Earlier this week, we told you about Dendreon’s plans to spend $50 million to upgrade its New Jersey manufacturing and lab facility. Well, the Seattle biotechnology company — which is on the verge of commercializing its prostate cancer treatment, Provenge — also has some ambitious expansion plans for its hometown.

Our sister publication, the Puget Sound Business Journal, reports that the company is looking to double the size of its downtown Seattle headquarters as well as obtain about 250,000 square feet of lab space along the Seattle waterfront or in the South Lake Union Neighborhood.

Reporter Jeanne Lang Jones notes that the expansion comes at a good time for Seattle’s struggling life sciences sector, which has been shedding jobs as companies such as Targeted Genetics, Northstar Neurosciences and ZymoGenetics reduce staff.

The company — with offices at 3005 First Ave. and 3101 Western Ave. — said it could move its headquarters in a few months if it finds the right space.

As of last March, Dendreon employed 198 workers. But the company — which raised $221 million last month — has been on a hiring spree. Its Web site now lists more than 80 jobs openings in Seattle and New Jersey.

Ever since Amgen gobbled up Immunex for $16 billion in 2001, Seattle has lacked a real heavyweight biotech company.

Could Dendreon be that break out company that helps put the region on the map?

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and Amazon’s Sharon Chiarella on crowdsourcing and cookie sales  

Sharon Chiarella is vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon.com’s "online marketplace for work," which connects people who want tasks done (for example, tagging web photos or doing small bits of research) with people willing to do them, often for pennies. Chiarella, a veteran of Kodak, Microsoft and Yahoo, joined Amazon in 2007, and is overseeing the company’s efforts to expand the Mechanical Turk service. She talked to TechFlash about the power of crowdsourcing, how it’s being used today, and why it shouldn’t be used to sell Girl Scout cookies.

On the genesis of Mechanical Turk:

One of the things that Amazon concluded or understood was that having access to a workforce that’s around the world to do things that computer algorithms aren’t really good for was really important, not only to our business but an insight that would be important to other people’s businesses as well. That was generally the starting concept for it. Once we launched it into the marketplace, we learn every day from our customers. The ways they use Mechanical Turk is really much broader than we originally realized.

On ways in which Mechanical Turk is being used today:

We have businesses who are using Mechanical Turk to help them improve their search results. As an example, they might use workers to create key word tags for images or audio clips or podcasts or video. Because it’s hard for computers to pull out key words for those sets of formatted content. In addition to improving search, we have companies that are asking workers to rate search results. So "Here’s the search term, here’s what my search engine came back with, are these in the most relevant order, are they all relevant?" And they might even go so far as to say, “Here’s what a different search engine came back with, how would you compare them?” So they’re really using them to rate relevancy, which is something that’s really difficult for computers to make a judgment on.

On companies that are using Mechanical Turk:

A lot of the companies that use us consider Mechanical Turk their secret sauce. If you go up on the site, you’ll see some names. I can’t tell you the names.

On interesting ways that Mechanical Turk is being used:

The Enron documents became public documents and one company put up the Enron documents and asked workers to identify company names, names of people and places, and they were creating a searchable database to get to the various documents and sort through it. That was just interesting. We have one company that’s using it to feed an iPhone app that lets you find local produce. So you can see where you are, it looks at the GPS on the iPhone and it will tell you what is locally grown within your area. The way they create that database is they have workers find out what’s grown locally in those areas.

On other wacky uses for Mechanical Turk:

We have one person who created a book about cats and it was crowdsourced. Every chapter was a different author, which was kind of interesting. (Amazon CEO) Jeff (Bezos) actually bought a copy of that and had us all sign it … There’s also somebody who asked people to sing specific parts of a song and strung it together. It’s been used as a delivery service: Deliver a bag of potato chips to Room 214 at this hotel.

On Mechanical Turk’s workforce:

We have over 200,000 workers in 100 different countries, so we really are a 24-by-7 workforce. It follows the sun, if you will.

On the value of Mechanical Turk:

If you use a broad range of workers, you can get a lot done very quickly because they’re all working in parallel. So a big project that might take a really long time in calendar time can be done in a very compressed fashion.

On the use of Mechanical Turk to search missing people, such as adventurer Steve Fossett:

With Steve Fossett, unfortunately, the areas that workers were searching in were not the areas where he was found. But there were a lot of things found, a lot of missing aircraft that had been lost over the years, that were identified, which was pretty amazing. It always amazes me how big this country is that things could get lost and never be found. 

