Category: News

CloudCheckr, Excell Partners and the Rochester Angel Network have announced a collaborative partnership which will make CloudCheckr software available at no charge to Excell and RAN sponsored companies. The CloudCheckr solution enables public cloud users to increase visibility and control of their public cloud deployments.

PRESS RELEASE

CloudCheckr Inc. , Excell Partners, and the Rochester Angel Network (RAN) are proud to announce a collaborative partnership which will make CloudCheckr software available at no charge to Excell and RAN sponsored companies. The CloudCheckr solution (CloudCheckr) enables public cloud users to increase visibility and control of their public cloud deployments. As a result of this collaboration, all Excell and RAN companies can focus their energies on building their technologies while CloudCheckr provides a secure solution to help them optimize their cloud performance and control costs.

“We are delighted to present this to our companies. The fact that this is a cutting-edge technology developed in Rochester and provided to other Rochester-based companies underscores the dynamism and possibilities in Western NY.”
Rami Katz, COO of Excell says: “We are delighted to present this to our companies. The fact that this is a cutting-edge technology developed in Rochester and provided to other Rochester-based companies underscores the dynamism and possibilities in Western NY.”

CloudCheckr compiles a complete inventory of cloud resources and, within its 3 modules, applies state-of-art analytics. The Resource Control module features historical reporting, trend analysis, and real-time change monitoring. These features allow users to review historical data, track present usage, and model future needs.

The Cost Optimization module analyzes utilization and pricing options to produce actionable sizing and purchasing recommendations. On average, CloudCheckr recommendations save small companies upwards of 50% of their monthly infrastructure costs without sacrificing functionality.

The Best Practices module compares users’ deployments against hundreds of proprietary best practices for properly configuring cloud resources. These encompass the areas of security, cost, availability and usage. CloudCheckr identifies and prioritizes configuration exceptions along with detailed explanations and instructions for correcting the identified issues.

CloudCheckr Inc., founded in 2011, is based in Rochester, NY with satellite offices in San Francisco and Argentina. The company provides a complete analytic solution for public cloud users. It is an Amazon Web Services Technology Partner.

Excell Partners is a Seed-Stage Venture Capital Fund established in cooperation with the University of Rochester and the State of New York to invest in High-Tech Startups in Upstate NY. Excell manages a portfolio of 21 ventures and is looking to make 8-10 investments in 2013.

Rochester Angel Network is a is a private group of accredited investors in the Greater Rochester, NY Region with an interest in investing in seed and early stage startup companies. The network provides an accessible and efficient forum by which entrepreneurs can find potential investors, and investors can find deals of interest.

Contacts

CloudCheckr Inc.
Aaron Klein, 585-734-6011

The post CloudCheckr, Excell Partners and Rochester Angel Network Announce Collaboration appeared first on peHUB.

Computer game maker Richard Garriott has secured $2 million in crowd funding for Shroud of the Avatar™: Forsaken Virtues. The original pledge goal for Shroud of the Avatar on Kickstarter was $1 million.

PRESS RELEASE

Legendary computer game maker Richard Garriott is getting back to his fantasy RPG roots to develop Shroud of the Avatar™: Forsaken Virtues. And now he and his game design team at Portalarium® have the funds to fully make the game thanks to a highly successful Kickstarter crowd funding campaign that ended with more than $2 million raised. The original pledge goal for Shroud of the Avatar on Kickstarter was $1 million. Garriott is best-known for developing the hugely popular Ultima series of role-playing games.

“The Kickstarter backers will forever have certain perks that will remain exclusive to that part of our campaign”
The Shroud of the Avatar Kickstarter campaign ended Sunday, April 7 at 10 a.m. Central time. At closing, more than 20-thousand backers had pledged $1.9 million on the game’s Kickstarter page. Combined with figures from the game’s own crowd funding site located at ShroudoftheAvater.com, Shroud of the Avatar raised a total $2.030 million at closing from 23,096 backers.

