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Thank You, events, Mobile Robert Buderi wrote:

Xconomy held another sold out forum yesterday afternoon, with more than 225 people pouring into Microsoft’s New England Research & Development Center for our Mobile Madness conference.

A writeup and photo spread of the afternoon’s events and the insights provided by the great array of speakers—including the results of the Mobile Smackdown between iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone advocates—are coming soon. But right now, we wanted to reiterate our deep thanks to the speakers, sponsors, and underwriters who made it possible.

First, a special thank you to Microsoft and Gus Weber, for once again opening the beautiful NERD facility to the innovation community.

A big thanks as well to our event sponsors, each of whom supports the mobile community in a variety of ways: AT&T, Cisco, Hosted Solutions, Invest Northern Ireland, McCarter & English, and UK Trade & Investment.

As always, we’d also like to thank our underwriters and venture members, who support what we do on an ongoing basis. In reverse alphabetical order, our underwriters are: Wolf & Company, WilmerHale , UK Trade & Investment, the Science & Technology Directorate of U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Schwartz Communications, MFA—Moody, Famiglietti, & Andronico , McCarter & English, the Kauffman Foundation, J. Robert Scott Executive Search, Invest Northern Ireland, EMC, Cisco, Biogen Idec, AT&T, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

The venture member list includes: Polaris Venture Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Launch Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Flagship Ventures, Boston Millennia Partners, Atlas Venture, and Advanced Technology Ventures.

We’d also like to thank our Mobile Madness event partners: the Mass Technology Leadership Council, MITX, Mobile Monday, and MOITI, the Massachusetts Office of International Trade & Investment.

And needless to say, the stars of all of Xconomy’s events are the leaders and innovators who volunteer to speak. We’re enormously grateful to our Mobile Madness speakers and showcase participants; you can see the whole list here.

It was another great day-and we couldn’t have done it without you! And there are plenty of other Mass Mobile Month events coming up—hope to see you at one of them soon.

One last thank you on a different front—to Mozy, which will now be providing its MozyPro online backup service to all Xconomy computers across our network. Thank you to the folks at Mozy and its parent, EMC. Our writers will no longer be able to say the computer ate their story!

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Biotech, diabetes, Drugs Luke Timmerman wrote:

It’s pins-and-needles time for employees and investors at San Diego-based Amylin Pharmaceuticals and Waltham, MA-based Alkermes. The FDA has a deadline of Friday, March 12, to say whether it has approved a new drug from Amylin and Alkermes (oh yeah, and Eli Lilly too) which seeks to transform diabetes treatment with the first once-weekly injectable drug to control blood sugar.

Amylin (NASDAQ: AMLN) has the most riding on the FDA’s decision of whether to approve exenatide once-weekly, because this product with billion-dollar potential will likely be its biggest sales driver for years to come. Alkermes (NASDAQ: ALKS) developed the technology to make the drug last an entire week in the bloodstream, and it stands to collect a 7.5 percent royalty on worldwide sales, without spending a nickel on manufacturing or marketing. Lilly, Amylin’s marketing partner is a huge company that needs a stream of hits to keep earnings up.

For those in need of a refresher, here goes. This diabetes drug is a first-of-its kind treatment that takes a key ingredient in Amylin’s top-selling drug, exenatide (Byetta), and packages it with a biodegradable polymer from Alkermes to make it last longer in the blood. The drug has shown in clinical trials it can control blood sugar more effectively with just one shot a week, compared with the existing drug, which requires two shots a day. The new convenience also means patients shouldn’t have to worry as much about the peaks and valleys of drug concentration in their bloodstream that leads to a lot annoying monitoring through pinpricks.

If the drug is approved by the FDA, it catches on in the marketplace, and more patients stick with their prescribed regimens, it could have an impact on the diabetes epidemic. An estimated 25 million people in the U.S. have diabetes, and as the obesity epidemic rages on, the incidence of diabetes is expected to double over the next 25 years, Amylin CEO Dan Bradbury told me back in January.

Richard Pops

The drug has about an 85 percent chance of winning regulatory approval sooner or later, and could generate worldwide peak sales of $2 billion by 2017, JP Morgan analyst Cory Kasimov, in a note to clients March 8.

“This is every bit as meaningful for us as a company as it relevant to patients,” says Richard Pops, the CEO of Alkermes. “Exenatide once-weekly really has the potential to affect many, many, many patients with this disease in this country, and around the world.”

Investors in both Amylin and Alkermes have been bidding up those stocks to near 52-week highs this week in anticipation of good news from the FDA. But there could be wrinkles in how this plays out.

There are four possible scenarios that Kasimov mapped out earlier this week, which I’ll sum up here.

—First, the FDA could approve the drug with some standard boilerplate warning about risk of patients getting pancreatitis, but not a more severe Black Box warning about risk of getting thyroid cancer. The odds aren’t great (15 percent probability), but that would drive Amylin and Alkermes stock up …Next Page »

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IT, people, World Wide Web 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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