Category: News

Microsoft will reportedly unveil sequels to its first two Surface tablets at its Build developer conference, which is scheduled to run from June 26th through June 28th. Unnamed sources from Microsoft’s supply chain have told Digitimes as much, and they claim initial components for the Intel-based version of the next-generation Surface began shipping in late 2012. According to the report, the next-generation Surface tablets will be smaller than the current models, with screens measuring between 7 and 9 inches diagonally. An earlier report suggested that Microsoft is developing an “Xbox Surface” gaming tablet with a 7-inch 720p display and an ARM-based Texas Instruments processor, but it is unclear if this gaming device is one of the tablets mentioned in Digitimes’ report.

Arista Networks announced several new features to its flagship 7500 modular switching platform Wednesday. With enhancements to density, scale and speed, Arista says the 7500E is its fastest and most scalable Ethernet switch ever, and will enable cloud networks to scale to over 100,000 servers and and millions of virtual machines while delivering a network architecture that can concurrently support cloud, big data, web 2.0, and virtualization.

“The 7500E Series is a major engineering achievement, offering the industry’s highest throughput and three times the capability of the original Arista 7500 in every dimension – performance, density and power without a chassis upgrade,” said Andreas Bechtolsheim, Arista’s Chairman and Chief Development Officer. “It enables customers to build the world’s largest switching infrastructures that handle the most demanding workloads with ease.”

The Arista 7500E offers configurations with a choice of 152 ports supporting 10GbE, 288 ports for 40GbE or 96 100GbE wire-speed ports. Key enhancements include 3x fabric bandwidth at 30 Terabits per second, 3x packet buffer at 144 Gigabyte per switch, 3x the control plane performance, triple the power efficiency at less than 4 watts per 10GbE port, and a triple-speed 10/40/100GbE line card.

New Line Cards, SDN Features

Four new line cards are available for the 7500E, including the 10/40/100G line card with integrated MXP (multi-speed port) optics that can be software configured on a per port basis delivering constant price-per-bandwidth at every port speed. All line cards offer the same deep packet buffers that support 128 MBytes per 10G port,512 MBytes per 40G port and 1.5 GBytes per 100G port, large L2/L3 lookup tables, and wire-speed VXLAN processing on every port.

The Arista 7500E together with Arista EOS, includes Software Defined Networking capabilities that support programmatic control of the switch. With a Layer-3 load-balancing architecture, a universal cloud networking infrastructure can be built to support data centers with more than 100,000 servers that deliver consistent performance for dynamically scaling workloads in public or private clouds.

“The high density 40GbE and 100GbE interfaces, deep packet buffers, SDN features and the robustness of EOS makes the Arista 7500 an ideal spine platform for our network,” said Benjamin Nathan, Director, IT Operations and Infrastructure at Weill Medical College of Cornell University. “Arista continues to innovate on programmability with its Linux based EOS and was a key factor in deciding on the 7500E for our Big Data needs.”

The 7500E series switches and line-card modules are generally available now.

We all know of the shale oil boom in the United States that has produced an explosion in domestic oil production primarily on private and state lands and helped to decrease our dependence on oil imports. Hydraulic fracturing and directional …

LAS VEGAS – For Alex Delgado, things were going from bad to worse as Superstorm Sandy slammed the Jersey Shore. It was high tide, during a full moon. There was a 13 foot storm surge, and the data center was less than a mile from the beach. Six hours into the storm, the company’s operations team in India had to be evacuated due to a cyclone.

The staff at the International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) data center in Union Beach, N.J. used to joke about a single telephone pole that carried “half of the Internet and half of its power.” As Sandy came ashore, that was the pole that fell. In short, had Delgado won a raffle that week, it would have been for the Hunger Games. Everything was going wrong.

The campus was swamped with six to seven feet of water. Both its power substations were under water, as were the diesel fuel pumps. UPS batteries were nearing their end of life. Street power was out, and access to the facility was hindered by partially collapsed road.

Different Scenarios, Different Considerations

Delgado, the Global Operations and Data Center Manager for IFF, shared his experience this week as part of a keynote panel at Data Center World in Las Vegas. The panel showcased two stories of Sandy’s impact: one from the Jersey Shore at the heart of the damage, another from Philadelphia.

The data center in Union Beach supports more than 50 manufacturing facilities around the world for IFF,  a chemical manufacturing company that did over $2.8 billion in revenue last year. While Delgado and his team struggled with the storm, the event had no major impact on customers, as the company didn’t lose a single order.

The 4,500 square foot facility is a single tenant building with 30 minutes of UPS backup. Its disaster recovery site is 2 hours away at an IBM facility in Sterling Forest, New York. As the storm intensified, IFF was able to shift its critical operations to the backup facility.

