic exoskeletons that, in some cases, have restored patients’ ability to walk. 

“It turns out your nervous system is trainable,” Barrett said.

Neville Hogan, co-founder of Interactive Mobile Technologies Inc. perfers to call his company’s technology “therapeutic” rather than rehabilitative, saying the product is more like Lasik surgery than eyeglasses. Interactive Motion makes the InMotion shoulder, wrist, hand and ankle robots, which are aimed at treating people who have lost motion as a result of stroke. The company’s modular machines work out the affected muscle, include a video game, and sense the user’s strength level.

“If the patient lags behind, the machine moves them forward. If the patient goes faster, the machine does nothing,” he said. Read more here

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

A storage startup called Nasuni is unveiling a virtual NAS file server that runs on VMware and connects customers to cloud platforms such as Amazon's Simple Storage Service, adding encryption to enhance security and several features to improve performance.

Nasuni was founded last year and on Tuesday is announcing the beta version of its Nasuni Filer ? a so-called "cloud storage gateway." Target customers are mid-sized companies who are interested in cloud storage, but are concerned about exposing sensitive data or suffering from high latency.

"We connect our customers to partners, people like Iron Mountain and Amazon that provide cloud storage, and we are delivering it as a file server in your virtual environment," says Nasuni founder and CEO Andres

Rodriguez, who previously founded Archivas, an online storage management software vendor acquired by Hitachi Data Systems three years ago. 

Nasuni is based in Natick, Mass., with 18 employees, and has $8 million in first-round funding from North Bridge Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. Rodriguez says Nasuni has eight customers in alpha mode and is now offering the filer in a free public beta.

Nasuni's NAS file server runs in a VMware virtual machine and integrates with either Amazon S3 or Iron Mountain remote storage services, while providing features such as encryption, caching, deduplication, automatic provisioning, and synchronous snapshots.

Accessing cloud storage introduces latency, Rodriguez says, but Nasuni allows users to work with a local cache, speeding up access to data.

"It's quite clever," says IDC analyst Laura DuBois. "It does address security concerns in the form of encryption of data in flight and at rest, and it also certainly addresses the concerns around availability."

Nasuni is one of many startups building software and services that add capability to cloud platforms such as Amazon. For example, the company RightScale was founded to help customers build and clone virtual servers and manage storage in the cloud, and Symantec offers storage management for Amazon customers.

Nasuni will make its product generally available in the spring, and add more partners before doing so, according to Rodriguez. Nasuni will start charging customers after the beta trial, with fees starting around $250 a month. Although two vendors will be involved in each sale, customers would receive just one bill, which could come either from Nasuni or a partner depending on the billing model, he says. Read more here

Source: Laser Focus World

Fiber lasers are bringing femtosecond technology to the masses. How fast they're coming, and whether they have already arrived, depends on your definition of "femtosecond technology." If all you want are modest-energy pulses lasting hundreds of femtoseconds, commercial femtosecond fiber lasers can easily meet your needs. If you want the absolute bleeding edge of ultrafast technology, with attosecond pulse duration and/or extremely high pulse energy, you still need a Ti:sapphire laser. In between, you have choices.

Moreover, the state of the art in fiber-laser technology is advancing rapidly. Fiber oscillators have yet to compete with solid-state Ti:sapphire lasers for all high-end ultrafast applications, says Frank Wise of Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), "but their potential is enormous and some recent advances make it clear that fiber lasers are going to get there." Just a few days after he said that, I saw a report that erbium-doped fibers had generated a single-cycle pulse. To read more, click here.

Source: R&D magazine

Computer-based machining systems make basic metalcutting a largely plug-and-play process. In most cases, a 3-D CAD file run through a CAM package and posted to a CNC machine tool will produce a part that resembles the original model. However, it's far from a sure thing that the part will totally fulfill the function its designer intended. In reality, the experience and perception of those who manage the advanced machining systems ultimately determine how closely the final results reflect an engineer's intent.

Michael Rufo, principal engineer and leader of the Advanced Systems Group at Boston Engineering Corporation, Waltham, Mass., says engineers usually are familiar with the machining operations required to turn their designs into tangible parts.

