One of our favorite industry analysts for life sciences is Chris Connor at IDC. He recently endorsed the new direction that Seattle-based Insightful is heading with its products for data analytics. The company just announced the availability of Insightful Clinical Graphics, which helps researchers present data in visual terms. The company is a tad late in jumping on the bandwagon of delivering tools that make mountains of data more relevant to diverse audiences, particularly those that are not necessarily in the pharmaceutical industry...but there is a big market out there for easy to use products that can deliver analytics through graphics and illustrations. We've always been impressed with a much smaller local company, Arkitek Studios that's been around for years – the company uses animation to help customers such as Dendreon and Sonus explain complex research data to investors and other audiences.

-posted by Rachel

'Tis the season for weirdly fascinating stories...take the Word Of The Year Contest or WOTY. I had no idea that Merriam-Webster sponsors the contest annually. This year's winner is w00t (pronounced "whoot" and spelled with two zeros), an exclamation of joy used primarily by gamers. One of the runners up is Facebook, which the dictionary defines as a verb. Not such good news for the Facebook folks, I'd think -- looked what happened to Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex brand. Once it became a household word and stood for any type of facial tissue, it became extremely hard to protect the trademark in court. Today, the company spends mucho money defending its property rights.

-posted by Rachel

The MIT Venture Lab once again sponsored Startup Demo on December 13. Startups featured this year included Redmond's 2Bot Corporation, Seattle-based Athleon Sport, Safari Development (Denmark) and its Talking Letters application, Seattle's TeachStreet, ex-Microsofties Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui's DocVerse and Overcast Media.

-posted by Rachel

Gig Harbor is just full of interesting companies. One down the street is GottaPlay Interactive, a company that is establishing itself as the "Netflix" of video game rentals. GottaPlay just anounced Stephan P. Muller as its latest board member, and the man has got some great street cred for such a small company: he's held global executive positions with Apple and Reuters. Welcome to the neighborhood!

-posted by Rachel

Marcelo Calbucci and the folks over at Sampa are doing a great job of creating a monthly list of startups in the Seattle area. It's always interesting to see the new companies that are added to the list, some of which have names and/or purposes that are mystifying or just downright humorous. My favorites this month: imaPodHead, Human Proxy and its product, inluu and Beyond Wine and Cheese.

-posted by Rachel

You're probably getting tired of my posts on technology company name changes in Seattle...but here we go again. Centeris recently morphed into Likewise Software. The Bellevue company's been around for quite awhile, so given that, the name change may come as a surprise.

-posted by Rachel

You may have noted a certain, um, sparseness to the blog postings of late. There's actually a reason for this. (Not a good one, mind you, but still...).

You see, we are putting up a new web site, and the idea was to hold blog posts to roll over into the new site. But like all tech projects, this one has experienced certain unanticipated delays. So we have neither a new site nor any recent blog entries to show for all the hard work of the last several weeks. While the site redesign is still being wrestled to the ground and beaten about the head and neck, we will post these updates to ensure that we don't close out December with NOTHING to show. Enjoy.

And stay tuned for updates on the new site.

-posted by Paul