The damage in Union Beach was severe. The data hall stayed dry, as it was on the second floor of the building. But the storm surge took out power and mechanical infrastructure, and flooded the machine shop, ruining most of the facility’s power tools and spare parts. With the power out and roads closed or blocked, staff stayed in place for days. With provisions exhausted after the first 48 hours, IFF staff subsisted on vending machine food as they began the recovery effort, Delgado said.

The data center was returned to service on Dec. 8 with new generators and infrastructure. Delgado wound up procuring 300 batteries and 3 generators.

Delgado’s key “lesson learned ” included vendor support. ”If you don’t have a good relationship with your vendors, start shaking some hands today,” he said. He also noted that the company had moved to cloud email, which saved a ton of headaches in terms of communication.

The View From Philly

Donna Manley, IT Senior Director at the University of Pennsylvannia, showed a different side of the storm. While Philadelphia wasn’t nearly as impacted as much, the operational impact of the storm was great.

The university’s data center is in a multi tenant building, with a main data center of 4,850 square feet in the University City section of Philadelphia. Manley’s story is important because it revealed a larger concern than just the data center: the city of Philadelphia’s aged infrastructure.

A week prior to the storm, Manley and her team started the planning process. They identified teams, began tarping the windows, and put diisatser recovery provider SunGard on alert. “We started our crisis command center on the 29th, setting up a separate box.net instance just in case we lost power and were in an emergency situation,” said Manley.

Understanding the geographic diversity of the staff was important, as some employees lived in areas where the storm hit hard. “We had very few individuals that could have been on site,” said Manley. ““We needed to make sure there was technical and management staffing.””

Cloud Services Play a Role

Manley leveraged online storage provider Box.net to get them through the storm. “Resourcing doesn’t just mean people,” said Manley. “One of the big things we have going on is our documentation. Up until recently, we had it in Sharepoint. We made it available on box.net, and we didn’t have to worry about servers going down and documentation not being available to us.”

Manley’s advice is to have a data center crash kit checklist. “Because we’re an urban campus, we have a couple of unique items on there – respirator masks, subway tokens to get to disaster recovery site at Sungard)”, she said.

She said it’s also important to read the fine print on Disaster Recovery Agreements to see whether a fee is required to put your provider on standby. There’s also food, as there’s  a chance workers will have to stay put at the data center for extended periods of time, and the local restaurants aren’t as committed to staying online as a data center.

Both organizations said the prospect of managed services and hosting now appealed to them a little bit more than prior to the storm. Cloud services played an important role in both disaster plans, even if only to keep communications open through email.

Earlier this year, I received some lessons on what wins in frontier markets from former Coca Cola CEO Neville Isdell. “Young markets need a long investment horizon,” Neville told me. “U.S. companies, in general, don’t have the long-term view that they need. If a U.S. CEO says he or she’s building something for twenty-five years from now, an investor is likely to say ‘Oh, come on. I’m not going to invest in that. You’re wasting my money’”

I interviewed Neville for a forthcoming book on success in Africa. He’s a firm believer that many US firms struggle in frontier markets because they’re compelled to a short term view. And Neville knows frontier markets. Raised in Zambia since the age of ten, he attended the University of Cape Town in South Africa, then returned to Zambia and joined the local Coke bottler at age twenty-three. He assumed leadership of Coca-Cola’s large South Africa operation eight years later, before taking on leadership positions worldwide and the CEO job in in 2004. In 2008 he was named by Beverage Industry magazine as the sector’s CEO of the year. Under Neville’s successor Muhtar Kent, Coke today generates 47% of volume and 33% of income from three emerging and frontier regions: Latin America, Eurasia and Africa.

I asked Neville how he convinced shareholders to take those long term bets at Coca-Cola. “Well, having shareholders like Warren Buffet helps,” he said. “Warren looks for long-term value, so he shared this view. Also as a company we have seen this everywhere, so we expect it.”

Not every company enjoys that long-term commitment, even in sectors where it’s most necessary to success. In the mining sector this year, multiple boards have pulled back from long term capital investment plans. They’ve often done so under pressure from investors. In describing why the $10 billion Blackrock World Mining Fund was reducing by up to a third its stake in mining industry leader BHP Billiton, one of the fund’s managers put the challenge quite plainly: “Some of their decisions are very good in terms of long-term strategy, but are you going to make money from it in the next three years, which is our investment horizon?” It’s a reasonable position, but one that compels hard discussions.

Across sectors, shareholder investment horizons preclude some frontier market investments and require other investments to be staggered so the company can continue to return cash to investors even as it pursues those opportunities. Companies that succeed, like Coke, have the experience to make a realistic assessment of the constraints of frontier markets and the anticipated timing of returns. That’s a conversation they have with shareholders and with stakeholders in their operating countries on a continuous basis.