"Most engineers have built things before," he says, "but there are always things that you don't see." So, to one degree or another, an engineer depends on the machine shop that makes his parts to identify problematic features from a manufacturing process point of view. To read more, click here.

Source: R&D Magazine

With Recovery Act funds in hand and more on the way, labs continue their outreach.

To say that the outlook for government R&D laboratory executives is brighter for 2010 than 2009 would be a great understatement. At this time last year most laboratories were scrambling to adjust to a short-term financial upheaval brought about by an across-the-board freeze on budgets until March 2009. Additional question marks about the outcome of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and personnel changes associated with a change in federal administration put some laboratories in the position of retrenchment.

For 2010 there are still questions. But the prospects are far more certain, and the outlook has certainly taken a turn for the better, say participants in the 2009 R&D CEO Roundtable, an annual open forum discussion about the state of R&D at government labs hosted by R&D Magazine on Nov. 12, 2009, at the Renaissance Orlando Hotel at Sea World, Orlando, Fla. A change in administration, the appointment of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and ARRA funding appear to have turned the tide.

2010 budget breakdown
In contrast to 2008's outlook for FY2009, participants were, in general, upbeat about the prospects for constructive and beneficial science being done at U.S. Department of Energy and NASA facilities. However, some worry whether the expiration of ARRA funds will put them back into a similar situation as at the end of 2008. To read more, click here.

Source: GLGgroup.com

As stated in this source article, overall cleantech investment growth is expected in 2010 driven by energy efficiency and IPOs in Asia that are increasingly dominating the sector. Amidst increasing Chinese cleantech venture funding, the overall trajectory of the U.S. economy and stock market will have play a role in global financing over the course of the year. Read more here.

Source: Businessweek

During the boom, Silicon Valley's entrepreneurs dreamed of taking their companies public for all the recognition-and cash- that an initial public offering bestowed.  But a growing number of tech's hottest startups are passing on the process, or at least delaying it indefinitely.  Read more here.  

Source: The New York Times

The world’s biggest and most expensive physics experiment will finally be going into regular operation later this month, but it is going to operate at only half power for the next two years, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said Thursday. Read more here.

We noticed that the show was a bit quiet. Was it because the venue is larger? Was it because some of the scientific attendance didnt come this year, given the change in location? Everybody seemed to agree on the better organization, nicer choice for the largest show in optics/photonics of the year. Rumors were contradicting each other as to when the show would go back to San Jose: next year? in 3 years? in 5 years? The later the better.

The South Hall gathered all the best/big players in my opinion and Amplitude/Crystal Laser/Imagine Optic/Fastlite booth was impressive: large, well designed, well situated, with loads of dynamic features (among which, disco lights, much to the taste of Samuel Bucourt).

Quantel had also made great improvement to their booth. A new marketing campaign, with bold colors and fun pictures. They indicated the traffic on the booth was way better than in San Jose, maybe due to a larger booth, better visibility and good situation.

The French pavilion was more open, and hosted regular visitors of the show: IXFiber, KLOE, Teem Photonics, Cordouan Technologies, etc.

The talk with executive perspectives on the world of optics and photonics provided us with a few insights:

• The active photonics market represents 127 billions worldwide. Flat panels market is the #1 market, by far. Solar shipments (PV) have grown dramatically and on a constant basis since 1980. Laser shipments from 1968 to 2009 show an average of 13% growth rate but we can notice a downturn about every nine years. The last one was in 2000, and 2009 proved to be one as well.

Read this excerpt of "LASER MARKETPLACE 2010: How wide is the chasm?" : "Despite the economy, financial performance of individual laser companies was largely a function of the particular market sectors served. While semiconductor, telecom, and materials processing were hit hard in 2009, instrumentation, military, and biomedical sectors fared better.

