Source: Mass High Tech

Waltham-based Phase Forward, which offers data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety, has announced a multi-year, multi-million dollar extension of an earlier agreement with contract research organization (CRO) Everest Clinical Research Services Inc.

The original deal was signed in 2007 and had Everest using Phase Forward’s InForm Integrated Trial Management and its hosted Central Designer module Electronic Data Capture solution. The companies did not disclose financial details.

Everest, based in Little Falls, N.J., was established by a team formerly with Pharmacia Corp., and has been an independent CRO since Pharmacia’s acquisition by Pfizer five years ago.

Phase Forward (Nasdaq: PFWD) claims to have more than 90 CRO customers.

Earlier this week, Phase Forward announced another multi-year extension of a license and services agreement involving InForm, this one with Danish health-care company Novo Nordisk.

Last week, Phase Forward said that it had purchased Waban Software, a Cambridge-based clinical data analysis and reporting applications maker, for $14 million cash. The acquisition will form the Waban Software Group within Phase Forward, the companies reported.

For 2008, Phase Forward generated revenue of $170.2 million, a 27 percent increase from $134.3 million in 2007. The company’s net income, however, was $13.8 million for 2008, compared to $29.2 million in 2007. To know more, click here.

Source: Biophotonics

CARS visualizes lipids in cancer metastasis, p.12-13 (studies by Cheng at Purdue University)

Shedding light on cancer, p.20-23

Researchers are using FLIM to study brain tissue from epileptic patients, p.33

Source: Laser Focus World

The following articles are of interest:

SRS microscopy maps distribution of lipids, drugs, p.24-25 ; Xialiang Sunney Xie of Harvard (who developed CARS) explains the technology, said to be more sensitive than CARS.

STD microscopy continues to push the bounds of resolution, p.28-30 ;

Fast laser pulses probe cell biology by selective destruction, p.45-48 ;about laser cell surgery.

Full-field OCT approaches clinical application, p.69-71 ; researchers iamge breast cancer tissue with histology-like results.

Fiber lasers present new safety challenges, p.73-76, with special mention of femto and pico second pulse lasers.

Source: Laser Focus World

Lasers at terawatt (1012 W) powers have potential for all kinds of interesting new physics, but the systems are bulky, inefficient, and plagued by the difficulty of managing the heat without melting the optics (see www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/318551). To push the boundaries of high-power laser science toward resolving these problems, German researchers have for the first time used ytterbium calcium fluoride (Yb:CaF₂) as an amplifying medium to demonstrate a diode-pumped, chirped-pulse laser amplifier system with a terawatt output.¹

Mathias Siebold and colleagues at the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena, Germany) and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany) used a direct-diode-pumped scheme, unlike previous approaches that required frequency doubling. “Other lasers have achieved petawatt output,” says Siebold, “but nearly all of them are flash-lamp pumped. Our system is all-direct-diode pumped, and has achieved record power for such a system. To know more, click here.

Source: BioOptics World

According to new data presented today at the American Urological Association’s (AUA) Annual meeting, real-time, in vivo confocal endomicroscopy may help urologists to differentiate low and high-grade bladder tumors from normal bladder tissue. Mauna Kea Technologies’ (Paris, France) Cellvizio, a probe-based confocal laser endomicroscopy (pCLE) system that provides live images of internal human tissues at the cellular level, is the subject of the work.

“With additional clinical investigation and further technological innovation, pCLE could provide a useful adjunct to white light cystoscopy in bladder cancer diagnosis and streamline patient management,” says Joseph Liao, Assistant Professor of Urology at Stanford University and Chief of Urology at Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, who led the investigation. “Adding pCLE may potentially improve the yield of bladder biopsy in some patients while avoiding unnecessary biopsy in others.”

The data were derived from research on 27 patients; the study represents the first in vivo microscopic evaluation of the human bladder using micro endoscopic technology and demonstrates that healthy and cancerous tissue may be differentiated in real time. It found that normal urothelium was characterized by a network of regular polygonal-shaped cells, with superficial umbrella cells larger than deeper intermediate cells. Meanwhile, high-grade tumors had much more architectural irregularity and cellular pleomorphism. To read more, click here.

Source: Innovation economy blog

The Mass Biotech Council’s Annual Meeting began with an overview of the group’s newly-issued strategic report, which observes that biotech in the Bay State is likely to undergo a serious shake-out in 2009. According to analysis by Deloitte and L.E.K. Consulting, half of all public biotech companies in the state could run out of cash before the end of this year, and one-third to one-half of all private companies will be out trying to raise money in 2009.

By the end of the day, things hadn’t gotten much sunnier. A panel on the economic outlook for the next year seemed to conclude that things will get worse, not better, for most life sciences companies over the coming year.

“If you have cash flow, are close to cash flow, or are cash flow positive,” the outlook isn’t so terrible, said Jonathan Fleming, managing general partner at Oxford Bioscience Partners. What’s happening right now, Fleming said, is kind of like a forest fire. A lot of things will burn, but that creates opportunities for new breakthroughs, he said.