Any comparison across sectors has to carry a caveat, and the distance from commodity production to beverages is about as wide as it gets. Yet, there’s irony and learning in seeing how Coke, a leader in fast moving consumer goods, socializes its shareholders and key stakeholders to success over the long term. It’s a posture reflected in the recent election to the Coke board of Helene Gayle, CEO of the non-governmental organization CARE. Ms. Gayle is a non-traditional choice, but she is widely respected among her peers for vision on challenges which can take a generation to address and which undergird growth in the frontier markets of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Frontier markets experience fast growth, but they’re no fast buck. As corporate boards turn to frontier markets for more growth, they will be well advised to follow Coke’s lead. From silver miners to soda bottlers, it is those companies that will prevail in young markets.

HTC on Thursday posted its audited earnings results for the first quarter of 2013 and the were in line with the company’s pre-announcement from last month. HTC managed to pull in just $2.88 in after-tax profit, down about 98% from the year-ago quarter, which had already seen profit drop 70% from Q1 2011. Revenue last quarter came in at $1.45 billion and operating margins fell to just 0.1%.

Continue reading…

Deanna Brown, who was the CEO of Federated Media, has joined e-singles startup Byliner as president, the company announced Thursday.

Brown has a long history in the digital media industry. Before her time at Federated Media, she held executive roles at Scripps Networks Interactive, Yahoo and AOL. She was the CEO and cofounder of Inside.com, the founder of Gaming Industry News, and the cofounder of Condé Nast’s digital division, CondéNet, in 1995.

Byliner, which is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2011 by former Outside Magazine editor John Tayman, sells fiction and nonfiction e-singles individually and also offers subscriptions. The site also hosts a large library of content posted elsewhere and lets users follow their favorite writers.

“I really wanted to work with a startup again, using my experience in building and scaling promising new ventures, but I also wanted to be part of something I’m personally very passionate about,” Brown said in a statement. “I love the content business, and I hold great writers and their work in the highest esteem. I’m a huge reader and own five different digital readers. Byliner is a perfect fit — for both head and heart — and makes great sense at this point in my career.”

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Last month Google altered the method of collecting data for its Android distribution charts, now measuring the popularity of the operating system iterations by visits to the app store instead of check-ins to the company’s servers as before. The move significantly changed the results compared to the previous month, but is there a noticeable difference that is felt in the Android distribution charts for May?

Based on the number of devices visiting Google Play during the 14 days ending May 1, Jelly Bean now ranks as the most popular Android sweet, after Gingerbread. With a combined distribution level of 29.4 percent, for Android 4.1 and Android 4.2, Jelly Bean surpassed Ice Cream Sandwich, which now runs on 27.5 percent of all droids.

The Jelly Beans

Altogether, Jelly Bean has grown by 4.4 percentage points from 25 percent distribution level, which translates into a 17.6 percent increase compared to the previous data set from April. Android 4.1 rose to 2.3 percent from 2.0 percent — 0.3 percentage points higher — while Android 4.2 displayed a 3.1 percentage points rise to 26.1 percent in May from 23 percent distribution level in April.

Jelly Bean’s growth, as shown in the charts, appears to be influenced more by the number of devices sold with (and upgraded to) Android 4.1 rather than smartphones and tablets running Android 4.2. Alongside the likes of the the Samsung Galaxy S4 — which runs the second Jelly Bean iteration — Android 4.2 is bound to get a boost in distribution level over the upcoming months. The first Jelly Bean iteration is likely to keep its popularity crown largely intact in the upcoming period due to sales of devices still running Android 4.1, like the HTC One.

Ice Cream Sandwich

Android 4.0, versions 4.0.3 and 4.0.4, reached a 27.5 percent distribution level in May, a number 1.8 percentage points lower compared to the 29.3 percent distribution level from April. This translates into a 6.14 percent decrease over the course of a single month.

Considering that new devices tend to run Android iterations from the Jelly Bean family, the fact that Android 4.0’s popularity slowly decreases each month (bar last month when Google changed the data collection method) shouldn’t come as a surprise.

The Older Sweets

Android 3.2 still runs on 0.1 percent of all droids, a number 0.1 percentage points lower compared to the data released in April. That’s a 50 percent decrease over the course of a single month, but normal considering the scarce popularity that Honeycomb enjoyed after it was unveiled and the number of Android tablets swarming on the market which may have swayed fondleslab owners towards newer devices.

If you were hoping for Gingerbread to be finally surpassed by a newer sweet, you are going to be disappointed. Android 2.3 — versions 2.3 to 2.3.2. and 2.3.3 to 2.3.7 — reached a combined distribution level of 38.5 percent. 0.1 percent for the former version and 38.4 percent for the latter.

That’s 1.3 percentage points lower from 39.8 percent in the month before, which implies a 3.26 percent decrease since April. Gingerbread’s popularity, as expected, will go down further in the upcoming months.

