SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google will increase the cash it allocates to its venture-capital arm to up to $300 million a year from $200 million, catapulting Google Ventures into the top echelon of corporate venture-capital funds.
Access to that sizeable checkbook means Google Ventures will be able to invest in more later-stage financing rounds, which tend to be in the tens of millions of dollars or more per investor.
It puts the firm on the same footing as more established corporate venture funds such as Intel's Intel Capital, which typically invests $300-$500 million a year.
"It puts a lot more wood behind the arrow if we need it," said Bill Maris, managing partner of Google Ventures.
Part of the rationale behind the increase is that Google Ventures is a relatively young firm, founded in 2009. Some of the companies it backed two or three years ago are now at later stages, potentially requiring larger cash infusions to grow further.
Google Ventures has taken an eclectic approach, investing in a broad spectrum of companies ranging from medicine to clean power to coupon companies.
Every year, it typically funds 40-50 "seed-stage" deals where it invests $250,000 or less in a company, and perhaps around 15 deals where it invests up to $10 million, Maris said. It aims to complete one or two deals annually in the $20-$50 million range, Maris said.
LACKING SUPERSTARS
Some of its investments include Nest, a smart-thermostat company; Foundation Medicine, which applies genomic analysis to cancer care; Relay Rides, a carsharing service; and smart-grid company Silver Spring Networks. Last year, its portfolio company HomeAway raised $216 million in an initial public offering.
Still, Google Ventures lacks superstar companies such as microblogging service Twitter or online bulletin-board company Pinterest. The firm's recent hiring of high-profile entrepreneur Kevin Rose as a partner could help attract higher-profile deals.
Soon it could have even more cash to play around with. "Larry has repeatedly asked me: 'What do you think you could do with a billion a year?'" said Maris, referring to Google chief executive Larry Page.
(Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)
The college basketball season gets under way Friday with a game at a Europe military base, two more aboard Navy ships and another featuring a reshaped national champion playing in a brand new building.
No. 14 Michigan State plays Connecticut, in its first game since the retirement of coach Jim Calhoun, at Ramstein Air Base in Kaiserslautern, Germany. It's the first game between Division I teams held in Europe.
Then it's on to the decks for No. 4 Ohio State against Marquette on the USS Yorktown in Charleston, S.C., and Georgetown facing No. 10 Florida on the USS Battan in Jacksonville, Fla.
No. 3 Kentucky, the defending national champion with a heralded freshman class, plays Maryland in the first college doubleheader at the new Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y.
This week’s Ask the Expert features Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, who will answer questions related to Alzheimer’s disease and memory loss. He is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center and an author of “The Alzheimer’s Action Plan.” Dr. Doraiswamy has also served as an adviser to government agencies, advocacy groups and businesses.
About five million Americans today live with Alzheimer’s disease, and a new diagnosis is made about every 70 seconds. Cases are expected to triple over the coming decades as baby boomers age.
Misperceptions and misdiagnoses are common about Alzheimer’s, which ranks second to only cancer among diseases that adults fear the most. Many people do not understand that there are dozens of causes for memory loss besides Alzheimer’s, including many that can be fully reversed if caught early.
Among the questions Dr. Doraiswamy is prepared to answer:
What are the best tests to determine if it is or isn’t Alzheimer’s?
How do you determine your own risk?
What are the family-care options? Medications for memory? Medications for behavior problems? Preventive strategies?
What has been learned from the latest clinical trials?
How can you improve your memory?
Please leave your questions in the comments section. Answers will be posted on Wednesday.
You can follow Booming via RSS here or visit nytimes.com/booming.
John Gress for The New York Times
Dan Brown, inventor of the Bionic Wrench, is defending his patent rights against the Max Axess, made in China.
Last Christmas, Sears had a brisk seller in the Bionic Wrench, an award-winning, patented tool with spiffy lime green accents. This holiday season, though, Sears has a special display for its own wrench, in the red and black colors of its house brand, Craftsman.
The Bionic Wrench is made in America by Penn United Technologies. Sears sells the Max Axess, sourced from China.
One customer who recently spotted the new Craftsman tool, called the Max Axess wrench, thought it was an obvious knockoff, right down to the try-me packaging. “I saw it and I said, ‘This is a Bionic Wrench,’ ” recalled Dana Craig, a retiree and tool enthusiast in Massachusetts who alerted the maker of the Bionic Wrench. “It’s a very distinctive tool,” he added.
The tools have one significant difference, Mr. Craig noted. The Bionic Wrench is made in the United States. The Max Axess wrench is made in China.
