VentureBeat

SpinSpotter is a new browser plug-in that hopes to arm online news junkies with the power of pointing out when the media has a dog in the fight.

It works like this: Users install the plug-in, which currently is only available to FireFox users, though an IE 7.0 plug-in is coming down the pike. While browsing news stories, you flag instances of media bias or spin, using the guidelines of what the company calls the “Seven Deadly Spins” as defined by an advisory board of professional journalists. These no-nos are: personal voice, passive voice, a biased source, disregarded context, selective disclosure, lack of balance, and over-reliance on press releases. Read an article with some spin, and you can use the plug-in to mark and label the offending passage as such. All other SpinSpotter users will now see the text marked in red, with an explanation of why it was tagged, who tagged it, and a suggested edit to correct the spin. Think of it as a cross between del.icio.us and factcheck.org.

I downloaded and attempting to use the plug-in today, but SpinSpotter found absolutely no instances of bias for me to investigate. While the reason for this is obvious — the plug-in was released just yesterday, and so there are still very few users to flag spin — it could lead one to the hilarious conclusion that left-wing community Daily Kos and right-wing magazine The National Review are both completely free of spin. I expect this will rapidly change as more users come on board.

Once a core group of users does begin using the plug-in, there will also be a group of “referees,” i.e. journalism grad students. The referees will function roughly in the same way an admin or moderator might on an online message board, trying to ensure text marked as spin is actually spin. In addition, fellow SpinSpotter users can vote a marked passage up (i.e. this is definitely biased) or down (i.e. actually, this isn’t biased). SpinSpotter algorithms can look what users are agreeing is biased reporting, and will attempt to predict what similar items would possibly declared biased. John Atcheson, CEO and co-founder of SpinSpotter, gives the example of “Bush’s third term” as a phrase that may be likely to get flagged repeatedly. SpinSpotter would then automatically begin to learn that the phrase is likely to be biased.

Users of SpinSpotter also get a Trust rating. Accurately mark instances of bias, and users will vote you up and increase your Trust rating. Inaccurately mark statements of fact as media spin, users vote you down and your Trust rating plummets. SpinSpotter gives much more weight to an experienced and reliable user — a trusted user’s down vote can counteract thousands of up votes from untrusted users.

The company is also taking great pains to maintain objectivity itself. It cites its two co-founders as examples of this — Atchenson supports Obama, while fellow co-founder and chief creative Todd Herman is reports that he is “conservative in most things.” The SpinSpotter team has also listed all of their political contributions and stated potical viewpoints, as well as maintaining a page disclosing any potential conflicts of interest. Their six-member journalism advisory board also nicely spans the political spectrum, including both Liberal Fascism author Jonah Goldberg and The Nation contributor Brooke Allen.

SpinSpotter plans to generate revenue by selling advertising on their site, as well as collecting and selling the back-end data their (hopefully) thousands of users will generate to ad agencies, marketing groups, political campaigns, and possible even news outlets.

While the idea has a certain amount of promise, Atchenson readily admits that SpinSpotter was rushed to market in preparation for the presidential elections this November, and it shows — I had repeated browser errors while using the plug-in.

More problematic is that the nature of political journalism is changing. For at least the past decade, people increasingly seem to want their news from implicitly biased sources, whether it’s readers devouring scoops from bloggers of their particular political persuasion, or right-wing political junkies tuning into Fox News while their left-wing brethren flips to MSNBC. As Atchenson himself points out, people do not turn to a Maureen Dowd op-ed looking for clear-eyed objective insight, but this growing division of media outlets makes a company like SpinSpotter’s job more difficult. One man’s spin is another man’s truth. It may or may not be great for democracy, but it is a market reality.

That said, it’s easy to admire SpinSpotter’s goal of bringing transparency to journalism. As a journalist myself, I’d welcome SpinSpotter or something similar taking off, even if it means getting beaned with the accusation of bias from users. The question is whether SpinSpotter can manage to obtain a critical mass of users, avoid attempts to game the system, and maintain the appearance of objectivity as partisans flag differing political viewpoints as spin.

The five-month old company is based in San Diego, and its lead investor is Epic Ventures.

Video of the company’s DEMO presentation below:

I wish my memory could get this kind of upgrade. Today, a new kind of chip memory is going to get a boost with the launch of a new venture spin-out company. If it succeeds, we’ll be carrying around much more responsive, instantly available portable gadgets in the future.

MRAM has been in the research labs for a long time as a chip technology that has the combined advantages of both temporary and permanent memory. But it has always been poised on the cusp, not quite ready yet to tip the scales in multibillion-dollar industries.

But Freescale Semiconductor is making a big move today by spinning out a venture-funded MRAM chip company, EverSpin Technologies. The spin-out is backed by New Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Lux Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and Epic Ventures. The first round investment is $20 million.