Froyo, Eclair and Donut — the only Android iterations from the charts older than Gingerbread — reached a combined distribution level of 5.5 percent, 0.3 percentage points lower than the 5.8 percent in the month before. The 5.17 percent decrease is influenced by droid users switching to a newer device.

What Comes Next?

Google used to provide a historical dataset, but the search giant removed it when the new data collection method was implemented last month. Although we don’t have a solid enough basis for comparison purposes, it’s fair to assume that the trend depicted in May will continue over the upcoming months at least until Google releases a new Android iteration (it’s bound to happen sometime).

The internet of things isn’t just about the connected home, smart cities or even gathering data on the high seas. The economics are moving to a point where utilities are seriously eying the trend of home energy management as something that might affect their bottom line, especially if the adoption of electric vehicles takes off.

In this week’s podcast I speak with Russell Shaver, a consulting engineer with Austin Energy, about it’s interest in the internet of things, and the changing economics driving the utility to care more about demand response. For example this week in Austin, the price of power on the spot market rose from the average $30 or $40 per watt to a whopping $900 per watt in Texas thanks to the temperature and the loss of some generation capacity. As a consumer I’m insulated against those price fluctuations, but Austin Energy has to pay. And those prices are only going to rise.

That makes connectivity and intelligence in the home around energy consumption worth spending money on. Hence Austin Energy’s new incentive plan that gives residents $85 if they purchase one of three connected thermostats. Listen for the details of that program as what Shaver sees as the future for connected devices and the role utilities will play.

(Download this episode)

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Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham
Guest: Russell Shaver of Austin Energy

• A bit about how Austin Energy uses demand response today.
• The OpenADR protocol and the need for open standards and data sharing even for energy data.
• Why electric vehicles change the game for utilities and what Austin Energy wants to see from connected cars
• The power of the opt-out. Especially when it’s 110 degrees and you’re hosting a party.

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LAS VEGAS – David Shaw of IO has been named the Data Center Manager of the Year Award by AFCOM, the leading association for data center managers. Shaw, the Senior Vice President of IO, was honored Wednesday night in an awards ceremony at Data Center World in Las Vegas.

Shaw manages more than 1.5 million square feet of data center capacity for IO, which has been a pioneer in deploying modular data center designs. He oversees IO’s “Data Center as a Service” offering to deploy managed data space in IO’s factory-built modules, which also includes the company’s IO.OS data center management software.

The other finalists were Tate Cantrell, the Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global, and Donna Manley, the Senior IT Director at the University of Pennsylvania.

Shaw, who has been working in the industry since 1987, oversaw the opening of the world’s largest modular data center in Edison, New Jersey, and ensured that the facility remained 100 percent operational during Hurricane Sandy and in its aftermath.

The Power of People

In accepting the award, Shaw noted that there are six things data center managers work with – power, cooling and connectivity, and people, process and technology. Of those, he said people were the most important part of the equation. He dedicated the award to his team of 50 staff members, who work in four data centers in the U.S. across the U.S.

Shaw also emphasized the importance of bringing “new blood” into the industry by getting the next generation of IT workers working in the field.

Prior to joining IO, Shaw led the greenfield build and operational implementation of a 7 megawatt data center to support electronic medical records and critical patient care systems for 26 hospitals and services across five states. He was also responsible over a 10-year period for global data center management at Perot Systems.

He received in-depth specialist data center and operations training from IBM and the UK Ministry of Defense, and is certified in ITIL service management. While serving in the Royal Air Force, he graduated in electronic engineering and studied computer-aided engineering, specializing in robotics.

The data center manager of the year was selected in a blind test judged by three past winners. The award is named for Len Eckhaus, the founder of AFCOM.

AFCOM was founded in 1980 to support the educational and professional development needs of data center and facilities management professionals around the globe. The association has more than 3,500 members and 40 chapters worldwide, and provides education and networking for data center managers through its Data Center World conferences, regional chapters, and Data Center Management magazine.

The Irish mobile app development and deployment outfit FeedHenry (which was one of GigaOM’s Mobilize Launchpad finalists a couple years back) has just scored a respectable $9 million, Intel-led funding round.

VMware was already an investor along with Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland, and all three have participated in the new round as well. Intel has however taken the lead this time with ACT Venture Capital also joining in.

FeedHenry serves business customers that want to develop and deploy in-house mobile apps. In February the company partnered up with Telefonica, allowing the bundling of FeedHenry’s platform with the telco’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, Instant Servers, for the benefit of European customers.

According to Marcos Battisti, Intel Capital’s managing director for Western Europe and Israel, the investment will help FeedHenry expand internationally:

“The mobile application market segment for enterprise is at a tipping point and those companies delivering a comprehensive solution that provide both an end to end mobile development strategy and a way to implement applications easily and securely will be at the forefront of the market segment.”