The shift at Sears from a tool invented and manufactured in the United States to a very similar one made offshore has already led to a loss of American jobs and a brewing patent battle.
The story of the Bionic Wrench versus Craftsman, which bills itself as “America’s most trusted tool brand,” also raises questions about how much entrepreneurs and innovators, who rely on the country’s intellectual property laws, can protect themselves. For the little guy, court battles are inevitably time-consuming and costly, no matter the outcome.
Still, the inventor of the Bionic Wrench is determined to fight. He is Dan Brown, an industrial designer in Chicago who came up with the wrench after watching his son try to work on a lawn mower. Mr. Brown says he believes that the Max Axess wrench copies his own and he is planning to file suit against Sears, which declined to answer any questions about the wrenches for this article.
The Bionic Wrench is distinguished by its gripping mechanism, a circle of metal prongs that, inspired by the shutter in a single-lens reflex camera, descend evenly to lock onto almost any nut or bolt.
Since Sears has halted new orders, the Pennsylvania company that makes the Bionic Wrench has had to lay off 31 workers, said Keith Hammer, the project manager at the company, Penn United Technologies. “And that’s not to mention our suppliers,” he added.
Mr. Brown sees a broader issue than just the fate of his wrench. “Our situation is an example of why we’re not getting jobs out of innovation,” he said. “When people get the innovation, they go right offshore. What happened to me is what happened to so many people so many times, and we just don’t talk about it.”
Inventors typically spend $10,000 to $50,000 to obtain the type of patent Mr. Brown has on the wrench, said John S. Pratt, a patent expert at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton in Atlanta. Though he said he could not comment on the merits of Mr. Brown’s potential suit, patent infringement cases can be especially difficult in the tool field, where many improvements are incremental, Mr. Pratt explained.
A defendant in such a case would most likely argue that either the tool did not warrant a patent in the first place, or that its own product did not violate the patent.
The fact that Sears made some changes to the wrench’s design, like making the grooves that allow the metal prongs to slide back and forth visible instead of hidden, will make the case more challenging, he said. “It’s hard for me to imagine that Sears isn’t particularly careful about breach of patent, so there’s probably another side to the story,” he said.
After patenting the wrench in 2005, Mr. Brown formed a company, LoggerHead Tools, to bring it to market, making a point of having it made in the United States.
The Bionic Wrench was greeted with enthusiasm at trade shows and in industrial design competitions, and the company survived the downturn in 2008. Mr. Brown resisted overtures from large chain stores that wanted to sell the tool under their proprietary brand, he said, and rejected the lure of cheaper manufacturing in China. “I was raised a different way,” he said.
The tool sold fairly well on its own — LoggerHead has shipped 1.75 million of them — but Mr. Brown, 56, who teaches industrial design at Northwestern University, says LoggerHead operated on a shoestring and he plowed much of the profit back into the company. “You cannot have big offices and fancy cars and everybody with an administrative assistant, because we are competing with China,” he said.
For all the talk of a “fiscal cliff” threatening the nation’s finances, President Obama also faces a foreign policy cliff of sorts, with a welter of national security issues that he put on the back burner during the campaign now clamoring for his attention.
Atop that list, administration officials and foreign policy experts say, is the bloody civil war in Syria and the standoff with Iran over its nuclear program. The United States is likely to engage the Iranian government in direct negotiations over the next few months, in perhaps a last-ditch diplomatic effort to head off a military strike on its nuclear facilities.
Administration officials said that they had not set a date for talks and that they did not know if Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would give his blessing. But with Iran’s uranium centrifuges spinning and Israel threatening its own military action, the need to avoid a war may make this high-risk diplomatic effort Mr. Obama’s No. 1 priority.
Syria, too, will demand a pressing response, given the high human toll of the violence and the danger of a spreading regional conflict. Mr. Obama, however, remains leery of being dragged into the conflict, rejecting calls to supply weapons to rebel groups. His reluctance has been partly political, experts say, but he also has strategic qualms.
“At a time when he was running on a platform of ending wars in the Middle East, he did not want to be seen as starting one,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel.
“But if he doesn’t try to intervene in a way that gives him a way to shape a post-Assad regime on the ground,” Mr. Indyk continued, referring to the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, “there’s a high risk of descent into chaos in Syria, and a sectarian war that spreads to Lebanon, Bahrain and eventually Saudi Arabia.”
Beyond those flash points, the president will have to grapple with Pakistan, an unstable nuclear state whose relationship with Washington has eroded during his presidency. And he will have to oversee an orderly exit from Afghanistan, where the waning American role threatens to throw the country back into chaos and Islamic militancy.