“I am incredibly grateful to all the fans who backed us during the Kickstarter campaign,” said Garriott. “And those fans are now part of our design and development process going forward with Shroud of the Avatar. We will be listening to all of them as we go about making the kind of fantasy RPG that I really enjoyed making in the earlier part of my career. But this is really only the start. We will continue to keep our own crowd funding store open to bring in more funds to help us add even more features to the game.”

Fans who were unable to make a pledge on Kickstarter, still have an opportunity to get behind the project. The store at www.ShroudoftheAvatar.com continues to provide several ways to back the project. “The Kickstarter backers will forever have certain perks that will remain exclusive to that part of our campaign,” said Garriott. “People who visit the game store now will see many Kickstarter-like tiers to back the project. But we will continue to add new items to the game that will be available for purchase by both our Kickstarter backers and new backers. The exciting part is that a lot of what we will be adding going forward will be based on feedback from our fans; items and features that they are already telling us they want to see in the game.”

The Kickstarter campaign saw several major announcements about Shroud of the Avatar, including news that New York Times best-selling author Tracy Hickman is joining the team as lead story designer. Several stretch goals were announced and successfully reached including a serialized prequel novel based on the Shroud of the Avatar storyline and authored by Hickman, a pet system with animal taming, guild houses and banks, city theaters for player performances, castle merchants with unique merchandise and much more.

Shroud of the Avatar is expected to launch in 2014. For more information on the game and to become a backer of the project go to www.ShroudoftheAvatar.com (PayPal accepted).

About Portalarium

Portalarium was formed in September of 2009 in Austin, Texas. The company was co-founded by legendary game developer Richard Garriott, who created Ultima, one of the longest running and most successful fantasy role-playing game series ever. For more information about Portalarium, go to www.portalarium.com.

Portalarium and Shroud of the Avatar are trademarks of Portalarium, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Contacts

Portalarium
David Swofford, 512-750-9098
[email protected]

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Google’s latest stable channel of Chrome includes developer support for rich browser notifications in web apps. This isn’t the rumored Google Now integration coming to Chrome, but it does bring the browser one step closer to having proactive, useful pop-ups of actionable information. Don’t look for the new feature on Chrome for Mac or Linux though: for now, the notification support is only baked into the Windows and Chrome OS versions.

François Beaufort, newly hired by Google after months of publicly finding and sharing information on the company’s browser efforts, found the notification code in the latest Chromium stable channel. He notes that “we should start to see bubbling some of them (notifications) quite soon now.”

That means developers have yet to add support for these bits in their web apps but can do so now. So far, I’ve only seen a few notifications on the Chromebook Pixel and all of them have been from Google services. Google Voicemails, missed Google Voice calls, incoming Gmail messages and Google+ Hangout invitations have all appeared for me recently.

Why are the notifications important? They bring the Chrome browser closer to a one-stop shop for online needs; more like a true operating system. These notifications are actionable — you can click them to jump into the appropriate web app, for example — but not obtrusive since they’ll disappear in a few seconds on their own if no action is taken. Think of them like notifications on your smartphone. They provide relevant, real-time information but you can choose to ignore any further action until later.

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Asian specialist investment firm Asiya Investments has launched Asiya Investments Hong Kong. The firm will manage the business’ emerging Asia investment activities from that base.

PRESS RELEASE

Asiya Investments (“Asiya”), the Asia specialist investment firm, today

announced the launch of Asiya Investments Hong Kong Limited (“Asiya Hong Kong”),

licensed and regulated by the Securities & Futures Commission (SFC), from where

the firm`s Emerging Asia investment activities will be managed.

The Company`s establishment of a permanent, on-the-ground, presence is in

response to growing demand from GCC investors for more direct access to Emerging

Asia`s growth opportunities. Asiya Investments` proximity to these markets is

expected to further deepen its relationships with local institutions and

businesses and enhance its ability to source more investments in Emerging Asia,

which today accounts for over 20% of the world`s GDP and 35% of the growth in

the global economy.

Asiya Hong Kong is managed by its two Executive Directors, Sulaiman Alireza and

Dan Xystus. With a 20-strong team of investment professionals in place in Hong

Kong, they will focus on further building Asiya`s investments in public markets

as well as direct investments across Emerging Asia.

Mr. Alireza spearheaded the establishment of the Hong Kong entity, having

previously worked at HSBC`s Capital Markets division and spent over 8 years in

Hong Kong. He now leads the Direct Investments and Joint Ventures practice. Mr.

Xystus in turn leads the firm`s Public Equity investments and enjoys over 20

years experience in the financial markets. Having been a Managing Director at

Chicago Equity Partners, he joined the Group in 2008 when he led the

establishment and then management of Asiya`s public equity investments and hedge

fund strategies. The hedge funds now have a strong track record over the last

three years.

Commenting on the announcement, Mr. Ahmad Al-Hamad, Group Managing Director of

Asiya Investments, said: “We are really excited about this move, which we have

been working on since we established Asiya Investments Dubai last year. What

this move does for us is build upon the solid foundations we`ve established over

the past eight years. Since 2005, we have steadily built a strong presence in

Asia through our partners and the investments we`ve made, which total over $500

million.”

He continued, “Historically, there has been an under investment from the GCC

into Asia relative to the region`s share of global growth. Now we`re finding

increasing demand from Arab investors for detailed knowledge of the investment

landscape in Asia. This presence, in the heart of Asia, puts us in an even

better position to address this portfolio imbalance and deliver that expertise

to our shareholders and partners. We offer them unique access to direct deals

and world-class investment management capabilities – both areas in which we have

generated a robust track record of performance and returns for Asiya and our

co-investors. We`re also going to use our base in Hong Kong to facilitate joint

ventures between companies in Emerging Asia and the GCC, as we see an

intensifying level of economic and social engagement between the two regions.”

The establishment of the firm`s Hong Kong presence marks the planned and

continued expansion of the Group. In May 2012, Asiya Investments Dubai was

launched as its Investment Advisory arm based in the Dubai International

Financial Centre (DIFC), as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Group`s Corporate

Office in Kuwait.

Asiya Investments is an investment firm specialising entirely in Emerging Asia,

acting as a bridge for investments between the Middle East and the markets of

Emerging Asia. Asiya does this by inviting clients to invest with it in a range

of assets in which the firm invests its own capital, including public and

private equity, real estate and income producing strategies. The firm

specifically concentrates on investment and advisory in sectors that will

benefit from rising domestic demand in Emerging Asia, driven by population

growth and accelerated urbanization. Key sectors for the Firm include: Energy,

Real Estate, Infrastructure, Financial Services and Consumer Products.

Additionally, Asiya also provides co-investment opportunities as well as

research and advisory services on direct investments, acquisitions and joint

ventures.

Asiya Investments Hong Kong Limited is licensed and regulated by the Securities

& Futures Commission (SFC), to carry Type 4 (Advising on Securities) and Type 9

(Asset Management) activities.

About Asiya Investments:

Asiya Investments is a premier Emerging Asia specialist investment firm,

providing a gateway for capital flows to and from growing markets in Asia.

The Firm builds paths for investment opportunities between the Arab world and

high growth emerging Asian countries. With locations in Asia and the Middle

East, it offers its clients the opportunity to co-invest in Asia through its

asset management products and direct investments. The Firm`s clients also

benefit from access to its Economic Research and Advisory Services to help them

in effectively building their investment strategies between both regions

Asiya Investments has been investing in Emerging Asia since 2005. Originally

established as the Kuwait China Investment Company, the Group provides its

shareholders and clients with the benefit of an 8 year track record of investing

in the Asian markets. Its shareholders include some of the most prominent

institutional investors and business leaders in the region including the Kuwait

Investment Authority (KIA), Alghanim Industries, HH Sultan M. bin Saud Al-Kabir

of Saudi Arabia and other private sector GCC shareholders.

The Group currently consists of the Corporate Office in Kuwait, the Investment

Advisory arm in the Dubai International Financial Centre, and the Investment

Management arm in Hong Kong.

The post Asiya Investments Launches in Hong Kong appeared first on peHUB.

Over a decade after Spin City ended its five-year run, Michael J. Fox is coming back to network TV. Last fall, NBC announced that it had picked up a new network comedy starring Michael J. Fox. The actor will star in a role that mirrors his own life, including his Parkinson’s Disease.

Fox took to the pages of the latest issue of AARP The Magazine to reveal where he’s at in life, his marriage, and his struggles with his disease.

“I’m always aware that there are others who don’t feel so good and can’t express themselves the way I can,” Fox told the AARP. “That’s no small factor in the way I’ve been able to deal with this.”

Fox stated that his sense of humor has been paramount to dealing with his long-term condition, but that it is sometimes a struggle. He and his wife, Tracy Pollan, have four children, who are learning early the virtue of patience.

“Sometimes the kids will need their dad’s help and he’ll say, ‘I’m not feeling great right now,’” said Pollan. “But on the flip side, the first thing he does is go back to the kids when he’s feeling good. It teaches them patience and empathy.”

On playing a role that is so similar to his own life, Fox mused that his Parkinson’s is too far progressed to ignore, saying, “It’s too difficult to hide it. I could manage it for a scene or so, but it would fall apart over time. As long as I play a guy with Parkinson’s, I can do anything.”

(Image via Twitter)

It was revealed over the weekend that Austin, Texas will be the next city to receive freedom from monopolistic ISPs thanks to Google Fiber. Of course, the announcement kicked off a new round of people from other cities asking Google to bring Fiber to them next. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that most may never see Google Fiber.

Ars Technica reports that two analysts for Alliance Bernstein – Carlos Kirjner and Ram Parameswaran – have calculated the costs of bringing Google Fiber to most of the nation. Over five years, it would cost Google $11 billion, or four percent of its current net worth, to realize the dream of many across the nation.

So, why is Google Fiber so expensive? First and foremost, the infrastructure costs are astronomical. The main reason you don’t see many established ISPs upgrading their services is for this very reason. Upgrading infrastructure takes time and money – both of which most ISPs aren’t willing to sacrifice when most of their customer base is apparently happy with what they have.

The other major hurdle is of the regulatory kind. Google was lucky enough to get a range of perks from Kansas City, and Austin must be offering the same perks as well. Some cities may not be as kind, while other cities may have stricter regulations in place in regards to how utility poles, which are used to hang fiber wires, can be used.

In short, there are a number of obstacles standing in the way of nationwide Google Fiber deployment. The projected cost is definitely one of the main reasons, but there’s a number of others that Google must take into account before deciding to bring its service to another city.

That being said, relying on Google alone for Fiber is a fool’s game. There are other groups, like Gigabit Squared, that are working to bring Fiber to other cities across the nation. The FCC is also pushing for more gigabit networks across the nation.

Google didn’t start the Fiber craze, but it definitely helped give it some exposure. We can only hope that the move to Austin encourages more cities and organizations to start building out Fiber networks in other cities across the nation.

CDIB Capital International Corporation, the international private equity investment arm of China Development Financial, has closed an investment in Dubai-based Flemingo International. Founded in 1997, Flemingo is a global travel retail operator with a focus on emerging markets.

PRESS RELEASE

CDIB Capital International Corporation (“CDIB Capital”), the international Private Equity investment arm of China Development Financial, has successfully closed an investment in Dubai-based Flemingo International (BVI) Ltd. (“Flemingo” or the “Company”).

Founded in 1997, Flemingo (www.flemingo-intl.com) is a leading global travel retail operator with a focus on emerging markets. In addition to being the largest player and a pioneer in the duty-free industry in India, the Company has a presence across over 120 outlets in 26 countries in Asia, Africa and Europe. The Company operates across a wide range of duty-free formats including airports, seaports, borders, downtown, in-flight, diplomatic commissaries, luxury retail, travel essentials and F&B outlets, and benefits from strong partnerships with leading global suppliers.

“We are absolutely delighted to have CDIB Capital as part of the Flemingo team,” said Atul Ahuja, Global CEO of Flemingo. “With their extensive experience and capabilities in Asia, they will be an invaluable partner as we continue to expand our reach in duty-free markets in the region.”

Lionel de Saint-Exupery, President and CEO of CDIB Capital, added “Flemingo has successfully established itself as the leading franchise in the emerging markets duty-free industry through impressive organic growth as well as well-targeted acquisitions. We are truly excited to work closely with Atul Ahuja and his talented team as they continue to deliver profitable growth.”

About CDIB Capital

CDIB Capital is a leading Asian private equity investor focused on middle market growth capital transactions, with a sectoral bias for consumer/retail, media/technology, value added manufacturing and financial/business services. It is an affiliate of China Development Financial, one of the oldest and largest merchant banking groups in Greater China with over US$17bn in assets.

CDIB Capital is headquartered in Hong Kong, with principal offices in Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul and San Francisco. For more information on CDIB Capital, please visit our website at www.cdibcapital.com or send an email to [email protected].

The post CDIB Capital Backs Flemingo appeared first on peHUB.

When HP first announced its Project Moonshot server initiative in November, 2011, the announcement centered on the potential for low-power ARM chips from Calxeda to be the agent of transformation. Yesterday HP began selling its first production servers … based on Intel Atom chips.

As HP touted its new servers as game changers, Calxeda is again talking about how its ARM technology is still … well, the future. The company today reaffirmed  its “ongoing commitment” to  Project Moonshot, saying HP servers based on Calxeda technology will be in production “later this year.”

“We were honored to be selected by HP to be among the very first Project Moonshot partners at the November 1, 2011 launch and to have our processors incorporated into HP’s first generation of extreme low energy servers,” said Calxeda CEO, Barry Evans. “Since that time, the two companies have worked closely to advance extreme low-energy processing technologies, which have received positive industry response, and outstanding early customer implementations.”

HP says Moonshot consists of a “comprehensive roadmap” of workload-optimized ProLiant servers that will incorporate processors from partners including AMD, AppliedMicro, Cavium and Texas Instruments, as well as Calxeda and Intel. This approach is part of HP’s focus on flexibility, offering customers more options for processors and  faster iteration of server designs.

With Moonshot, HP is providing an architecture that adapts some of the concepts of blade chassis, centralizing components like power supplies and fans at the chassis level, with hot-swappable server cards that can be used to customize compute processing with particular workloads. This ability to match different processors to specific workloads is one of the most interesting features. And that’s where Calxeda and the other chip vendors come in.

Calxeda says that once its Moonshot server arrives, it will offer better TCO than the Intel Atom Centerton based products unveiled today.   The server will feature four ECX-1000 servers, running at 1.4 Ghz, each with 4 GB DRAM.

But by the time Calxeda’s Moonshot server is ready for production, Intel may be moving the goalposts again. In the second half of 2013, Moonshot servers will begin using the next generation of Intel’s Atom chips, known as Avoton. Intel says Avoton will quadruple the densityof the current prodiuct with 4 Avoton SoCs per server. Avoton is built on Intel’s 3D tri-gate 22-nanometer process technology and is based on a new microarchitecture codenamed “Silvermont.”

“We have not only enabled the first Moonshot system to lift-off, but with Avoton we will also bring HP Moonshot’s customers a revolution in energy efficiency and performance per watt to drive major TCO improvements when processing lightweight web scale workloads,” writes Intel’s Raejeanne Skillern in a blog post.

Will Moonshot reverse a trend in which the largest server purchasers have been working with original design manufacturers (ODMs) or next-generation designs from the Open Compute Project? It remains to be seen, but the progress of Moonshot will give data center operators initial options to manage the energy being used in their facilities. A key question is whether HP’s focus on converged infrastructure – standardized around HP hardware, software and services –   will gain traction in the fast-moving landscape for web-scale servers.

For any one of us, the “reality” of a situation is just what we choose to pay attention to. Take the wonderful experiment a few years ago when renowned violinist Joshua Bell played for tips in the subway. Thousands of people rushed through that busy metro station barely noticing what seemed to be yet another poor musician on the platform. Their reality was the noise and the myriad annoyances that go with crowds of people jostling to get to trains. A few stopped in their tracks and listened in awe. Same place, same time — two different realities.

The same goes for a complex place like Silicon Valley. Every day brings a fresh horde of visitors — business executives, overseas dignitaries, researchers, and journalists — trying to discover what makes Silicon Valley tick. Some go away thinking they’ve seen a land of “technophilic gurus and futurists…embarked on a quest to develop the ultimate patch to the nasty bugs of humanity.” Others see it as a giant economic engine spitting out startup after startup to capitalize on the region’s wealth of innovations. But as far as I can tell, the reality they discern here is not the same as the one I see, or at least, is just a part of my reality.

Throngs of economic development officials from all around the world regularly parachute into Silicon Valley to do the usual rounds of the “innovation ecosystem” and see one slice of reality — Twitter, Facebook, Google, venture capitalists, and Stanford University (which, by the way, is too often an extension of all of the above; even in an English class, creating an app is a requirement). They are taken to school on how to create innovation clusters in their geographies, and too often they come away with surface-level solutions: bring in venture capitalists, create incubators, provide incentives for universities and labs to commercialize their technologies, build a robust IP system, establish liaison offices in Silicon Valley.

None of that is necessarily wrong, mind you, but if the recipe worked, one would think that after some 30 years of trying to replicate Silicon Valley elsewhere, we would see many thriving clones. Yet Silicon Valley remains unique.

This, I would argue, is due to another reality of Silicon Valley. It’s a reality that is often hidden from visitors’ eyes and hard to penetrate, much less to dissect and duplicate — but if you adjust your gaze you’ll see it. This is the reality of artists, musicians, community organizers, many of them non-techies, working side by side with techies to hack not so much technologies but ways of working, living, creating, and organizing. If there is one thing people in general here have learned from technologists, it is that things are hack-able — that the way we’ve designed various systems is not pre-ordained or immutable. We can tinker, re-design, and play with them. The fact that this ethos has infected artists, social activists (yes, they are called hacktivists), philosophers, urban planners, community organizers, and technologists, and that they all mingle together to create things — that’s what makes Silicon Valley tick.

They come together in meetups, salons, hackathons, live/work houses, clubs, and many other places that cross all the traditional organizational and discipline boundaries. They don’t ask for permission to do what they do. They are not paid for their efforts, at least not with money. They are less interested in technologies per se than in playing with established ways of doing things and conventional ways of thinking, creating, learning, and being.

Silicon Valley is rife with gatherings and places for doing this. On a Sunday you may spot some of the tech and not so tech-savvy denizens at a Brunchy Sunday series, where they come together to write and share their creations — blog posts, a song, a pitch, a chapter of a book, a screenplay, or anything else. You can see them most evenings at Noisebridge (pictured below) — a collective space for learning and doing projects together whose members’ main guiding principle is to “be excellent to each other.”

You can drop in on a Science Hack Day, a 48-hour hackathon that brings together scientists and passionate amateurs to engage in any serious or whimsical undertaking (the two often blur) that has to do with science. You can pop into a meetup of the “Quantified Self” movement — a collection of enthusiasts who are collecting tons of personal, health, and other data for various purposes: to speed up the rate of medical innovations, to improve their own health, to have fun with data, to be a part of a community with similar interests. Or participate in the Institute for the Future’s Re-Constitutional Convention, where governance scholars, practitioners, artists, and others try to re-imagine our oh-so-flawed governance structures. (Many of these examples are described in my book, The Nature of the Future.)

To shine a spotlight on this reality I’m giving it a name: these people are engaged in “socialstructing.” It’s a type of value creation that takes place outside of institutional boundaries, relies on social ties, and fulfills social, not monetary, needs such as the desire to belong, to be a part of something meaningful, to have fun, or, to use game researcher Jane McGonigal’s phrase, to “achieve an epic win.”

Socialstructers engage in hard work that they choose for themselves and to which they bring the best of their talents and abilities. Without management hierarchies, without titles and assignments, they do things such as self-organize into teams for 48 hours during a Science Hack Day (pictured right) and produce over a dozen new things, ranging from software code that converts data from nuclear accelerators into music to a robot that analyzes twitter sentiments. It’s a level of ingenuity any R&D department would marvel at.

Here’s my advice, then, if you are one of those organizations that sends scouts to Silicon Valley or establishes an outpost to tap into the innovation taking place here. Yes, visit the venture capitalists and the startups, but don’t overlook this other reality. To understand and learn from Silicon Valley, you need to participate and get embedded in the socialstructed creation that is taking place here. Spend an evening at Noisebridge, hang out at Hacker Dojo, go to a Quantified Self meetup, sign up for a Science Hack or Med Hack or another hackathon. In settings like these you’ll see a Silicon Valley that is just as — or maybe more — vital to fueling the innovation the place is known for.

Noisebridge photo by Dylan Hendricks, 2013. Science Hack Day photo by Gretchen Curtis, 2012.

Flurry is known for measuring the size of the mobile app market and the effectiveness of mobile advertising, and now it is expanding its ad business. On Tuesday the company plans to unveil Flurry Marketplace, a real-time bidding exchange for ads in mobile apps.

The company hopes Marketplace will stand out because it is offering app publishers and developers a way to sell their ad inventory while also giving them accurate data about their audience. Flurry’s audience data is the big draw: the company said it has access to information about 300,000 apps used on over 1 billion devices. Flurry claims to have access to the user habits of 90 percent of all active smartphones and tablets in the world.

The idea is that if publishers understand more about who is using their apps — like parents or college students, for example — and why, they can make better decisions about where to place their ads in real time.

There are other real-time exchanges for mobile app publishers — like MoPub and Nexage, for example – but those still need outside user data to know how to target your ads.

Marketplace is the latest in Flurry’s effort to expand its capabilities to be a one-stop shop for serving app developers and publishers. Late last year it raised a $25 million dollar funding round, and already this year it launched one new product, a free crash reporting tool for app makers.

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In the global smartphone market, Samsung (005930) is a force to be reckoned with. The company extended its lead during the fourth quarter as it shipped an astounding 63.7 million smartphones, representing 29% of the global market according to research firm IDC. Samsung’s next closest competitor was Apple (AAPL) which sold 47.8 million iPhones for 21.8% of the market during the same time span. The story is much different when it comes to tablets, however. IDC estimates that Samsung shipped 7.9 million tablets in Q4 2012 for 15.1% of the global market, which represented big year-over-year growth put still paled in comparison to Apple’s 43.6% share. In other words, Samsung still has a lot of work to do.

Continue reading…

Mike Goodenough is global director of cloud field engineering for savvisdirect at Savvis, a CenturyLink company and global provider of cloud infrastructure and hosted IT solutions.

Far back in the mists of time–at the pre-dawn of the digital age–scientists and engineers huddled in small rooms, devising ways to move electrons in such a manner as to represent the operations of logic upon the physical domain. No more would the slide rule be the sword of innovation and discovery. The future of the world rested firmly in the whirring circuits of that which would become: the computer.