FeedHenry’s rivals include firms such as Antenna Software and SAP. The Irish firm’s particular selling point is flexibility, allowing deployment of its Mobile Application Platform to public, private and hybrid clouds. Apps developed on the platform can also be built once then rolled out to iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

The company also provides “backend-as-a-service” functionality, with server-side code based on Node.js, as well as app management tools and analytics. There’s been considerable activity in that BaaS market with Salesforce.com and Rackspace adding mobile backend capabilities there and Facebook buying Parse just last week.

It should be noted that this is far from the first investment Intel Capital has made in this space. Just this January, it also put $4.6 million into enterprise mobile app deployment firm Apperian. And, in February, parent company Intel bought the mobile app development tools division of AppMobi.

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While all the press attention is focused on Google Glass, there’s another even more life-changing invention continuing to be developed and refined at Google. The company’s self-driving cars have already driven more than 400,000 miles without an accident (there have been two crashes — in the first the Google car was rear-ended at a stop light, and in the second it was being driven by a human).

Although they won’t likely become commonplace on our roads for another 15 to 20 years, make no mistake, driver-less cars are the future, and will have lots of benefits. Aside from reducing accidents, they’ll be able to travel much faster — no need for speed limits — and give passengers (and we’ll all be passengers) time to do other things. Forget working from home, you’ll be able to work from your car.

Eventually it will also mean driving under the influence will be a thing of the past, as will road traffic cops.

Of course it all depends on how well, and how quickly, our governments embrace the idea. Will we see secondary super-fast roads just for driverless cars? Will self-driving vehicles be allowed to drive on regular roads alongside human drivers (certainly that’s the goal)? And will human drivers eventually be outlawed?

It still seems very much like a science fiction story, but it’s very real, and at the weekend Google dropped an interesting snippet of information. In order to intelligently make decisions, its self-driving cars gather some 750MB of sensor data every second.

In a LinkedIn post today, Bill Gross, founder and CEO of Idealab shared an image of what Google’s self-driving car “sees” while it is about to make a left turn. He says:

It is capturing every single thing that it sees moving — cars, trucks, birds, rolling balls, dropped cigarette butts, and fusing all that together to make its decisions while driving. If it sees a cigarette butt, it knows a person might be creeping out from between cars. If it sees a rolling ball it knows a child might run out from a driveway. I am truly stunned by how impressive an achievement this is. I believe that this is an UNDER-hyped revolution in the making.

He also posted another image from the same set.

There’s no question Bill Gross is right. This is an under-hyped revolution in the making, but is it one that drivers will embrace? Maybe in 15-20 years we’ll be so plugged in that we won’t think twice about handing over the keys to a computer chauffeur. But at the moment I think certainly outside of the real gridlocked cities, people like to drive and trust in their own abilities behind the wheel.

If you’re in a car, and you suddenly see an accident up ahead, would you trust a computer — with all its high-tech data gathering sensors — to make the right choice to avoid it, or would you prefer to be the one taking action?

I’d love to know your thoughts on this subject, so leave your comments below.

Skobbler, the Berlin-based outfit that largely provides tools for incorporating OpenStreetMap-based functionality into other companies’ apps, has launched a major revamp of its own iOS play, ForeverMap.

ForeverMap provides both online and offline mapping functionality, based on OpenStreetMap. The first iteration used a much older version of Skobbler’s technology and required the user to download a rather hefty 1.5GB of data covering all territories, regardless of where they intended to use the app.

The new version, ForeverMap 2, has been available for Android since November, but is now also out there for iPhone and iPad. It aims to provide the best of both online and offline worlds – to allow proper offline search and routing, unlike Google Maps, and to allow online functionality, unlike travel apps such as CityMaps2Go. Its coverage is global, and users can choose to download offline maps on a per-country basis.

“We know that modern users want one map that handles all of their needs, and we believe we’ve delivered this with a genuinely innovative hybrid solution based on the popular, rich and dynamic OpenStreetMap,” Skobbler CTO Philipp Kandal said in a statement.

However, while ForeverMap2 is a consumer play, it is also a showcase of Skobbler’s GeOS SDK and NGx mapping engine. As co-founder Marcus Thielking told me, it gives the company’s prospective white label clients – who are largely in the automotive business – “a good template” for what they could build on top of the product.

“It’s the perfect pitching tool – we just give it to them and they can see what we can do,” he said. Previously announced customers for Skobbler’s technology include the city guide app outfit Triposo.

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The Mozilla Foundation is accusing Gamma International, a UK-based software group, of making a false association between one of its products and the Firefox name.

Gamma International produces FinFisher, a program used by governments to obtain data in a covert way. FinFisher is often installed by disguising itself as an update to a well known program such as Firefox. Mozilla has now sent a cease and desist letter to Gamma claiming that its Firefox trademark is being violated and that the practice must end immediately.

