The round was led by T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global Management and other public market investors, with participation by its previous venture capital investors Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, Samsung Ventures and Sutter Hill Ventures. The round brings the company’s total financing to $245 million, and follows its Series B of $40 million last year.

“In our view, Pure represents a rare combination of disruptive innovation, strong leadership, and strong growth. In particular, customer references were excellent,” said Henry Ellenbogen of T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. “We look forward to working with Pure as they scale and strive toward becoming a public company.”

Pure Storage produces Flash Array, a solid state storage solution that lowers the price of flash storage to about $5 per gigabyte. The company essentially makes solid state storage at a price comparable to traditional storage, but at 10x its speed, space and power efficiency.

The money will be used to bolster R&D efforts as well as expand internationally. It also helps prepare the company for an IPO, the company indicated in a press release. Over the last 10 months, the company has extended into 10 new countries, including  the U.K., Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Denmark, Poland, Germany, Japan, Korea, Australia, and Singapore.

Along with the funding, the company also announced adding former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman to its board.

“Pure Storage is experiencing much of what we did at Data Domain,” said Slootman. “They’re replacing one storage media (disk) with another (flash). They pioneered the use of inline data reduction to remove the cost hurdle for the media upgrade, and, as a result of being the first to get this right they are growing about as fast as companies can grow organically. I am glad to be able to offer my own perspective in driving and managing growth to the top tier board of directors and leadership team at Pure.”

Pure Storage competes against legacy storage solutions EMC Corp and NetApp, which offers flash storage solutions at a much higher rate of $20 to $50 per gigabyte. It also competes against startups such as Nimble Storage and Skyera. Earlier this month, Skyera released its latest generation (link to “Skyera’s Latest Gen Boosts Data Capacity by 10X for ½ the Price” shared on Google Docs but not published) that offers flash for $1.99 per gigabyte, or 49 cents after data deduplication techniques are applied.

Molex provides Apple with products like multimedia connectors, or as they’re more commonly known: “Firewires.”

Molex creates electronic parts like connectors, fiber-optic products, antennas and sockets for a variety of verticals including data and computing, telcos and automotive. The company reported gross profitability at more than $1.06 billion in 2013, down half a percentage point from 2012. With the deal struck, Molex joins the Koch Industries portfolio, which already includes Georgia-Pacific LLC, The Matador Cattle Company, and more resource-based ventures bearing the Koch name like Koch Minerals, LLC and Koch Pipeline Company, LP.

Koch Industries and Molex share similar origin stories, as Koch Industries is led by brothers David and Charles Koch and Molex, until recently, was owned and operated by the Krehbiel family.

Per the deal, Koch now owns all Molex’s outstanding common, Class A, and Class B stock––and laid down a pretty penny more for the shares than they traded for the previous Friday. (Stocks of the common, A and B variety are distinguished by associated voting rights.) According to the release, Koch dropped capital at a 42 percent equity increase (up 31 percent for common stock, 56 percent for Class A common stock). Obviously, premiums make deals more appealing to investors (get a brush-up here.)

It is widely accepted that most companies are merged with a premium over their stock value, around 20%. Molex, with 42 percent, seems in line with recent acquisitions which according to pundits and financial sources are higher in 2013 than usual.

Molex reports net revenues at 3.6 billion worldwide in 2013, 3.8 percent more than last year. The company, based in Lisle, IL, chose this moment for acquisition to reward longtime supporters and employees. “After 75 years this was a difficult decision, but our board of directors and our family believe that this transaction…provides outstanding benefits for all our stakeholders,” said Fred Krehbiel, co-chairman of the Molex board in the release. “The transaction is expected to provide substantial opportunities for our worldwide employees, many of whom have spent much of their working lives at Molex and are responsible for the company’s long term success.” Following the deal, the Krehbiels will give up their stock and positions and leave the company to Koch.

The news makes no mention of future product releases or jumps into new sectors––only of a continued “track record of growth and investment in people, innovation and technology,” says Martin Slark, CEO and vice chairman of Molex in the release.

Documents Molex filed with the SEC say the company’s sales to Apple account for 14 percent of net revenue in 2013, though they’re not Apple’s only connector provider. Risks to the business, also listed in the papers, provide clues to reasons for an acquisition now. According to the company, Molex faces intense competition, industry consolidation, a dependency on new products and pressure to lower prices.

