Author: Wade Roush

Wade Roush wrote:

When Tim Berners-Lee and colleagues from CERN proposed the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and the hypertext markup language (HTML) as Internet-wide standards back in the early 1990s, they didn’t face much resistance, because there weren’t any competing ideas for doing what Berners-Lee wanted to do—that is, setting up a global network of hyperlinked electronic documents.

How different the world is today. On the online video front alone, there are at least four contenders for the title of de facto Web video standard, including Flash (controlled by Adobe), VC-1 (Microsoft), Ogg Theora (favored by many free software and open source software developers), and H.264/MPEG-4 (supported by Apple, Google, and others). Standards makers at the World Wide Web Consortium, which has 350 members from across the information technology and telecommunications industries, are still debating which video formats should be supported in the forthcoming version of HTML, known as HTML 5.

The longer this state of fragmentation lasts, the harder it will be for companies and consumers to know how to invest their resources, especially as the Web goes mobile. Mobile devices like the iPhone and the iPad can’t play Flash videos; Adobe’s Flash player, which is ubiquitous on laptop and desktop computers and is soon coming to many mobile devices, can’t play H.264 content.

Jeffrey Jaffe, announced Monday as the new CEO of the Cambridge, MA-based Web consortium, is parachuting directly into this mine field. In a phone interview on Monday, I had a chance to ask Jaffe for his ideas about how the consortium can come to consensus on issues where the W3C’s own members have powerful and conflicting interests. While it may be too late to short-circuit the debate over Web video, Jaffe said it would be extremely important in the future for the consortium to identify key areas for standards-making early, before too many players have proposed alternatives and taken up entrenched positions.

We also talked about the consortium’s other challenges, including a membership that’s shrinking as a wave of mergers and acquisitions rolls through the IT industry. Jaffe had been on the job for all of two hours when I spoke with him, so he was careful to point out that many of his thoughts about these questions were preliminary, and that his policies will be much more fully formed in a few months. Here’s a transcript of our conversation.

Xconomy: What’s it like for you to be taking over day-to-day leadership at the organization that oversees the growth of the entire Web?

Jeffrey Jaffe: One of the things that’s quite evident, as I talked about a little in my initial blog posting as CEO of W3C, is that the World Wide Web is basically the most transformational thing that has happened in the past several decades. It’s changing everything about how we learn, how we do business, how we entertain ourselves. It’s incredibly important, and there’s lots more change still in front of us. So I just feel extremely privileged to have an opportunity to work closely with Tim in taking this to the next level. I can’t imagine anything more exciting and meaningful for me at this stage of my career.

X: How has your experience leading technology organizations at IBM, Bell Labs, and Novell prepared you to work in the nonprofit world of standards bodies? The standards-making process has so many stakeholders pushing in different directions. On the surface, it seems pretty different from creating new products or services. Or maybe not?

JJ: Great question. I think I bring a lot of relevant experience to this. Maybe I’ll just focus on four things. First of all, I’ve worked in three large companies, all of whom cherish standards and recognize the importance of standards and who really feel like they want to participate [in W3C]. I understand how the corporations who are among the stakeholders of W3C think about …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Boston-based DataXu, whose bidding engine helps online advertisers decide which advertising purchases are most likely to pay off in the form of conversions or click-throughs, has raised $11 million in new funding, according to an announcement today.

New investor Menlo Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, led the round, which was joined by existing investors Flybridge Capital Partners and Atlas Venture. Menlo Ventures managing director John Jarve will join DataXu’s board.

Xconomy profiled DataXu in December 2009. The company, built around decision-support software originally developed by MIT aeronautics and astronautics professor Edward Crawley, was founded in 2007 and raised a $6 million venture round in the spring of 2009.

DataXu’s system evaluates ad inventory available from auction-based ad exchanges such as those operated by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and makes real-time decisions about which ads represent the best deals for advertisers, based on data such as the identity of the venue, the time of day, or the day of the week. The company said in today’s news release that market response to the platform has “exceeded expectations.”