Alex Fowler in charge of privacy and public policy at Mozilla says on his blog,

As an open source project trusted by hundreds of millions of people around the world, defending Mozilla’s trademarks from this type of abuse is vital to our brand, our users and the continued success of our mission. Mozilla has a longstanding history of protecting users online and was named the Most Trusted Internet Company for Privacy in 2012 by the Ponemon Institute. We cannot abide a software company using our name to disguise online surveillance tools that can be — and in several cases actually have been — used by Gamma’s customers to violate citizens’ human rights and online privacy.

Mozilla has acted following a report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on digital spying. The report compares a legitimate install of Firefox with what the report’s authors claim is a FinFisher install. This, they say, comes labeled with version numbers, copyright details and descriptions from a legitimate Firefox version.

Photo credit: olly/Shutterstock

Salesforce.com will set up its first European data center in the UK next year, the enterprise software-as-a-service firm said on Thursday.

The company has come under criticism for not having a European data center in the past, largely due to compliance issues – Salesforce is part of the EU-U.S. Safe Harbor framework, which means it’s allowed to handle European citizens’ personal data, but many customers would prefer the certainty that a locally sited data center allows. (We will be discussing such issues at our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, by the way.)

Salesforce said last year that it hoped to open a data center in the UK in 2013, but this appears to have been pushed back a little now. According to a statement today, the new data center – the firm’s sixth — will be completed in 2014 in partnership with NTT Communications’ local arm, NTT Europe.

In a statement, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Europe had provided the greatest revenue growth – 38 percent — for the company in the 2013 fiscal year:

“We are doubling down on Europe with the announcement of our new data centre in the UK, which will support continued customer success in EMEA.”

Robin Balen, NTT Europe’s wholesale data center business chief, added that the new facility would be “powered 100 percent by renewable energy sources.”

Innovation Challenge

Meanwhile, Salesforce has also teamed up with a group of European venture capital firms – Notion capital, Octopus Investment and MMC Ventures – to launch a €5 million ($6.6 million) Innovation Challenge for startups.

Startups are invited to pitch their enterprise cloud apps that could run (surprise!) on Salesforce’s platform. There will be pitching events through Europe between September and November, and the winners will get seed funding. Apps will need to be at least in the beta stage, with demonstrable “traction, customer success and user adoption.”

“This is a unique opportunity for innovative start-ups in the enterprise app market here in Europe to receive commercial support to allow them to compete on a global stage,” Octopus principal Luke Hakes said in a statement.

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HarbourVest Global Private Equity Limited has announced the retirement of Mr. Paul Christopher as non-executive director of the company and the appointment of Mr. Alan Hodson as a non-executive director. HarbourVest Global Private Equity Limited is a Guernsey-incorporated closed-end investment company which has a dual listing on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext Amsterdam.

PRESS RELEASE

HarbourVest Global Private Equity Limited (“HVPE” or the “Company”), a closed-end investment company, today announces the retirement of Mr. Paul Christopher as non-executive director of the Company and the appointment of Mr. Alan Hodson as a non-executive director effective 30 April 2013. Sir Michael Bunbury, on behalf of the Company, expressed his thanks to Mr. Christopher for his contribution to the Company since joining the Board in October 2007.

Speaking for the Company, Sir Michael said:

“The Board of HarbourVest Global Private Equity is very pleased that Alan Hodson has agreed to become a director. His deep experience of listed markets will be very valuable in helping to guide the future development of the Company.”

Mr. Hodson is Chairman of Blackrock Commodities Income Investment Trust and a Director of JP Morgan Elect. He is also Chairman of Triodos New Horizons Limited and of the Board of Special Trustees of Great Ormond Street Hospital Children’s Charity. Mr. Hodson joined Rowe and Pitman (subsequently SG Warburg, SBC and UBS) in 1984 and worked in a range of roles, all related to listed equity markets. He became Global Head of Equities in April 2001 and was a member of the Executive Committee of UBS Investment Bank and of the UBS AG Group Managing Board. He retired from UBS in June 2005 and has since held positions on a variety of commercial and charity Boards.

Enquiries:
Anson Fund Managers Limited Tel +44 1481 722 260
Secretary
HarbourVest
Stuart Howard Tel: +44 (0) 20 7399 9815 [email protected]
Laura Thaxter Tel: +1 (617) 348 3695 [email protected]
Fishburn Hedges
Paul Farrow / Ben Lyons Tel: +44 (0) 20 7839 4321 [email protected]

Notes to Editors:

About HarbourVest Global Private Equity Limited:
HarbourVest Global Private Equity Limited (“HVPE”) is a Guernsey-incorporated closed-end investment company which has a dual listing on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext Amsterdam. HVPE is registered as an investment company with the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM). HVPE is designed to offer shareholders long-term capital appreciation by investing in a private equity portfolio diversified by geography, by stage of investment, by vintage year, and by industry. It invests in and alongside HarbourVest-managed funds which focus on primary partnership commitments, secondary investments, and direct investments in operating companies. HVPE is advised by HarbourVest Advisers L.P., an affiliate of HarbourVest Partners, LLC.