MIT Sloan School economist Ernie Berndt suggested that companies working on diagnostics and vaccines will likely feel more wind at their backs than others. But Berndt noted that while disease foundations (like the Gates Foundation or the Michael J. Fox Foundation) have been ardent supporters of drug development over the past few years, that funding seems to be slowing in the current economic climate. To read more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Ultrafast fibre laser manufacturer Fianium has been awarded a coveted 2009 Queen’s Award for Enterprise: International Trade for its outstanding growth and export achievements in the rapidly expanding laser technology market. The company has grown 70% year on year since its formation in 2003, with over 80% of this growth coming from territories outside the UK including mainland Europe, USA and Asia.

Fianium founder and CEO Anatoly Grudinin commented: “Receiving this accolade is a well deserved reward for our talented team’s hard work and dedication over the last six years. 70% year on year growth is a fantastic achievement and I firmly believe that based on existing customer demand and longer-term market potential we’ll be able to maintain this for the next three to five years.” To read more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Manufacturing a precision surface requires a balance between satisfying the optimum quality requirements at the minimum cost. Steve Martinek summarizes the challenges of increasing the precision levels of optical interferometers for this application.

The successful manufacture of precision surfaces, components and systems for use in a range of applications critically depends on the ability to confirm their quality. Optical interferometry has become a widely accepted and extremely suitable metrology method for accomplishing this task despite the large diversity of test requirements.

Inherently precise and potentially accurate, owing to the sub-micrometre scale of wavelengths typically used to generate the interference fringes, the technique confronts a range of requirement challenges. These include lateral sizes ranging from tens of square micrometres to hundreds of square metres, vertical resolution and repeatability in the nanometre to sub-angstrom rms regime, wavelengths from 193 nm to 10.6 µm, and the ever-present insistence for low-cost solutions. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

New approaches to obtaining diffraction-limited beams from large-mode-area fibres point to unprecedented ruggedness and output powers. Breck Hitz investigates.

At the turn of the century virtually every laser conference boasted announcements of fibre lasers with diffraction-limited beams offering higher and higher power levels. But during the past four or five years there have been no such announcements. The levels reached in 2004 and 2005 – somewhat over a kilowatt or, in one or two hero experiments, 2 kW – have not been exceeded.

The limiting problem is also the chief advantage of fibre lasers: their very high surface-area-to-volume ratio. Difficulty in extracting waste heat ultimately limits the output power of all conventional optically pumped solid-state lasers. Because a fibre intrinsically has such a large surface-area-to-volume ratio, the overheating issue is removed. But the very geometry that solves one problem produces another.

The metres long, approximately 10 µm diameter core of a singlemode fibre laser requires that significant power densities propagate over large distances, and that is precisely the recipe for nonlinear effects such as stimulated Brillouin scattering, stimulated Raman scattering and self-phase modulation. These nonlinear effects reduce the intracavity laser power and eventually limit the laser’s output. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Clinical trials management company Phase Forward Inc. reports it has entered into a multi-year, multi-million dollar license and services agreement with Danish health care company Novo Nordisk.

The new deal, financial details of which were not released, expands upon the existing relationship between the two companies, according to company officials. Novo Nordisk says it will use Phase Forward’s electronic data capture product called InForm as its default data capture system across all clinical trial phases.

Waltham-based Phase Forward (Nasdaq: PFWD) has been serving up the InForm service to Novo Nordisk under an application service provider (ASP) arrangement since 2006, officials said. The Danish company says it is already using InForm to support trials in more than 30 countries.

Earlier this month, Phase Forward bought Waban Software, a Cambridge-based clinical data analysis and reporting applications maker, for $14 million cash. The acquisition will form the Waban Software Group within Phase Forward.

In September, Phase Forward acquired Radnor, Pa.-based Clarix LLC for $40 million in cash. Clarix makes web-based clinical trials software, focusing on interactive response technology for managing data during studies.

Phase Forward’s products and services have been used in clinical trials from Boston Scientific Corp., Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Harvard Clinical Research Institute and sanofi-aventis, among others. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

A new listing of the top water technology companies in the world from The Artemis Project includes four companies based in New England, with two of the top three being locally grown.

Cambridge-based desalination technology developer Oasys Water Inc., which landed $10 million in venture funding in February, and Vermont-based Seldon Technologies Inc., which makes water filtration and purification devices based on nanomaterials, were listed as numbers two and three, respectively, on the list.

Stealth-mode startups 349Q Inc. of Somerville, which was launched by Bang Ventures co-founder Mark Modzelewski, and Electrolytic Ozone Inc. of Cambridge were also included on the list, ranking at numbers 42 and 44, respectively.

The listing was the first in what officials at The Artemis Project, a California-based consultantcy and research firm focused on water technology, expect to be an annual feature. The water tech firm rankings were conducted using a scoring system by intellectual property advisory group ipCapital Group of Williston, Vt., and incorporated the strength and breadth of a company’s intellectual property as well as its proposed technologies. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

If one were to allocate stereotypical baseball personas to New England’s technology clusters, they would provide a pretty typical cast of characters — biotech as the possibly over-hyped star in the prime of his career who performs almost, but not quite, up to the talk around him; telecommunications as the wily veteran getting a jolt of youth through its relatively new marriage to mobile; and clean tech, the recent call-up from the minors in which everyone sees potential, but who still has some learning and maturity to go through.