“We are very pleased with the early results that our system has achieved for some of the world’s leading brands and their agencies,” DataXu president and CEO Mike Baker said in a statement.

Jarve, at Menlo Ventures, said his firm chose to invest in DataXu rather than competitors in the market for so-called “demand-side” platforms “because of their proven leadership team and scalable, differentiated technology, which is delivering significant value for its customers.”

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Wade Roush wrote:

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the Cambridge, MA-based World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the standards underlying the global network, has a new co-captain. It’s Jeffrey Jaffe, a technology industry veteran who served most recently as chief technology officer and executive vice president of products at Waltham, MA-based Novell.

The W3C announced Jaffe’s appointment as CEO of the consortium this morning. While Berners-Lee remains as director of the nonprofit organization, the CEO’s job is to lead it, according to a recruitment listing that was still online as recently as yesterday. Together with the director and staff, according to the listing, the role of W3C’s CEO is to “develop the vision that leads the Web to its full potential [and] communicate that vision to the world and engage relevant stakeholders,” as well as to lead “strategic planning and change management” and oversee worldwide operations, including financial, legal, and cultural aspects.

In other words, Jaffe will manage most of the day-to-day details of running the consortium—a job formerly handled by Steve Bratt, who stepped down as CEO last year to head the World Wide Web Foundation. (The foundation aims to use the mobile Web to empower people in developing countries; see Part 1 and Part 2 of Xconomy’s November 2009 interview with Bratt.)

Berners-Lee can certainly use the help. The 15-year-old consortium is an increasingly sprawling bureaucracy—jointly run by the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics, and Keio University in Japan—with programs ranging from security to Web accessibility for the disabled to mobile Web platforms and international development. It has 350 member organizations, only about 130 of which are based in the United States.

“Jeff has outstanding leadership and business skills to help address a wealth of arising opportunities,” Berners-Lee said in a statement about the appointment. “Just as the Web is constantly growing and changing, so is the community around it and so is the Consortium. Jeff’s broad experience gives him a deep understanding of many different types of organizations, which will be invaluable in managing W3C’s evolution.”

Jaffe’s work history spans several titans of the U.S. computing and …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

I regret to report that both I and my column are going on a bit of a hiatus, as I’ve been seated as a juror on an extended civil trial in Boston. To fill some airtime, I thought I’d direct you to a few old columns that are special favorites of mine or that have connections to current events.

By the way, if you really have the urge to catch up on all of my past columns, just get a copy of Pixel Nation: 80 Weeks of World Wide Wade, an e-book published by Xconomy last month. You can download a free PDF version here or buy a $4.99 Kindle version at Amazon’s Kindle store. But for today’s installment, I decided to revisit four pieces from the past year or two and offer a few thoughts on each with the benefit of hindsight.

Public Radio for People Without Radios
February 13, 2009

This column was all about the Public Radio Player (then called the Public Radio Tuner), one of my favorite mobile applications. It turns my iPhone into a radio that can pull in a live stream from almost any NPR station in the entire country, not to mention dozens of on-demand shows like Car Talk, Fresh Air, and On Point. The news update is that the fine folks at the Public Radio Exchange (who will be taking part in Xconomy’s Mobile Madness company showcase next week) have recently come out with several great new apps, and are working on more. First, there’s the new, improved 2.1 version of the Public Radio Player itself, which went live in the iTunes App Store last week and has great features such as a sleep timer and a built-in Web browser. Then there’s a dedicated app for This American Life, the cult-favorite documentary radio show from Ira Glass at Chicago Public Radio, which comes with access to the entire 15-year archive of shows. Finally, PRX is working on a dedicated app for my favorite NPR station, Boston’s WBUR. That’s due for release sometime this spring.