About HarbourVest Partners, LLC:
HarbourVest Partners, LLC (“HarbourVest”) is an independent global private equity investment firm and an SEC registered investment advisor, providing vehicles for institutional investors to invest in the venture capital and buyout markets in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere through primary partnerships, secondary purchases, and direct investments. The HarbourVest team began investing in 1982 and has committed more than $30 billion to investments over its more than 30-year history. Across its global investment platform, HarbourVest and its affiliates have more than 230 employees in Boston, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bogotá, and Beijing.

_____________________________________________

Join us at our next event: What’s Next… for collaboration on corporate responsibility?

Ben Lyons

FISHBURN HEDGES
77 KINGSWAY
LONDON WC2B 6SR
t +44 (0) 20 7839 4321
d +44 (0) 20 7544 3092
f +44 (0) 20 7242 4202

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Brothers Edmund and Danny Truell have completed a substantial growth capital investment in Imagine Publishing to support its next phase of global expansion. Imagine Publishing is a UK-based multimedia content publisher.

PRESS RELEASE

Brothers Edmund and Danny Truell have completed a substantial growth capital investment in Imagine Publishing to support the next phase of the multimedia publisher’s global expansion.
Imagine Publishing is one of the UK’s fastest-growing multimedia content publishers. Formed in May 2005, it now publishes 19 regular print magazines, 50 digital apps, more than 250 bookazines, 29 websites and thousands of articles every month in the technology, videogames, photography and knowledge/science markets. An Imagine magazine is purchased every ten seconds, and the Company this month won a Media Pioneer award at the Specialist Media Show for the successful ‘Content is King’ digital strategy that has brought its content to all major mobile smartphone and tablet devices worldwide.
In the financial year to March 2013, Imagine delivered revenue of nearly £20m, and was recently named in the Sunday Times Profit Track 100 of the UK’s fastest-growing companies (with 63.04% profit growth in FY 2009-12). The latest investment from the Truell brothers will be used to accelerate Imagine’s global rollout into the major international markets, notably India, the US and Australia, and to cement its position as the leading global multimedia content provider.
The Truells have been investors in Imagine since inception, and following significant new investment will assume the majority shareholding, which sees the Company’s co-founders Damian Butt (Group Managing Director), Steven Boyd (Group Finance & Commercial Director) and Mark Kendrick (Group Creative Director) each retain significant stakes in the business. HSBC has for the third time also provided debt facilities to give further balance sheet strength.
Imagine is now strongly capitalised and well positioned to develop further its pioneering approach to content delivery on a global scale.
Edmund Truell commented: “I’m delighted to continue to back and at a bigger scale an innovative management team who are true mobile device pioneers, being one of the first to put their content on the iPad, and the first to publish all their titles on every platform. The team is now ideally positioned to lead and transform the migration of published content to digital platforms worldwide.”

-ENDS-

For more information:
Equus Communications
James Culverhouse
[email protected]
+44 (0)20 7223 1100

Notes to Editors
Edmund Truell has 28 years of financial services experience in private equity and debt markets. Edmund trained at Bankers Trust Co in New York, following which he was appointed a director of the Hambros Bank in 1991; Chief Executive of Hambro European Ventures in 1994; led the 1998 buyout and formation of Duke Street Capital; and was responsible in 2000 for creating and building Duke Street Capital Debt Management. He was Chairman of the British Venture Capital Association from 2001 to 2002. With his brother Danny Truell, in 2006 he co-founded Pension Corporation, a leading provider of risk management solutions to defined benefit pension funds. Its FSA-authorised and regulated insurance company, Pension Insurance Corporation, has over £4 billion in assets under management and has insured 50,000 pension fund members and amongst other achievements was the first to insure the benefits of a public sector pension scheme, as well as transacting the largest ever UK corporate pension insurance buyout. He is qualified as a Chartered Financial Adviser and a Trustee of The Truell Charitable Foundation and the Charles Darwin Foundation. Danny Truell serves as the Chief Investment Officer at Wellcome Trust and is Chairman of the ALM Operating Committee at Pension Insurance Corporation Limited.

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Email remains one of the most popular forms of communication in the world, currently fending off the unwanted attentions of Twitter, Facebook and Skype after effortlessly swatting away the threat of SMS and the printed letter. Yet we’re increasingly happy to entrust our email to the cloud, accessing through a web browser whenever we want to stay in touch.

Whether or not your email is with a cloud-based provider like Gmail or Hotmail, there’s always room for a decent email client. And if you want something that’s simple, elegant and feature-packed, we suggest you take a closer look at eM Client 5.0.

From the moment installation finishes, you see how helpful and simple eM Client wants to be. From offering you a choice of three minimalist skins to detecting existing programs and importing messages, contacts and other online information (including calendars and chat histories), the program bends over backwards to make migration as simple a process as possible.

Before you know it, you’re up and running, contacts paired and messages synchronising in the background. Everything you expect from a fully formed email client is here, from support for encrypted messages to signatures and templates, email rules and both global and search folders. We especially like the right-hand sidebar, where extra information about a selected email’s sender is displayed, including all past messages from that person.

But eM Client is more than just a client for email — it handles contacts, calendars, tasks and even chat, with support for Facebook, Skype, ICQ, Yahoo! And Google support. Throw in customizable and RSS widgets, and you’re looking at one fully featured mail client. You can even back up and restore your accounts and messages from within the program.

There is one downside to all this functionality: the Free version is limited to non-commercial use and two email accounts. If you need more, then you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro version for the princely sum of $49.95. But you get 30 days to decide which is for you before choosing which license to go for.

eM Client 5.0 is available now as a free download for PCs running Windows XP or later.

Photo Credit:  2jenn/Shutterstock

FeedHenry said it raised $9 million in a round led by Intel Capital and joined by new investor ACT Venture Capital and existing investors Kernel Capital, VMware Inc. and Enterprise Ireland. Private investors also participated. The new funding will support the international expansion of the company’s mobile application platform.

PRESS RELEASE

Intel Capital leads $9M investment in FeedHenry to Power Growth in Cloud-Based Mobile Enterprise Solutions

BOSTON MA AND WATERFORD, IRELAND – May 2, 2013 – FeedHenry, a provider of cloud- based mobile enterprise application solutions, today announced that it has secured $9M (€7M) in a funding round led by Intel Capital. The funding includes a seven figure investment from existing investor Kernel Capital. Other existing investors VMware Inc., Enterprise Ireland and private investors also participated and were joined by new investment from ACT Venture Capital.  This new funding will provide FeedHenry with the capital to accelerate the international roll out of its mobile application platform that draws on critical cloud-based technology.

FeedHenry provides a next generation mobile application platform that helps businesses build mobile app solutions that integrate securely to their business through the cloud

“ Increasingly, enterprises are viewing mobile apps as transformative to their business operations” commented Cathal McGloin, CEO, FeedHenry “As organizations evolve towards more complex apps with connections to multiple backend systems, the need for a cloud- based mobile application platform is compelling. This new investment will give us the means to continue to innovate and expand the capabilities of our platform to better serve our growing customer base”

“FeedHenry has already gained significant momentum and credibility in the enterprise mobility market segment and we see this investment as a way to contribute to its  growth and international expansion” said Marcos Battisti, Managing Director for Intel Capital, Western Europe and Israel. “The mobile application market segment for enterprise is at a tipping point and those companies delivering a comprehensive solution that provide both an end to end mobile development strategy and a way to implement applications easily and securely will be at the forefront of the market segment.”

According to Forrester’s Enterprise Mobility Research Report, the mobile apps market segment is expected to reach $37 billion by 2015. Since FeedHenry’s inception, the company has seen significant traction of its cloud-based mobility platform with global customers in a wide range of industries including healthcare, travel and transportation, business services and utilities. Partnerships with mobile operators and cloud vendors have also extended FeedHenry’s international reach. The Company believes that the current mobile enterprise market segment combined with FeedHenry’s scalable technology platform and flexible engagement model, positions it well to grow the business.

About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel’s global investment and M&A organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, health, consumer Internet, digital media and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$10.8 billion in over 1,276 companies in 54 countries. In that timeframe, 201 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 317 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2012, Intel Capital invested US$352 million in 150 investments with approximately 57 percent of funds invested outside North America. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.

About FeedHenry
FeedHenry provides next generation, cloud-based mobile enterprise application solutions that simplify the development, deployment and management of mobile apps for enterprise. The FeedHenry platform enables development of native, hybrid and HTML5 apps that securely connect to multiple backend systems and supports deployment of server-side code to private, public or hybrid cloud environments.  The solution offers IT departments the ability to create, control, measure, adapt and future-proof their mobile business strategies for employees, partners and customers in one place, increasing productivity, connectivity and engagement. Visit www.feedhenry.com and follow @FeedHenry.

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If you buy fruit juices at your local grocery store, you might notice the Welch’s brand juices sold in refrigerated cartons. Welch’s calls them “refrigerated cocktails” and offers exotic-sounding flavors like Strawberry Peach, Dragon Fruit Mango Cocktail and Orange Pineapple…