And the winner was… Safeguard! This was our second PACT award in a row for ‘Investment Deal of the Year’. Watch Safeguard’s President and CEO, Peter J. Boni, accept the award below:

In other Safeguard news, our own Phil Moyer headlined the Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic panel at Philly Tech Week, where he noted the potential for startups to claim a significant stake in the mobile world in its many incarnations, from phones and tablets to the Internet of Things.

Outside of Philadelphia, our life sciences team has been busy with the New York Digital Health Accelerator (NYDHA). The new Digital Health Accelerator program’s goal is to foster health IT innovation and create the next generation of healthcare tools. NYDHA is supported by Safeguard Scientifics along with other venture firms and local health providers, such as Aetna, New Leaf Venture Partners, New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and NYU Langone Medical Center.

Our partner companies have also been garnering attention. Here’s the latest news:

• AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions’ Bill Gilbert and Brice Voithofer offer seven reasons for claim denials in surgery centers for Becker’s ASC Review.
• DriveFactor was quoted in a press release about technology-driven data recording and its role in usage-based auto insurance (UBI). DriveFactor’s UBI program was covered in Insurance Thing and Live Insurance News.
• Good Start Genetics’ Series B stock financing deal was featured in an InformationWeek roundup of Health IT companies attracting funding for their innovative approaches to healthcare. The announcement was also covered by FinSMEs, The Boston Business Journal, MassHighTech, PEHub, Xconomy, Fortune / CNNMoney, BioCentury, FierceMedicalDevices, and IVD Technology.
• MediaMath became the first demand side platform to spin off an agency from its core software business. With the creation of Kepler Group, the marketplace gets a new services provider for programmatic media buying–one that will work directly with high-touch brands. The new firm launches in the U.S. with nine clients, including Kayak spinoff media agency, Kepler Group, makes it the first demand-side platform to create an agency. The news was featured in AdAge and AdExchanger.
• NovaSom announced that Michael Coppola, M.D., President and Chief Medical Officer of the American Sleep Apnea Association, will be joining NovaSom as Chief Medical Officer and Vice President of Medical Affairs.
• NuPathe CEO Jean Hollingsworth spoke on the Smart Talk Q&A panel as part of Philly Tech Week. MedCity News covered the panel, recapping the advice in “7 tips for women working in the life sciences industry.” In addition, NuPathe will report first quarter 2012 results on Thursday, May 10 at 8:30 a.m.
• PixelOptics’ emPower! eyewear won a Gold Edison Award for Quality of Life in the competition’s Lifestyle and Social Impact category.

To read more of our Week in Review series, please use the following feed: www.safeguard.com/WeekInReview. Have a great weekend!

Spongecell is a digital advertising technology company that enhances standard banner ads with rich interactive features including video, social media, interactive maps, carousels, downloadable/SMS coupons, and more. Spongecell allows companies to collect data and analytics that provide a detailed portrait of audiences that cannot be produced in other advertising platforms.

In this Q&A, Ben discusses the key components to determine when/if to pivot your business, the importance of transparency in creating a great company culture, and his vision for the future of the ad tech industry.

Why did you choose to become an entrepreneur?

In a way, it’s about controlling your own destiny. You’re able to work closely with people who you trust—both to take initiative and to make decisions that impact your life as well as the lives of everyone else you’re working with.

When I was in high school, I actually started a couple of small businesses on my own. Then in college, I had my own web consulting company. So while I always gravitated towards entrepreneurship, I graduated college right in middle of the dot-com craziness and felt like I needed to get experience and learn from other people who were already out in the real world before starting my own venture. So I worked for companies of all different sizes, from start-ups to high-growth companies to public multi-nationals, to get a varied set of skill sets—the combination of which made it really easy for me to transition into helping start Spongecell.

I also quickly realized that Carnegie Mellon prepared me well to be an entrepreneur. A lot of my coursework had been project-based—sort of semester-long startups. So I found that I’d gotten a lot of experience related to the business world before I’d ever really even been in it. I had the tools, skills, and confidence; I just needed an idea and the right partners!

To what would you attribute your success?

So much of it is about being an eternal optimist. Look at the story of Spongecell. Five of us started the company in 2006, raising a couple million dollars to go after our first idea—a calendaring widget—back when widgets were all the rage. We were so incredibly optimistic about the idea, but it just didn’t work out. We ran out of money, had to let all our employees go. We were back to square one.