The 3-D Graphics Revolution of 1859
December 19, 2008

I was never much of a collector until I started buying nineteenth-century stereoscope views a couple of years ago. We’re used to thinking of 3-D as a recent technological advance—the province of high-tech filmmakers like James Cameron—but these old cardboard-mounted image pairs (taken through separate lenses a few inches apart, like our eyes) remind us that the quest to …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Reports last week that Billerica, MA-based life sciences equipment supplier Millipore was in merger talks with Waltham, MA-based Thermo Fisher Scientific were half right. Millipore was in merger talks—but it has settled on suitor Merck KGaA, the German pharmaceutical and chemicals giant. And Millipore is fetching a higher price than the earlier reports suggested, too.

Millipore said Merck will acquire all outstanding Millipore (NYSE: MIL) shares for $107 per share, or $7.2 billion, in an all-cash transaction. The boards of both companies have approved the merger; now the deal goes to Millipore shareholders for a vote. Merck KGaA is paying about a 13 percent premium above Millipore’s last closing stock price of $94.41 on Friday.

The news comes after a week of speculation that Millipore was on the auction block. A February 22 story published by Bloomberg Business Week (and summed up by Xconomy) said Thermo Fisher had made an unsolicited $6 billion bid for Millipore. Thermo Fisher offered no comment on the story. Millipore confirmed on February 23 that it was entertaining bids, but did not mention Thermo Fisher or Merck. The company said at the time that its board of directors was “evaluating strategic alternatives to enhance shareholder value, including by pursuing a process with potential bidders to explore a possible merger or sale of the Company.”

According to today’s announcement, Merck KGaA plans to retain Millipore’s senior management, keep the company’s Billerica headquarters open, and gradually combine Millipore with the German company’s chemicals business in the U.S. Merck’s U.S. chemicals subsidiary, EMD Chemicals, is currently headquartered in Gibbstown, NJ.

Combining Millipore with EMD will lead to cost savings of around $100 million per year by 2013, Merck KGaA said. EMD has already begun downsizing: it announced the closure of a 70-employee test kit manufacturing facility in Madison, WI, in December, and said it planned to cut another 230 jobs nationwide.

Merck KGaA chairman Karl-Ludwig Kley called the combination “an excellent strategic fit” that would allow the company to offer a greater range of products to its customers. Millipore, which was founded in 1954, has 6,000 employees in 30 countries, and hit $1.7 billion in sales in 2009. The company is best known for making filters with micrometer-sized pores, used for everything from basic life sciences research to biologic drug manufacturing, but it also sells a wide range of other products from custom antibodies to wine filtration systems.

“Over the past five years, we have transformed Millipore into a life science leader by driving innovation, entering new markets, and generating exceptional operational performance,” said Millipore CEO Martin Madaus, in a statement. “Today’s announcement, which is the outcome of a thorough strategic review process, is a validation of the tremendous value of the Millipore brand…We are excited to join a high-quality company like Merck as we will gain greater scale and scope in the life science industry.”

Merck KGaA has no corporate connection with U.S. pharmaceuticals giant Merck & Co., which is based in Whitehouse Station, NJ, and was separated from the German parent company in 1917.

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Wade Roush wrote:

[Updated 9:55 a.m. and 1:35 p.m., see below] Russell Wilcox, until recently the president and CEO at Cambridge, MA-based display technology pioneer E Ink, has left the company, Xconomy has learned.

In his 13 years with E Ink, Wilcox rose from the level of vice president of business development to the leadership helm, and engineered the sale of E Ink to Taiwan-based Prime View International (PVI) for $450 million last December.

As of this morning, E Ink’s website still lists Wilcox as president. However, e-mails to Wilcox’s E Ink address elicit an auto-reply stating that “as of February 26, 2010, Mr. Wilcox is no longer with E Ink.” Wilcox’s LinkedIn profile states that his work at E Ink ended in February.