(...)So taking into account last year's "cyclic" performance, tempered with the upbeat attitude (and increasing orders) of most laser manufacturers going into 2010, all while heeding the caution that the bottom we've hit could be long and wide, Laser Focus World forecasts an increase of 11.1% in laser sales worldwide for 2010, bringing the sales total to $5.91 billion-still a long way from the $7.01 billion actuals in 2008. That said, laser sales are very much dependent on the health of the particular market segment in which they play. In 2009 as in previous years, 81% of laser industry sales were concentrated in three primary market segments: communications, data storage, and materials processing. And in 2010 (as in 2009), certain sectors will fare better than the rest."

To read more, click here.

• Discussions among the panel showed that generally speaking, industry executives thought the market hit botton in Mid-2009 and started to recover afterward. How much is recovery and how much is rebuilding the inventory? we'll know that in 6 months.

Europe was last to come down and fast to come back. Recovery was driven by R&D (stimulus) and semi-conductor OEMs. There were concerns about the resets of budgets in academia in a couple of years, once the stimulus is over. On the 8 billions the NIH got from the stimulus, only 2 were spent and it is not clear on what they were spent on. The panel expected more consolidation to come in 2010, especially if the economy picks up. Now is a great time to buy but a poor time to sell: as some dont have any choice but to sell, the rest will try to hold to their companies.

See you next year.

Source: MHT

New England tech companies may be putting the recession in their rearview mirrors based on hiring and confidence data collected by Mass High Tech in the fourth quarter of 2009.

Almost one third of the regional tech companies responding to MHT's quarterly Pulse survey (30.8 percent) plan to grow their local head count by more than 10 percent in early 2010.

With 18.9 percent of the 567 respondents saying they will boost hiring by at least 20 percent, that marks the highest total for that hiring level in more than a year and a half. While biotech, medical and Internet companies were most likely to grow their staffs by at least 20 percent, growth was expected in all tech sectors.
To read more, click here.

Source: MHT

One of the hottest business sectors these days is mobile technology. And New England, in particular, has successfully managed to parlay its deep experience in making the equipment and infrastructure of telecommunications and networking.

While the storied companies of the past - Cabletron Inc., Chipcom and even Digital Equipment Corp. - were focused on the cutting edge of wired connectivity, wireless is now the hot topic.

There are plenty of hardware and equipment makers locally focused on building wireless parts, including chipmaker Skyworks Solutions Inc. of Woburn, which just posted record revenue, and mobile switch maker Starent Networks Corp., which was acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. for $2.9 billion in October.
To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

An analysis of the stock price performance of New England technology companies during the first decade of this century shows that life sciences companies dominated, providing the greatest return from 2000 through 2009.

Of nearly 60 companies taken from the Mass High Tech and Bentley University New England Technology Stock Index, Hologic Inc. of Bedford, a maker of women's health products, led the top performers by ending 2009 at 866.7 percent of its 2000 share price.

At the same time, some of the companies suffering the greatest losses in share price value were on the IT side - networking and Internet infrastructure companies as well as software and semiconductors.
To read more, click here.

Source: OptoIQ

Source: OptoIQ

Raman spectroscopy promises to revolutionize cancer diagnosis and detection. An understanding of system components and their key parameters can enhance its for applications such as in vivo screening.

Optical spectroscopy provides a rapid, quantitative, noninvasive alternative to traditional cancer screening and detection techniques such as biopsies with histological analysis. Researchers working under Anita Mahadevan-Jansen at Vanderbilt University, Michael Feld at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (see www.bioopticsworld.com/articles/340114), Robert Alfano at City University of New York (see www.bioopticsworld.com/articles/345204) and Arjun Yodh at the University of Pennsylvania (see www.bioopticsworld.com/articles/322985) have demonstrated useful biomedical applications using a variety of spectroscopic approaches. To read more, click here.

Source: OptoIQ

In vivo optical molecular imaging (OMI) is poised to move into clinical use as one of the key tools in personalized medicine, complementing more established imaging tools such as CT and MRI. Growth of equipment sales is on track to reach $400 million in 2014 and nearly $1 billion by the end of the decade. However, this strong growth hinges on partnerships with key medical equipment vendors, the outcomes of clinical trials assessing imaging agents, regulatory approvals, patent litigation, and decisions about insurance reimbursement. These are some of the findings of a new market report from Strategies Unlimited.