Though its hard to imagine an electronic parts producer struggling in a digital age, the industry brings its own challenges. And a partnership with Koch could give Molex room to work, so that they won’t have to innovate under the gun (and on the cheap) in a capital-intensive and crowded industry. “Connector Supplier” ranks Molex third on the top 10 list of connector manufacturers, as it pulled more than $3.5 billion in sales two years running (2011-2012). In past months, the industry’s looked a little bleak; but hopefuls wait for a 4.4 percent overall connector sales increase before end of full year 2013.

As the Krehbiels bow out, the Kochs are poised to take Molex to new heights. Though Molex has already scaled international (they have 41 manufacturing locations in 15 countries; and just, 29 percent of its 2013 net revenues stem from the Americas), Koch Industries’ money, resources and guidance will help further penetrate their markets. Currently, Molex has captured about 8 percent of the connector industry: a number they’re looking to increase.

“Once the transaction is completed, Molex will be even better positioned to navigate an evolving industry,” the company said in an employee FAQ about the deal. “With Koch behind us, we will be able to protect and grow our market share, ensure continuity for customers, provide growth opportunities for our employees, and maintain the overall stability of the business.”

Implications of the deal may affect Apple on the political, rather than technological, front. Already, news sources have penned headlines that poke at Koch Industries’ leadership’s politics; yesterday, the Daily Beast ran an article titled, “Get Ready to Support the Kochs, Liberal Apple Fans.”

As to business, it’s going on as usual for now, Molex says. Until the year’s out and the deal’s closed, “we need all employees to remain focused on their day-to-day responsibilities,” the employee FAQ states.

The third generation in Skyera’s solid state platform, skyEagle offers flash storage at a price for $1 per gigabyte less than its previous release, while improving performance to an industry leading 5M IOPS, according to the company’s own claims. It adds over 2.5 petabytes after compression and deduplication. It leverages the high density of the Most Advanced 1y/1z NAND (MAN) flash chips together with its own high performing flash controller technology. The new platform features 16 interchangeable 16Gb Fibre Channel and 10Gb Ethernet ports and supports a mix of Fibre Channel and iSCSI block-based SAN protocols, plus 96 lanes of optional PCIe connectivity. It also supports NFS and CIFS.

The company claims installation can be done in as little as 10 minutes.

“Last year’s release of skyHawk offered higher performance at a price point much better than anyone close to us” Skyera’s CEO Radoslav Danilak told Red Herring. “This year, we’ve gone beyond that by an order of magnitude. We are changing how flash is working as well as how people work with Flash. We are offering customized commodity Flash at the same price as consumer storage with enterprise endurance and reliability.”

In addition to a consumer grade discount, Skyera’s customers also gain greater control over the system, Danilak contends. The data is routinely backed up at multiple ends, so that if any components fail, the system continues operating. “You can replace components while the system is still running,” Danilak said.

“Skyera is enabling smaller companies to have Facebook or Google type storage systems in the cloud by shrinking the density more than 100 times,” Danilak claimed. “It’s similar to the transition of bringing the mainframe to the personal computer. One rack of our systems gives you a very powerful data system. We can deliver big data to just about every customer.”

The company recently raised $51.6 million from Dell Ventures, WD Ventures, and several Tier 1 NAND Flash vendors. Though Danilak declined to state what last year’s generation did for the company’s base, he allowed that the company had delivered on its investors’ plan within 5 percent of accuracy. He anticipates similar results with the latest release.

Danilak expects future generations of Skyera’s platform to be “even crazier disruptions than generation three,” he said. “Interestingly, it was our customers who pushed us to this capacity. The market demanded, and our engineers worked around the clock to deliver it.”

While the company competes against data storage entities such as Pure Storage or Nimbus, it outdoes these players by an order of magnitude, explained Frankie Roohparvar, COO of Skyera.

“skyHawk’s introduction last year put us in a class by ourselves in regards to capacity and performance,” Roohparvar stated. “We felt that our only competition was us, and now we have disrupted ourselves not by a factor of 2 over 18 months in accordance with Moore’s law, but by over 10 times the performance and capacity in just 12 months.”

“This is the most democratic change in manufacturing,” says Mark Andersen, chief of business, science and technology at the CPL.

Free access means the lab welcomes all in the pursuit of 3D printing and other tinkering, though what’s made will be constrained by staff supervision and the machinery’s limitations. “You can make things you need, small things at this point; but this is the way of the future,” says Andersen.

As to hardware: the lab purchased a milling machine, two vinyl cutters, two laser cutters, three 3D printers, and an Xbox Kinect scanner with help from a grant by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Accompanying open-source software on library computers means users become familiar with programs they can download at home, free. Workshops, open lab hours and demonstrations show beginners what the tech’s capable of, like creating mini museum exhibits, wooden cell phone docks and more.

“We’re trying to introduce them to tools that are actually going to be low-cost or no cost, and are going to be accessible for them wherever they go,” says Andrea Sáenz, first deputy commissioner for the library. “We think we’re going to turn on some people who didn’t see themselves as tech workers…and spark some interest.”

“[The lab] provides an entry point to people who would otherwise not have access to this equipment,” says Patrick Molloy, director of government and public affairs for CPL. “It fosters creation and exploration.”

The maker lab itself is an experiment, with six month’s time for observation and tweaking.“The library’s always been there to provide access to information and this is something that people may have interest in,” Molloy says.

“Giving people access to the current ideas of the day has always been at the core of a library’s mission,” Sáenz says. “[With the lab], we’re saying these are the current ideas of the day, this is what’s relevant, this is what matters.”

The lab aims to demystify maker technology and help people learn marketable manufacturing skills. Though equipment and other limitations may prevent designers from building a better mousetrap, the library’s prepared in case of breakthrough. Staff can help makers with everything from business plans to patents. Should someone invent a new and innovative product, “we’re ready for it,” says Sáenz.

“It’d be great if 5 years from now someone [said], ‘I invented this because the library showed me how to do this, or how it is possible,’” says Andersen.

Oracle has made some strong boasts about its cloud ambitions, but has yet to produce any real muscle. This acquisition gives Oracle new team members with real insight into what’s happening behind the scenes at OpenStack, as well as a unique tool that can plug into a data center and make any platform ubiquitous, a key advantage for an enterprise company selling a variety of technologies to a diversity of infrastructures.

“The addition of Acme Packet to Oracle’s leading communications portfolio will enable service providers and enterprises to deliver innovative solutions that will change the way we interact, conduct commerce, deliver healthcare, secure our homes, and much more,” said Oracle President Mark Hurd.

Oracle is paying $29.25 per share, a 22 percent premium over Acme’s closing price last Friday. The purchase puts Oracle in the video conferencing and IP business and in direct competition with Cisco communications. Oracle’s offer is more than six times Acme’s sales over the last six months, according to Bloomberg data. The sale is expected to revive slumping sales of its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems.

“Either the total addressable market is on the verge of a huge, transformational inflection point and will quickly balloon into a multi-billion dollar market, or Oracle senses that the future of its business model is in the control of communications data flow, and this acquisition, pricey as it is, is a sure beachhead into a new leg of growth,” Greg Mesniaeff, an analyst at Maxim Group, told Bloomberg.

Acme will help speed the development of cloud computing by providing secure communications across all devices and networks.

“The communications industry is undergoing a dramatic shift as users become more connected and dependent on mobile applications and devices,” Bhaskar Gorti, senior vice president and general manager of Oracle Communications, said in the statement. “Service providers and enterprises need a comprehensive communications solution that will enable them to more effectively engage with their customers.”

Last week, Acme reported a $2 million loss on a 15 percent drop in revenue to $70.7 million, topping analysts expectations despite the wane in figures. Acme’s stock has dropped 29 percent over the past year, but managed to improve 37 percent over the last three months due to better than expected sales, the Wall St. Journal reported.

“Together with Oracle, we expect to provide customers with purpose-built, innovative solutions to accelerate the deployment of all-IP networks and help deliver a consistent experience across all services, devices and networks,” said Andy Ory, Chief Executive Officer, Acme Packet.

This is Oracle’s first acquisition for the year. Last year, it acquired 11 companies, the largest of which was a $1.9 billion for Taleo, a human resources cloud software provider. It also purchased customer support software maker RightNow Technologies Inc.

The deal is expected to close in the first half of the year.

“China is currently our second largest market. I believe it will become our first. I believe strongly that it will,” Cook told the Chinese news agency.

Cook also met with heads of China Mobile to “discuss matters of cooperation,” Reuters reported, a sign that Apple may be working towards a deal with the world’s largest carrier with over 700 million subscribers that would vastly open up the company’s presence in the country. Apple China already has deals Unicom and China Telecom to sell its iPhones in China, but have yet to forge an agreement with China Mobile due to disagreements on revenue sharing terms. Talks have gone on for years. China Mobile also uses a different 3G network from the rest of the globe, and Apple may need to wait until a new network usable by the mobile carrier is available before it could launch the iPhone on that network. China Mobile has indicated it would not release an iPhone until it had a working 4G network.

Cook also met with government officials in Beijing, including China’s minister for industry and information technology. He also met with high level executives from China Unicom.

Due to the lack of agreement with China Mobile, Apple has lost much in the China market to competition from other smartphone brand such as Samsung Electronics and Lenovo.

Cook did not indicate a timeline for making China its number one market, but indicated the company’s presence in the country would steadily grow. Apple currently has only 11 stores in China and Hong Kong, and plans to increase that number to 25.

Apple earned $5.7 billion in sales from China in the quarter through December, about 16 percent of its global efforts.

Damages will be set at a later trial, though MobileMedia’s CEO Larry Horn told Bloomberg they will likely be “substantial.”

“We’re very pleased,” Horn told Bloomberg in a courtroom interview after the trial. “We think it’s justified.”

Filed in 2010, the original claim included 14 total patents, but that number was narrowed down to three as the case went to trial this year. Centered around camera phone technology and how the phone handled calls, the three patents include one for transmitting pictures from one camera to another, one that handled how a phone would reject a call, and another that dealt with the hold status pm the phone. MobileMedia claimed it would suffer “irreparable injury” if Apple was allowed to use the patented technology without royalty payments.

Apple had argued in court filings that MobileMedia’s patents are legally invalid and lacked “legally sufficient” evidence to prove infringement.

MobileMedia owns about 300 patents. While some would be quick to dub the company a “patent troll,” the company does monetize payments on behalf of Nokia and Sony, which owns about 10 percent of the company.

The case required the jury to examine technology from the mid to late ‘90s when it was first invented, Bloomberg reported.

Apple has been fighting its own patent battles and appears to be winning them. Last August, the company was awarded $1 billion when a jury ruled Samsung had violated six out of seven patents, a decision that is being appealed.

“We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial,” Apple’s CEO Tim Cook related in an extensive interview with Businessweek. “So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.

“Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac,” Cook also told the publication. “We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it.”

Even before Cook gave his interview, traces of the production change had hit the web, with buyers reporting “Assembled in the USA” labels on newly bought Macs.

Apple had assembled many of its products in the US before moving most production to Asia to save on labor costs in the late ’90s. Several parts for the iPhone and iPad are already made in the US, including the display glass that is manufactured in Kentucky. Besides being headquartered in California where it designs its products, the company is building a campus in Austin, Texas. It is also expanding an existing data center in North Carolina, and has begun production on new data centers in Oregon and Nevada.

In the Bloomberg interview, Cook also defended Apple against criticism of Foxconn’s labor practices, pointing out the computer company enlisted the Fair Labor Association to audit Foxconn’s factories.

“We’re doing a number of things that I think are really great, really different, and industry-leading,” Cook said. “No one is looking at this as deeply as we are or going as deep in the supply chain.”

Though a new evolution for the company, Apple’s move to shift Mac production to the US will have minimal effect on the country’s 8 percent unemployment rate. The company’s sales are shifting away from Macs to the iPad, which is more complicated to produce domestically. Yet while its just a beginning effort, the move is a big change of heart that transitions the company’s image away from that of a near slave labor manufacturer.

The round was led by Redpoint Ventures and joined by Goldman Sachs, and existing investors Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and others. It brings the company’s total investment to $39 million.

“The Redpoint team has been looking at data center architectures for a good while now – and we’ve been particularly focused on the open opportunity to address the limitations of networking architecture,” said Satish Dharmaraj, General Partner at Redpoint Ventures. “Big Switch’s open ecosystem approach and its brilliant team have created a breakthrough disruption at the right moment – and we’re very proud to participate in supporting their vision.”

The company provides network flexibility by allowing multiple networks to act as a single network, thus providing better network control of such devices as routers and switches. The platform is highly scalable and designed to address businesses’ limits on virtual and physical infrastructure by providing virtual overlays between hypervisor-based switches as well as OpenFlow switches, thus offering end-to-end network virtualization. Its API is 100 percent compatible with Floodlight, the only Apache-licensed SDN controller, so its supported by a large ecosystem of applications. Its technology allows businesses to change networks and data centers without expensive hardware upgrades.

Founded in 2010 and based in Palo Alto, the company will use the new funding to expand engineering, sales and marketing teams to ramp up its market.

“We started this revolutionary trend away from closed and proprietary systems, and are gratified that every major physical and virtual infrastructure vendor is now participating,” said Guido Appenzeller, CEO and co-founder of Big Switch Networks. “Working with our ecosystem of partners, the Big Switch platform will disrupt networking applications as we know them today.”