[Update] E Ink spokesman Sri Peruvemba, reached by phone today, confirmed Wilcox’s departure. In reply to an e-mail inquiry, Wilcox told Xconomy this morning: “Yes I left E Ink at the end of last week after completing a transition and hand-off to PVI. It was the right moment to complete a super adventure for me, and E Ink will be in good hands under PVI CEO Scott Liu.”

Wilcox was the last member of the team that founded E Ink in 1997—which also included Joe Jacobson, Jerry Rubin, Barrett Comiskey, and J.D. Albert—to retain a senior management position. It is not known whether his departure is related to the PVI sale, although it is not unusual for a startup CEO to give up his or her role within the first year after an acquisition.

Named a New England Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young in 2009, Wilcox is credited with helping to raise $150 million in venture and strategic financing for E Ink and leading the company through a much-longer-than-expected period of technology and business development. As Wilcox explained in a lengthy interview with Xconomy in February 2009, it took about six years to create the first workable versions of E Ink’s signature electrophoretic displays, then to make them durable and robust under different operation conditions, and finally to make them affordable. It wasn’t until 2004, when Sony launched its Librié e-reader in Japan, that E Ink’s technology found a major outlet.

Wilcox became president and CEO of the company that year, and under his direction the company went on to become the leading supplier of monochrome displays to e-reader manufacturers, including Sony, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Plastic Logic. In fact, the publicity around the growth of Amazon’s Kindle e-reading platform brought so much attention to E Ink that many investors and other observers felt that PVI’s initial $215 million offer for the company was too low. A group of shareholders threatened to block the sale, and the Taiwanese firm eventually made a sweetened offer that included additional PVI stock. That stock subsequently increased in value much faster than expected, bringing the total value of the acquisition to roughly $450 million.

Wilcox earned a degree in applied mathematics from Harvard College in 1989, spent four years in the management consulting business with Corporate Decisions Inc., and returned to Harvard in 1993 to pursue an MBA, which he received in 1995. There is no indication so far about Wilcox’s plans for the future, but the motto in his LinkedIn page reads “you live to your fullest potential when you pursue a challenging dream that builds lasting value for others,” and a status update on the same page from last week states, “wondering how much energy could be saved if all plug outlets were intelligent.”

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Wade Roush wrote:

If a book can be made from something other than paper—say, pixels on a screen—then why can’t it consist of something other than plain old words and pictures?

It can. Companies like Eastgate Systems in Watertown, MA, have been publishing PC-based interactive “hypertexts” for almost 30 years. Thanks to the built-in speech synthesis software on Amazon’s Kindle, every e-book can also be an audio book. And now a few publishers are experimenting with video books.

That phrase, video book, is where Emeryville, CA-based startup Vook gets its name. Since launching its first titles last fall, Vook has come out with 19 video books, in a variety of genres from cookbooks to adult fiction to children’s books to fitness and self-help. Most are available in two formats—a Web version for consumption on a laptop or desktop and an iPhone/iPod Touch version for people with Apple devices.

This week I’ve been exploring two Vook titles (I refuse to refer to them using the company’s lower-case noun “vook”—it’s just too ugly). I’m pleased to say that they have exceeded my expectations.

I went into this as a skeptic. While I’m not someone who needs to be persuaded about the power of multimedia technology, I’ve seen enough poor-quality multimedia concoctions to know that the “multi” is only as good as the media. Simply throwing in a random video or making certain words into Wikipedia hyperlinks does not automatically enhance a text. In fact, adding digital goodies will more than likely detract from the simple pleasure of reading, unless the new material meets a few important criteria.

First, it must be relevant to, but different from, the text itself—providing information in a way that truly exploits the capabilities of the additional medium. Second, it should have high production values. I’m not asking for Emmy-winning quality here, but at least show me where you’ve put as much thought and work into your video as the author put into his words. Third, the added material should be both balanced with the text (I’m talking about volume—neither too little nor too much; let the main text do the driving) and smoothly integrated into it (meaning, for example, that it should be easy to switch back and forth between the text and the added media).