Optical molecular imaging is an attractive and cost-effective tool for examining and monitoring disease states and todetermine a drug's effectiveness in living tissue. Highly portable, fast, and less expensive than conventional imaging technologies, it has the potential to bring sophisticated diagnostics right to the doctor's office. When coupled with more traditional imaging tools such as CT and MRI, optical imaging adds an unprecedented degree of quantification and specificity to the healthcare decision-making process. To read more, click here.

Source: OptoIQ

Nonlinear Raman microscopy is an emerging technique in biomedical imaging. An inexpensive prototype system, based on coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS), demonstrates value for real-time, minimally invasive chemical analysis of cells and tissues. It overcomes drawbacks of both Raman and CARS, and in doing so demonstrates potential for clinical application-including blood analysis and breast cancer detection.

Spectroscopy provides quantitative and chemically specific analysis of cells and tissues in a truly non-invasive way. Raman scattering of light by molecules can reveal vibrational and rotational modes, for example-but while Raman microspectroscopy has seemed a promising tool for bioimaging, its weak signal strength and background fluorescence are major obstacles to generation of unambiguous results in real time.¹ Recently, though, improved acquisition speed has drawn significant attention to nonlinear Raman microspectroscopy. To read more, click here.

Source: The Boston Globe

Source: Xconomy

Google is the undisputed king of Internet search and advertising, but its second act as a company might be to invent a new computer model for efficiently discovering targeted antibody drugs.

“Google is committing incredible resources to it. Incredible resources,” says Tillman Gerngross, the founder and CEO of Lebanon, NH-based Adimab. “The infrastructure alone is in the millions of dollars of raw computational power.”

Gerngross won’t say exactly how much money and manpower Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) is putting into his startup, so it would be easy to dismiss this as chest-thumping from an overzealous biotech entrepreneur who’s just trying to raise cash. But Gerngross isn’t in that tight spot. He’s the Dartmouth professor who founded GlycoFi to make faster, cheaper antibody drugs in yeast, and sold the company to Merck for $400 million in 2006. His new company, Lebanon, NH-based Adimab, has struck deals in the past year to produce antibody drug candidates for Merck, Roche, Pfizer, and one other unnamed pharmaceutical giant. Those partnerships have given Adimab enough cash to run for the next 10 years, Gerngross says.

Google first made its interest in Adimab clear back in October. That’s when its corporate venture arm led an undisclosed financing that included Polaris Venture Partners, SV Life Sciences, OrbiMed Advisors, and Borealis Ventures. I spoke with Gerngross at length about the strategy behind this investment a couple weeks ago at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. We met one day before Adimab held a board meeting not far from the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Read more here

Source: The Washington Post

DAVOS, SWITZERLAND -- The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $10 billion over the next decade to research vaccines and make them available to the world's poorest countries, the Microsoft co-founder and his wife said Friday.

Calling on governments and businesses to contribute, the Gateses said the initiative will produce higher immunization rates and is intended to protect 90 percent of children in poorer countries against such dangerous conditions as diarrhea and pneumonia.

"We must make this the decade of vaccines," Bill Gates said in a statement. "Vaccines already save and improve millions of lives in developing countries. Innovation will make it possible to save more children than ever before." Read more here

Source: Mass High Tech

The Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, which administers the 10-year, $10 billion Massachusetts Life Sciences Act, has announced it has set aside $3 million to launch a matching grant program for small companies.

This is the first time since the bill was enacted in July of 2008 that the center has opted to give out cash awards to companies. Previous grants has been directed to infrastructure and academic researchers, while companies have received loans and tax credits. The Life Sciences Center was tasked with setting up a number of grant programs as part of the bill but has had to delay implementation, due in part to budget cuts.

The new small business matching grant program that will match federal small business grant funding — from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation or the Department of Defense — for early-stage life sciences companies in Massachusetts. The MLSC will begin accepting online applications for the new program on Monday, Feb. 1. 

The program will provide matching grants of up to $500,000 to eligible life sciences companies. MLSC officials said they would seek out companies whose products are production-ready and those that are likely to create additional jobs in the state. Read more here