Robotics, however, breaks the mold. As a sector, robotics has been around too long to be considered a rookie, yet is still relatively unknown to most of the region. It has shown some considerable power — two of the most well-known and successful robotics companies in the nation, iRobot Inc. (Bedford) and Foster-Miller Inc. (Waltham), call New England home — but as an industry sector (rather than a platform technology that enables other sectors), it still seems to be holding back with a number of potential home runs waiting in the wings. To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Waltham-based software maker Gennius Inc. is looking to launch a specialized analytical application to help customers tell if they are getting their money’s worth for their health care dollars.

Gennius, which offers applications that assist companies manage the quality and compliance of physicians in a network, now wants to broaden its customer base to include organizations that contract for medical services, according to president and CEO Bernadette Downey. Such customers, she said, could use the new system’s ability to deal with complex health care-specific variables. For instance, an insurer could use the Gennius system to evaluate a hospital’s performance, or a hospital could employ it to evaluate a physician group with whom it has a contract. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

If there were any doubt that Greater Boston is holding its own as an international hub for the mobile industry, you only need to look at the growth of the local chapter of Mobile Monday, an international organization sponsoring regional networking groups focused on the mobile industry.

The first meeting of the local Mobile Monday (MoMo) chapter was held in April 2006 and played host to approximately 20 people in a classroom at MIT. Now, looking ahead to the group’s next event, to be held next week at the Fairmont Copley Plaza hotel, it is expected to draw more than 500 attendees and will include a keynote address by Gov. Deval Patrick.

Kate Imbach, the marketing director for Boston-based Skyhook Wireless Inc. and one of the organizers of the local chapter of MoMo, said the rise of the organization mirrors the growth in the local mobile industry, which includes application developers, infrastructure makers, technology platform developers and all kinds of companies in between. “I think we have a perfect storm here of universities, venture capital and entrepreneurs to become one of the largest mobile hubs in the world,” Imbach said.

MoMo as an organization was started in Helsinki, Finland in 2000, but MoMo Boston has become the largest chapter in the world — followed closely by Los Angeles, London and Amsterdam, according to Imbach. The local volunteer organization is led by Imbach from Skyhook and Matt Gross, a general manager at Boston-based uLocate Communications Inc. To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Mobile Monday Boston, a networking organization centered around the mobile and wireless industry in Boston, has released its quarterly investment review of the greater Boston mobile industry, reporting $215 million in investment in local mobile companies for the three-month period.

The total represents the largest quarterly investment in mobile in the past five quarters, according to organization officials, and includes both private and public financings over 11 local companies.

Burlington-based Nuance Communications Inc. led the investment with the January sale of 17.4 million shares of stock, valued at $175 million. The quarter also included private venture capital investments in wireless infrastructure company Quantia Communications LLC of Newton, enterprise mobile software organizations Onset Technology Inc. of Waltham and Vela Systems Inc. of Burlington, and mobile advertising firms Quattro Wireless Inc. of Waltham and Extreme Reach Inc. of Needham. To know more, click here.

Source:R&D magazine

When photographers zoom in on an object to see it better, they lose the wide-angle perspective—they are forced to trade off “big picture” context for detail. But now an imaging method developed by Princeton researchers could lead to lenses that show all parts of the scene at once in the same high detail. The new method could help build more powerful microscopes and other optical devices.

“It allows you to take a closer look at an object without narrowing your field of view,” said Jason Fleischer, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Princeton who led the research. The study, co-written with graduate students Christopher Barsi and Wenjie Wan, is reported as the cover story in the April edition of Nature Photonics.

Cameras and other optical devices—including the human eye—are limited by the amount of light that they can collect through their lens openings, or apertures. In order for a light ray to be recorded, it has to pass through the lens and reach the device’s “detector”—such as the eye’s retina or a digital camera’s detector. But many light rays never make it to the detector, either because they are too weak, or because they are deflected. (…)

The new method addresses the shortcomings of small apertures by taking advantage of the unusual properties of substances called nonlinear optical materials. In conventional lens materials such as glass or plastic, rays of light pass through without interacting with one another. In nonlinear materials, light rays mix with each other in complex ways. Rays that don’t reach the camera may pass along some of their information to rays that do get recorded by it. Thanks to the mixing of rays, information that would otherwise be lost manages to reach the camera.

The image from a nonlinear lens would therefore be rich in detail. Unfortunately, it would also be distorted—and useless for conventional optics. But if the information could be unscrambled, a computer could reconstruct a high-resolution undistorted image of the entire scene. “In such an image all parts of the scene will be ‘zoomed in’ at the same time,” said Fleischer. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

After tanking in late 2008, confidence among New England technology company managers showed signs of life in the first three months of 2009, according to a quarterly Mass High Tech research survey.

The Pulse of Technology survey of more than 700 managers showed that those saying they are “very confident” about technology sector growth rose by three percentage points, to 20.5 percent, in the research conducted from January through March. The gains among the most confident came at the expense of “not confident,” which dropped three percentage points during the same period.