As he does so, some question whether he will rethink his administration’s heavy reliance on drone strikes to kill people suspected of being extremists, a policy that has proved lethally efficient but has sown deep resentment in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
More broadly, Mr. Obama will face Russia under the aggressive leadership of President Vladimir V. Putin and China with the opposite problem — negotiating a tumultuous change in power after a scandal that tainted the top ranks of its Communist leadership.
None of these problems are new, but many were effectively shelved over the past year as the president waged a bitter re-election battle dominated by his stewardship of the economy. Foreign policy played such a bit part in the election that even in the debate ostensibly devoted to it, Mr. Obama and Mitt Romney detoured into a discussion of high school test scores in Massachusetts.
For reasons of history and political reality, a re-elected Mr. Obama is likely to devote more time to foreign affairs. From Richard M. Nixon to Bill Clinton, presidents have tended to make their bid for statesman status in their second terms. The prospect of continuing gridlock — with the Republicans still controlling the House — gives Mr. Obama all the more reason to favor diplomacy over domestic legislation.
There is also some unfinished business from the past four years, not least Mr. Obama’s frustrated efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. But several experts cast doubt on whether the president would throw himself into the role of Middle East peacemaker, as Mr. Clinton did in his second term.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has had a fraught relationship with Mr. Obama, faces his own voters early next year, but he seems likely to stay in power with a right-wing government. Such an arrangement could make peacemaking difficult.
“Because he got his fingers burned and was outmaneuvered by Netanyahu, he will wait to see the outcome in the Israeli election,” said Mr. Indyk, who wrote a book about Mr. Obama’s foreign policy, “Bending History.” He added that the president is “going to think long and hard about trying again.”
The added wrinkle for the United States: the Palestinian Authority is likely to petition for nonstate membership in the United Nations next month, a step it had put off until after the election. If the United Nations were to grant it, that would trigger Congress to cut off aid not only to the Palestinian Authority but also to the United Nations itself.
The mere fact of Mr. Obama’s victory does not ease these problems. But as the president himself famously said to Russia’s former president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, at a nuclear conference in South Korea, he may have more room to maneuver in dealing with them.
Ask foreign policy experts for wild cards in a second Obama term and two countries come up: India and Cuba. Little progress was made in opening the door to Havana during the past four years, but hope springs eternal for those who advocate an end to the half-century-old trade embargo. Mr. Obama also is likely to build on his ties to India.
India figures into the biggest geopolitical bet of Mr. Obama’s presidency: the American pivot from the Middle East to China and Asia. With four more years, experts said, Mr. Obama can put meat on the bones of an ambitious, but incomplete, policy.
Here, however, is where the fiscal cliff meets foreign policy. To be credible in reasserting an American presence in Asia, experts said, will require a robust military presence from the Yellow Sea to the South China Sea. But unless the White House and Congress can strike some kind of fiscal deal, the Pentagon will face deep automatic cuts in its budget, depriving it of the ability to project power as it once did.
For Mr. Obama to realize his grandest visions abroad, then, he will still have to work with the same House Republicans who thwarted him on the home front in his first term.
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INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Andrew Luck has joined the shaved squad, too.
Nearly three dozen players on the Indianapolis Colts have shaved their heads in a show of support for head coach Chuck Pagano, who is undergoing treatment for a form of leukemia.
Luck became a new member of the no-hair club Wednesday morning. Players and coaches were not available for comment because they were headed to Jacksonville, but a team spokesman confirmed that Luck will indeed look quite different when he takes off his helmet Thursday night.
"Buzzed heads and orange locks in honor of Chuck," team owner Jim Irsay tweeted. He also included a link to a photo showing many of the players who had gotten buzzed.
Indianapolis (5-3) has gone to great lengths to give their ailing coach encouragement.
Reggie Wayne wore orange gloves against Green Bay, the ribbon color used to raise awareness for leukemia. Nameplates above player's lockers at the team complex now include orange stickers with Pagano's initials in the middle of Indy's trademark horseshoe. They sent Pagano a game ball after their surprising win over the Packers on Oct. 4. Irsay has placed signs reading (hash)Chuckstrong in each end zone of Lucas Oil Stadium, and the team has been trying to raise money to support leukemia research.
The newest addition to the agenda came late Tuesday when the team said Wayne, Luck and interim coach Bruce Arians would participate in a fundraiser at Dunaway's, a local restaurant, on Nov. 16. They will sign autographs and take photos with fans to help benefit The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.
