Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Broadcom To Acquire Dune For $178 Million
By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek
December 1, 2009 01:32 PM
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/data_centers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222000084
Broadcom is stepping up its data center and cloud computing offerings by agreeing to acquire Dune Networks, which has developed a 100 Gbps scalable chipset that is capable of connecting more than 10,000 servers in a single deployment. Broadcom said the deal involves a payment of about $178 million for the Israeli company.
"Dune's massively scalable interconnect fabric, combined with our Ethernet products, augments our portfolio of solutions for data center networking equipment," said Broadcom's Martin Lund. "This technology is particularly well suited to meet the emerging requirements for cloud computing networks at a large scale."
Lund, who is VP and general manager of Broadcom's network switching business line, added that the Dune acquisition will help Broadcom in bringing new Ethernet applications to data centers. Broadcom has been building on its traditional Ethernet strength to broaden its position in data centers. Ever since the company failed in its effort to acquire a recalcitrant Emulex to beef up its data center offerings, Broadcom has been on the prowl for firms that can bolster its data center and cloud computing portfolio of products.
"Dune Networks' distributed connection fabric is a complement to Broadcom's existing product suite," said Eyal Dagan, Dune's CEO, in a statement. "Our joint customers will be able to bring to market low cost, high performance data center switching that will enable end users to build next-generation cloud computing networks."
A privately held company, Dune builds devices that facilitate application development of data center, enterprise, and carrier Ethernet solutions. Its products can scale in capacity, port rate, and service schemes, thereby extending the lifecycle of packet platforms of older legacy models.
Broadcom noted that data centers are scaling to high-bandwidth capacities demanded by cloud computing and the company plans to augment its services for that market through the Dune Networks acquisition. Broadcom said it expects to close the deal by the end of March 2010.
EndoGastric Solutions Raises $21.5 Million
http://www.ventureloop.com/ventureloop/vb_article.php?natId=528&p=1
EndoGastric Solutions (EGS) has announced that it has closed a round of Series E financing worth $21.5 million. The investment was led by Advanced Technology Ventures and included other current investors. EGS plans to use the funding to support its expanding commercial presence for its market-leading Natural Orifice Surgery (NOS) platform, a platform that includes the EsophyX and StomaphyX surgical devices.
2009 has been a transformational year for the company, seeing it more than double its revenue, case volume and commercial employee base. The company anticipates acceleration of its revenue growth in 2010. Over the past six months EGS has increased its sales and marketing organization to support 30 territories nationwide, and to include a complete marketing, training and reimbursement team. The financing is an indication of the support and enthusiasm shared by current investors for the products and procedures the company is developing.
EndoGastric Solutions is a pioneer in endoluminal procedures for the treatment of upper gastrointestinal diseases, including gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and other GI disorders. EGS’ mission is to utilize the most current wisdom in gastroenterology and surgery to develop new transoral procedures and products to address the largest unmet needs in gastrointestinal diseases. EGS is headquartered in the Greater Seattle Area and was founded in 2002.
Monday, November 23, 2009
New Hologram Research
Check out the YouTube video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkA3y-QmatM
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Organic Motion Taps $7.4 Million in Funding
October 23, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/5/
Motion capture tech start-up Organic Motion today said it has secured $7.4 million in a second round of funding. Foundry Group led the round. Organic Motion's software allows off-the-shelf chips and cameras to generate 3-D avatars; the technology uses the stock hardware to follow a person's every move, replicating that activity on-screen. It's avatar creation solution is already being used by clients Sony, Six Flags, Adidas, Disney, and Sony and has obvious avatar-creation applications for virtual world developers as well.
Unity Technologies, Sequoia Confirm Funding
October 26, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/5/
Playfire Picks Up $2M Funding Round
November 10, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/page/2/
Playdom Funding Round Totals $43M
November 11, 2009
Social games developer Playdom has reportedly secured $43 million in venture financing, with an equity stake based on a pre-money valuation of $260 million. New Enterprise Associates, Rick Thompson, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners reportedly invested in the company, the first outside round of funding Playdom has participated in. A certain amount of speculation has flowed from the news -- Tech Crunch, which reported the investment, speculates that the space's arguable leader (based on monthly average users), Zynga, is worth as much as $1 billion.