The “very confident” total still fell short of the 24-to-26 percent scores of the first nine months of 2008. However, the confidence ratings were partially supported by stability, if not growth, in hiring plans. The respondents expecting decreases in their local work force dropped two percentage points to the negligible levels of early 2008, while 43.9 percent of respondents said they planned no change in staffing, up from 35.4 percent in Q4 2008. To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Clinical trials management company Phase Forward Inc. has bought Waban Software, a Cambridge-based clinical data analysis and reporting applications maker, for $14 million cash. The acquisition will form the Waban Software Group within Phase Forward, the companies reported.

Waban Software Inc., founded in 2001, makes life-sciences information management software products for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Its acquisition by Phase Forward will give the Waltham company additional biobanking, pharmacogenomics and biomarker development capabilities. Waban, which employs 81 workers and has its operations in Mumbai, India, will move its local operations to Waltham and will appoint president Himanshu Oberoi to the role of vice president of Waban Software Group, Phase Forward. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

For months, advocates of clean tech have positioned it as a vehicle for economic recovery, with New England’s clean tech cluster leading the way. Now that the president’s economic stimulus initiative is in place, we asked CEOs of several New England clean tech companies about the bill’s impact on their sector, and what else government can do to spur the energy economy. To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

This week’s issue has two elements that, taken separately, suggest that clean technology is a burgeoning industry and that the other New England states are active in technology and are becoming fertile ground for young upstarts to grow their roots. Taken together, which we hope you’ll do, there is a larger story: Industry clusters — which each state is trying to grow independently by linking entrepreneurs, universities, financiers and public-sector agencies — know no geographical boundaries. Companies that form a cluster start by selling regionally, then branching out nationally or internationally. (For example, First Wind was born in Massachusetts, but is building out in Rhode Island.) In Maine, materials companies (and more and more biotechs) that are growing often come to Boston for capital. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

The James Webb Space Telescope’s first mirror segment has completed its initial series of temperature trials.

cryogenic testing

The first mirror segment that will fly on the James Webb Space Telescope has completed its initial series of cryogenic temperature tests in the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, US.

The segment is the first of 18 mirror segments that will be joined to make a giant, 6.5 m diameter hexagonal mirror. During the test, the segment was subject to temperatures of -248 degrees centigrade in a 215 cubic-metre helium-cooled vacuum chamber at NASA Marshall. To read more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Femtosecond source’s “extremely fast” wavelength tuning could find applications in multiphoton microscopy and optical coherence tomography.

Femtosecond laser set-up

A femtosecond soliton source with fast and broad spectral tunability has been developed by researchers in Argentina. The source, which comprises a Ti:sapphire laser and a highly nonlinear photonic-crystal fibre, can be tuned from 850 nm to 1000 nm with nearly constant pulse width and average power (Optics Letters 34 842).

“The laser can be tuned simply by controlling the power launched into the fibre, which has two advantages,” Martin Masip, a researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, told optics.org. “First, the tunability is controlled by an electronic device, which results in a robust scheme with no mechanical movable parts. Second, the wavelength can be changed extremely fast.”To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Marie Freebody speaks to Fianium’s chief executive officer, Anatoly Grudinin, to find out how misconceptions about ultrafast fibre lasers are threatening their commercial success.

Anatoly Grudinin is chief executive officer and founder of Fianium, a UK-based fibre laser company focused on volume manufacturing of ultrafast fibre lasers for biomedical and industrial applications. Grudinin has been working in fibre optics since joining the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Science in 1980. Between 1992 and 2003 Grudinin worked at the University of Southampton, UK, conducting research into ultrafast fibre lasers and nonlinear fibre optics.

Anatoly Grudinin

How do ultrafast fibre lasers work?
In many respects, ultrafast fibre lasers are similar to conventional continuous-wave or nanosecond fibre lasers. In all three cases, the lasers are configured as master-oscillator power-amplifier systems. In terms of architecture, lasers producing long, nanosecond, picosecond or femtosecond pulses are the same. The main difference is in the design of the master oscillator.

At Fianium we use a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM) as one of the cavity reflectors. The other reflector is similar in design to those used in conventional fibre lasers. The magic of the SESAM is that its reflectivity grows with pulse intensity and thus naturally promotes ultrashort pulse generation.

To read more, click here.

Source: The Boston Globe

Despite the global credit crunch, a handful of large Bay State life-sciences companies say they are continuing to expand.

Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc., which is gearing up to market a highly anticipated drug to treat hepatitis C, plans to hire 200 to 300 new employees this year in Massachusetts. The company currently has at least 1,300 employees, including more than 1,000 at its Cambridge headquarters.

“We are relatively unaffected” by the recession, said chief executive Joshua Boger. “We raised almost $1 billion in the last 12 months in the midst of this capital crunch. We raised $320 million in February in the public market in two hours, so it is possible.”(more)

Source: Mass High Tech

Watertown-based A123 Systems Inc. has announced a $15 million investment from GE Energy Financial Services and GE Capital Equity to expand the company’s lithium ion battery manufacturing and smart grid capabilities in the U.S. The investment brings GE’s total of seven funding events in A123 to about $70 million, giving the firm more than a 10 percent share of the battery maker’s ownership.

The investment in A123 will support new jobs at the company’s existing facilities in Hopkinton and in Novi, Mich., as well as its new factories under construction in Michigan. The new plants, for which A123 is currently seeking additional financing from federal and state stimulus funds, will be used to produce battery systems for hybrid and plug-in electric vehicles.