I’ve read two Vook titles so far, and I’d give both of them decent grades on my scorecard. (By the way, my three criteria are purely personal. There are plenty of other critics with their own definitions of what makes good multimedia.)

The video books I picked were The Sherlock Holmes Experience, a double feature including the Arthur Conan Doyle stories “The Man with the Twisted Lip” and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” and Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time To Cash In on Your Passion, by wine impresario Gary Vaynerchuk. The Holmes title goes for $2.99, and the Vaynerchuk costs $6.99. I read both books on my iPhone.

I’ll comment first on the Sherlock Holmes book, since it’s the less successful of the two and shows some of the pitfalls inherent in multimedia projects. If I were a producer at Vook, I’m not sure I would have dared to tackle the Holmes stories, given that they are, in a sense, multimedia artifacts to begin with. Conan Doyle published most of his stories in The Strand Magazine, an illustrated monthly sold mainly to London’s burgeoning class of rail commuters. From the very first story (”A Scandal in Bohemia,” 1891), the Holmes tales were accompanied by …Next Page »

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Wade Roush wrote:

Investors continue to pour cash into Luminus Devices, the Billerica, MA-based maker of bright, efficient LEDs, at a rate that would startle most entrepreneurs in the life sciences, let alone the hardware, computing, and infotech industries. Luminus announced today that it has raised $19 million in Series F funding, from a group of existing investors that includes Argonaut Private Equity, Braemar Energy Ventures, Paladin Capital Group and Stata Venture Partners. The round, the first since a $72 million Series E round in May 2008, brings the eight-year-old startup’s total financing to roughly $159 million. Xconomy profiled Luminus in October 2009.

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Wade Roush wrote:

Boston-based Currensee, a social network for currency traders, announced today that it has closed an $8 million Series B financing round led by existing investor North Bridge Venture Partners. Egan Managed Capital joined as a new investor, and Egan partner Travis Connors has joined Currensee’s board. Currensee has actually raised $6 million in new funding, but the company is reporting the round to the Securities and Exchange Commission as an $8 million round because $2 million from its $6 million Series A round in October 2009 was converted to Series B terms as part of the deal, according to CEO Dave Lemont. (The company has raised $12 million altogether.) The startup, which Xconomy profiled in April 2009, says it will use the funds in part to accelerate its expansion in Europe and Asia.

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Wade Roush wrote:

According to a report today from the Bloomberg news agency, Thermo Fisher Scientific (NYSE: TMO), the Waltham, MA-based supplier of laboratory instruments and equipment to the life sciences industry, has made an unsolicited bid to acquire Billerica, MA-based Millipore (NYSE: MIL) for $6 billion. Millipore makes diagnostic and laboratory equipment for biotech firms.

Bloomberg attributed its report to “a person close to the situation,” who added that Millipore has hired investment bank Goldman Sachs to advise it about the deal, which could be inked as early as next week.

If the report is accurate, it’s a sign that Thermo Fisher is on something of a buying spree. The company paid $145 million in January for Ahura Scientific, a venture-backed maker of handheld optical instruments. This month it acquired Finland-based Finnzyme, a maker of reagents and instruments for DNA amplification.

A $6 billion purchase of Millipore would presumably be highly leveraged or would consist of a mix of cash and stock. Thermo Fisher had $1.56 billion in cash on hand at the end of 2009. The company’s total market capitalization is $19 billion.

Millipore’s share price on the New York Stock Exchange was up sharply on the takeover rumor, hitting $86 by 2:00 p.m. Eastern time, an increase of about  22 percent over the day’s opening price. Thermo Fisher’s stock was down slightly.

Neither Thermo Fisher nor Millipore immediately responded to Xconomy’s requests for comment on the Bloomberg report.

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