UPDATE: Playdom CEO John Pleasants said in a statement confirming the funding event: "We are focused on growing Playdom into a world-class gaming company. A number of compelling games are in development for 2010, and we’re bullish about our future and the potential to bring people together through social gaming. Social games appeal to everyone, everywhere. Our players range from ages 13 to 80 and come from more than 150 countries, so the opportunity for growth is tremendous."
Berlin-Based Wooga Secures $7.5M in Funding
November 12, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2009/11/berlin-based-wooga-secures-75m-in-funding.html
RockYou Raises Additional $50M from Softbank
November 17, 2009 http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/
Chinese Sports Gear Firm Peak Shoes Raises $60M
Chinese sports apparel maker Quanzhou Peak Shoes a has raised nearly $60M in new VC funding. Legend Capital and CCB International joined return backer Sequoia Capital China.
Spending some time with their goods, we can't understand why investors are hot on them. We wouldn't be caught dead wearing these sneakers and their front-man Shane Battier is a great player but has no marketing draw - the fact that Shane Battier wears Peak Shoes is more of a turn-off than a draw.
To be fair, the idea here is that China makes all the world clothes while brands like Nike and Addidas get the spoils. Peak is looking to both make the clothing and own the brand. That adds up if they can indeed turn the corner with the brand. But they need to work with cooler athletes or its no-go.
Dutch Startup Flogs Raises €2M for Event Synchronizing Tool
http://www.flogs.com/
Maintaining a full calendar is always a tough task for users, whether it involves sharing, scheduling, or simply showing up. Dutch startup Flogs raised a €2M ($2.9M) round of funding from a group of private investors and the Dutch Government. The software company has its sights on building an international presence with their digital organizing software. With this new round of funding Flogs will further develop its sharing and synchronizing features.
Founded in 2008 by Michiel Mol, Bram van Gestel and current CEO Toon Timmermans the software company has developed a flexible event aggregate tool. The tool allows users to share event schedules: sporting events, concerts, CD releases, films, and art shows (to name a few) over multiple calendars. Should the time or date change for an event it's automatically adjusted in an user's calendar via Flogs.
Nonetheless, are users more concerned with sharing events across platforms or scheduling them? Improving scheduling capabilities over multiple platforms has been the business focus for both Tungle and Timebridge. Each service caters to "business professionals." As this sector of service continues to develop overall, Flogs has an opportunity to demonstrate how well its solution meets user needs in both an entertainment and leisure space.
(The service is compatible with Outlook, iCal, Windows Live, Google Calendar, and works well on a PC, Mac, PDA, iPhone or smartphones.)
Fizzback Raises £1.6M in Series B Round
London-based Fizzback raised £1.6M ($2.6M) in a second round of funding led by Nauta Capital and primary backer Advent Venture Partners.
Founded in 2004, the software company has since made its business developing customer engagement tools. Solutions allowing companies to entertain customer feedback in real-time. Responses are captured at point-of-experience, using an intelligence search engine, and sorted by relevance. Overall Fizzback's innovative tool extends customer relationship management, by bringing businesses closer to the voice of the customer.
Sezmi Gets Infusion of $25 Million to Fund Personalized TV
Sezmi has a deep understanding of the changing needs of TV viewers and created a new end-to-end offering to meet those needs. The company uses a personalized on-demand viewing experience and works with partners from broadcast, broadband, content, and advertising industries to make a new TV choice for consumers. The service will be offered to consumers through broadband service providers and national retailers. Separately, the company also announced it has made its all-in-one personalized television service available in Los Angeles to the public.
Sezmi was founded with an ambitious goal: to redefine the television experience with the first-ever personal television system and is headquartered in the Belmont, California.
Dailymotion Secures $25M Round Led by French Government
Advent Venture Partners, AGF Private Equity,Atlas Venture, Partech International, each took part in a round led by the French Sovereign Fund (FSI). FSI, a joint entity owned by the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations and the French government, contributed $11M to the round.
After recently demonstrating a sustainable business model, investors are very excited about the potential that Paris-based Dailymotion offers. This new round of funding will support global growth with its current online platform as well as accelerate development in mobile and IPTV services.
According to comScore, August 2009 figures show that Dailymotion attracts 60 million unique visitors, and nearly a billion views per month. These figures provided in context with current revenue outpacing infrastructure costs may prove persuasive, yet there is still some work ahead for the firm. Before decidedly making its claim as "The World's Leading Independent Video Site" the company now has the task of demonstrating how well it can monetize user content. Profitability is a good start, sustainable profitability is even better.
