Okay, I just can’t resist. For some time, I’ve noticed that some people have last names that seem inappropriate, ironic, and/or just plain funny given the companies that employ them.

Take Virtual Radiologic Corp., a Minnetonka-based company that contracts with radiologists across the United States to interpret and analyze imaging data from CT scans, MRIs and ultrasounds sent over encrypted broadband networks 24 hours a day.

In January, Virtual named a new CEO: Robert Kill. Not sure if I’m comfortable with the CEO of a health care company whose last name is KILL.

At least he’s not a doctor. Can you imagine that? “Mr. Lee, your heart transplant surgery will be performed today by Dr. Kill.”

That reminded me of another last name I came across a few years ago. A fellow by the name of Ted Crooks. What did Mr. Crooks do for a living? He oversaw the development of fraud prevention software at Fair Isaac. I can see the headline already: “Crooks stops fraud.”

Not to be outdone, a colleague offered this gem. The chief operating officer of Vasectomy.com: Maya Wank.

‘Nuff said.

You remember what an IPO is, right? It stands for initial public offering.

Forgive me for asking since IPOs have been a little scarce these days, given the global recession and shaky capital markets.

But lo! Word today that Rosetta Stone Inc. went public with a better than expected $112 million IPO and promptly saw its shares soar nearly 40 percent from $18 to $25.12.

Rosetta Stone, which makes language education software and tapes, isn’t based in Minnesota but nonetheless has strong connections to our state. Norwest Equity Partners, a Minneapolis-based private equity firm, owned part of the company and still remains a major investor. Piper Jaffray & Co. co-managed the stock offering.

With an uptick in the stock market, some positive housing data, and surprising profits from Wells Fargo, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs, is Rosetta’s IPO another sign that economy is at last recovering?

John Lindahl, NEP’s managing general partner, isn’t saying exactly. For one thing,  NEP-owned companies rarely issue IPOs, he said. Life Time Fitness was the last one to go public. NEP normally likes to sell its companies to strategic buyers.

Rosetta, though, represents a “tremendous upside in growth, both domestic and international,” Lindahl said. “It’s also a branded product, which helps companies gain an international following.”

NEP first acquired its 40 percent stake in Rosetta in 2006 through a management buyout. (ABS Capital Partners owned the remaining 60 percent.) Sine 2005, Rosetta sales have more than quadrupled from $45 million to $209 million in 2008. With that numbers like that, Lindhal figured the smart move was to go public.

Still, times are not exactly normal and though Lindhal wouldn’t say it, he must have wondered how Wall Street would react to an IPO in a middle of the worst recession since World War II. He found the result thoroughly gratifying.

“This was a very good exit for us,” he said. Rosetta “was the only company to price above its range since May 2008. The IPO was substantially oversubscribed.”

Normally, an investor would like to see shares go 15 to 20 percent higher than the initial price on the first day of trading, he said. Rosetta went 40 percent.

“It’s great,” Lindahl said. “It’s very unusual to exit ANY investment in this economy. It’s just so difficult to price” given uncertain market demand.

That last sentence should people pause. Rosetta’s IPO may not signal the end of the recession but it does prove that investors are coming out of their shells- long enough to snatch shares of a highly profitable, high growth company, that there is pent up demand for quality IPOs.

The IPO should also give some cheer to venture capitalists and other private equity firms wondering how to make money from their clogged investment portfolios. By exiting existing investments, maybe VCs and private equity can start to make new bets.

We’ll find out soon enough. The MoneyTree report on local and national VC activity during the first quarter comes out Friday. And the Star Tribune Quarterly Deals Report will hit newstands Monday, April 27.

OrthoCor Medical Inc. said it has raised $1 million from angel investors. The Minneapolis-based start-up is developing a device that uses electromagnetic energy to treat knee pain.

The company has ties to the University of Minnesota. OrthoCor, then called Nesos Health, was vetted by six teams of graduate business and engineering students from the school’s New Product Design and Business Development Program. One student in the program, Kin-Joe Sham is now OrthoCor’s vice president of research and development.

OrthoCor hopes to obtain approval from the Food and Drug Administration by August, said CEO John Dinusson, a former venture capitalist who also served as vice president of private banking at Eagle Crest Capital Bank in Edina and director of initiative ventures with the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.

Earlier this month, famed biotech investor Steven Burrill paid a visit to Worthington where he gave the keynote address to a regional bioscience conference. Burrill, who is looking to raise a $1 billion venture capital fund to lure start-ups to the Elk Run Biosciences Center, spoke about what health care will look like in 10 years.

Advances in DNA sequencing and mobile technologies will allow consumers to instantly store and update medical information on cell phones, PDAs and even iPods.