On Mechanical Turk being labeled a “virtual sweatshop”:

If you look at the tasks, you’re right, the tasks are in pennies. If you pay someone two cents to do a task and it takes then 10 seconds, that’s $7.20 an hour and we do have workers that are very efficient who get into a set of tasks and do it very quickly … The broader point is that we want to have an opportunity for businesses and workers to find each other and what we’re seeing over time is there’s a large breadth of work and there are a lot of workers who show up for a lot of different motivations.

 

A closer look at Sharon Chiarella:

What kind of car do you drive: A GM "I don’t know what year it is … it’s several years old."

Profession you would try if not in technology: Teaching.

Hobbies: Biking, wall-climbing, and "learning to play golf." She’s a Girl Scout leader, but promises she does NOT crowdsource cookie sales: "You’re not allowed to. There’s a lot of rules around Girl Scout cookie sales."

Favorite restaurant in Seattle: Metropolitan Grill. My favorite Italian restaurant is Sages in Redmond.

Favorite vacation spot: Hawaii.

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and Microsoft search reunion at eBay  

Just as Microsoft is becoming a popular destination for former Yahoo search engineers and executives, eBay appears to becoming one for ex-Microsofties.

Microsoft’s Hugh Williams, who played a key role in the company’s new Bing search engine, has left to join eBay, as first reported this week by Silicon Alley Insider’s Nicholas Carson. Our calls to eBay this week haven’t been returned, but PaidContent.org’s Joe Tartakoff confirmed with Williams that he will be leading the company’s search development team.

What’s interesting is that eBay already employs two former Microsoft search executives, Christopher Payne and Dane Glasgow, who joined the e-commerce and online auction company when it acquired Positronic, their Seattle-based startup, earlier this year.

These moves tend to happen in clusters, as people who join a company recommend former colleagues as potential hires. On the surface, the hires might seem an odd move by eBay, given the fact that Microsoft’s Live Search engine didn’t exactly light the market on fire.

But Mary Jo Foley quotes an anonymous Microsoft insider calling the departure of Williams a "huge loss" for Microsoft’s search team.

Williams’ LinkedIn profile says his team at Microsoft was responsible for key elements of the newly launched Bing search engine, including "the development of all user-facing web search relevance features, including the left-rail explore pane (with its "table of contents"), navigational query treatments, query-biased summaries, "deeplinks", related searches, and whole page results relevance."

He also managed the company’s Powerset team and also managed development of search features in Internet Explorer 8 — which happens to count a certain online auction company among its key partners.

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Secretive Ground Truth taps Sterling Wilson as top executive  

The super secretive mobile analytics startup Ground Truth has landed a high-profile technology executive as its top guy.  Sterling Wilson, the former president of Qpass and former chief financial officer at Concur Technologies, is now working at the Seattle startup as president, according to three sources familiar with the company and business incorporation records filed with the state

We’re also hearing that the company is nearing completion of a venture round with Voyager Capital, the Seattle venture firm which counts Tom Huseby as a strategic partner. Huseby was among the earliest investors in Qpass, which recorded one of the more successful venture exits in recent years when it sold to Amdocs for $275 million in 2006.

Ground Truth has kept an extremely low profile ever since it was started by former Medio Systems co-founder Michael "Luni" Libes. In a short interview with TechFlash in early April, Libes said Ground Truth was no more than a business plan at that time.

But it appears as if things are moving forward. Papers filed with the state indicate that the company incorporated last October. They list Wilson as president and Libes as officer.

Huseby — though his name is misspelled in the filing — is shown as chairman. His longtime colleague, Susan Sigl, also is listed as an officer. Noel Howe — a Seattle attorney and former general counsel at Seattle online music startup Melodeo — is named as secretary.

So what’s the stealthy startup up to?

I am hearing they are building a new mobile analytics service, an area where another Seattle company has found success: M:Metrics. That company, which measures how people use mobile devices, sold out to comScore last year for $44.3 million.

One person who was familiar with Ground Truth’s plans said the company is doing something very clever, while another source said they have attracted quite a bit of buzz with the team involved.

Wilson spent eight years at Qpass, leading the company and its more than 280 employees after the Amdocs buyout. Before that, he spent six years at Concur as chief financial officer and executive vice president.

Wilson was traveling, and could not be reached for comment. Libes declined to comment via email.

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