Pathway Medical has scored $40 million as part of a venture funding round that the Kirkland medical device maker hopes to finalize at $55 million, according to a report by Xconomy.  It follows a $24.5 million round that closed last April with participation from HLM Venture Partners, Oxford Bioscience Partners, Forbion Capital Partners, Giza Venture Capital and others.

Earlier this week, the company received FDA clearance to being marketing its Jetstream G2 technology for the specific use of breaking apart and removing blood clots in peripheral arteries in the arms and legs. The company says that more than 12 million suffer from peripheral arterial disease in the U.S., a number that is expected to top more than 20 million in the next 10 years. The product has been used on 600 patients.

The Pathway device — first approved by the FDA in January — removes plaque, clots and lesions from arteries. Last October, the company named Paul Buckman as chief executive, who replaced co-founder Tom Clement. Buckman previously served as CEO of Devax and eV3.

A spokeswoman for Pathway declined to confirm the financing deal, but Buckman did confirm the amount in the Xconomy story and said the company is targeting profitability in 2011. The company said a formal announcement will be made in a few days.

The venture deal is the largest in the state so far this year, and the biggest since Big Fish Games reeled in $83 million last September.

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and Geithner’s remarks spook the VC industry, but details scarce  

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s testimony to regulate the financial industry was greeted with mixed reactions today, with VentureBeat noting that the plan could lead to more "stringent reporting requirements" for venture capital firms. Details are still being ironed out, but the National Venture Capital Association tells VentureBeat that they are concerned about

At a recent meeting at OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, managing director Chad Waite criticized any government effort to lump the venture industry in with private equity and hedge funds.

"We don’t play games with numbers. We take a gal, a guy and a dog in a garage and start a company around it," said Waite, dismissing some of the value that hedge funds and private equity professionals add to new business formation. Waite was hopeful that President Barack Obama would recognize the difference, referencing conversations that Obama had engaged in with Steve Lazarus of Arch Venture Partners.

The NVCA’s Emily Mendell echoed some of Waite’s concerns in an interview with VentureBeat.

“We do have a big concern that this is the type of thing where venture capital gets swept up into regulation meant for other asset classes. The venture industry is just not that large, and we don’t have any leverage, and we don’t participate for the most part in the public markets…The government wants VC firms investing in startups and innovation, so creating regulatory burden for those firm at this time doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.”

Geithner’s made only passing remarks to the venture business in his testimony.

Accordingly, we recommend that all advisers to hedge funds (and other private pools of capital, including private equity funds and venture capital funds) with assets under management over a certain threshold be required to register with the SEC. All such funds advised by an SEC-registered investment adviser should be subject to investor and counterparty disclosure requirements and regulatory reporting requirements. The regulatory reporting requirements for such funds should require reporting, on a confidential basis, information necessary to assess whether the fund or fund family is so large or highly leveraged that it poses a threat to financial stability.

It is hard to imagine any venture fund being so large that it could pose a threat to financial stability.

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and Microsoft’s new ‘I’m a PC’ ads target Macs as overpriced, elitist  

The Mac vs. PC advertising war just entered a new phase. Microsoft today unveiled the ad below to kick off a new phase in its "I’m a PC" campaign — echoing recent comments by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer about the high price of Apple computers.

Money quote, after leaving the Apple store: "OK, for $1,000, they only have one computer available, and that’s a 13-inch screen. I would have to double my budget, which isn’t feasible. I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person."

 

 

Jessica Mintz of the AP has more background on the ad.

(Via Mary Jo Foley and Andrea James.)

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" _fcksavedurl="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-US&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:0bb6a07c-c829-4562-8375-49e6693810c7&showPlaylist=true&from=msnvideo" target="_new" title="Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion">Video: Laptop Hunters $1000 – Lauren Gets an HP Pavilion</a>

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Playboy gives Microsoft Silverlight a whole new level of exposure  

Hugh Hefner, meet Bill Gates. Microsoft’s Silverlight technology may have lost Major League Baseball’s online business to rival Adobe Flash last year, but the Redmond company has picked up another American icon with Playboy’s use of Silverlight for an interactive archive.

Always diligent in our work, we’ve been dutifully testing the online application. Judging purely from a technology perspective, of course, it’s a good showcase of Silverlight’s capabilities, including the ability to smoothly browse the digital pages. The tables of contents are clickable, leading to fast navigation. It’s also possible to search the full text of the articles — which is no doubt the feature that gets the most use.

The online application (do we need to mention it’s not safe for work?) offers free access to selected Playboy magazines dating back to the mid 1950s, showing the pages exactly as they were published in print. The application was first shown last week at Microsoft’s Mix conference.

"Playboy has an incredibly rich history and an intensely loyal readership," said Playboy founder Hefner in the news release announcing the application. "This is the perfect opportunity to offer them something they have always wanted and also a great way to allow a whole new generation to easily explore the magazine."

The application was created by Bondi Digital Publishing, which also developed the underlying technology for "The Complete New Yorker." More broadly, Playboy’s choice of Silverlight for the application could be a good sign for Microsoft — particularly if the old saying holds true about adult entertainment signaling the future direction of technology.

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