Tag Archives: Small Times Magazine

Ablynx names new CEO


March 27, 2006

Mar. 27, 2006 — Ablynx, a developer of nanobodies, a class of antibody-derived therapeutic proteins, announced that Edwin Moses has accepted its board’s offer to extend his role as chairman to include that of chief executive officer.

Moses has been non-executive chairman of Ablynx since November 2004. He takes over the CEO role from Mark Vaeck, who will continue to support the company in a consultative capacity.

Ablynx has signed collaborative drug discovery deals with Novartis, Centocor, Kirin Brewery and Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals.

Mar. 24, 2006 – Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will dedicate a six-story, 94,000-square-foot facility known as the Molecular Foundry today.

A gathering of scientific, political and academic leaders will officially open the national user facility, one of five being constructed by the U.S. Department of Energy to serve the nanoscience and nanotechnology community, providing equipment and expertise to international scientists.

Mar. 24, 2006 — INEX, a UK-based public-sector facility that works with companies to develop and commercialize MEMS, microsystems and thin film sensor technologies, announced it has completed the upgrade of its 100mm fabrication line to 150mm.

The organization also announced it has added an additional 400 square meters to its existing cleanrooms for a new overall capacity of 1,000 square meters.

The upgrade project has been partly financed by the UK Department of Trade & Industry under it $156 million micro- and nanotechnology manufacturing initiative, and the European Commission’s Objective 2 program.

The expansion and upgrade brings with it a capacity of around 5,000 wafer starts per year, according to INEX, which said capacity is sufficient to support small and medium volume markets. INEX is currently investigating devices that address opportunities in the telecommunications, defense, and biomedical business sectors, among others. The organization is working on products with a variety of partners that includes both large multinationals and recent spinout companies.

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Mar. 24, 2006 – IBM announced that its researchers have built an integrated circuit around a single carbon nanotube molecule.

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The circuit was built using standard types of semiconductor processes, according to an IBM news release. It uses a single carbon nanotube molecule as the base for the other components in the circuit.

“Carbon nanotube transistors have the potential to outperform state-of-the-art silicon devices,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of science and technology at IBM Research, in a prepared statement. “However, scientists have focused so far on fabricating and optimizing individual carbon nanotube transistors. Now, we can evaluate the potential of carbon nanotube electronics in complete circuits — a critical step toward the integration of the technology with existing chip-making techniques.”

The circuit built by the IBM team is a ring oscillator — a type of circuit that chip makers build to evaluate new manufacturing processes or materials. By integrating the circuit around a nanotube, the IBM team said it observed circuit speeds faster than previously demonstrated circuits with multiple nanotubes.

The IBM scientists will use the oscillator to test carbon nanotube transistors and circuits and to gauge their performance. The work was reported in a paper titled “An Integrated Logic Circuit Assembled on a Single Carbon Nanotube” that appears in today’s issue of the journal Science.

Mar. 23, 2006 – Adidas, the maker of performance apparel and sports gear, is working with Nano-Tex to add comfort to shorts and pants in its Yocum activewear line, according to a news release.

Part of the new Adidas performance product line, Yocum products made with Nano-Tex’s Coolest Comfort treatment will include men’s and women’s shorts, 3/4 pants, pants with a zip-off leg option, and other products. Colors will include dark shale, sesame, moon and explorer.

The Coolest Comfort treatment is a quick-acting moisture wicking fabric enhancement which pulls perspiration away from the skin to keep the body cooler, dryer and more comfortable. The treatment is formulated for resin-treated cottons and synthetics.

The new products will be available this spring.

Mar. 22, 2006 – BioLok International Inc. (OTC.BB: BLLI), a manufacturer and distributor of dental implant technology, received clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market its nano-based product.

The nanocomposite, time-release calcium sulfate product is used for bone regeneration, augmentation and other dental applications. BioLok is headquartered in Deerfield Beach, Fla.

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Mar. 22, 2006 – As MEMS-based products make their way into the consumer electronics market, one promising application is a device a reviewer dubbed the “remote control bagel.”

Hillcrest Labs, a startup from Rockville, Md., generated considerable buzz at the January Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with its “Loop” air mouse for televisions. It holds out the promise of replacing clunky 50-button remote controls with a device that has just two buttons and a scroll bar.

But the MEMS-based free-space pointing device is only part of Hillcrest’s offering. The company also has created an on-screen navigation system that abandons the TV Guide-style grid for zoomable visual directories. For instance, users can choose videos from a full-screen mosaic of movie covers. This system, “Spontaneous Navigation,” is key to handling the growing number of media offerings, according to Andy Addis, Hillcrest’s executive vice president and a former Comcast executive.

“People translate visual information 60 times faster than textual information. As the number of offerings grows, presenting things visually offers greater scalability,” he said. “With a grid-based guide, if you have 20,000 media choices, that’s 4,000 page-down pushes on your remote. It just doesn’t work.”