A123 announced last week that it was chosen to supply energy storage systems for Chrysler LLC’s first-generation ENVI range-extended electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles.

To know more, click here.

Source: The Economist

When last year’s Nobel prize for chemistry was awarded to the discoverers of green fluorescent protein, the pages of newspapers (this one included) lit up with photographs of “brainbows”. Jeff Lichtman, the neurobiologist who created those pictures, had used the discovery to invent a way to tag nerve cells with genes whose products fluoresce green, red and blue. By mixing these three hues in different proportions he was able to “paint” the cells in question in more than a hundred different colours. (More)

Source: Boston Globe

WASHINGTON - When Dave deBronkart, a tech-savvy kidney cancer survivor, tried to transfer his medical records from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center to Google Health, a new free service that lets patients keep all their health records in one place and easily share them with new doctors, he was stunned at what he found.

Google said his cancer had spread to either his brain or spine - a frightening diagnosis deBronkart had never gotten from his doctors - and listed an array of other conditions that he never had, as far as he knew, like chronic lung disease and aortic aneurysm. A warning announced his blood pressure medication required “immediate attention.”

“I wondered, ‘What are they talking about?’ ” said deBronkart, who is 59 and lives in Nashua.

DeBronkart eventually discovered the problem: Some of the information in his Google Health record was drawn from billing records, which sometimes reflect imprecise information plugged into codes required by insurers. Google Health and others in the fast-growing personal health record business say they are offering a revolutionary tool to help patients navigate a fragmented healthcare system, but some doctors fear that inaccurate information from billing data could lead to improper treatment. To know more, click here.

Source: Yahoo! News

A common, harmless human virus can target and kill breast cancer stem cells, Canadian researchers report.
“We suspected that reovirus might be effective against cancer stem cells, because we have shown time and again how well it destroys regular cancer cells,” Dr. Patrick Lee, a cancer researcher at Dalhousie Medical School in Halifax, Nova Scotia, said in a news release. He explained the importance of targeting cancer stem cells.
“Cancer stem cells are essentially mother cells. They continuously produce new cancer cells, aggressively forming tumors even when there are only a few of them,” said Lee, who added that cancer stem cells are resistant to chemotherapy and radiation. (More)

Source: The Washington Post

Scientists have produced strong new evidence challenging one of the most fundamental assumptions in biology: that female mammals, including women, are born with all the eggs they will ever have.

In a provocative set of experiments involving mice, Chinese researchers have shown for the first time that an adult mammal can harbor primitive cells in her ovaries that can become new eggs and produce healthy offspring, they reported yesterday. While much more research is needed to confirm and explore the findings, the work raises the tantalizing possibility that it could someday lead to new ways to fight a woman’s biological clock, perhaps by stockpiling her egg-producing cells or by stimulating them to make eggs again.(More)

Source: Healthcare IT News

BOSTON – David Blumenthal, MD, the newly appointed National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, sees “major hurdles” for the HITECH Act, according to a New England Journal of Medicine article.

The HITECH Act, the portion of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) that deals with healthcare information technology, is set to help doctors adopt HIT, specifically electronic health records.

The law uses a “carrot and stick approach” where eligible doctors will receive incentive payments for the first five years for demonstrating “a meaningful use” of EHR technology and demonstrated performance during the reporting period for each payment year. If an eligible professional does not demonstrate meaningful use by 2015, his/her reimbursement payments under Medicare will begin to be reduced. No incentive payment will be made after 2016.

Blumethal says spurring the adoption of EHRs and other HIT will probably require more than financial carrots and sticks.

“Proponents of HIT expansion face substantial problems,” he said. “Few U.S. doctors or hospitals – perhaps 17 percent and 10 percent, respectively – have even basic EHRs, and there are significant barriers to their adoption and use: their substantial cost, the perceived lack of financial return from investing in them, the technical and logistic challenges involved in installing, maintaining and updating them, and consumers’ and physicians’ concerns about the privacy and security of electronic health information.” To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

From software to solar, potato plastics to privacy, New England companies, entrepreneurs and officials are taking initiatives to position the region to lead a national economic recovery and to carve out niches where New Englanders can thrive long term. Inside this issue, we examine some of the region’s emerging clusters, success stories and recovery efforts.

News

• Location is good, location is bad. Being a tech company in the North Country presents challenges and opportunities.
• Material witnesses: New Hampshire and Maine leverage a manufacturing heritage to create a materials cluster.
• The robotics cluster is growing in New England, but a lack of robotics programs in colleges raises a red flag.
• Going proactive: Some New Englanders aren’t going to sit back and wait for data privacy problems.
• Turning stimulus money into action. Six governors have their own approaches to recovery and all are going online to monitor stimulus funds.

Inside Report

• Clean tech CEOs address the impact of the economic stimulus package on their industries.
• Six against the tide: A look at tech company success stories in each state.
• CyberStates: See where your state ranks in tech employment and pay

Special Supplement

• The Cleantech Directory: Mass High Tech has compiled the first comprehensive directory of New England’s clean technology companies, with key data on 415 firms in alternative energy, energy efficiency, water treatment and more. See the special supplement.
• To know more, click here.