So when Pagano showed up in the Colts' locker room Sunday without his grayish hair or trademark goatee, player director of engagement David Thornton decided to bring in a barber following Tuesday's practice.
The idea was an immediate hit — and seems to be growing larger by the day.
About two dozen players, including kicker Adam Vinatieri, defensive end Cory Redding, Pro Bowl safety Antoine Bethea and punter Pat McAfee, left the team headquarters Tuesday night with no hair. It's a new look for McAfee, who had a ponytail until last fall when he cut it off and donated the hair to Locks of Love, a cancer charity.
"We haven't been together long... But we're in this together," McAfee wrote in a Twitter message.
On Wednesday morning, more players joined the contingent, including Luck, the No. 1 overall draft pick and this week's AFC offensive player of the week.
At this rate, all of the Colts could have a whole team without hair playing Thursday night at the Jaguars. Arians, one of Pagano's close friends and a prostate cancer survivor, doesn't have any hair, either, though he's donned that look all season.
Pagano was diagnosed with leukemia on Sept. 26 and remained hospitalized for treatment until Oct. 21. He watched the next two Colts games from his home before doctors allowed him to attend Sunday's victory over Miami. Pagano watched the 23-20 victory from the coaches' box and spoke with his team before and after the game.
"I've got circumstances. You guys understand it, I understand it," Pagano said in an emotional postgame speech. "It's already beat. It's already beat. My vision that I'm living is to see two more daughters get married, dance at their weddings and then lift the Lombardi Trophy several times. I'm dancing at two more weddings and we're hoisting that trophy together, men. Congratulations, I love all of you."
On Monday, Pagano's physician, Dr. Larry Cripe of the Indiana University Simon Cancer Center, said Pagano was in "complete remission." Cripe said Pagano is still scheduled to have two more rounds of chemotherapy. The second round starts this week and will last four to six weeks, Cripe said.
Arians has said the Colts hope to have Pagano back on the sideline Dec. 30, Indy's regular season finale against Houston.
___
Online: http://pro32.ap.org/poll and http://twitter.com/AP_NFL
The calls started coming in late on Tuesday and early Wednesday: offers of dry ice, freezer space, coolers. By the end of Thursday there were dozens more: A researcher at Weill Cornell Medical College would clear 1,000 tanks to save threatened zebra fish; another, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, promised to replace some genetically altered mice that were lost; and a doctor at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia even offered take over entire experiments, to keep them going.
As hurricane-driven waters surged into New York University research buildings in Kips Bay, on the East Side of Manhattan, investigators in New York and around the world jumped on the phone to offer assistance — executing a reverse Noah’s ark operation, to rescue lab animals and other assets from a flooding vessel.
“I’ve had 43 people who have offered to help so far, and some of them are direct competitors,” said Gordon Fishell, associate director of the N.Y.U. Neuroscience Institute, who lost more than 5,000 genetically altered mice when storm waters surged the night of Oct. 30, cutting off power. “It’s just been unbelievable,” he said. “It really buoys my spirits and my lab’s.”
Staff members at N.Y.U. worked around the clock to preserve research materials, running in and out of darkened buildings without elevator service, hauling dry ice and other supplies up anywhere from 2 to more than 15 floors.
The university’s medical center also got instant help, from almost every major research institution in the area.
The response reflects large shifts in the way that science is conducted over the past generation or so. Individual labs always compete to be first, but researchers increasingly share materials that are enormously expensive and time-consuming to reproduce. The loss of a single cell line or genetically altered animal can slow progress for years in some areas of biomedical research.
“We are totally dependent on each other in the life sciences now, for a very large number of cell lines and extracts, research animals and unique chemical tools and antibodies that might not have backup copies anywhere in the world, or in very few places,” said Dr. Steven Hyman, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. “Losing any of these tools tears a significant hole in the entire field.”
Danny Reinberg, a professor of biochemistry at N.Y.U.’s medical school, has studied genetics for 30 years, accumulating valuable mice strains and stocks of extracts from cell nuclei that would be extremely difficult to replace. The extracts must be stored at minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.
Dr. Reinberg said he lost all of his mice: nine strains, including more than 1,000 animals that died in the storm surge. But he managed to save all of the cell extracts by moving some containers into freezers at N.Y.U. labs that weren’t affected and others to the Rockefeller, Columbia and Cornell medical centers, each of which cleared space, he said.
“We were able to save many things; it was just phenomenal to get that kind of help,” said Dr. Reinberg, whose house in New Jersey has had no power.