We started working on a new idea—interactive ads—but unfortunately, we didn’t have any capital to support this new endeavor. This was back in October 2008, and if you recall, it was nearly impossible to raise money to hire or to do anything else. We hadn’t even paid ourselves a salary for nine months at that point.

But being the overly optimistic entrepreneurs that we were, we thought this new idea had legs, and it helped that we had some early validation in the form of a few successful test campaigns. Thankfully, since then the idea has really taken off, and we’ve been able to build a great business that we get to enjoy every day.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as an entrepreneur?

I learn a new one every day. A business is constantly changing, so you’re always learning. In the early stages, when you’re trying to raise your first dollar and trying to earn your first dollar of revenue, you learn different things than when you’re a company with 60 people that’s growing rapidly and facing different kinds of challenges.

So I’d say the most important lesson I’ve learned is being able to adapt to a constantly changing environment. I mean constantly, even from one day to the next. Being able to adapt and morph your business, whether you’re introducing new ideas or adding new products or bringing in new people or entering new markets, is key to getting where you’re trying to go.

Communication, too, is critical. At Spongecell, we have employees spread across the country, even into Europe, and we have to make sure that everybody’s on the same page, that we’re all selling the same products, that we’re all following the same core principles. That only happens with good communication and making sure that people really understand what’s going on so they can embrace it. When everybody’s operating on the same core principles, you’re going to have a more efficient business and a better culture.

What’s your biggest business challenge right now?

I think it’s being smart about how we scale. A lot of people talk about scaling for its own sake. But we’re more interested in being smart about it. We try to take a long-term approach to our growth. Scale to me is about more than just driving as much revenue as we possibly can. Scale is making sure that our existing clients are happy and that our new clients are having great first-time experiences. It’s making sure that our software is in tiptop shape and that people who work with us have great experiences on all fronts.

Being smart about those kinds of things and taking a long-term view on growth will ultimately help us scale successfully. It’s easy to just chase the dollar and sell deals that may or may not be the right fit, but we want to make sure that we’re taking the right deals, knowing that we can deliver on them and that they’re going to be great for our clients.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs in the ad tech or digital advertising space?

I would say don’t be afraid to change. Be ready and willing to change if and when you see the opportunity to create a better business. One of the mistakes we made was hanging on to our old business six months longer than we should have, which ate up a lot of cash that would have been useful in starting our new endeavor. It’s definitely challenging to let go though, as you get so emotionally tied to your idea knowing it’s something that you believed in and worked years of your life on.

Make sure that you find a balance between sticking to your original idea and knowing when it’s time to pivot into something new. Pivoting is inevitable. It’s not necessarily worn like a badge of honor, and it’s something that people should take very seriously. Once the decision’s made to do it though, do it with all of your heart and effort. Don’t hang on. That would be my advice: When the time comes to change—and it inevitably will—change quickly and don’t look back.

Also, be able to identify when the time is right to make the change. There are tangible signs that it’s time that you can look out for, like when you you’re not hitting your revenue metrics and your pipeline isn’t there (if you can identify why you aren’t hitting the metrics or if you have a big pipeline that you think will close, that’s a different story). Making the pivot is important even when you’re having success. Never stop looking for other ways to increase the value of your business, like adding new markets or products.

What is your long-term vision for the ad tech or digital advertising marketplace?

Right now we think about marketing on different devices in different ways. For a long time TV and radio, for example, were separate entities; you only bought and sold for one medium.

In digital, there’s still a lot of this kind of fragmentation. Some teams buy video campaigns, others buy mobile tablet campaigns. You would think that all of that would, and should be, consolidated under a single digital team. I think that’s where it’s going. I think the technology will provide for one ad buy that can be executed across tablets, across pre-roll video ads, across display ads, and potentially even extend to outdoor and traditional TV ads.

Eventually, it could all be bought, sold, and delivered in the same way. I think traditional TV probably will stay outside the realm for a while, but ultimately I believe it’ll all converge, and there will be one or more unifying platforms.

How do you operate at Spongecell? How do you motivate your team? What’s the culture like?

We’re very transparent about what our opportunities are. We have a chart that everybody in the company can see, and you can click on everybody’s name and see what their roles and responsibilities are and what they need to do to get to the next level. Anyone can even see what my job is and what I do on a daily basis. I think that level of transparency helps people really feel like this is a company that actually cares about them and wants to see them grow and develop. As such, our turnover rate is really low.