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/archives/2009/10/dailymotion_sec_1.html
Monday, November 9, 2009
HP bought Tabblo: a Web 2.0 tool company
Tabblo: A place to make cool stuff with your photos
The Tabblo Company was started in 2005 and Hewlett-Packard bought it in 2007.
While there are plenty of online photo-sharing sites, and a host of options for writing (keeping a blog), doing both together requires a level of commitment not possessed by many.
What you can do with Tabblo
Outside of being the best place for using photos and words together for making "tabblos" (web pages), Tabblo lets you:
- have full control of who can view, comment, and share your tabblos
- pool your photos together with other Tabblo members for collaborative Tabblo creation
- participate in the Tabblo community with your Tabblos, photos, and commentary
- integrate open photo services such as Flickr to avoid having to upload to multiple sites
- publish tabblos to blogs, social networking sites, and other places online
With Tabblo, you can do all of the above entirely inside of your web browser (no downloads required) and with an unprecedented amount of control.
Tabblo lets you order printed versions of your creations in a variety of shapes and sizes for delivery to any US address (international shipping coming soon).
Structured Design Process (SDP) approach in Front-End stage of any project
The impact of Front-End Work in rapid development of any new product is discussed here when Structured Design Process (SDP) is applied. Christakis states that much of the work in the Front-End stage involves planning and decision-making by a team created to work on the project (p. 94). The planning guides the activity from the point of discovery to product completion.
Product development in today’s business environment is carried out in very large and complex organizations and most of the time geographically distributed and involve many project partners. The Front-End Work includes new product concepts, definitions, and technical approach, and the design team must meet the constraints and multitude of requirements.
The SDP approach to Front-End Work creates collaboration among all the members of the project. Since most of the projects in current business atmosphere are done globally the collaboration plays an important role. The Front-End Work in collaboration environment where SDP approach is applied results in a master plan document where useful information regarding the project is presented and used during the life of the project. In creating master plan document the engagement of an interdisciplinary team is required. In the Christakis book, a XT234 compound developed by XYZ Pharmaceutical Company was used as an example how the Front-End Work was applied with SDP approach. The master plan document addresses all the requirements, technology needs, distinct options impacting the projects, and presenting a consensus action scenario graphically.
The principal benefits from the application of the SDP process are that it provides the capability to accomplish the planning in a shorter time, produce better Front-End Master Plans to reduce the project development life cycle. Applying SDP approach in any type of project such as engineering or medical could result in faster delivery of a product to market.
Reference:
Christakis, A. N., Bausch, K. C. (2006). How People Harness Their Collective Wisdom and Power. Information Age Publishing, Connecticut.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Gatcha! - Massive Multiplayer Online distribution platform for games
By launching Gatcha!, the company clearly stresses the social role of gaming in bringing people together. Gatcha! has been developed to build on something new: it is a distribution platform which aims to make games social, distribute them on the web, and entertain and bring people together through a new way of communicating. Gatcha! will thus not only be present on Netlog, but can and will also be perfectly integrated on other platforms (Facebook, MySpace, HI5, etc…).
Gatcha! will be a large MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) game with global rankings and levels and will also include 3rd party games (including branded games). The principle is that you can win from someone in one game, lose in another, and in this way reach a balanced ranking.
$10.9M for wireless multimedia system - Dilithium Inc.
Dilithium lands $10.9M for wireless multimedia systems
Dilithium Networks a PETALUMA, Calif. company, provider of converged video services for wireless internet and mobile applications, has brought in $10.9 million of an $18.1 million round of equity and securities, according to a filing with the SEC. Based in Petaluma, Calif., the company is backed by CM Capital Investments, Deutsche Bank,Infocomm Investments, Jafco Ventures, Motorola Ventures and U.S. Venture Partners. The company has now raised close to $44 million in capital to date, including $8 million bagged in June.
http://www.dilithiumnetworks.com/
Small cap start-ups into the hands of longer-term investors
Annie's note: do you think this is a good idea? Offering VC holding (private start-up equity) in the stock market for investors to buy the stock? It seems the VCs want to dump their mistakes into the stock market for small investor like you and I to buy. What do you think?
VCs Look Beyond Wall Street’s Short-Term Mindedness
OCTOBER 8, 2009, 12:57 PM ET
By Scott Austin
When will Wall Street go long?
- Getty Images
The venture capital industry, driven batty by Wall Street’sincreasingly short-term mindedness, may not wait for an answer.
