The stampede of top Hollywood talent to the Internet in the last several weeks has been a jaw-dropping event, considering the wide berth most industry stars have given the Web.

Tim Burton and the “South Park” creators signed deals with Shockwave.com to develop short cartoons. Robin Williams is producing a talk show for Audible.com. Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld,” and top producers from “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files” have popped up in the halls of newly formed Icebox.com in Santa Monica.

As Internet entertainment enters the era of big personalities, countless wannabees who believed they could scrabble their way to the top via cyberspace are seeing their chances start to fade.

But Icebox.com doesn’t want to see the industry evolve in that direction. Created by the former head of the new-technology division at Beverly Hills talent agency International Creative Management along with some leading television producers, Icebox.com has a business plan designed to discover and nurture new talent, in addition to working with established stars.

“Our mandate is to go out, find, and work with best talent out there,” said Chief Executive Steve Stanford. “We want to work with both the Who’s Who in the industry and the guy who turns out to be the next Mike Judge still working out of a garage.”

Launching next month, Icebox is developing eight new animated shows from some of the industry’s most innovative, established talents to be aired in ultra-short (two- to five-minute) episodes.

Given the success of animated shorts crossing into the mainstream such as “The Simpsons,” which started out as short segments on “The Tracy Ullman Show” the Icebox team wants to foster new properties that are more creative for having been developed outside of the traditional Hollywood box.

Icebox wants to lure visitors primarily through the work of the industry greats, then direct traffic to the animated shorts by unknown artists. Stanford describes the space for unknowns as a “free for all,” with audience reaction the sole arbiter of success.

“The opportunity to discover new talent is immense,” Stanford said. “We’re very much an incubator for talent, which doesn’t happen much in this town.”

Electronic Nose

Pasadena-based Cyrano Sciences Inc., which develops electronic nose technologies for biotech uses, has nabbed the exclusive license for the newest patented technology to come out of its neighbor, the California Institute of Technology.

The Caltech patent is on an algorithmic-based system that can recognize microorganisms via sensors. The system will be incorporated into Cyrano’s electronic nose gadgets, with the intent that doctors may soon be able to hold the gadget close to a patient’s breath or body fluid to take a “sniff” and thus identify any disease- and infection-causing microorganisms found.

Cyrano intends to incorporate the patented system into products currently being developed in partnership with medical diagnostic manufacturer Welch-Allyn.

In other local biomedical news, Westlake Village-based biotech company Solgene Therapeutics LLC won a prestigious $100,000 grant from the National Institute of Health to study a potential new type of bone-healing therapy. Solgene, which specializes in developing drug delivery methods, will collaborate with the associate dean of Cornell University Medical School, Joseph Lane, to test the therapy.

News & Notes

Activision has reported the best fiscal quarter in its history. For the third quarter ended Dec. 31, the video-game company had net income of $22.3 million (75 cents per diluted share), compared with $15.7 million (61 cents) for the like year-earlier quarter.

L.A.-based CarsDirect.com will take its services international, thus giving Europeans the power to order new cars online and have them delivered straight to their doorstep. The Internet company will build its overseas headquarters in the U.K., and has appointed former managing director of BMW Great Britain Kevin Gaskell as CEO of the new operations.

As part of its aggressive effort to reinvent itself, Walt Disney Co.’s Go.com has partnered with eBay to create auction areas on Disney’s various Web properties. Under the four-year agreement, for which financial terms were not disclosed, the companies will launch Disney-product-only auctions on the Mouse’s sites, which include ESPN.com, ABC.com and Disney.com.

Contributing columnist Sara Fisher can be reached via email at [email protected].