MRAM stands for magnetoresistive Random Access Memory. MRAM uses tiny magnets combined with conventional silicon circuits to create a combo memory. It is a single chip with the speed of static RAM and the permanence, or non-volatility, of flash memory. Typically, flash is slow and permanent, while SRAM is fast but temporary.

With MRAM powering a portable device, you could have zero boot time, or “instant on.” And you wouldn’t lose any data if the device suddenly lost power. Freescale will transfer its MRAM technology to the start-up and keep an equity position in the new venture.

The new venture means a couple of things. It will require an investment that is bigger than what Freescale alone could pour into the start-up. But it also means that the technology is closer to commercialization after years of research. Lisa Su, chief technology officer at Freescale, said the move will accelerate the adoption of MRAM across a bunch of uses. Freescale already has a slate of MRAM products in the market and EverSpin will supply products to Freescale’s MRAM customers.

MRAM hasn’t yet taken over the world because the products still have smaller storage capacities (four megabits) for the moment. As the manufacturing improves and memory capactities rise, MRAM will be able to wrest more applications away from traditional memory.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Q Thera takes in $15M for neural stem-cell treatments (release)
• Stroke clotbuster Concentric Medical withdraws IPO (IPOhome)
• Avera recaps with $9M to relaunch human tests of GI drug (VentureWire)
• Tissue repairer Nerites raises $5.7M (release)
• Semafore Pharma aims for $7.5M to launch new cancer-drug trials (VentureWire)
• Triage Wireless gets $6.7M for “cuffless” blood-pressure monitors (peHUB)
• MAKO Surgicals prices IPO, falls in first day of trading (WSJ)
• ImmunoCellular acquires assets of Molecular Antibody Technology (release)

Q Thera takes in $15M for neural stem-cell treatments – Q Therapeutics, a Salt Lake City biotech working on neural stem-cell treatments for neurological conditions, has received the first portion of a $15 million second funding round. Investors in the round included vSpring Capital, Invitrogen, Epic Ventures, Toucan Capital, University of Utah Research Foundation, Salt Lake Life Science Angels and Q management.

Q is taking aim at diseases such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral palsy that result when the protective myelin sheath that protects nerve fibers and the spinal cord deteriorates, often for little-understood reasons. The company is developing neural stem cells that can produce new glial cells, which in theory should be able to regenerate the damaged myelin. (Irritatingly enough, the company insists on calling its product “Q cells.”) The company aims to begin clinical trials in transeverse myelitis, a paralyzing form of MS, next year.

Stroke clotbuster Concentric Medical withdraws IPO – Concentric Medical, a Mountain View, Calif., developer of medical devices for removing stroke-causing blood clots, withdrew its proposed IPO. The company becomes the eighth life-science startup to abandon an IPO this year.

Concentric, of course, cited “unfavorable market conditions” as the reason for its withdrawal. The device maker, which is still unprofitable, reported working capital and cash and short-term investments of $20.3 million at the end of June and has been burning cash at a rate of about $7 million a year, so it’s not necessarily in dire straits. Concentric, in fact, today announced it had arranged a $15 million line of credit with Horizon Technology Finance, giving it an additional cushion.

The company makes and sells a catheter-based device that can be snaked through a patient’s blood vessels to the brain in order to physically “grab” and remove stroke-causing blood clots. Although Concentric won approval for the device in 2004, sales have grown more modestly — in part, perhaps, because Concentric hasn’t undertaken the clinical studies necessary to demonstrate the usefulness of its technique compared to other treatments, and has no plans to do so. (The company listed this point as a risk factor in its SEC filings.) What’s more, the Concentric device can sometimes damage blood vessels in the brain; in one of two studies, almost ten percent of patients suffered a cranial hemorrhage.

Our previous coverage of the company is here.

Avera recaps with $9M to relaunch human tests of GI drug – Avera Pharmaceuticals, a San Diego specialty pharma developing drugs against a variety of conditions, recapitalized with a $9 million “first” funding round, VentureWire reports. Such a recap usually amounts to a restart for a company, which in this case was prompted by a halted clinical trial of a drug for irritable bowel syndrome and overactive bladder.

Investors in the recap included all participants in the company’s previous funding round: Aisling Capital, SV Life Sciences, Aberdare Ventures, BioAsia Investments, H.I.G. Ventures, Montreux Equity Partners, Bay City Capital, BTG PLC, Frazier Healthcare Ventures, InterWest Partners, St. Paul Venture Capital and Windamere Venture Partners. The company declined to provide a valuation to VentureWire, but it’s almost certainly suffered a “down round,” or it wouldn’t be recapitalizing.