Addis stressed that the Loop and navigation system go hand in hand. “When the mouse was invented, there wasn’t really any application until Apple developed the graphical user interface,” he noted. “It was a pointing device with nothing to point at.” The Loop itself would be the same today without the navigation system, he said. “We think we’ve developed the mouse and Windows for your TV.”

Founded in 2001 and backed by more than $30 million in venture capital, Hillcrest at first focused on the pointing device. Founder and Chief Executive Dan Simpkins had previously led SALIX Technologies, a developer of voice switches that was acquired by Tellabs in 2000. In developing ideas for the Loop, Simpkins and a team of Hillcrest engineers “studied every input device known to man,” Addis said.

He said one-third of the company’s patent filings are related to the Loop itself, which has sophisticated digital signal processing technology built in. Unlike the Gyration Air Mouse, he stressed, the pointer technology is not based on a gyroscope. Addis was reluctant to talk about the inner workings of the Loop or the MEMS component. “Suffice it to say that we leverage multiple low-cost sensors,” he said.

Hillcrest has succeeded at generating a wow factor among consumers and industry analysts, but getting its innovation deployed in a challenging market for startups will be more difficult. As Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff wrote last May, although the system looks promising, it has yet to be used anywhere. “It’s still enabling technology that must be built into set-top boxes or consumer electronics devices.”

Hillcrest is talking to companies in the consumer electronics, PC, telecommunications, satellite and cable markets. Addis said its first deals, to be announced later this year, would likely be with consumer electronics companies because that market moves the fastest. The technology may appear first in products such as digital video recorders and game consoles. The cable and telecom companies will be the toughest sell, he admitted.

“The trick is they are trying to sell into companies that do not do revolutions,” said Danny Briere, CEO of telecommunications consulting firm TeleChoice, in Mansfield Center, Conn. “The cable companies are protecting a bunch of paradigms that Hillcrest is blowing away. With Hillcrest’s product, you pick it up and instantly know how to use it. You don’t have to learn how to use it or remember how to use it.

“It’s just a matter of time before the cable companies come around to graphical menus and pointing devices, Briere said. “The cable companies realize that to generate more revenue, they have to become a portal to other media, gaming, and e-commerce, and they run up against a wall really fast in the two-dimensional environment.”

Briere, whose clients include large phone companies, said all the major players are interested in Hillcrest. “It’s a huge competitive advantage for whoever partners with them first. The migration path to this will be insane.”

Forrester’s Bernoff predicted that new navigation products like Hillcrest’s are likely to change the face of TV by 2008.

Mar. 22, 2006 – Acacia Patent Acquisition Corp. has acquired a patent portfolio relating to the use of micromirrors to create a digital image in televisions, monitors, and projectors. The patented technology generally covers techniques for using micromirrors to display a color image having gray scale gradations and is used in large screen televisions and projectors.

Acacia Patent Acquisition Corp. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Newport Beach, Calif.-based Acacia Research Corp. (Nasdaq: ACTG, CBMX) and is part of the Acacia Technologies group, which develops, acquires, and licenses patented technologies.

Mar. 21, 2006 — Acusphere Inc. (NASDAQ: ACUS), which develops nanoparticle-based drugs, Monday reported financial results for the quarter and year ended Dec. 31, 2005. During 2005, the company recognized $3.4 million in collaboration revenue in connection with its agreement with Nycomed for European marketing rights to the company’s product candidate, AI-700.

As of Dec. 31, 2005, the company reported $6.0 million in deferred revenues relating to this agreement. Under this agreement, as amended, Nycomed is scheduled to pay Acusphere $2.9 million in 2006, including up to $1.85 million which Nycomed agreed to pay to help fund the Company’s qualification of its commercial manufacturing facility for AI-700.

Operating expenses in 2005 increased to $49.6 million, compared to $32.1 million in 2004, primarily due to costs incurred for the Phase 3 clinical program for AI-700 and the one-time $6.2 million write-off in June 2005 related to the acquisition of patents from Schering AG.

As of December 31, 2005, the company’s total assets were $95.8 million of which cash and cash equivalents totaled $51.1 million.

Mar. 21, 2006 – Fluidigm Corp. today announced a strategic agreement with In-Q-Tel, an independent, private, not-for-profit company established by the Central Intelligence Agency to further develop Fluidigm’s integrated fluidic circuit (IFC) technology for sequence detection applications.

This marks the second development agreement between Fluidigm and In-Q-Tel. The South San Francisco- based Fluidigm fabricates IFCs, which are micro-mechanical chips for fluid handling. IFC fabrication methods make it possible to integrate hundreds of thousands of biochemical reactions in an area roughly the size of a microscope slide.