Source: Greentech Media

The battery startup will have to prove its battery technology is a good fit for electric cars. It lost a bid to sell battery cells to GM, which opted for a technology that can hold more energy. by: Ucilia Wang

A123systems won a crucial deal to supply Chrysler with battery cells and co-develop battery packs for the carmaker’s plug-in hybrid and all-electric. The Monday announcement is a coup for the startup battery developer in Watertown, Mass., which recently lost a bid to sell battery cells to General Motors for powering the Chevy Volt (see With General Motors Snub, Is A123 Systems on the Ropes?). The Volt is GM’s first plug-in hybrid electric car, which is used by GM to trumpet its technical achievement and serious intention to make cars with low-carbon emission. To know more, click here.

Source: HS Daily

U.S. physicists have created the first curved laser beams; the laser’s plasma channels could be used to control lightning strikes by firing laser pulses into thunderclouds

We have written many stories about lasers – lasers on the battlefield, lasers for destroying ballistic missiles in their flights, lasers for killing mosquitoes dead in the fight against insect-borne disease (see 17 March 2009 HS Daily Wire). Indeed, writes New Scientist’s Colin Barras, lasers have thousands of applications in every section of modern society. All these laser beams used in all these applications are fundamentally similar — single-colored and straight.

Now, U.S. physicists have helped to change that by creating the first curved laser beams. This breakthrough could one day help guide lightning to the ground. Optics researchers led by Pavel Polynkin at the University of Arizona in Tucson generated 35-femtosecond-long laser pulses from a standard titanium-sapphire system. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

t Mass High Tech’s Clean Tech Forum today a panel of local clean tech industry insiders agreed that while the sector is growing, more needs to be done by both industry and state and federal agencies if New England is to become one of the leading clean technology centers of the world.

Growing the cluster is not a “check box,” said Phil Giudice, commissioner of the Massachusetts Division of Energy Resources, and both industry and the state have a lot to do. However, he said, the tools are in place to make it happen.

As part of the discussion, Giudice and New England Clean Energy Council president Nick d’Arbeloff also noted a new program the state has recently rolled out called the Governor’s Clean Energy Challenge, aimed at providing incentives for companies to increase their energy efficiency.

Among the major issues discussed before an audience of approximately 200, panelists said the manufacturing segment of the clean energy sector was being held back, both by funding and by the complex siting and permitting issues that come with building a new manufacturing or production plant in the region. To know more, click here.

Source: Boston Business Journal

The brand-spanking new offices of Zafgen Inc. could belong to any kind of company — design firm, ad agency, you name it. But it’s a four-person biotech company with an active pipeline of obesity fighting drugs. The science, the legal department, the human resources manager are all outsourced. Until its move Friday, the company was even sharing its voice-mail system with another company. (More)

Yet another great event by Xconomy, around mobile innovation, at the new Microsoft R&D center in Cambridge.

Source: Xconomy, Wade Roush

A standing-room-only crowd gathered yesterday for Xconomy’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England, hosted by Microsoft at its gorgeous new New England Research and Development Center (or NERD, as Microsoft’s Reed Sturtevant called it). Google’s Rich Miner, MIT’s Sandy Pentland, and two panels’ worth of mobile entrepreneurs were on hand to share their latest thinking about the best ways for startups to gain and maintain a foothold in the mobile industry.

If there was a single takeaway message from the event, I’d say it was this: It’s a time of great ferment in the mobile industry, with carrier restrictions on the distribution of consumer-oriented mobile applications finally breaking down. But it’s very difficult to build a sustainable business around a single application or a single mobile platform—so companies need to think flexibly about the audiences and platforms they develop for, the amount of capital they really need (and the sources from which they’ll raise it), and the combinations of revenue opportunities they’ll pursue.

Next week we plan to post some video outtakes from the event, but today we’ll round up some of the highlights:

—Xconomist Mark Lowenstein, the managing director at consulting firm Mobile Ecosystem, set the scene with a few statistics and observations. Mobile companies raised $500 million from New England venture investors last year, and have raised $5 billion cumulatively, he noted. The traditional barriers to entry in the mobile industry—the wireless carriers’ traditional protectiveness about giving access to cell phone “decks” or top-level menus to third-party application developers, for example—are falling fast. New England companies, with their longtime focus on good user interface design, are well positioned to take advantage of this change, Lowenstein said.

—Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, said his company has just added the 100 millionth access point to its global database of Wi-Fi network locations, part of its WPS location finding system. He said getting WPS onto the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch platforms was the key moment in Skyhook’s progress—but that, ironically, he dismissed Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ first call about the deal back in 2007 as a prank.

—Jamie Hall, the president of MocoSpace, said the mobile social network has grown to 6 million members, who view 2 billion pages every month. The key to MocoSpace’s success in mobile social networking—a business in which several other companies have dabbled without much success—was circumventing the carriers by doing everything “off-deck,” creating room for constant innovation and upgrades.