Avera shut down mid-stage trials of its drug, known as AV608, last year after animal testing turned up potential toxicity issues. The company has since redesigned the drug to eliminate a compound it called a “non-active metabolite,” and hopes to resume studies later this year. Avera had raised more than $72 million prior to the recap.

TODAY’S HEADLINES:

• Teva acquires protein-therapeutic maker CoGenesys for $400M (release)
• ViewRay takes in $25M for MRI radiation-therapy guidance (release)
• NovaMed, Chinese clinical-research outfit, receives $14M (release)
• Progentix Ortho raises first funding round (release)
• Medical imaging co. Point Biomedical recaps with $25M (VentureWire)
• Lumidigm takes in $7M for optical-fingerprint ID systems (VW)
• Medical-software co. Compressus aims to close $14M round (VW)
• Channel Medical Partners aims for $150M med-tech fund (VW)
• Spinal-implant maker Scient’x names Michael Huggins as CEO (release)
• Specialty pharma Cardiokine names Manuel Worcel as CEO (release)
• Respiratory-disease co. Pulmatrix appoints Robert Connelly CEO (release)

Teva acquires protein-therapeutic maker CoGenesys for $400M — CoGenesys, a Rockville, Md., protein-drug biotech spun out of Human Genome Sciences in 2006, has been acquired by Israel’s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries for $400 million in cash. The companies’ joint release is here.

CoGenesys, like its former parent HGS, is focused on the development of protein and peptide drugs for a variety of conditions. The company’s two lead drug candidates aim to treat neutropenia, a depletion of white blood cells that puts people at risk of serious infection, and heart failure.

Teva said the acquisition advances its recently revised strategic goal of pursuing biotech drugs (”biopharmaceuticals”) and generic biologics (”biogenerics”). It’s not entirely clear whether Teva is interested in pursuing CoGenesys’ actual drug pipeline or simply putting its manufacturing technology to use in Teva’s existing international biogenerics business. No biogenerics have been approved for use in the U.S.

ViewRay takes in $25M for MRI radiation-therapy guidance — Gainesville, Fla.-based ViewRay, a developer of MRI-based cancer-radiation systems, raised $25 million in a second funding round. Investors included OrbiMed Advisors, Fidelity Biosciences, Aisling Capital and Kearny Venture Partners.

ViewRay claims its system will be the first to offer real-time “volumetric” imaging of tumors concurrent with radiation treatment, which ostensibly allows radiation oncologists to compensate for organ movement. The funding will go for additional staff and the manufacture and validation of advanced prototypes of the system. Our previous coverage of the company is here.

NovaMed, Chinese clinical-research outfit, receives $14M — NovaMed, a Chinese startup that performs outsourced commercial and clinical-trial management for Chinese and international drug companies, raised $13.8 million in a second funding round. Investors included Fidelity Asia Ventures, its US affiliate, Fidelity Biosciences, and Atlas Venture.

Founded in 2005 by a former AstraZeneca executive and a Chinese Internet entrepreneur, NovaMed essentially acts as a middleman for companies with drugs they’d like to sell or test in China. Depending on the client, NovaMed says it will do everything from running clinical trials and shepherding drugs through the Chinese regulatory process to manufacturing, distributing and selling pharmaceuticals.

The company had previously raised roughly $6 million. NovaMed said it will use the new funding to expand its operations and also to in-license new drugs for deveopment or sale in China.

Lumidigm takes in $7M for optical-fingerprint ID systems — Lumidigm, an Albuquerque, N.M., developer of multispectral fingerprint scanners, raised $7 million in a third funding round, VentureWire reports, citing a regulatory filing. Investors included Epic Ventures led the round, joined by new investor Sun Mountain Capital and existing investors Fort Washington Capital Partners, Motorola Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson New England and Intel Capital. Lumidigm’s technology aims to read fingerprint information both from the skin surface and from subsurface layers to improve accuracy and foil attempts to spoof the technology.

Medical-software co. Compressus aims to close $14M round — Compressus, a Washington, D.C., software maker whose products link hospitals and doctors to government agencies for public-health monitoring and emergency response, is looking for an additional $1.3 million to close out a $14.3 million third funding round, VentureWire reports. The company, which was founded by three lobbyists, has so far raised more than $27 million from angel investors.

Channel Medical Partners aims for $150M med-tech fund — Channel Medical Partners, a Skokie, Ill., VC firm focused on medical-device investments, aims to raise a $150 million second fund, VentureWire reports. The new fund would be more than triple the size of its $40 million initial fund, raised in 2001. Channel aims to fund 12 to 15 startups with the new cash, and will concentrate on device firms, although it is open to investing in diagnostics, drug delivery and “specialty supply” companies as well.