VentureBeat

Alien Technology, a maker of tiny radio tags and readers, has a somewhat bumpy history. But now it’s back with a new round of $38 million in venture funding.

Back in 2006, without ever recording a profit and with losses exceeding sales, it filed for a scary IPO but was forced to pull it and then cut its worforce. It has burned through a whopping $302 million.

The new round is only slightly smaller than the $40 million it was seeking in the summer. It was led by existing investors Advanced Equities, New Enterprise Associates, Rho Ventures and Sunbridge Partners. The financing is well timed, closing just before the economic crisis, and suggests that the company has moved on from a hype cycle a few years ago to real products and revenues. (It also has a new CEO.) Its chips are being used in a wide range of technologies, from tracking evidence in crime labs to locating pallets of goods in massive warehouses.

“We raised the round quickly, but I’m glad we closed our round before Wall Street collapsed,” said chief executive George Everhart (pictured left).

The Morgan Hill, Calif.-based company makes radio-frequency identification (RFID) chip tags and readers that scan the data stored on those chips from dozens of feet away. Its claim to fame is “fluidic self-assembly,” a futuristic manufacturing method developed by UC Berkeley’s John S. Smith, who founded Alien in 1994.

Alien’s factories in Fargo, N.D, and San Jose have machines that take the tiny RFID chips and put them into a river of goo. The goo has chemicals that make the chips align themselves into little packages where they can be sealed and attached to a radio antenna. (If you don’t like my technical description of goo, there’s more information here. Basically, the chips flow through a river until they settle into little receptor slots on a piece of film. Then they’re sealed and tethered to an antenna).

The system is so efficient that it can package two million chips per hour, compared with 10,000 per hour with other packaging methods, according to Alien. Early on, this wasn’t an advantage because the volumes were too low.

Beyond making the tags, Alien also makes the high-value readers that can scan the data and send it off to software-tracking programs. Alien can thus be a vertical supplier of anything its customers need to implement an RFID tracking system. But the strategy exposes it to more competitors in each sub-sector of the RFID business. Read the rest of this entry »

We all know that the iPhone’s brilliant interface has changed the game. But let’s face it: while we’ve learned to deal with the touch-based keyboard on our iPhones, typing in messages is an inelegant process that is often executed with total disregard for the surrounding world. Some people (myself included) walk down the street while texting, pulling up directions on Google Maps, or updating Twitter. Some even send text messages as they drive. And so while touch has become a wonderful way to maneuver around a phone, it’s not always the ideal way to go.

A Charlotte, North Carolina-based company named Yap wants you to use your voice, instead. Yap, which just raised $6.5 million in its first round of financing, is a speech-to-SMS company whose technology lets you send texts to your friends without typing, post updates to Facebook and Twitter, and so on. Unlike speech-to-text services like Jott (our coverage) and PhoneTag (formerly Simulscribe), which employ humans to translate voice messages into text, Yap is entirely automated. See sample screenshot below.

On top of building its own speech-to-text applications, the company has opened up its platform to third-party developers and will license its technology to companies that can find interesting ways to deploy speech-to-text. By becoming a platform, the small company is entering into competition with some established players. The most famous of these is TellMe, a voice-recognition company that raised about $263 million before Microsoft bought it for around $800 million last year. The other is Nuance, which has a similar capability and has its applications on over two billion phones. Yap’s co-founder, Victor Jabolokov says his company has an edge on TellMe because, unlike TellMe, which requires adherence to grammatical forms, Yap can turn free-form speech into text. As for Nuance, which he sees as the bigger threat, Jabolokov says that the smaller company’s agility will let it tackle parts of this market before its larger competitor can lumber its way in.

The really big opportunity is not limited to speech-to-text. Despite the wonders of the iPhone, the killer interface for mobile that Jabolokov envisions will incorporate voice, translating your commands into search queries, pulling up calender appointments, setting a course for your GPS, and activating essentially any application on the fly. Jabolokov says this is the goal, but considering TellMe, Nuance, and Google probably have their eyes on it, managing to get there will be seriously tough.

However, there are hundreds of millions of SMS messages flying across the wire all the time, and getting a respectable piece of that will more than justify the investment. SunBridge Partners led the round, which included Harbert Venture Partners, Pittco Capital Partners, and existing angel investors.

[Editor's note: If you're interested in mobile innovation, be sure to check out MobileBeat2008, VentureBeat's conference on July 24]

We recently covered widget-maker Gydget, when it switched over to the widget business from its previous incarnation as events site Attendio.

At the time, we mentioned that the company was seeking a fresh infusion of capital from its investors. It has now received the round, from investor SunBridge Partners, although it isn’t disclosing how much.

Gydget is a good example of a company that seems to have found a viable business plan in the course of an unsuccessful first try. Attendio never gained much traction, but the company tells us that its Gydget widgets are in active use.

Some new celebrities using the widgets include Henry Rollins, Paul Oakenfold and Unkle, as well as the whole artist catalog of Curb Records. Two larger labels, EMI and Universal Records, are also preparing to roll out the widgets, according to the company.

Gydget’s main competition is probably SplashCast, which has Columbia Records on board (see our previous coverage). However, the true risk for widget companies is always the Next Big Thing.

Most deals with record companies are non-exclusive, meaning artists can drop out at any time in favor of using a new, slicker technology.