Category: News

Eucalyptus Systems continues its laser-focus on enterprises using Amazon Web Services in need of private cloud software, adding three of the most anticipated capabilities in version 3.3. Support for Auto-Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing, and CloudWatch have been added, making Eucalyptus more ideal for testing applications built for AWS in a private environment. The company has also added resource tagging, expanded instance types and a new maintenance mode, as well as support for Netflix’ OSS tools Chaos Monkey, Asgard, and Edda.

With each subsequent release, Eucalyptus is building on its existing EC2, S3, EBS, and IAM features so it maintains compatibility with Amazon, positioning itself as the private cloud option in a hybrid setup.

“We’re focused on three principles,” said Andy Knosp, Vice President of Product at Eucalyptus. “The first is increasing agility, allowing an organization to be much more responsive. The second is cost effective control – over time, doing dev and testing can be quite expensive. Eucalyptus is a low-cost alternative to test and development on private platform (the customer) controls. The third, is that the future is hybrid, and we will continue to develop and enable capabilities around Hybrid.”

What The Feature Additions Mean

Auto Scaling: Auto Scaling allows application developers to scale Eucalyptus resources up or down based on policies defined using Amazon EC2-compatible APIs and tools. With Auto Scaling, cloud resources can be seamlessly increased or decreased to maintain performance and meet SLAs.

Elastic Load Balancing: Elastic Load Balancing is an AWS-compatible service that distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Eucalyptus instances to provide greater fault tolerance for applications.

CloudWatch: CloudWatch is AWS-compatible service that monitors cloud resources and applications running on Eucalyptus clouds. It provides a reliable and flexible monitoring solution which allows application developers and cloud administrators to programmatically collect metrics, set alarms, identify trends, and take action to ensure applications run smoothly.

Leveraging Netflix Tools

Additionally, the company has added support for Netflix OSS tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard, and Edda, through its API fidelity with AWS. Chaos Monkey is an important testing tool that introduces random errors to identify potential problem points. Asgard is Netflix’s open-sourced management console for AWS, which makes it easier to work with the service through additional functionality that isn’t accessible in the normal AWS web interface, removing a lot of the command line tools required to do certain things. Edda tracks changes in the cloud. The three all come out of a company that has had its share of experience with AWS, and offers its software as open source.

“Eucalyptus was the first private cloud platform to support Netflix OSS tools, including Chaos Monkey, Asgard and Edda, through its API fidelity with AWS,”” said Adrian Cockcroft, cloud architect at Netflix. “Thanks to this integration, those tools can now be used in both private and public cloud environments.”

The goal is to make Eucalyptus as AWS-compatible as possible to provide a standardized and consistent environment that spans both a private and public cloud. It alleviates some budget and resource-strapped teams of developers, test engineers and QA teams test and get things running quicker.

Some examples of sophisticated engineering organizations leveraging Eucalyptus include MemSQL, AppDynamics, Mosaik Solutions and Nokia-Siemens Networks. All have already deployed Eucalyptus private clouds for continuous high-volume, large-scale testing of their applications built for AWS.

Eucalyptus has also released resource tagging that allows the assignment of customizable metadata to resources in Eucalyptus, and goes a long way in helping categorize cloud resources in different ways. The expanded instance types align closely to the new instances Amazon has released for EC2, making it easy to go back and forth; and a new maintenance mode allows administrators to perform maintenance with zero downtime to instances or apps running in the cloud.

“This will lead into the ability to do live upgrades,” said Knosp. “We hadn’t really leveraged the live migration features. Many customers were designing with failure in mind, (so) there wasn’t a huge demand. But we’re increasingly seeing more customers as they move, and demand is coming from the administrator side.”

“Before Eucalyptus, our engineers had to manually configure each set of nodes for distributed testing, which was incredibly slow and painful,” said Eric Frenkiel, CEO ofMemSQL. “Now, we can set up and run new instances in just 30 seconds. This allows our engineers to quickly run thousands of tests, and deliver the highest quality product.”

“The ability to automate infrastructure across hybrid environments is becoming increasingly important for IT organizations tasked with accelerating development cycles and achieving greater efficiencies,” said Bryan Hale, VP of Online Services, Opscode.”Like AWS, Eucalyptus utilizes Opscode Chef as an automation engine, which helps ensure consistency across cloud environments. With this release, Eucalyptus is driving even deeper compatibility between public and private clouds to meet customer demand for hybrid cloud computing.”

The Abraaj Group has sold its stake in Unitrio Technology Ltd. The buyer was NTT Facilities, a member of the Japanese Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. Financial terms were not announced,. Unitrio, of Thailand, designs and builds data centers.

PRESS RELEASE
The Abraaj Group, a leading investor operating in growth markets, today announced the successful exit of its investment in Thailand-based Unitrio Technology Limited (Unitrio). The Group sold its stake in Unitrio to NTT Facilities (NTTF), a member of the Japanese Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), which provides comprehensive engineering services for data centers, telecommunications, commercial buildings and related facilities.

Abraaj, through its first South East Asia Fund, acquired its stake in Unitrio in 2010. The investment in Unitrio was predicated on the increasing demand within Thailand for high quality data centers due to rapidly growing internet penetration rates, the proliferation of mobile and other devices, increasing virtualization of IT infrastructure, and the adoption of cloud computing in the public and private sectors, factors that are leading to substantially greater requirements for data hosting and storage capacity across the country.

While the ICT sector has developed significantly over the past two years, substantial growth remains with internet penetration in Thailand currently at 30%, which is substantially below penetration rates of greater than 70% in more developed markets.  Recent floods in Thailand have also shown the need for additional back-up facilities across the country with domestic service providers seeking to expand and diversify their offerings.  Within an ASEAN context, the growth expected in Thailand is second only to Indonesia, with the amount of data center space expected to almost double and data center revenues expected to grow by over three times by 2015.

Founded in 1980, Unitrio started as a distributor of UPS systems and subsequently a distributor of data center and telecommunications equipment.  Foreseeing the growth trends in data hosting and storage, the company sought to move into the data center space.  Abraaj’s investment in Unitrio helped facilitate the transformation of the company into a turnkey designer and builder of data center facilities.  Today, the company has a broad base of institutional customers within the public and private sector, across the telecommunications, banking, industrial and education sectors.

Commenting on the exit, Srisant Chitvaranund, Managing Director, The Abraaj Group, said:  “Our investment in Unitro was well timed as we capitalized on rapid growth in the domestic ICT market.  In Unitrio, we were able to find the right partners who had a vision for their company and we helped them execute an extremely successful strategy and business plan.  We believe that NTTF, given their strategic interests in the sector, is the right partner for Unitrio going forward and will enable the company to achieve their next level of growth”.

Metee Anivat, Chief Executive Officer of Unitrio added, “Abraaj’s investment in Unitrio helped transform the company from what was a Thai family business into a leading designer and builder of data centers. Abraaj assisted us with enhancing our strategic planning, corporate governance and information systems, as well as improving our overall operational efficiency.  We are now well positioned to leverage the numerous opportunities in the domestic market and look forward to our new partnership with NTTF”.

ENDS

THE ABRAAJ GROUP

The Abraaj Group is a leading investor operating in the growth markets of Asia, MENA, Turkey and Central Asia, Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America. Employing over 300 people, the Group has 33 country offices spread across six regional hubs in Bogota, Dubai, Istanbul, Mumbai, Nairobi and Singapore.

The Abraaj Group currently manages US$ 7.5 billion across 25 sector and country-specific Funds encompassing private equity (majority and significant minority investments with ticket sizes of between US$ 10 million to US$ 100 million) and  real estate (primarily yield-generating) investments.

Funds managed by the Group have holdings in over 150 partner companies that create sustainable value in sectors including manufacturing, education, retail, aviation, oil and gas, financial payments infrastructure, healthcare and agribusiness. The Group’s current partner companies include industry leaders such as Network International, the largest independent payment solutions provider in the Middle East and Africa, NEP Holding, with its Diamond brand and a market leader in the residential filtration market of Malaysia with a growing presence in Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Southern China, Brookside Dairy, the largest dairy in East Africa and, Iasacorp, a long established family run women’s retail business in Peru.

The Abraaj Group is committed to the highest environmental, stakeholder engagement and corporate governance standards and is a signatory of the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment and the United Nations Global Compact.

The post Abraaj Group Exits Unitrio appeared first on peHUB.

Opsona Therapeutics raised €33 million (US $ 43 million) in an oversubscribed Series C financing led by BB Biotech Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund.  Other new investors included Sunstone Capital, Baxter Ventures, Amgen Ventures and EMBL Ventures. Participants included existing investors Fountain Healthcare Partners, Roche Venture Fund and Seroba Kernel Life Sciences. Opsona develops new treatments for inflammatory diseases.

PRESS RELEASE

Opsona Therapeutics Limited (‘Opsona’), the innate immune drug development company, today announced that it has raised €33 million (US $ 43 million) in an oversubscribed Series C financing. The participants in this Series C financing include existing investors, Novartis Venture Fund, Fountain Healthcare Partners, Roche Venture Fund and Seroba Kernel Life Sciences. The new investors joining the consortium are BB Biotech Ventures, Sunstone Capital, Baxter Ventures, Amgen Ventures, and EMBL Ventures. BB Biotech Ventures and Novartis Venture Fund led the Series C financing round. BB Biotech Ventures, Sunstone Capital and Baxter Ventures will be joining the board of directors.
Opsona is developing new treatments for inflammatory diseases and will use the proceeds to conduct a two-part multi-centered, double blinded and placebo controlled clinical study to evaluate the safety, tolerability and efficacy of its lead product OPN-305 in renal transplant patients at high risk of Delayed Graft Function (DGF). This is the first clinical indication for OPN-305, a fully human monoclonal IgG4 antibody targeting Toll-like-receptor-2 (TLR2). Opsona recently completed a successful Phase I clinical trial in healthy human volunteers and has also demonstrated activity in preclinical animal models and ex-vivo studies. This first-in-class inhibitor of TLR2 has the advantage of inhibiting multiple cytokines leading to the pathogenesis of the complex inflammatory response in various diseases (ischemia/reperfusion injuries, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, lupus, nephritis and various cancers) and has therefore a potentially broad application potential.
Dr. Martin Welschof, CEO of Opsona, commented: “The innate immune system represents a new frontier in targeting inflammatory diseases, and the quality of venture and corporate investors in this funding round is a demonstration of Opsona’s expertise and capabilities in this highly promising field. With their repeat investment, our existing investors have clearly indicated their long-term commitment to Opsona, while the new investment from BB Biotech Ventures, Sunstone Capital, Baxter Ventures, Amgen Ventures and EMBL Ventures is a further endorsement of Opsona’s future potential.”
Dr. Martin Muenchbach, Managing Director at BB Biotech Ventures, added: “We are delighted to be working with Opsona Therapeutics and the other investors. We are excited to further advance Opsona’s lead product OPN-305 into a well-designed Phase II efficacy study to improve post-operative complications in renal transplantation, an indication with major unmet medical need and attractive commercial potential. This high-quality study with clinically meaningful endpoints will also be of relevance for a subsequent Phase III registration study.”
-ends-
About Opsona Therapeutics
Opsona is a leading immunology drug development company, focused on novel therapeutic approaches to key targets of the innate immune system associated with a wide range of major human diseases, including autoimmune and inflammatory diseases, transplant rejection, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and atherosclerosis. The company was founded in 2004 by three world-renowned immunologists at Trinity College in Dublin. Opsona’s lead product, a fully human monoclonal IgG4 antibody (OPN-305) targeting Toll-like-receptor-2 (TLR2) has demonstrated activity in a number of animal models and was recently tested in a Phase 1 clinical trial in healthy volunteers. The company has initiated a two-part multi-centered, double blinded and placebo controlled clinical study to evaluate the safety, tolerability and efficacy of OPN 305 in renal transplant patients at high risk of Delayed Graft Function (DGF) as the first clinical target indication for the development of OPN-305. The company was awarded a EUR 5.9 million non-dilutive grant by the European Union for clinical development of its anti-TLR2 antibody in solid organ transplantation including renal transplantation and the program has recently obtained EMA and FDA orphan drug status. Additional indications are currently being explored.
Further information is available at http://www.opsona.com/.
About Novartis Venture Fund
The Novartis Venture Funds manages over $850 million in committed capital. NVF invests in companies which have the potential to change a core therapeutic field or explore new business areas that will be critical to patient care. Our primary interest is in the development of novel therapeutics and platforms as well as medical devices, diagnostics, and delivery systems. The Funds invest for financial objectives at all stages, but prefers to invest in the early-stages of company development. With ten investment professionals located in Basel, Switzerland and Cambridge, MA the team has extensive experience in pharmaceutical R&D and venture capital.
About Fountain Healthcare Partners
Fountain Healthcare Partners (“Fountain”) is a life science focused venture capital fund headquartered in Dublin, Ireland with a second office in New York, US. Fountain specialises in making investments in biotechnology, medical device, specialty pharma and diagnostic companies. www.fh-partners.com
About Roche Venture Fund
The Roche Venture Fund invests in innovative biotech and diagnostics companies to develop commercially successful life science companies. Based in Basel with an office in South San Francisco, RVF is the corporate venture fund of the healthcare company Roche. RVF invests globally with a portfolio of over 30 companies in 10 countries. For more information, please visit www.venturefund.roche.com.
About Seroba Kernel Life Sciences
Investing in Life Sciences. Investing in Life. Seroba Kernel is a European life sciences venture capital firm, focused on investing in breakthrough healthcare technologies that promise to improve lives and make a difference worldwide. Based in Ireland and the UK, our team combines in-depth scientific and medical knowledge with broad regulatory and commercial expertise. We source investment opportunities globally and work with some of the world’s best entrepreneurs developing innovative medical devices, diagnostics and therapeutic drugs. We fund new healthcare opportunities through key value-adding stages, from inception through development and clinical evaluation, regulatory approvals, market launch, and partnering with leading medtech or pharma companies. www.seroba-kernel.com
About BB Biotech Ventures
BB BIOTECH VENTURES is a healthcare-dedicated venture capital fund, focused on companies that develop and market drugs and medical devices. The Guernsey based fund is advised by the Bellevue Group, a publicly listed investment bank headquartered in Kusnacht/Zurich, Switzerland. BB BIOTECH VENTURES has a dedicated team of investment advisors and an advisory board. In addition, it is supported by the Group’s healthcare investment experts, and an extensive network of specialists and advisors. With BB Biotech, BB Medtech, and BB Biotech Ventures, the Bellevue Group is amongst the largest financial investors in the health care segment worldwide. Over the last two decades, the Group has raised and invested more than USD 500 mn in venture capital. For more information, visit www.bbbiotechventures.com.
About Sunstone Capital
Sunstone Capital is an independent venture capital investor founded in 2007 by an international team with combined entrepreneurial, operational and financial experience. Sunstone Capital focuses on developing and expanding early-stage Life Science and Technology companies with strong potential to achieve global success in their markets. Managing total funds of EUR 693 million, Sunstone Capital is one of the largest and most active European venture capital investors.
About Baxter Ventures
Baxter Ventures identifies companies with promising, novel technologies, products and/or therapies, and provides them with the capital and expertise needed to drive successful innovation. Baxter Ventures was created in 2011 by Baxter International Inc., which has an 80-year legacy of healthcare innovation and saving and sustaining lives worldwide.
About Amgen Ventures
Amgen Ventures is a corporate venture capital fund focused on providing resources to biotechnology companies with early and clinical stage programs to develop pioneering discoveries in human therapeutics. The focus of the fund primarily is in early and later stage development in areas of therapeutic interest to Amgen, but also includes novel modalities with the potential to address targets in emerging therapeutic areas of interest.
About EMBL Ventures
EMBL Ventures is an independent venture capital investor that manages two Funds with a total of €68 million capital on behalf of major European institutional and private investors. Currently it invests with its second Fund, the EMBL Technology Fund II. EMBL Ventures’ close relationship with the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) and its technology transfer organization EMBL Enterprise Management Technology Transfer GmbH (EMBLEM) allows it to finance disruptive technologies in an entrepreneurial start-up environment, aiming ultimately for a transaction with a partner that is seeking to acquire external product innovation. EMBL Ventures is exclusively focused on life-science investments. EMBL Technology Fund II is supported by the European Communities Growth and Employment Initiative, MAP ETF Start-up Facility.

The post Opsona Raises €33 million appeared first on peHUB.

The ability of Brazil, Russia, India and China to support their leading banks is tightly correlated to the credit rating on the banks, according to ratings agency Moody’s. The agency compares the ratings of four of the biggest BRIC banks which it says are likely to enjoy sovereign support if they run into trouble.

China’s Industrial & Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) tops the list of BRIC lenders with a rating of (A1 stable)  thanks to the central bank’s $3 trillion plus reserve stash.

Brazil’s Banco do Brazil  (Baa2 positive) is in investment grade territory but it still fares better than the State Bank of India (SBI) (Baa3 stable) and Russia’s Sberbank (Baa3 stable) at one notch above junk status.

That gels broadly with credit ratings for the underlying sovereigns — Brazil for instance is rated Baa2 while India has a Baa3 rating (it is in danger of losing its investment grade rating however). Russia’s sovereign rating though at Baa1 is two notches higher than Sberbank’s Baa3.

The Moody’s report found that all of the four banks had seen creditworthiness improve in recent years. But those in Brazil and China benefited from the stable domestic environments while SBI and Sberbank ratings were constrained by the more challenging operating conditions in India and Russia.

In a self-perpetuating cycle, ratings will be higher because governments are prepared to provide high levels of support to the banks, reflecting the lenders’ systemic importance and in some cases government ownership.

Credit default swaps (CDS), the cost of insuring debt on all four banks show a correlated fall from 2008′s peak with sovereign debt CDS (see graphic below)

 

 

Moody’s said:

Top BRIC banks’ deposit ratings  are very closely aligned to their governments’ debt ratings, because Moody’s considers that BRIC governments will provide very high systemic support to these banks, reflecting these banks’ very high systemic importance and government ownership.

Moody’s expects that the deposit ratings of large BRIC banks will remain closely correlated with their government debt ratings.

There’s a reason why mobile carriers are scared of third-party messaging apps such as WhatsApp, and here it is: people are now sending more messages over these services than they are text messages.

We now know this for a fact, courtesy of analysts at Informa. As Europe’s digital chief, Neelie Kroes, greeted the news on Monday morning:

It's official: chat apps have overtaken SMS globally. The cash cow is dying. Time for telcos to wake up & smell the data coffee.—
Neelie Kroes (@NeelieKroesEU) April 29, 2013

Informa says 2012 saw nearly 19 billion messages sent over these apps each day around the world, versus 17.6 billion SMS messages. The analyst house reckons the contrast will be even starker in 2014, with 21 billion text messages projected, against almost 50 billion app-based messages.

As you will note, this suggests that SMS volumes will continue to increase, at least in the short term. Nonetheless, it is clear that the big growth is to be found in, er, the data coffee – spurred along by the likes of Nokia, which is now selling phones with dedicated WhatsApp keys.

However, things may not be as bleak for the mobile operators as they seem.

Hazy picture

First off, while the volumes of non-SMS messages has overtaken that of traditional texts, the user numbers remain significantly lower – although how much lower is a bit unclear.

According to Informa analyst Pamela Clark-Dickson, there were 3.5 billion SMS users in 2012. Regarding the chat apps, Clark-Dickson only took 6 into account, namely WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, Nimbuzz, Apple’s iMessage and KakaoTalk. At the end of 2012, she said, there were 586.3 million users of these platforms, but that’s not taking into account other giants such as Facebook Messenger for Android (somewhere between 100-500 million installations) and China’s TenCent (around 300 million users).

Even if there were, let’s say, a billion chat app users, the disparity between message volume and user numbers shows that people who use these “over-the-top” (OTT) apps use them more frequently than those who use SMS – specifically, the average OTT app user sends 32.6 messages a day, and the average SMS user just 5 texts. This stands to reason because OTT apps are generally free to use, so we should therefore be wary of assuming that every OTT message represents a “lost” SMS from a revenue perspective, in much the same way as it’s illogical to claim that a free “pirated” song download represents a lost sale.

Those chat app users are probably also SMS users, because – for example – WhatsApp is of little use when you’re trying to message someone on a different platform (or someone with a basic dumbphone). There, SMS is and remains the great leveller: any mobile phone can use it. This is particularly important for some enterprises.

Whither Joyn?

And then we have a big unanswered question: even when SMS tails off, how big a chunk of the IP-based messaging market will the carriers themselves own?

Thing is, Informa’s analysis of the market does not include projections for Joyn, the industry-wide drive to create a common, interoperable messaging and file-sharing platform that works on all (or at least most) operators’ devices — Joyn has only just kicked off, so there are no real takeup figures from which to extrapolate. Precedent suggests that the mobile industry is incapable of acting in concert, but that doesn’t mean it can’t buck the trend when its back is against the wall.

“Mobile operators do have the opportunity to provide their own IP-based messaging applications,” Clark-Dickson noted.

And then we have services such as Telefonica’s Tu Go and Rogers’s One Number that extend traditional handset functionality onto the desktop. These services heavily blur the line between SMS and IP-based messaging – if the carriers can pull off this sort of thing while monetizing it in some way, what does it matter whether the medium used is technically SMS or something else?

Also don’t forget that carriers can build offerings around these third-party apps. For example, WhatsApp has partners with 3 Hong Kong and RCom, which sell flat-rate bundles specifically for WhatsApp use while at home or roaming. It may break the principle of net neutrality, but it’s a tactic some carriers are employing.

Either way, though, what’s clear is the speed at which all this is happening. The SMS is 20 years old and chat apps have only been around for around 5 years. Although we should take care when predicting the results, the trend of IP-based messaging replacing SMS certainly appears unstoppable.

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

• Forecast: the converged mobile messaging market
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• How carriers can fight “the death of SMS”

Eucalyptus has made no secret that it wants to be the private cloud that best complements Amazon’s public cloud. Now, it’s banking that its support of popular Netflix open-source tools will show that it’s the most Amazon Web Services-compatible private cloud of them all.

By supporting these tools that help deploy, run and monitor workloads on AWS, Eucalyptus is going a step beyond supporting the bare-bones AWS APIs, Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos said in a recent interview.

The new Eucalyptus 3.3 release, due in May, will support Chaos Monkey for testing the limits of a cloud deployment under stress; Asgard for automating deployment of large-scale applications; and Edda, a dynamic querying tool, for polling AWS resources.

“For Eucalyptus customers, this is real proof of AWS compatibility. Other folks who say they are AWS-compatible really aren’t — the real proof of the pudding is in supporting these Netflix tools,” he said. ”We’re not saying that everyone in the world will start using Asgard, although many will.”

That Eucalyptus would throw its lot in with Netflix is not shocking. Mickos and members of the Eucalyptus team attended the Netflix OSS open house in February. Netflix used that event to promote the use of its open-sourced cloud management, testing and monitoring tools by third parties, at least partly so that cloud alternatives to AWS will emerge.

Netflix is one of the biggest and most skillful AWS customers. Netflix tools fill gaps in AWS and help it run better. But Netflix is also acutely aware that Amazon has a streaming video service that is a direct competitor to its own core business and would very much like there to be another cloud out there that is as scalable and price efficient as AWS.

In the open-source cloud world, Eucalyptus contends with a slew of OpenStack players as well as OpenNebula and CloudStack.  But there is concern that the market, as young and potentially big as it may be, will not support all these options. Talk at the recent OpenStack summit and beyond is that there will be consolidation of the contending vendors.

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

• Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
• Cloud computing 2013: how to navigate without a map
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond

Effectively reaching an online audience – and meeting their expectations – has grown increasingly complex. Beginning with the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, devices, browsers, and connectivity have become increasingly fractured, presenting a wide range of challenges to content providers looking to deliver a consistent and engaging experience to business users and consumers. While expectations differ depending on context, users across all profiles are demanding better performance.

Our panel of experts will discuss these topics:

• How do user expectations vary by platform and use case?
• What are the limiting factors in user experience and performance?
• Which industries and application types are particularly performance-sensitive?
• How do you balance server, client, and data solutions?
• Considerations for in-house development and choosing vendor partners.

Our speakers include:

• Cormac Foster, Research Director, GigaOM Research

• Dave Ohara, GigaOM Research Analyst and Founder, GreenM3

• Larry Cornett, GigaOM Research Analyst, Product Strategy & Design Consultant, Brilliant Forge

• MJ Johnson, Director, Product Marketing Akamai

Register here to join GigaOM Research and our sponsor Akamai for a free analyst roundtable webinar, “Optimizing the cross-platform experience,” on Thursday, May 9, 2013 at 1:00 p.m. EDT / 10:00 a.m. PDT.

Belgium has pared back its public debt with the sale of the structured credit portfolio held by its ‘bad bank, Royal Park Investments, to U.S. private equity firm Lone Star and Credit Suisse, writes Reuters. Finance minister Koen Geens said in March that Belgium needed to find a further 1 billion euros ($1.30 billion) from asset sales to ensure that national debt did not rise above GDP, writes Reuters.

Reuters – Belgium has pared back its public debt with the sale of the structured credit portfolio held by its ‘bad bank’, Royal Park Investments, to U.S. private equity firm Lone Star and Credit Suisse, the finance ministry said on Saturday.

Finance Minister Koen Geens said in March that Belgium needed to find a further 1 billion euros ($1.30 billion) from asset sales to ensure that national debt did not rise above GDP.

Royal Park Investments (RPI) has sold its asset portfolio through a block sale to Credit Suisse and Lone Star Funds, a specialist in buying distressed debt assets, for 6.7 billion euros ($8.73 billion), an official statement said.

It means the Belgian state, along with Ageas, the insurance company which emerged from the break-up of Fortis at the height of the financial crisis, will both receive about 1 billion euros.

As of March this year, Ageas and the Belgian state both had about 750 million euros of equity capital in RPI, while French bank BNP Paribas had 200 million euros.

Belgium’s budget deficit topped the European Union’s limit of 3 percent of output in March when the EU statistics agency Eurostat forced it to include the bail-out of troubled bank Dexia in its budget calculations.

To solve the problem, Belgium made 1.4 billion euros of savings and said it also needed to raise another 1 billion euros from asset sales.

In Saturday’s statement, the Belgian state also said it would buy back from Ageas a call option on shares in BNP Paribas so that it could sell its stake in the French bank when it judged fit, without having to worry about the option.

Belgium’s 10 percent stake in BNP Paribas is worth about 5 billion euros.

Ageas said it plans to pay a dividend of 1 euro per share following the Lone Star sale.

The post Reuters – Belgium Sells Royal Park Investments Credit Portfolio appeared first on peHUB.

Private equity firm PAI Partners plans to finance its acquisition of R&R Ice Cream from Oaktree with a 253 million euros ($331.2 million) five-year Payment-In-Kind Toggle note, according to Thomson Reuters‘ publication IFR.

IFR – Private equity firm Pai Partners plans to finance its acquisition of R&R Ice Cream from Oaktree with a EUR253m five-year Payment-In-Kind Toggle note, one of the banks managing the deal said on Monday.

Marketing for the securities, expected to be rated CCC+ by S&P, will take place on Tuesday and Wednesday. Barclays and Credit Suisse are joint physical bookrunners.

The bond is callable after one year. The first and last interest payments are made in cash, but are otherwise

payable in cash or in kind subject to certain conditions.

A consent solicitation has also been sent to bondholders of R&R Ice Cream’s existing 8.375% secured notes, which mature in 2017, to amend the change of control provision.

The post PAI Partners Backs R&R Ice Cream with PIK Toggle appeared first on peHUB.

If the rumors are to be believed, every company in the tech world is currently working on a smartwatch. Apple was among the first to be linked to a wrist device, but since then we’ve heard similar development stories concerning Samsung, Microsoft, Google, and LG, to name just a few.

Assuming at least some of those rumored watches come to fruition, the developers are going to have to find a way around the issue of typing on a tiny smartwatch face, but researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have come up with what they think is an ideal solution.

ZoomBoard is a tiny QWERTY-based keyboard that lets you zoom into the key you want with a single tap, making it easier to accurately select each letter. The number of zoom levels can be adjusted, depending on how large your fingers are. Spaces can be inserted by tapping on the space bar or by swiping right. Deletions are achieved by swiping left, while swiping upwards will reveal symbols.

The developers ran a text entry study on a 16 x 6mm keyboard (smaller than a US penny) and report that “after eight practice trials, users achieved an average of 9.3 words per minute, with accuracy comparable to a full-sized physical keyboard. This compares favorably to existing mobile text input methods”.

You can watch a video of ZoomBoard in action here, or if you prefer a more hands-on approach, you can try it out for yourself. The simulation works fine on Chrome and Internet Explorer, but didn’t seem to function properly on Firefox, for some reason.

I found ZoomBoard makes typing pretty easy. Let me know what you think of it in the comments below.

Private equity firm KKR has agreed to give Spain’s Uralita a 320 million euro ($417 million), seven-year loan, the Spanish firm said in a regulatory filing, writes Reuters. Uralita, a construction materials manufacturer, said the agreement would allow it to repay its bank creditors and bondholders while providing more time and funds to develop its future plans.

Reuters – Private equity firm KKR & Co LP has agreed to give Spain’s Uralita a 320 million euro ($417 million), seven-year loan, the Spanish firm said in a regulatory filing on Monday.

Uralita, a construction materials manufacturer, said the agreement would allow it to repay its bank creditors and bondholders while providing more time and funds to develop its future plans.

The post Reuters – Spain’s Uralita Gets Loan from KKR appeared first on peHUB.

There’s an old joke in which a man asks a woman if she’ll spend the night with him for $1 million? She will. Then he asks if she’ll spend the night with him for $10?

“Do you think I’m a prostitute?” she asks.

“We’ve already established that”, he replies. “This is just a price negotiation”.

Not a great joke, but it came to mind recently when a reader pointed me to a panel discussion last September at the Brookings Institution ironically about STEM education and the shortage of qualified IT workers. Watch the video if you can, especially the part where Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith offers to pay the government $10,000 each for up to 6,000 H-1B visas.

In the joke, this is analogous to the $10 offer. There’s a $1 million offer, too, which is another U.S. visa — the EB-5 so-called immigrant investor visa, 15,000 of which are available each year and most go unclaimed. Why?

The EB-5 visa is better in many respects than the H-1B. The EB-5, for one thing, is a true immigrant visa leading to U.S. citizenship, where the H-1B, despite misleading arguments to the contrary, is by law a non-immigrant visa good for three or six years after which the worker has to go back to their native country. But the EB-5 requires the immigrant bring with him or her $1 million to be invested locally in an active business.

What’s wrong with that? Can’t Microsoft or any other big tech employer suffering from a severe lack of technical workers just set these immigrants up as little corporations capitalized at $1 million? It must be a better return on investment than the 1.52 percent Redmond made on its billions in cash in 2011. Yet they don’t do it. Why?

The answer is simple economics wrapped up in a huge stinking lie. First of all there is no critical shortage of technical workers. That’s the lie. Here’s a study released last week  from the Economic Policy Institute that shows there is no shortage of native U.S. STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) workers. None at all.

You may recall this lack of a true labor shortage was confirmed empirically in another column of mine looking at tech hiring in Memphis, Tennessee.

If there was such a shortage, Microsoft and other companies would be utilizing EB-5 and other visa programs beyond H-1B. They’d do anything they could to get those desperately needed tech workers.

Some argue that these companies are using H-1Bs to force down local labor rates.  Forcing them down how much is becoming clear, in this case thanks to Microsoft’s Brad Smith’s offer. If H-1Bs are each worth $10,000 to Microsoft, the average savings from using an H-1B has to be more than $10,000 plus the risk premium of cheating the system.

But the H-1B program wasn’t started to save money and money savings can’t even be considered as a reason for granting an H-1B according to regulations. Though companies have become pretty brazen about that one when they advertise for only H-1Bs for positions.

An interesting aspect of this story is that some readers have characterized Smith’s offer as a bribe. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just a gift or it’s intended to cover the true cost to the local and national economies of using an H-1B worker or, more importantly, not using a comparably trained U.S. citizen. But that can hardly be the case given the high unemployment rate among U.S. STEM workers.

What this kind of offer seems to be counting on are the typically terrible math skills of elected government officials; $10,000 ($3,333 per year) is not going to cover the lost income or true cost to society of a computer science graduate taking a lower-paying non-technical position.

What we need, I think, is a much simpler test for whether H-1Bs are actually warranted. The test I would impose is simple: if granting an H-1B results in the loss of a job for a U.S. citizen or green card holder, then that H-1B shouldn’t be granted.

Solving true technical labor shortages or being able to import uniquely skilled foreign workers are one thing, but this supposed H-1B crisis is something else altogether.

Reprinted with permission

Photo Credit: Cartoonresource/Shutterstock

Most photo editors have a few filters which can turn regular photos into instant works of art: an oil painting, say, or a pencil sketch. But if you’d like more — or you just want the arty effects, without the photo editing overhead — then XnSketch is a simple free tool which just might be able to help.

The program runs almost everywhere (Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android), and is very easy to use. We tried the Windows build, and it came with no adware or other unwanted extras — just unzip the download and you’re ready to go immediately.

The XnSketch interface is clean and simple. Open an image (there’s support for more than 50 file formats) and it’s displayed in a preview window. You can apply one of 22 effects — pastels and sketches, cartoons, halftones, print and stamp options — by clicking its thumbnail at the bottom of the screen. And as you select each one, the preview is updated to show you the results.

If you’re not quite happy with an effect then you can tune it by adjusting various settings. There are always sliders for brightness, contrast, gamma, exposure and saturation, but some effects provide additional options: edges, colours, opacity, blur and so on.

And when your masterpiece is complete, you can save the results as a JPG or PNG file, or share them via Facebook, TwitPic, Flickr, Picasa, email or a host of storage providers. Click File > Share > Imgur, for example, and XnSketch will upload your current image, then open a web page to display the online version, and all you have to do is share that URL with whoever you like.

There are a few issues here. Some of the effects are a little too minimal, for instance, and there’s not always any real way to tweak their strength. When applying an “Oil Painting” effect, say, we often found the results were too similar to the original image. Other programs will often allow you to amplify the effect, perhaps increasing the brush size, but XnSketch just doesn’t have that level of configurability.

Other effects do deliver excellent results, though, and there’s no doubt that the program is exceptionally easy to use. So while graphics experts will probably stick with photo editor filters, if you’re just looking to quickly apply a few fun effects, and share the results with the world, then XnSketch looks like a great choice.

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