Venture firms depend on a vibrant initial public offering market to sell off smaller companies to institutional investors who are willing to take a long-term position in them. That’s hardly happening anymore. While market regulations and consolidation among investment banks are partly to blame for the IPO sadness, VCs have also pointed their fingers at Wall Street for failing to steer small-cap start-ups into the hands of longer-term investors.
To wit: Accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton this week updated its November report, “Why are IPOs in the ICU,” that cut to the heart of how market changes caused underwritten IPOs to be closed to 80% of companies. While the updated report is mostly similar save for some revised charts, Grant Thornton does offer this nugget after talking to “key market participants”:
“We have interacted with management and portfolio managers of a number of classic, long-term investment firms, including Capital Guardian, Delaware Asset Management, Kaufman Funds, T. Rowe Price and Wasatch Advisors, that invest in small cap companies. These investors confirm that the current stock market model forces Wall Street to cater to high-frequency trading accounts at the expense of long-term investors, and that Wall Street is increasingly out of touch with the interests and needs of long term equity investors.
“Specifically, we have heard that the quality of research on Wall Street has deteriorated dramatically while, in comparison, institutional investors’ quality of in-house research is now “much better.” We also have heard that more investment oriented portfolio managers are more likely to be treated as “C” accounts (Wall Street may rank accounts as “A,” “B” or “C”; most resources are given to the so-called “A” accounts).”
What is the venture capital industry doing about this? The National Venture Capital Association has been encouraging venture capitalists and their portfolio companies to use as underwriters boutique banks instead of bulge-bracket firms they say largely won’t handle IPOs of $50 million or less, which is what most venture-backed companies need to fuel their growth. This also means connecting with investors willing to hold stock for years instead of flipping it for a quick profit.
Others are taking a more hands-on approach. InsideVenture, for example, was started up last year by venture capitalists to play matchmaker between venture-backed companies ready to go public and long-term institutional buyers. It holds conferences in which these investors can meet one-on-one with the companies and perhaps invest in them before a public offering. These investors benefit by getting a better shot at the kinds of companies whose IPOs in recent years have been steered to short-term traders by investment banks.
It’s unclear, however, how well that effort is working. In March, one of the people behind InsideVenture, Chuck Newhall, a veteran VC and co-founder of New Enterprise Associates, said the firm’s debut conference didn’t attract enough of the buysiders like mutual funds to make it a true hit. This week, InsideVenture sold its business to SecondMarket, an operator of a private-company stock exchange that is also seeking to help VCs liquidate their holdings.
Grant Thornton proposes the industry go further. In its report, the accounting firm suggests creating a parallel opt-in public market that would be regulated but open to all investors like the current stock markets. It would be supported by market makers or specialists who would commit capital, and would be priced in quote increments at 10 cents or 20 cents, which “would bring sales support back to stocks and provide economics to support equity research independent of investment banking.” Further, to discourage day trading, investors couldn’t execute direct electronic trades in the market, instead using brokers who would earn commissions and be incented to phone and present stocks to potential investors.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Video editing tool - eyespot
Upload your video to Eyespot and use its tools to edit it and publish it on other sites.
Multi-tiered video solutions model utilizes different styles of video to address the varying needs and budgets of businesses small and not so small. And our innovative video distribution solutions help deliver the right message, to the right audience, in the right way.
On December 19, 2008, video production company called PixelFish announced it has acquired online video editing company called Eyespot.
http://www.eyespot.com/Solutions/
2009 Horizon Report – Cloud Computing
Specialized data centers that host thousands of servers — has created a surplus of computing resources that has come to be called the cloud (Horizon Report 2009).
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Working Definition of Cloud Computing (2009) states: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on- demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
Cloud computing has transformed information technology (IT) infrastructures with its capability of solving large-scale problems, hosting client applications and data storage, and billing by consumption. Cloud computing makes it possible for almost anyone to deploy tools that can scale on demand to serve as many users as desired. To the end user, the cloud is invisible. The applications are always available for use and the technology supporting it doesn’t matter, as long as the usera get their work completed.
There are four deployment models in the cloud computing environment: public, private, community, and hybrid (Sun Microsystems, 2009).
There are three different cloud delivery models: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure as Service (IaaS).
The emergence of cloud-based application is causing a shift in IT technology. Educational institutions, government sectors, private and public companies are taking advantage of this shift and aligning their businesses with the new technology.
References: