Author: Serkadis

With each new Samsung Galaxy flagship phone, the company is breaking records. On Thursday, Samsung announced the latest one: 10 million Galaxy S 4 sales in the first 30 days after launch. That figure is sales to retailers, not consumers, but it’s an accomplishment nonetheless. And strong U.S. sales should continue, as the Galaxy S 4 became available on Verizon today.

It’s interesting to see the time frame for each Galaxy smartphone to hit the 10 million sales number: It shows how much momentum Samsung has achieved in the past four years. It took seven months for the original Galaxy S to cross the 10 million units sold mark, while the Galaxy S 2 did so in five months. Last year’s Galaxy S 3 crossed the milestone in 50 days and now the current model has done the same in just a month.

All of this makes it more difficult for the Android manufacturers to break back into the market they once enjoyed. For the first quarter of 2013, Strategy Analytics estimated that Samsung has earned nearly 95 percent of the global Android smartphone market profits, leaving a pittance to be divided among LG, HTC and others.

No other Android handset maker has the supply chain chops and component factories to compete with Samsung at this point. And that’s bad news for companies such as HTC, which is facing a time of uncertainty as key executives are leaving the company.

It’s also not the best of situations for consumers. If Samsung continues to dominate, there could be fewer handset choices from other companies. Either that, or we’ll all be using Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface in the future.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What the Google-Motorola deal means for Android, Microsoft and the mobile industry
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in mobile
• What to watch in mobile in 2013

Brooklyn mobile app design and development shop Thumb Labs has been acquired — or acqui-hired — by Adobe. Thumb Labs is the group behind the mobile apps for Behance, the design community startup that was bought by Adobe late last year, and Thumb Labs says it specializes in stylish and hip apps for iOS.

Details about the price of the acquisition weren’t disclosed. Adobe acquired Behance for close to $150 million, we reported last year. Thumb Labs says in a release:

At the end of this month, the Thumb Labs team will begin focusing our mobile talents on a united mission to empower the creative world.

Thumb Labs has worked on apps like Bondsy, an iPhone app for buying, selling and trading stuff with your friends. Fast.co.design described it recently as eBay for the Instagram set.

The mobile app design purchase is part of Adobe’s vision of using the cloud to empower designers and the design tech community. Adobe has been integrating Behance into its own Creative Cloud community and tool-sharing site that it launched for designers and developers early last year.

Designers are officially the rockstars of the tech industry. We’ll be featuring the tech industry’s most innovative and forward-thinking experience designers at our RoadMap event in November in San Francisco (tickets will go on sale this Summer, and sign up here to get first access to them).

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social fourth-quarter 2012 analysis
• The 2013 task management tools market
• The state of cross-platform media measurement

Bing announced the launch of a new feature in Bing News called the News Carousel. When a user searches for a person of note (i.e. a celebrity or politician), they will see a visual carousel with current topics related to that person. On the right-hand side of the page, they will also see related people.

A Bing spokesperson explains, “Say you’re searching for Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, you’ll see in the News Carousel images of stories related to them, such as Bieber losing custody of his Capuchin monkey to the German government. On the right-hand side of the page you’ll also see related people that might be of interest because they have some sort of relationship to your query.

“To do this Bing is leveraging the Satori technology that brings a deep understanding of the relationships between people, places and things to power the visual carousel that makes it easy to explore current events and other people related to the person you are searching for,” he adds.

Satori, which means “Understanding” in Japanese, is basically Bing’s version of Google’s Knowledge Graph, and powers Bing’s Snapshot experience, as described here.

“And that’s not the only progress we’ve made over at Bing News. We recently extended our news articles index beyond two weeks,” says Bing’s Tim Leung on the Bing blog. “This means when there’s no fresh news related to a given query, we can look back over several years to bring you any relevant articles. This is a pretty significant update and is just the start as we work to make Bing News even more comprehensive. While there’s still more to do, we believe these updates provide you with a deeper understanding of the world and an opportunity to explore the connections we’re able to make over here at Bing.”

More on the blog.

Google has partnered with the Charles Darwin Foundation and the Galapagos National Parks Directorate to collect panoramic imagery of the islands with the Street View Trekker. As a result, Google will be adding the “stunning” images to Google Maps later this year.

Here’s an early preview of what to expect:

“The Galapagos Islands are some of the most biologically unique ecosystems in the world. Explorers and scientists alike have long studied and marveled at these islands—made famous by Charles Darwin,” says Google Maps Project Lead Raleigh Seamster. “The Ecuadorean Government, local conservation groups and scientists are working to protect the Galapagos from threats posed by invasive species, climate change and other human impacts.”

“It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity,” Seamster adds.

The imagery should make a fine complement to Google’s other underwater “Street View” imagery. In fact, Google once again teamed up with the Catlin Seaview Survey (who it teamed up with last time) to capture the new underwater imagery.

This should all also go well with the new, more visual Google Maps experience.

The steel framework is already going up for a new data center being built by Russo Development and Sentinel Data Centers. Bloomberg L.P. will be the tenant for the facility in Orangetown, N.Y. (Photo: Russo Development)

Sentinel Data Centers and Russo Development will team up on a new data center for Bloomberg L.P. in Orangetown, New York, the companies confirmed today. The Orangetown data center is being developed by a joint venture between Russo and Sentinel, which will retain ownership of the property.

Bloomberg L.P. today confirmed that it has signed a lease for the entire 131,805 square foot build-to-suit data center facility in Orangetown. On Wednesday the Rockland County Industrial Development Agency endorsed Orangetown’s resolution to provide the project with a partial tax abatement package. Bloomberg’s lease agreement is conditional upon final authorization by the Rockland county executive.

“Bloomberg conducted a long and extensive search to find a location that meets all requirements for our latest data center, and this site in Orangetown checks all the boxes for us,” said Vladimir Kliatchko, Global Head of Research and Development at Bloomberg. “We have partnered with an experienced data center developer in Russo/Sentinel and we are confident they will deliver a first-class facility.”

Second Collaboration for Russo, Sentinel

The project is the second collaboration between Russo and Sentinel, who worked together on a multi-tenant facility operated by Sentinel in Somerset, N.J.

“We are thrilled to be again working with our friends at Russo Development on this fantastic project,” adds Josh Rabina, Co-President of Sentinel Data Centers. “The Bloomberg critical facilities team is truly top notch, and we look forward to delivering them a world class turn-key facility in Orangetown.”

The facility, which will consist of a single-story raised floor environment and infrastructure to provide in excess of 7MW of critical capacity, is planned to come online in the middle of 2014. The property was purchased by Russo Development in 2009 and was pad-ready for construction prior to lease signing.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to provide an optimal environment for Bloomberg’s innovative technologies,” said Edward Russo, President and COO of Russo Development. “This site provides ideal access to Manhattan, robust power sources, multiple telecommunication carriers, and opportunities for state and local tax incentives.”

The project is big news for Orangetown and Rockland County, and local officials hope it will help attract additional mission-critical facilities to the area.

“Bloomberg L.P. looked at over 100 sites in New York and New Jersey before choosing this one,” said Harriet Cornell, Chairwoman of the Rockland County Legislature and board member of the Rockland Economic Development Corporation. “That tells you loud and clear that Orangetown is a prime location for data center development. This is wonderful news for our County and exactly the kind of global firm which is perfect for Orangetown.”

While we don’t expect it to attract as much attention as the Tumblr acquisition, Yahoo announced that it has acquired gaming platform PlayerScale. That’s not to say it isn’t a big one.

“The team has built an incredible gaming platform that is used by over 150 million players worldwide,” a Yahoo spokesperson tells WebProNews. “We intend to continue to support and grow PlayerScale’s technology, and we look forward to building great new experiences on Yahoo! using the PlayerScale platform.”

PlayerScale’s Jesper Jensen had the following to say to customers, partners and friends (on its homepage):

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

This would be, I believe, the twelfth acquisition (or announcement) for Yahoo since October. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

So, is Yahoo cool yet?

Google has been warning of a big and scary new version of the Penguin update for quite some time. When Google’s Matt Cutts released a video discussing the upcoming SEO menu earlier this month, he mentioned that Penguin 2.0 was getting closer. Now it’s here.

Have you been affected by the new Penguin update? Is this update good or bad for Google results? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In the aforementioned video (below), Cutts said this about the update: “We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin. Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper, and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

Even before that video, Cutts was discussing the update on Twitter. He pretty much said the same thing: it’s called Penguin 2.0, and it would be larger.

Late on Wednesday, Cutts revealed that the update rolled out. He took to his personal blog to say, “We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

“This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally,” he noted. “For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.”

This does not mean that this is the last we’ll see of Penguin, by any means. When a reader of Cutts’ blog noted that he still sees a lot of spam in results, Cutts responded, “We can adjust the impact but we wanted to start at one level and then we can modify things appropriately.”

So, it sounds like they’ll still be working on Penguin-ifying results more beyond the update that has already rolled out. I presume this will come in the form of data refreshes, much like the last two version of Penguin we’ve seen.

Penguin is all about webspam, and Cutts discussed other webspam initiatives in that video. Specifically, he talked about denying value upstream for link spammers.This is not part of the Penguin update that just rolled out, so expect more there too.

“That comes later,” said Cutts.

Another reader suggested in the comments of Cutts’ blog post that people are finding it riskier to spend the time buildling authoritative sites that Google supposedly likes, because there’s still a chance that an algo update will (even if unintentionally) knock it down for one reason or another. He makes the case that it’s easier to build a bunch of “throwaway affiliate spam sites” that could easily be replaced if Google shuts them down.

Cutts’ response to that was, “We have some things coming later this summer that should help with the type of sites you mention, so I think you made the right choice to work on building authority.”

Cutts briefly discussed the new Penguin update in a conversation with Leo Laporte on Wednesday right before it was getting ready to roll out. In that, he said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”

It will be interesting to see how long Google waits for a data refresh on Penguin again. Unlike Panda, which saw many refreshes, before ultimately transforming into a rolling update, Penguin, since originally launching in April, 2012, only saw two refreshes before this new update (May and October, 2012). If this one is even bigger, should we expect refreshes even less often? The less often they happen, the harder it is to recover, some webmasters have discovered. I’m guessing a lot of those impacted negatively by this new update will be looking at starting over with new sites.

It remains to be seen just how big the impact of this update really is on webmasters. If you’ve been affected (either positively or negatively) let us know in the comments.

SAP HANA (High Performance Analytics Appliance) is the powerful in-memory database technology from German enterprise software powerhouse SAP. Built from the ground up as a platform to tackle real-time analytics for big data volumes, HANA lets organizations analyze business operations based on a large volume and variety of detailed data in real time. SAP has grown the popular big data platform for sports and entertainment, and its own cloud platform for giving businesses the deployment option to run their mission-critical SAP ERP, SAP CRM and SAP NetWeaver BW powered by SAP HANA.

IBM DB2, HANA and SmartCloud

Global IT powerhouse IBM has announced new SmartCloud capabilities, including DB2 with BLU Acceleration that can result in as much as 25 times faster reporting and analytics, and SmartCloud availability for SAP’s HANA. BLU Acceleration technology from IBM adds innovative dynamic in-memory analytics to DB2 database software on IBM SmartCloud to help companies and governments tackle big data. IBM’s new SmartCloud offering includes a SAP HANA Appliance on IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications, hosted on SmartCloud Enterprise+. In addition, a virtual SAP HANA Appliance is now available on IBM SmartCloud Enterprise (SCE) for early stage development and test.

“Clients are looking to leverage big data and analytics at the speed of business,” said Jim Comfort, general manager of IBM SmartCloud Services. “Today’s news shows how IBM is delivering mission-critical cloud services to provide essential analytics innovations to business users at the point of impact.”

The integrated managed service combining SAP HANA and IBM SmartCloud for SAP Applications helps business leaders acquire the information they need to make decisions quickly, drilling down into critical marketing, sales and supply chain insights. Both the physical and virtual SAP HANA Appliances on SmartCloud are offered on a “bring your own license” (BYOL) model; however, a license can be purchased through IBM when working with IBM Global Business Services.

HP and SAP Project Kraken

During the SAP SapphireNow event last week HP and SAP announced advancements to a joint initiative, codenamed “Project Kraken,” to improve business processes and mitigate risks for customers. At the event HP and SAP demonstrated a test system, built from years of HP server technology innovations and optimized with the in-memory SAP HANA database for  SAP Business Suite. The prototype system, optimized with 16 Intel Xeon processor E7 family (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EX) CPUs and 12 terabytes of memory, has been engineered specifically for complex, data-intensive workloads.

“The combination of our best technologies—SAP HANA with HP Converged Infrastructure—revolutionizes in-memory computing to redefine the speed at which market leaders will soon operate, to speed transactions to a matter of seconds,” said Bill Veghte, chief operating officer, HP. “With the collaboration of HP and SAP, organizations can consolidate online transaction and analytic processing into one place and perform real-time analytics at never-before-imagined speeds, while competitors continue to move data between multiple environments to access meaningful insights at a far slower pace.”

Neocore Games is one of those indie developers that are working on a title for a few years, release it, get praised for it and then get back to work for their next game. The Hungarian studio does not talk too much of its accomplishments, instead it lets players enjoy and spread the word on its products.

This is probably one of the … (read more)

The HTC First, a handset with the Facebook Home software pre-loaded, won’t be arriving in the UK as planned. EE was set to be the exclusive carrier for the handset, but is now contacting those who pre-ordered the HTC First to explain the phone is not launching after all. In the U.S., AT&T is the exclusive carrier and has already discounted the device to $0.99 on contract, just weeks after introducing it.

According to U.K.-based site Mobile News, the decision was made by Facebook and not HTC or EE. Sources provided Mobile News the following quote:

“The HTC First has been pulled and will never go on sale in the UK. Sales in the US were poor and Facebook has taken the decision not to give it a more widespread release.”

That’s likely true given the relatively poor reception of the HTC First in the U.S. No official sales figures have been announced, but multiple reports have indicated sales are meager for the mid-range Android smartphone.

Engadget has confirmed the situation with EE, with the carrier saying: “Following customer feedback, Facebook has decided to focus on adding new customization features to Facebook Home over the coming months.” The decision is a sound one as there’s little incentive for people to purchase hardware when the software can be downloaded directly from the Google Play store if desired.

Facebook Home is only available for a limited number of Android phones, but, if the company is serious about increasing engagement through a custom launcher, it should expand availability to more existing phones. Trying to differentiate a piece of hardware through a single social networking interface isn’t the answer. Simply put: the HTC First is a solution in search of a problem.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Tablets wars: Apple is from Venus, Amazon is from Mars
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Have you ever wanted to start your own video game company and create the games you have always dreamed of? With Game Dev Tycoon, you can replay the history of the gaming industry and become the leader of the game market with millions of fans around the world.

As in every business, in order to reach the top, you must build your company from scratch and make yo… (read more)

Ubiquity Critical Environments, a newly-created unit of Sears Holdings, will convert this Sears retail store in Chicago into data center space. (Photo: Ubiquity)

Will blinking blue lights of servers soon fill the aisles that previously offered the Blue Light Special? Sears Holdings has formed a new unit to market space from former Sears and Kmart retail stores as a home for data centers, disaster recovery space and wireless towers.

With the creation of Ubiquity Critical Environments, Sears hopes to convert the retail icons of the 20th century into the Internet infrastructure to power the 21st century digital economy. Sears Holdings has one of the largest real estate portfolios in the country, with 3,200 properties spanning 25 million square feet of space. That includes dozens of Sears and Kmart stores that have been closed over the years.

“It’s an amazing real estate portfolio,” said Sean Farney, the Chief Operating Officer of Ubiquity. “The goal is not to sell off properties. It’s to reposition the assets of this iconic brand. The big idea is that you have a technology platform laid atop a retail footprint, creating the possibility for a product with a very different look to it.”

Farney is an industry veteran who previously managed Microsoft’s huge Chicago data center, and then ran a network of low-latency services for the financial services firm Interactive Data. He sees an opportunity to build three lines of businesses atop the Sears portfolio: data centers, disaster recovery sites and “communications colocation” in which Ubiquity leases rooftop space to wireless providers.

Evaluating Properties for Conversion

Ubiquity will be able to leverage real estate at both closed stores and some that are still operating, depending on the opportunity. The first step has been to evaluate the portfolio and identify properties that could work as data centers. Chicago engineering firm ESD has been conducting a “data center fitness test” on promising properties to size up their power, fiber and risk profiles. Ubiquity is also working with Newmark Grubb Knight Frank to market the portfolio to the brokerage community.

The first Ubiquity project will be a Sears store on the south side of Chicago, nestled alongside the Chicago Skyway. The 127,000 square foot store is closing at the end of June, and will be retrofitted as a multi-tenant data center. Farney says he already has a commitment for the first tenant at the site on East 79th Street, which has 5 megawatts of existing power capacity and the potential to expand.

“It’s a building that’s lit very well, from both a fiber and power perspective,” said Farney. “It’s going to be great data center building.”

Farney acknowledges that many of Sears’ mall-based retail locations aren’t viable for data center usage. “I don’t think the industry is yet ready for a mall-based data center,” he said. “That may take some time. The stand-alone location is optimal.”

Ubiquity has those stand-alone facilities, along with distribution centers and some parcels of vacant land. ”There are closed Kmarts that are stand-alone, 200,000 square-foot properties with good fiber and power and 10 acres of parking,” said Farney. “These are owned assets.”

Farney says Ubiquity has flexibility in how it works with tenants. It could finance a buildout and then hand over a wholesale data center to an enterprise or managed hosting provider, or could opt for a powered shell solution for a tenant, depending on the customer needs.

Business Continuity, Complete With Starbucks

After initially focusing solely on data centers, Ubiquity has expanded its strategy. Although mall-based stores may not be right for data centers, they could be ideal for disaster recovery facilities, Farney said. That includes mall stores that have closed, as well as those that have downsized to a smaller retail footprint. In either scenario, a separate work space could be created with an exterior entrance to restrict access, while still allowing employees to take advantage of nearby stores and eateries.

WibiData — the big data startup from Cloudera Co-founder Christophe Bisciglia and Aaron Kimball — doesn’t have too big of plans. It only wants to become one of the first, if not the first, company selling off-the-shelf software that lets other companies build valuable, customer-facing applications on Hadoop. On Thursday, WibiData announced $15 million in Series B funding from Canaan Partners, as well as existing investors NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, to help make the goal a reality.

Kidding aside, that’s actually quite an ambitious goal in a Hadoop market that’s big and growing, but that’s exemplified by expensive consulting arrangements and purpose-built applications. Even more so for companies that want to do something other than transforming unstructured data into structured data (often called ETL) or run back-office analytics jobs. In fact, WibiData has spent the last 18 months doing just this type of deal, and Bisciglia says every single customer has already engaged with one of the big three Hadoop vendors (Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR).

Home energy-management startup Opower is a good example of this process. It’s actually one of Cloudera’s banner customers, but “when they wanted to take [their software-as-a-service tool] beyond batch analysis and ETL workloads,” Bisciglia said, Opower came to WibiData. So whereas the Opower service was originally focused on nightly data analysis comparing users energy usage against other users, it’s now working on dynamic recommendations for users and letting them engage with the application in new ways.

The WibiData architecture

During these engagements, WibiData has been building up its core technology for connecting those brawny back-office Hadoop environments to predictive customer-facing applications – a collection of HBase, data-formatting tools and machine learning algorithms that the company has been slowly open sourcing under the Kiji banner. It has also been learning the similarities among the applications it’s building for customers in the same field, figuring out what’s repeatable. What does any given company in the retail space, for example, need to get started on, say, its own recommendation engine?

And now, Bisciglia says, WibiData is going to double down on building application software based on what it has learned. The first two industries it targets will likely be financial services and retail, two areas where the company has seen a lot of traction. He envisions the finished product including some pre-defined schema for formatting data and some pre-built predictive models, both broadly applicable across that industry rather than specific to a single user.

There will also be different interfaces that allow different types of users (e.g., data scientists, systems engineers and business users) to interact with the data in the ways they need to.

Time will tell if WibiData can actually accomplish its goal of turning Hadoop into a collection of somewhat specialized software packages, but someone has to. Even industry heavyweights like Cloudera see the need, but their hands are full just getting Hadoop integrated into existing environments and getting those early uses up and running. As Cloudera CEO Mike Olson said at Structure: Data in 2012 to anyone ambitious enough to tackle the Hadoop-application gap, “Call me, I’ll connect you with funding. The money is out there.”

If you want to hear more about the need for Hadoop applications, check out this panel from Structure: Data 2013, where I speak with WibiData’s Omer Trajman, Continuuity’s Jonathan Gray and Pivotal’s Muddu Sudhakar.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Why the big data startup boom will likely be short-lived

The internet of things poses a variety of design challenges starting with the fact that we’re not exactly sure how most consumers will want to deploy and implement connected devices in their homes and lives. Much like people don’t think about using electricity, but instead they think about turning on the lights, plugging in a TV or other applications, using the internet of things will require applications.

But for the most part, people are selling consumers, not applications, but the links to make applications possible. So the WeMo isn’t just a connected outlet, its analogous to selling someone an outlet for electricity. What would someone in a non electrified world want with an outlet? What does the average consumer want with a WeMo? That was one of many topics that I discussed in this week’s podcast with product designer Carla Diana. Diana is fascinated by the SmartThings, the Twines and the other connected elements that she calls “mavericks” but she’s not sure that’s how the internet of things will actually invade the home.

Hear her discuss this, designing for ambient information without overwhelming users and how the internet of things will help take us away from our screens and embed technology into our lives in ways that make us more efficient and maybe more fun.

(Download this episode)

The GigaOM Podcasts RSS feed

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Carla Diana, Smart fellow at Smart Design and CEO of Carla Diana Creative

• How do you design something when we’re not even sure how people will use the internet of things?
• The importance of mavericks in the developing ecosystem.
• Pre-made kits may be the best example of how normal people will install the internet of things.
• Thinking about design and using the internet of things for ambient information.
• LEarn why “life now, data later” matters in designing for connected devices.

PREVIOUS IoT PODCASTS:

Podcast: The history of the internet of things includes a Swedish hockey team and LEGOs

IoT Podcast: Where self-milking cows graze fields of data gold

Podcast: Power to the people — and all their connected devices

What you really need to know before buying connected devices

How the internet of things may make parents less worried but more neurotic

Shark Week for the internet of things

What the Internet of Things can learn from Minecraft and Lemmings

Podcast: How IBM uses chaos theory, data and the internet of things to fix traffic

Electric Imp aims to make the Internet of Things devilishly simple

When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The Internet of things: creating tomorrow’s health care
• Siri: Say hello to the coming “invisible interface”
• The connected planet: Smartphones aren’t the only player

Following a tsunami of bad news for electric car maker Fisker Automotive earlier this year, the company has been silent in recent months, as it’s been figuring out what will happen to it: will it be acquired, will it sell off its assets, will it declare bankruptcy? Well, according to Reuters, a group of investors that includes former General Motors exec Bob Lutz and Chinese auto tech company Wanxiang are offering to buy Fisker for $20 million in a prepackaged bankruptcy deal.

If Fisker is bought for $20 million that would mean the company would be bought for less than 1 percent of its reported $2.2 billion valuation when it launched the Karma in the late summer of 2011. Twenty million dollars is not quite two percent of the total funding ($1.2 billion) that Fisker raised. Fisker also owes the U.S. government another $171 million to pay back its loan. That’s got to be one of the biggest losses in venture capital history.

Row of Fisker Karmas

Earlier this year there were media reports that Fisker was being bids for between $200 million to $350 million from different Chinese auto companies. But either those reports put the bidding high (if so, I would speculate they were leaked by Fisker to help with bidding), something changed in the valuation of Fisker (it plummeted), or the bidders realized a lower valuation of Fisker after looking under the hood.

In a similar end game, solar thin film company Miasole was sold for $30 million to Chinese renewable power company Hanergy, after raising at least $500 million in venture capital funding. Both Miasole and Fisker were backed by Valley firm Kleiner Perkins.

Fisker’s potential bidders include VL Automotive, which is a joint venture between Lutz and Gilbert Villarreal. VL Automotive wants to turn the Fisker Karma into an internal combustion engine car, stripping out the electric drivetrain and giving it an engine.

Read my long investigative story on Fisker: A look under the hood: why electric car startup Fisker crashed and burned.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Tesla’s Model X could make the electric SUV a hit
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Green IT Q1: Cleantech Breaking Out — and Bracing for Hard Times