THE BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY
Most often, CEOs are hired to replace a predecessor in times of troubles with the mandate to fix things. Once again, the British-based startup Shazam is an exception. Founded in 2000, the last 13 years have brought both traction and a venerated position in pop culture’s mobile hall of fame as an all-time, top 10 most downloaded iPhone app. The … [Read more...]
Pure Storage, the enterprise solid state storage entrepreneur, has raised an impressive $150 million. The company claims it’s the largest single private round in the history of storage. It is also the third largest financing round in a North American business technology company this year, according to Bloomberg data. The investment values the … [Read more...]
Baidu, the Chinese web titan behind the country’s search engine that works similarly to Google, will enter the television with its own smart TV as the company forays into the expanding online video industry. Dubbed TV+, the company’s first smart TV will be produced by TCL Multimedia Technology Holdings Ltd, with a 48-inch screen costing 4,567 yuan … [Read more...]
Last Monday, Wichita-based Koch Industries acquired Molex, the 75-year-old connector company and Apple parts supplier. Both companies look to close the deal by the end of this year, which depends on both regulatory and shareholder approval, according to a Molex FAQ on the deal. Privately-held Koch picked Molex up at a premium, dishing out $7.2 … [Read more...]
Last year, Skyera released skyHawk, a product that blew the lid of flash storage which, at a price tag of $3 per a gigabyte, essentially made flash pricing comparable to traditional storage while offering magnitudes of improvement in speed and performance. This year, the company claims to have boosted that capacity and performance by 10 times while … [Read more...]
Uber, the car service that lets you hail a driver anywhere from its app, has confirmed it has raised $258 led by Google Ventures in the biggest round ever for the search engine investment arm. TPG Capital also participated. With the Google investment, the company also gains access to Google’s technology, Uber explained in a blog post confirming … [Read more...]
Mobile advertising startup Locket has successfully set customers a-clicking. The company has approximately 100,000 users, a quarter of whom downloaded Locket within two days of launch. The company announced a new program, “My Ads,” last week that asks users to recommend ads they want to see on lock screens; and now Locket says engagement through … [Read more...]
Cloud data security company Alert Logic announced today that its executive management, together with private equity firm Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, now owns a majority interest in Alert Logic. With the partnership comes an additional boost of primary capital from Welsh Carson and the chance for Alert Logic to scale out. According to the … [Read more...]
Real estate kingpin Zillow has acquired StreetEasy, a go-to New York real estate listing service with over 1.2 million unique monthly visitors. The $50 million sale gives Zillow a local presence to leverage the market in New York City, one of the largest and most concentrated real estate markets in the world. StreetEasy, for its part, can now … [Read more...]
Facebook has acquired Mobile Technologies, the 12 year old company behind Jibbigo, a speech recognition and machine translation app. The app is the first to offer speech to speech translation in both offline and online environments. It enables users to text or record voice content in over 25 languages that is then translated on screen or read aloud … [Read more...]