Such real-time information will help patients better manage their health care by “telling what’s wrong with you and be predictive of whether you get diabetes or Alzheimer’s,” Burrill said. The data will also help doctors to better diagnose and treat diseases.

It’s no wonder then that Burrill is setting up shop in southeastern Minnesota, specifically near Rochester, home to IBM and Mayo Clinic.

Since 2002, the two venerable institutions have collaborated on a project that uses IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer to mine Mayo’s six million electronic patient records for trends and commonalities in large population groups that otherwise could go undetected for years. Such a system will give providers speedy access to medical data for treatment of specific diseases in like individuals by comparing genomic data.

Over the past six years, the IBM-Mayo collaboration has born intriguing fruit, says Drew Flaada, who oversees the project.

Examples:

1. A technique to data mine unstructured formats like doctors’ notes that will help researchers to not only find key words but also understand the right context. For instance does the word “cold” refer to a physical sensation or a stuffy nose and headache? Mayo-IBM have made available this research to the open source community, meaning outsiders can improve upon this work.
2. A way to align and compare multiple 3D images from CT scans of the same patient. Also allow doctors to isolate blood vessels from the rest of the brain in a potential stroke victim during a MRI scan.
3. Use molecular modeling to simulate the pathways and linkage points of viruses, allowing researchers to design better drugs. The Hormel Institute in Austin recently acquired a Blue Gene super computer for this purpose.

Flaada said IBM and Mayo are already talking with several companies about licensing some of this technology. While Flaada says he hasn’t directly spoke to Burrill, he supports the idea of a nearby bioscience incubator that can develop start-ups into real companies.

IBM could, perhaps, offer some its computing expertise to help the start-ups, he said. For example, companies at Elk Run could access via Internet software, servers, and computer power stored at the University of Minnesota in Rochester, a concept known as “cloud computing.” I also asked Flaada whether IBM would allow Elk Run start-ups the use of a Blue Gene supercomputer but a a IBM spokesperson quickly cut him off.

That same spokesperson also nixed my question about whether the work of the IBM-Mayo collaboration could be spun off into new companies. But you gotta know that’s where it’s heading.

I can already hear Burrill licking his chops.

And so ends the great Lois Quam experiment at Piper Jaffray. Quam, who ran the company’s alternative investment portfolio, has left to start her own business incubator after less than two years on the job.

It’s hard to see Quam’s brief tenure as anything more than a failure, considering the mighty expectations attached to her position, which, incidently, the company created specifically for her. Piper lured Quam from a senior position at UnitedHealth Group in 2007, presumably for big bucks, to help it make investments in health care and green energy start-ups.

But it’s hard to make investments when you don’t have any money. The capital markets dried up last year, which meant Quam was relegated to making speeches instead of launching new funds.

Piper’s decision to hire Quam will probably go down in history as a great idea at the wrong time. Quam is an excellent communicator, a high profile health care executive whose connections to government and powerful  groups like the AARP would complement Piper’s ambitions in health care. But any investments Quam would have made would take years to pay off, if ever.

Normally, it’s admirable for a company to think that far ahead. But Piper, as it turns out, did not have the luxury of time. Wall Street and the general economy melted last year and without fresh capital, the raison d’etre for Quam’s position became moot.

Piper sold of its brokerage operations to UBS to become a pure play investment bank. But CEO Andrew Duff said he wanted to diversify Piper to make it less dependent on the boom and bust cycles of investment banking. The company expanded overseas plus bought an asset manager. Quam’s hiring represented Piper’s boldest move yet, to become a direct investor in companies instead of just earning fees from managing IPOs and advising mergers and acquistions.

But Piper is still at heart an investment bank, a fact that has become painfully apparent when it lost$153 million last year. The company may still yet recover.

Quam, however, was not willing to stick around to find out.

It’s been a good year so far for RedBrick Health. The Minneapolis-based start-up, which designs and provides financial rewards for workers to improve their health, recently raised another $15 million in venture capital.

Next week, RedBrick will release results that says employees who participate in its health and wellness programs showed improved cholesterol, blood pressure, and body mass index.

Now comes word of a real coup: CEO Kyle Rolfing tells Patent Pending that RedBrick snagged Target Corp. as a customer.

Not sure if Rolfing accidently let the news slip during our interview. He didn’t give any details except to say that Target and RedBrick are still ironing out the details and than an announcement will come over the next few weeks.

But “they are a client,” Rolfing said.

Target is by far RedBrick biggest catch. The Minneapolis-based retailer employs over 360,000 people. Throw in Target’s enormous size and brand recognition and RedBrick must be positively giddy right now.