We have an intense and passionate group. We all work hard and people put in long hours. We’re intensely focused on delivering for our clients and being a client-first organization. We try to become smarter by understanding who we’re working for and how we’re working for them, ensuring our clients are going to have great experiences. When you have a great team that’s having a great time and they’re building a great product, that’s naturally going to lend itself to having great clients who are having that same positive experience.

What should startups look for in VCs, beyond just the financing? What are the core services that are most important for startups? What do startups tend not to think about?

I think it depends on the stage your business is in. In the early stages you really need money, but you should be smart about where it comes from. For example, if you know you’re going to be in the media world, then you should find investors with media connections. If you’re going to be in the consumer world, find those with consumer connections. You should always find investors that have expertise and experience in the space that you think you’re in or want to move into.

The early stages of a business are all about the product. You need to figure out what skill sets you have on your team and what you’re missing, then try to find an investor that can help fill in those gaps.

In the growth stage, a company’s needs change. You’re in your market, you know your market, and you have a skilled team that can sell into the market. But if you still have gaps that you can’t fill through hiring, you want to see if you can fill those with an investor. For example, maybe you need operational expertise to think about how to grow internationally. You’ll want to find an investor that’s been there, done that, so you have someone to guide you along the way.

What is your go-to news source?

AdExchanger. It covers our space really well. It feels more like an industry forum than a traditional publication.

What’s your must-have app?

The camera (yes it’s an app!), so I can take pictures of my beautiful 17-month-old daughter!

For more information about Spongecell, please visit the company’s website (www.spongecell.com). You can also follow Spongecell on Twitter @Spongecell and Ben Kartzman @benkartzman.

Read more in our Q&A Series with Safeguard Scientifics’ partner company CEOs.

Our team is executing a focused and disciplined strategy that enhances Safeguard’s brand as the preferred catalyst to build great companies. Our partner companies continue to generate attractive growth. In the first quarter, aggregate revenue of our partner companies grew 26 percent. For full-year 2012, we project aggregate partner company revenue in a range of $160 million to $165 million, keeping in mind that partner company revenues are reported on a one-quarter lag. In addition, four of our partner companies have achieved positive EBITDA performance.

We reported some exciting progress at our partner companies during the first quarter… here are some highlights:

• AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions acquired COMPUDATA, a medical-billing firm focused on Ohio and Pennsylvania anesthesia practices. AHS has now completed five acquisitions since mid-2009. Including acquisition activity, AHS revenue increased 40 percent in 2011 to approximately $40 million.
• Good Start Genetics announced the initial closing of a $14 million Series B Preferred Stock financing, which was led by existing investors Safeguard, OrbiMed Advisors, and SV Life Sciences. Proceeds from this financing will be used to augment commercial efforts for the company’s pre-conception carrier screening tests, and to support continued R&D efforts around its proprietary technology platform for future applications.
• Medivo acquired WellApps, a developer of mobile health applications that help patients manage chronic diseases.
• NuPathe received notices of allowance for two U.S. patent applications, one offering patent protection through 2025 for NP202 and another extending protection through 2027 for NP101.

During our call we received some questions to update the investor community on other developments. We discussed the PixelOptics rollout, which is moving forward with people anticipating the product’s arrival in their market. A new CEO has been added with over 2,000 eye care professional organizations targeted. We have rolled out the ability to demonstrate the technology as well as the complete selection of frames to well over 500 kiosk locations. We are planning for a growth acceleration path as we get into the second half of the year.

Our CEO Peter Boni reiterated that we provide multiple-stage as well as multiple-domain patient capital and expertise. With a focus on tech and life sciences, we have one foot each in industries that tend to be countercyclical. Being multiple-stage is also somewhat countercyclical. We can enter at any stage of investment, from some of our selective developmental stage companies to initial revenue-stage companies through to expansion-stage and even high-traction companies.

Today, later-stage technology firms are attracting investor attention, with LinkedIn, Facebook, and Zynga mania. That has impacted tech valuations. If we were single-domain or single-stage, we’d be locked into this market and its higher risk of buying high and selling low. Fortunately, we have the luxury of moving in and out of industries and up and down the growth ladder, to buy low with the opportunity to sell high – what is basically the essence of our strategy.

Rounding out some of the financial results from the quarter, we ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities of $234.4 million. This amount does not include an aggregate of $16.4 million of restricted cash and cash held in escrow. The total carrying value of outstanding debt was $45.9 million, and net cash was $188.5 million. Consolidated net loss for the three months ended March 31, 2012 was $9.7 million, or $0.46 per share, compared with net loss of $9.0 million, or $0.44 per share, for the same period in 2011.

If you were unable to join us live this morning, check out our podcast or listen to a replay of the call at 855-859-2056 or (international) +404-537-340. The replay will be available through May 25, 2011 at 11:59 p.m. EDT.

All this activity is helping startups innovate new and better ways for people to take an active role in their own health. In a recent Xconomy article, Lisa Suennen notes that “75 percent of all healthcare costs are due to chronic illnesses, many of which could be completely avoided.” The healthcare mobile apps that have attracted so much attention could help treat those illnesses through real-time monitoring of symptoms or faster lines of communication between doctors and patients.

In other life sciences news, Safeguard recently realized additional proceeds from Eli Lilly’s acquisition of Avid Radiopharmaceuticals. Earlier this month the FDA approved Amyvid, a diagnostic agent used in brain imaging. The approval triggered an additional $5.6 million in proceeds for Safeguard, with the potential for further proceeds in the future. Philadelphia Business Journal covered the news.

Here’s the latest from our partner companies:

• The news that AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions acquired COMPUDATA echoed around the media, earning attention in Becker’s ASC Review, Healthcare IT News, and Crain’s Cleveland Business.
• Beyond.com CEO Rich Milgram offered advice for job applicants in an article on Fox Business.
• DriveFactor, formerly Crimson, announced its expanded usage-based auto-insurance program that will potentially save drivers money by basing insurance rates on driving habits. Better driving equals better insurance rates.
• Putney hired Bert Mileski as Vice President of Quality. CEO Jean Hoffman says that Mileski will take Putney to a new level in both quality systems and manufacturing.
• ThingWorx was featured in a SmartGridNews.com profile that highlighted the benefits of the ThingWorx platform.

To read more of our Week in Review series, please use the following feed: www.safeguard.com/WeekInReview. Have a great weekend!

At 9 a.m. EDT that morning, we’ll host a conference call and webcast on which Peter J. Boni, our President and CEO, and Stephen T. Zarrilli, our CFO, will be providing a company update. Here’s the link to listen to our live webcast.

Alternatively, here is the conference call dial-in number: 800-537-0745 (+678-825-8236 for international callers). Conference ID#: 71553711.

We will also be tweeting LIVE during the call, so be sure to follow our ticker $SFE.

If you’re unable to join us live, check out our podcast, which will be available approximately 24 hours after the conclusion of the call. In addition, the webcast will be archived through May 25, 2011 at 11:59pm EDT, as will the telephone replay at 855-859-2056 (International) +404-537-3406.

We hope you can listen in to hear the about the progress we’re making at Safeguard and our partner companies.

In 2011 alone, Silicon Valley companies received $11.6 billion in investments. However, that figure only represents a third of all U.S.-based venture investment. In 2011, more than $30 billion of capital was deployed, a record since 2001. This clearly indicates that Silicon Valley was not the only place where entrepreneurs received funding to start and grow their businesses.

In fact, the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic are stealthily becoming destinations for startups and early growth-stage companies to raise funds. It is a region that is being sought out by entrepreneurs (both West Coast and East Coast) for its unique commercialization environment — a great compliment to the big-idea environment in Silicon Valley.

The pros and cons of location are often bandied about in arguments of East Coast versus West Coast. But choosing a location doesn’t need to be an either/or proposition. By creating a bi-coastal strategy, a company can have the best of both worlds and encode its DNA with the West Coast’s big ideas and the East Coast’s focus on commercialization.

The Northeast corridor is to commercialization what Silicon Valley is to engineers. If you’re going to sell something to a business, you’re likely going to travel to the Northeast. Within a 300-mile radius exist some of the most important industries of the 21st century, which represent target customers for aspiring business-oriented startups:

• Media and Communications: Headquartered in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia are Time Warner, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, as well as numerous other agencies, publishing companies, and marketing firms. These firms represent a gold mine for advertising technology companies.
• Financial Services: This industry calls Manhattan home. It’s tough to have an enterprise application without having one of the large financial institutions from NYC on your customer list. Software giants for the financial industry—SunGard, Bloomberg, and ADP—are headquartered here. And don’t forget the credit card and payment companies—Visa, Master Card, and American Express.
• Government: The single largest organization in the world, the U.S. Government, also has the largest budget in the world for technology and lies within this corridor. Any company that’s serious about the enterprise must have a dedicated federal government presence.
• Healthcare: Payers, such as CIGNA, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Aetna, and pharmaceutical companies, such as Merck and Pfizer, line the New Jersey and Pennsylvania corridor. In addition, healthcare also concentrates much of its spending on the East Coast. The business of medicine is fast becoming personalized and data intensive—demanding consumerized mobile technologies, big data architectures, and privacy-sensitive cloud architectures.
• Manufacturing and Industrial: The roots of the Northeast were in heavy manufacturing, but today the industrial firms on the East Coast are a next-generation fleet-of-foot industrial and logistics companies—like GE, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, and UPS — building the next generation of power, transportation, logistics, and materials.

Venture firms in the Northeast corridor have a deep Rolodex of customers, as well as access to engineers that have had to harden and scale technologies in line with some of the most challenging vertical scenarios our next generation of entrepreneurs faces. However, because of the need to face these commercialization realities every day, East Coast venture firms have tended to be more conservative than their West Coast brethren.

East Coast firms were known for focusing more on B and C Rounds, established customer bases, income statements, balance sheets, and cash flows. As a result, many early-stage companies felt they were disqualified from the start and that this “established” culture was stacked against them.

But over the past few years, as the cost of starting companies has dropped and innovation has sprung up from every direction—especially in the commercialization corridor, a vibrant community of seed- and early-stage companies — investors have sprung up to support these ideas on the East Coast in the form of organized angel groups, incubators, venture funds, and strategic “innovation/venture” groups (i.e. Comcast Venture, Moody’s Ventures, SAP Ventures, etc.).

Simply put, funding for all stages is now available on both the East Coast and West Coast. Smart entrepreneurs recognize this and are seeking the best of both coasts by actively selecting firms on opposite coasts from their existing investors. Even the new tech establishment firms are adopting a bi-coastal strategy—Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, to name a few, have opened offices in New York City.

It’s clearly no longer a question of, “Should I raise capital from an East Coast firm or a West Coast firm?” It’s more a question of how an entrepreneur can benefit from the culture, resources, and contacts of both. Mixing big ideas, talent, customers, and funding has always been a recipe for success. The technology opportunity has never been greater for entrepreneurs and now the funding opportunities are there to match. East Coast or West Coast, it’s a great time to be an entrepreneur!

This post originally appeared on VentureBeat.

And this was before the JOBS Act was signed into law by President Obama yesterday. The new law loosens the strict SEC regulations previously in place to offer new opportunities for emerging growth companies to seek financing or go IPO. Check back here for updates on the impact of the law once it’s fully rolled out.

Here’s our latest partner company news:

• AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions acquired COMPUDATA, an Ohio-based medical billing company. This represents AHS’ fifth acquisition since mid-2009, and expands the company’s footprint in Ohio and Pennsylvania while strengthening the company’s anesthesia practice customer base. In addition, you can now find AHS on Facebook and Twitter.
• MegaPath recognized Bridgevine with a Sales Excellence Award, one of its annual awards that spotlight the growth and success of its top channel partners.
• Good Start Genetics announced a $14 million Series B financing and three key hires. BioCentury, Boston Business Journal, CNNMoney / Fortune, Fierce Medical Devices, FinSMEs, IVD Technology, Mass High Tech, PEHub, Xconomy and VentureWire / Dow Jones picked up on the news.
• MediaMath partnered with PubliGroupe to bring a state-of-the-art media buying platform and services to advertisers and agencies in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The platform will be built with MediaMath technology.
• Medivo launched a new blog called “Beyond the Pill“, which provides life science marketers with timely analysis of the critical issues driving an evolution of the industry’s traditional commercial model toward new markets.
• NovaSom announced its collaboration with Jefferson School of Population Health to convene the first expert advisory board exploring the impact of undiagnosed obstructive sleep apnea on healthcare costs and productivity in the workplace.
• NuPathe presented a company overview at the 11th annual Needham Healthcare Conference this past Tuesday.
• Spongecell’s Blythe Dunham, Co-founder and Principal Software Architect, was featured on Rescuecom’s computer support blog.

To read more of our Week in Review series, please use the following feed: www.safeguard.com/WeekInReview. Have a great weekend!

Read on to find out how effective communication, hiring great employees, and building strong business relationships are helping Jean and the Putney team to create affordable generic pet medicines to keep pet family members healthy at a lower price point.

Why did you choose to become an entrepreneur?

I saw a need—a problem that needed solving—and I was at a stage in my life when I could start something new and take a risk. When I started my first business, Newport Strategies, I was fortunate enough to have already achieved considerable success in my career. I was named a CEO for the first time at the age of 29, and I could see that, with continued hard work, the privilege of some wonderful mentors and luck, I would continue and be even more successful.

But I could also see that that alone wasn’t going to fulfill my life, so I made the decision to leave my position as CEO in New York and move back to Maine. I thought hard about what I wanted to do next and what was going to be the most interesting thing for me to do. Starting a company and solving a need that I identified in the industry was something I felt extremely excited about.

My first company, Newport Strategies, identified the manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients around the world and linked that proprietary data to other data to help generic companies choose profitable products to develop. In founding Putney, I saw the need for affordable generic pharmaceuticals so that people who have pet family members could afford to treat them when they become sick.

To what would you attribute your success?

Hard work, listening, and being able to distill information and make sense of it. I’ve been able to see patterns and things other people didn’t see, in part because they weren’t listening as hard as I was. Relationships too have been fundamental to my success.

What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as an entrepreneur?

How to communicate. Not everyone sees things the same way I do, and it often takes repetition and more active listening to understand what people see and then be able to convince them to sign a deal, to join Putney, or to buy our products, for example. Communication is supremely important. I always knew that, but it has become ever more important. It’s one of the things that I’ve continued to learn about and feel the need to emphasize and improve on.

What’s your biggest business challenge right now?

Hiring great people and creating a bench of talent so that we can continue to hire to support our rapid growth. We look for people who have demonstrated success performing the particular jobs that we’re trying to fill. So if we’re looking for someone in regulatory affairs, we look for someone with a demonstrated track record of success at a generic drug company, particularly a human generic drug company, in the field of regulatory affairs.

Photo (L to R) from Putney, Inc.: Derek Chapman, Manager, Portfolio Growth Initiatives and Marketing; Tracy Sullivan, Executive Assistant; Jennifer Albert, Office Manager; Jean Hoffman, Founder, President and CEO; TJ Dupree, Chief Operating Officer; Patrick Powell, Vice President, Sales; and Derek Mills, Customer Service and Logistics Lead

We look for people who are smart, good communicators, and good team players. But overall, I’d say that the number one characteristic in successful employees on my team is a deep commitment and interest in learning and growing. They have a hunger to do better, to learn more, and to grow personally and professionally.

What advice would you give other entrepreneurs in the life sciences or the pharmaceutical space?

In the pharmaceutical space, the best advice I would give is to make sure that you have quality in every aspect of your organization and your operation. That means, in part, having sufficient depth and caliber of FDA expertise on your team. Because pharmaceutical companies are regulated by the FDA, you need employees who can advise your company and the manufacturing sites you own, or are working with, to ensure that they are in compliance with FDA current good manufacturing processes (cGMPs). This is the most important thing a pharmaceutical company can do.

How do you operate at Putney? How do you motivate your team? What’s the culture like?

People usually start smiling as soon as they walk in the door at Putney. They see the bright Putney colors and the Putney pets, our series of giant black and white photographs of pets on the wall. Most people’s screen savers are pictures of their pets. We have Putney pets on the website and on the back of everyone’s business card. So you walk into Putney and you get an immediate sense of our vibrancy, our energy, and our focus on pet health.

We put a lot of effort into recruiting the right candidates for the team, but we also are increasingly investing in training and team building activities so that everybody advances their skills and their overall understanding of the business goals of the company and the role of every member of the team in contributing to our success.

Putney is a very intense place and our people work closely together. They work hard to move the ball forward down the field, even into the evening hours. It’s a pretty exciting place to work right now. We schedule a lot of training here at Putney, so we have, for instance, a professor of finance from Babson’s Business School delivering a customized course called Putney Finance for all members of the team who don’t have MBAs. This completely customized course uses basic-level finance training, combined with Putney’s financials and Putney’s goals, to help both educate people here who are in technical roles or who don’t have a finance background, as well as share the financial goals of the company and how those goals are measured.

What’s your long-term vision for the veterinary market and pet generics in particular?