—Mort Rosenthal, CEO of Enterprise Mobile, said that even though Microsoft is the mobile device provisioning company’s sole investor, “If it’s a debate between Microsoft and the customer, the customer wins.” While the company specializes in deploying Windows Mobile devices into enterprises, it also works with other platforms, because customers demand it. And while the fragmentation of mobile technology across dozens of major devices from several large carriers is a bugaboo for most mobile companies, it’s actually what Enterprise Mobile thrives on. “An enterprise does not want a free-for-all,” Rosenthal said. “We [give them] one throat to choke.”

—Dave Grannan, CEO of vlingo, said his company realized early on that the mobile ecosystem wasn’t yet open enough to get vlingo’s mobile speech recognition system out to lots of users without a major strategic partner with existing carrier relationships. That partner turned out to be Yahoo—and while Grannan called landing the deal to get vlingo’s voice-driven interface built into Yahoo’s mobile platform “luck,” he also said it took persistence. It wasn’t until the fourth meeting with Yahoo that vlingo was able to convince the company to take a look at its technology. (And then Yahoo suddenly wanted to buy vlingo—but the startup was “not for sale,” Grannan said.)

—Jason Jacobs, CEO of FitnessKeeper, said there have been 300,000 downloads of his startup’s RunKeeper GPS fitness application for the iPhone 3G, with a surprisingly high percentage of users (he intimated 4 or 5 percent or more) of the free app converting to the paid “RunKeeper Pro” app. That’s creating enough revenue to cover the company’s current burn rate—which is low, because many of the FitnessKeeper team members are being paid in equity and the only full-time employee is Jacobs himself.

To know more, click here.

Source: R&D Magazine

New global investment in renewable-energy projects fell 53 percent in the first quarter, an indication money from government stimulus packages has been slow to reach the industry, a report concluded Thursday.

The steep drop-off shows the global economy’s continued deterioration despite a fresh emphasis on curbing pollution and promoting cleaner energy such as wind farms, solar parks and biofuels plants.

Without necessary financing, it has taken longer to finalize deals which could lead to industry consolidation, said Michael Liebreich, chairman and chief executive of New Energy Finance, an industry-research firm.

Other analysts are forecasting similar results for the quarter. “The economy in general, the capital markets overall have had a very difficult time of it,” Ernst & Young clean-technology analyst Joseph Muscat said.

For the January-March quarter, new global investment in clean-energy projects totaled $13.3 billion compared with $28.3 billion in the year-ago quarter, according to an analysis by London-based New Energy.

Stock-market investors cut new investments in companies devoted solely to clean energy to about $100 million from $2.1 billion, the consulting firm found. Companies that offer clean energy as a part of their overall business did slightly better.

New venture capital and private-equity investment dropped to $1.8 billion from $2.7 billion in the first quarter of 2008. Merger, acquisition, buy-out and refinancing - which is on top of new money - totaled $8.8 billion down from $18.8 billion in the year-ago quarter.

In the United States, asset financing for new projects was $500 million, compared with a little more than $5 billion in the year-ago quarter. To know more, click here.

Source: R&D Magazine

Major U.S. companies are cutting jobs and wages. But many are still spending on innovation.

Wary of emerging from the recession with obsolete products, big U.S. companies spent nearly as much on research and development in the dismal last quarter of 2008 as they did a year earlier, even as their revenue fell 7.7%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. The sampling looked at 28 of the largest U.S. R&D spenders, excluding deeply troubled auto makers and the drug industry, where R&D spending is dictated by government requirements. To know more, click here.

Source: optics.org

Fianium has appointed Colin Seaton as vice president of sales and marketing. Seaton has more than 25 years professional experience, 18 of which were spent in senior management positions at Coherent where his focus was on business development and strategic marketing of ultrafast non-fibre lasers. His appointment is intended to maintain the company’s growth in industrial markets, including materials processing and biomedical applications.

Source: optics.org

Optics.org speaks to the researchers who braved Mount Etna’s most recent volcanic eruption in a bid to demonstrate the gas sensing capabilities of their lidar system.

Measuring Mount Etna’s plume

Researchers in Italy have developed a lidar setup that they say can be used to track the spatiotemporal evolution of volcanic plumes and could even play a role in eruption prediction. The team from the Italian National Agency for New Technologies says that its instrument, which uses a carbon dioxide laser could be pointed at the mouth of a volcano to monitor for tell-tale changes in gas concentration (Optics Letters 34 800). To know more, click here.

Source:optics.org

Physicists are on the verge of demonstrating perhaps the ultimate application of the laser: creating nuclear fusion in the lab.

Getting to the point in the NIF target chamber

The US Department of Energy has given official clearance for experiments to begin at the $4bn National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. NIF is a huge facility consisting of 192 pulsed laser beams with a total energy of 1.8 MJ, more than 60 times more energetic than those from any machine currently in existence. The first experiments are expected to begin in May. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

E-health systems developed by medical software maker eClinicalWorks LLC and Dell Inc. are now available in Sam’s Club stores in Virginia, Illinois and Georgia. The companies said the e-health records could be available in Sam’s Club nationally later this year.

Electronic medical records have hit obstacles in the form of costs, according to a statement by Sam’s Club senior vice president Charles Redfield. Now, users can access the records through the Internet, using a software as a service (SaaS) model.

Last month, Mass High Tech reported on Westborough-based eClinicalWorks’ plan , noting that the company would provide training, software maintenance, services, and upgrades for about $25,000 in up front costs to physicians — about half of a typical installation. To know more, click here.

Source: Photonics Spectra - april 2009

State of the economy: A time of innovation and collaboration, p.41-44, with results from JDSU, Newport, Coherent, Zygo, IPG Photonics, etc.

Astrophotonics propels next generation telescopes, p.66-68

To read more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

Environmental activist and former vice president Al Gore joined Boston Mayor Thomas Menino to announce that the City of Boston has received $6.5 million from the federal stimulus package to create an energy efficiency organization for the city.

The $6.5 million, from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant, will fund Renew Boston, a public-private partnership aimed at increasing energy efficiency and alternative energy services for Boston residents and businesses. Renew Boston will create a $1.3 million residential energy efficiency program and a $1.3 million revolving loan fund. It will also go toward funding the top projects on the city’s list of municipal solar electric, solar thermal and wind energy projects.

The mayor also announced the formation of the Boston Climate Action Leadership Committee. The 21-member committee is intended to plan the city’s response to climate change. The committee is funded by grants of $250,000 each from the Barr Foundation and the Boston Foundation. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

The technology sector, for the fourth consecutive year, added jobs to the U.S. economy, according to the Cyberstates report, a publication from technology-focused trade association TechAmerica.

Nationwide, the report found that 77,000 net jobs in the high-tech industry were added in 2008, bringing the total number of U.S. tech workers to 5.92 million. In 2007, 79,600 high-tech jobs were added, and 2006 yielded an additional 139,000 jobs in the field. The majority of the gains in 2008 stem from software service and engineering and tech service jobs.

The report provides the most recent national data from 2008, as well as state-by-state data from 2007.

Among its 2007 findings, the report shows Massachusetts as having the second highest concentration of tech workers — 87 per 1,000 workers in 2007 — trailing only Virginia.

High-tech workers also tended to make 88 percent higher wagers, on a national level, than average private sector workers in 2007, TechAmerica reported. Massachusetts was ranked second, behind California, in average high-tech wages at $100,500. To know more, click here.

Source: Mass High Tech

New York-based private equity firm Patriarch Partners LLC has won the auction for the outstanding assets of Polaroid Corp. put on auction last week after the company filed for bankruptcy. As a result of the auction, Patriarch, which specializes in distressed assets, won all of Polaroid’s intellectual property rights as well as the brand name.

A motion to approve Patriarch as the buyer will be heard by the bankruptcy court in St. Paul, Minn., on Monday, April 6. Polaroid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December.

According to a report from Reuters, Patriarch’s bid totaled $59.1 million, which topped bids from several other firms, including PHC Acquisitions LLC, an affiliate of Genii Capital SA, a Luxembourg-based private equity firm and an investor in Polaroid spinout Zink Imaging Inc. of Bedford. To know more, click here.

Source: Industrial Laser Solution

Powerlase Limited, manufacturers of powerful nanosecond Q-switched, diode-pumped solid state (DPSS) lasers, announced that significant investment has been secured from an investor group including; MTI Partners, Deutsche Venture Capital, DJF Esprit LLP, Alice Ventures and FNI Venture Capital.

Having established a position as the laser manufacturing technology of choice for the majority of the world’s plasma display panel television (PDP) output, Powerlase will use the funding injection to further develop its world class technology for new markets. Continued research and development will aid Powerlase in securing customers in new market sectors including photovoltaics, AMOLED displays, micromachining, and laser patterning.

Powerlase’s technology is designed to improve manufacturing efficiencies. The focus on high growth sectors, led to record orders at the close of 2008. This latest investment will arm Powerlase with an enhanced ability to meet the growing demand for its market-leading laser systems in 2009 and beyond. To know more, click here.

Source: Industrial Laser Solution

It has been practice, in the years that Industrial Laser Solutions has published an annual economic survey of the industrial laser market, to review the numbers presented in the January issue. Most years this review, based on quarterly reports from public companies, is a subtle tweaking of the numbers.

• Shortly after the 2009 report was being published we became aware of a sudden and dramatic change in one of the major markets, fabricated metal products, which purchases large quantities of costly laser systems. According to industry sources, companies that had booked sales of these units after the major trade shows were receiving cancellation notices and requests to delay order shipments. Because of the significance of this revenue loss we decided to review the entire market for industrial lasers.

Source: Boston Business Journal

A provision in the economic stimulus package requires a number of technology providers to comply with the stringent Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act by next year.

As a part of providing some $20 billion in stimulus money for health information technology, Congress rewrote the rules of HIPAA regulations to require “business associates” — third parties that handle patient data — to comply with standards overseen by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Previously such firms were exempt from the statute, although often there is a contractual obligation to data privacy.

Other additions to HIPAA include a mandate for health providers to supply patients and HHS audit trails of who accesses patient information and when. Also, institutions and technology companies that experience a breach of protected health information — a definition broader than just names associated with Social Security numbers or financial data — must disclose the breach to patients, HHS and, in cases of more than 500 patients, the media.

For health IT firms, the new regulations will require those that house the patient data on corporate servers to upgrade their offerings to comply with HIPAA rather than simply negotiate liability in a contract with a health care provider. To know more, click here.