“Later in the week, at a Starbucks, I could finally download all my e-mail, and there were messages from people at the University of Pennsylvania and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, asking how they could help us re-establish the mouse lines we lost,” he said.
Some scientists have become interdependent because their students, who develop a specialty in specific tissues or animals, often move among labs. Research projects sometimes draw on experiments or analyses the students worked on at more than one place.
One researcher working in Dr. Fishell’s lab was formerly a student of Dr. Stewart Anderson of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, who sent Dr. Fishell a text message on Wednesday to offer help. “I told him that even if it costs money, we’re happy to keep experiments rolling, if we’re able to,” Dr. Anderson said.
By late Thursday, freezer space in minus-112-degree units was extremely tight in the city. So was dry ice.
Susan Zolla-Pazner, director of AIDS research at the Manhattan Veterans Affairs Medical Center, had lost power in her 18th-floor lab in the department’s building at 23rd Street and First Avenue. She finally hired a company to haul her 20 freezers-full of specimens, for safekeeping.
“We spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday hauling 1,300 pounds of dry ice up to the 18th floor, using the stairs, to stabilize the freezers first,” said Dr. Zolla-Pazner, who is also a professor of pathology at N.Y.U. School of Medicine. “And the dry ice people would only take cash. I have about 25 to 30 people working for me, and everyone was out there on 23rd Street, reaching into their pockets to get what we needed. It was a herculean and heroic effort on the part of everyone here, and that is the story that needs to be told.”
Henny Ray Abrams/Associated Press
A trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday. A day after the election, the outlook of continued divided government in Washington and little prospect for compromise unnerved traders.
A one-two punch of worries about the post-election picture in the United States and economic weakness in Europe sent stocks reeling Wednesday, with major indices falling more than 2 percent. Some industry sectors, like finance and managed care, fell substantially more than that over fears they would be hurt by tougher regulations and other adverse policies in President Obama’s second term.
The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index recorded its worst performance since June, falling 33.86 to 1,394.53, while the Dow Jones industrial average fell 312.95 to 12,932.73. It was the Dow’s first close below the psychologically important 13,000 level since August.
Shares also came under pressure after Barclays sharply reduced its year-end target for the S.&P. 500 to 1,325 from 1,395 — 5 percent below where the broad-based index closed Wednesday.
“Within the equity market in the near term, we believe there will be nowhere to hide,” said Barry Knapp, chief United States equity strategist at Barclays. “In the near term, we generally suggest cutting risk.”
Many market strategists expect that the market will remain volatile between now and mid-January. If Congress and the president cannot come up with a plan to cut the deficit, hundreds of billions in Bush-era tax cuts are set to expire at the beginning of 2013 while automatic spending cuts will sharply cut the defense budget and other programs.
Known as the fiscal cliff, this simultaneous combination of sweeping reductions in government spending and tax increases could push the economy into recession in 2013, economists fear.
In the wake of President Obama’s re-election, companies in some sectors, like hospitals and technology, will see a short-term pop, said Tobias Levkovich, chief United States equity strategist with Citi. Other areas, like financial services as well as coal and mining, are likely to be hurt, Mr. Levkovich said.
Indeed, coal companies were among the worst hit Wednesday. The coal industry is particularly sensitive to new environmental regulations, while Mr. Obama has pushed in the past for more investments in renewables and alternative energy sources that could reduce coal demand in the long-term.
Shares of Alpha Natural Resources, a coal giant, were down 12.2 percent to $8.45, while Arch Coal was off 12.5 percent to $7.58.
But HCA Holdings, a hospital operator, jumped 9.4 percent, to $33.85 a share. As a result of Mr. Obama’s victory, Goldman Sachs said it upgraded its rating on HCA to buy from neutral, and raised its price target to $39 from $31. It also raised price targets for Tenet Healthcare and Community Health Systems, although both are still rated neutral.
Goldman downgraded shares of Humana, a leading managed care company, to sell, and its shares fell 7.9 percent to $70.16. Goldman warned that Humana and other managed care providers could be hurt as health care reform moves forward, especially new rules for health insurers that become effective in 2014.
Shares of Wall Street firms and big banks were also hard hit. While Mitt Romney favored substantially altering the Dodd-Frank financial regulations passed in the summer of 2010 and easing many regulations, President Obama has supported stricter rules for the financial services industry. In addition, one of the industry’s fiercest critics, Elizabeth Warren, was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts, unseating her Republican opponent, Scott Brown.
Bank of America fell 7.1 percent to $9.23 while Goldman Sachs dropped 6.6 percent to $117.98 and JPMorgan Chase sank 5.6 percent to $40.48.
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