We see generic drugs for pets as an extraordinary opportunity to build a company as well as do something good for pets, pet owners, and veterinarians. It’s a unique opportunity in the pharmaceutical space, and we are very focused. We have the largest pipeline in animal health. We’re initially targeting the U.S., but we plan to build out internationally in the future. We see a huge opportunity here to provide high quality medicines that pet owners and veterinarians can afford and help improve the health of our pet family members.

What should startups look for in VCs, beyond just the financing? What are the core services that are most important for startups? What do startups tend not to think about?

One of the most important things to think about in raising capital is that raising capital isn’t just a one-time event. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs tend to focus on closing the transaction, but closing the transaction is the beginning of the hard work involved in executing your plan. The process of raising money should really be about qualifying the best venture capitalists that you can build a long-term relationship with.

Financing is ultimately a partnership with your VCs. They’re going to have seats on your board, and they’re either going to be your best or your worst advisors. For that reason, it’s very important for entrepreneurs, especially the senior management team of a company, to make a good choice in VCs, and to have VCs who feel they’re making a good choice in you and your business, but also in your people, because you’re going to need to work together closely to succeed. And you’re going to need to work together even more closely when things go wrong.

One of the things that I like about Safeguard is that when I asked for references, Safeguard was happy to provide a long list of current and former CEOs who would speak openly with me about their experience working with Safeguard. After closing the investment transaction, I’ve attended a number of events that Safeguard holds for all of their partner company CEOs, members of the Safeguard team, and advisors. They bring us all together and encourage us to share ideas, to build relationships, and learn from each other. The Safeguard events for CEOs are terrific—Safeguard brings an attitude of candor and openness to the table.

What is your go-to news source?

The New York Times online newspaper—www.nytimes.com.

What’s your must-have app?

The Notes app. I organize my life in my phone, and I keep notes of to-dos for myself, for each of my direct reports, and for each of my board members on my iPhone. I find it’s a very handy way to help me keep organized.

For more information about Putney, please visit the company’s website (www.putneyvet.com).

Click here to read more in our Q&A Series with Safeguard Scientifics’ partner company CEOs.

Both offer unprecedented access to information, and the way CIOs approach these innovations can determine the competitiveness of their companies in the next few years. Cloud and mobile technologies are entirely new models for connecting to customers that produce previously unfathomable data, require new data management technologies, and offer a new economic model.

To keep their companies competitive, CIOs must be “intrepreneurs,” driving innovation and new business models within their companies. One part businessperson, one part Chief Technology Officer, today’s CIOs can capitalize on the consumerization of technology to connect with business partners, employees, and customers in the cloud-based, mobile world they inhabit—or face competitors that do.

The cloud has been thriving in the consumer space, led by products like Dropbox, Amazon, and Google Docs. Now the cloud is working its way into the enterprise. Gone are the days when a company needed RFPs to innovate. Proposals for adding in-house servers or building new software just aren’t necessary anymore. Cloud-based technologies and low-cost mobile devices, plus agile development methodologies in tandem with big data and in-memory technologies allow companies to innovate at a very low cost. CIOs shouldn’t fight this notion; they should embrace it as a philosophy for unlocking innovation.

ING Direct is a great example. They are the largest Internet-based bank. They don’t fear the cloud—they are the cloud. Their business couldn’t exist without these technologies. They adapt to customer demands faster than many traditional banks. Following its merger with Capital One, ING announced the coming of a remote deposit service. Customers will be able to deposit checks directly into their accounts from their computers or by simply taking a picture of a check with the ING Direct mobile app. As they think about the future of their transactional systems to support this instant imaging of checks, they are already looking beyond traditional batch systems in an effort to provide straight-through processing from their customers’ phones to their accounts.

Beyond the innovative possibilities, the cloud also has practical benefits. Businesses can quickly and seamlessly scale their capacity as projects become successful without large up-front capital costs. Proactive CIOs will create secure, cloud-based sandboxes where employees can build new business models. If and when the project is successful, the economics are there and the technology is there to support auto-scaling. This dramatically reduces the risk and friction of innovation and makes the CIO an enabler of competitiveness.

The cloud will be especially crucial as more companies embrace mobile devices. Processors, networking speeds, and memory capacity have all hit an inflection point, putting search, email, maps, and calendars in consumers’ hands. Phones and tablets have become so popular that experts predict that good old personal computers will make up less than 20 percent of the devices connected to the Internet by 2014. This proliferation of smart devices means a proliferation of data. A proliferation of data will require massive infrastructure and a re-consideration of the traditional technologies used to store and analyze this data. Simply put, there are more companies solving these problems outside of the firewall than inside the firewall, which makes the economics and the business model inevitable.

Businesses can’t assume that they are immune to this shift. Employees now expect access to both business data and personal data on their mobile devices. People barely blink when their business and private lives intermingle. The millennium generation hardly understands the concept of their employer owning their phone or tablet. Many companies will need to let employees bring their own devices in order to recruit the best and brightest of the newest generation of workers and provide environments that encourage innovation and connectivity.

Many of the big four accounting firms (the largest employer of recent college grads) have already instituted such a policy and are encouraging employees to bring their iPad or smartphone to work. The company occupies a small piece of real estate on those devices as opposed to the employee’s personal life occupying a small piece of real estate on a corporate device. The consumerization of the enterprise is upon us.

For the last 10 years, CIOs tried to consolidate and outsource as much as possible to gain the benefits of economies of scale. Today, however, the economies of scale outside the firewall dwarf most enterprises’ internal economies—with a fraction of the economic risk. At the same time, labor arbitrage can be accomplished without an RFP right over the Internet. Many CIOs have found themselves flat-footed without the necessary internal skills to harness a world where infrastructure, processing capacity, and labor are available in abundance.

The best CIOs are building small teams, partnering them with business units, and giving them a mandate to innovate with no barriers outside of the firewall. They are also building a serious enterprise technology team to build relationships to the major cloud vendors and evolve their offerings and relationships to support going live with these innovator teams. These are the CIOs that are intrepreneurs and the breed that will take their companies into the next generation of business.

Both cloud and mobile technology offer untold possibilities for CIOs who are willing to rethink their business environments. Those proactive enough to experiment with new business models, even if they only start with low-risk cloud-based applications, are the ones who will succeed.

This post originally appeared on the Fortune Brainstorm Tech Blog.

Startup Health Academy, an incubator and accelerator for healthcare entrepreneurs, recently announced its inaugural class, and Medivo CEO Sundeep Bhan was included in this prestigious group. Startup Health Academy is a new way to support entrepreneurs developing new technologies that are reducing health costs and improving patient care.

Medivo is also pursuing that goal through its acquisition of WellApps, which creates mobile apps for monitoring symptoms of intestinal illnesses. In a recent story, Xconomy called the acquisition another step toward Medivo’s goal of creating a comprehensive physician dashboard detailing patients’ latest symptoms.

The convergence of tech and life sciences has sparked MedCity News to host a summit on July 10th in Philadelphia, aptly named Converge. This one-day summit will further explore the implications and potential of innovations in healthcare. According to MedCity’s press release, the driving force behind this conference is as follows: “Data, technology and traditional healthcare have collided in a way that will change the medical industry forever. This is an era of change but also innovation: a new generation of entrepreneurs is coming from the tech sector to contribute to the medical industry, while at the same time progressive-minded leaders in hospitals, pharma, medtech and beyond are finding new problems to solve and new directions to chart for their sectors.”

In other partner company news:

• Becker’s ASC Review recently noted AdvantEdge Healthcare Solutions’ $40 million in revenue for 2011—a 40 percent jump over 2010.
• The Richmond Times-Dispatch featured Crimson Informatics in a story describing their efforts to implement usage-based car insurance by collecting data on driving habits.
• Lumesis joined forces with Investortools to offer fixed-income professionals further insight into the health of their current and potential portfolios.
• Erich Wasserman, Co-founder and General Manager, EMEA of MediaMath sheds light on the MediaMath Open partner certification program over at ExchangeWire. Wasserman also recently contributed an article to AdMonster, titled “Consolidation and the Future of Digital Display Advertising.”
• Baltimore Business Journal’s profile of NovaSom highlighted its recent accomplishments in fighting obstructive sleep apnea.
• NuPathe announced its fourth quarter and full year 2011 results and held a conference call for the investment community this past Tuesday.
• Putney CEO Jean Hoffman was named one of MaineBiz’s 2012 Business Leaders of the Year. An accompanying video takes viewers inside Putney’s Maine office to speak with Hoffman and veterinarian John Flood.
• Swap.com partnered with Yoplait Light to encourage swapping – from products on Swap.com to nutrition and fitness habits.

To read more of our Week in Review series, please use the following feed: www.safeguard.com/WeekInReview. Enjoy your weekend!