Computers weren’t things that rested on one’s desk. No, they were mighty monoliths erected as harbingers of mathematical, scientific and engineering feats that recreated the world of humanity in its own, towering image. To be master of the computer was to hold the destiny of the universe in your hand.

A scant few years later, though, things changed.

Where once a high degree of science was required to understand, navigate and create meaning from numbers, figures and formulas in a swarm of electro-mechanical interactions, now even high-school dropouts could construct powerful systems and arrange them strategically to illuminate the fabric of world commerce.

Return to Science

At some point along the way, the science was lost. When we abandoned the mainframes for personal computers and servers, math succumbed to convenience. Physics became a distant memory. And the culture that at once feared and admired the messengers of technology knelt down to worship tiny fruit-based entertainment.

In this fashion, the corporate environment shifted. Enormous tasks could be tackled with stacks of small machines, instead of acres of memory core. Simplicity became the watchword, and when computer science was replaced by information technology, so too was knowledge traded for the total cost of space and power.

But now cloud computing returns us full-circle to where we began, with enormous data centers housing collective systems so massive that a million businesses can fit inside. The science of “big computers” is here once again.

Evolution of Cloud

Bringing cloud into the mix changes the nature of modern business computing. Most recently, you would measure IT in terms of physical CPUs, disks, networks, blades and other manifestations of technology to be managed, replaced and amortized—entities of their own designs. However, the budgets with which these eventualities were addressed became so compressed that they began to collapse in upon themselves, ultimately resulting in an explosion of outsourced infrastructure.

The equation thus mutated from purchasing power to operational effectiveness. Services now deliver what once was provided by legions of staff. And budgets for computers and software are instead shifted to create meaningful, lasting value for the enterprise. With the business itself rejoining this computing equation, the service model provides a solution to an evolutionary change in commercial mechanics.

Measuring the Intangible

When you compare it to the corporeal world in which we live, computer services are the energy in a universal system of hardware matter. Energy is mobile—it can transfer states, add or subtract properties, and alter its surroundings—yet exists regardless of its bindings. Cloud services are likewise portable, divorced from the platform on which they operate. Moving cloud energy around to satisfy the demands of a continually changing business environment does not end in chaos, but merely reflects the subtle alteration in technical trajectory.

This is the promise of the future data center. Cloud meets the requirements of the operating system budget. What was once implemented with CapEx servers costing $7 per day is delivered for $3 per day in the OpEx cloud. Your operational parameters go from return on investment (ROI) on assets to value realized from capabilities.

Indeed, cloud is more than just cost efficacy. It moves beyond hardware implementation and software licensing, and is instead quantified by the value of the services being provided. And while the basic variables in the algorithms of the cloud remain—compute, memory, storage and network—they become hidden by a universal architecture that focuses on the what, not the how.

IT is not about defining “what is the cloud.” Rather, it is deriving value by conjoining business principles with technology innovation. How does the equation fit you?

Industry Perspectives is a content channel at Data Center Knowledge highlighting thought leadership in the data center arena. See our guidelines and submission process for information on participating. View previously published Industry Perspectives in our Knowledge Library.

When rumors sprang up in January about the scientific journal publisher Elsevier buying British reference manager and academic social network Mendeley, the reaction was negative in some quarters. Elsevier has a bad reputation among many academics over the amount it charges for access to its journals, which are generally populated by taxpayer-funded research. Mendeley’s community is all about open collaboration, so the takeover rumors inspired a #mendelete Twitter campaign.

So, now that the takeover has come to pass (the Financial Times reports the deal value as £45 million (USD $69 million), or around £20 per user), what fallout should we expect?

Cleaner data

According to Mendeley CEO Victor Henning, everything should be just fine. Mendeley will “stay an independent site” with plans to expand its 50-strong team to 80 within the next 18 months, he told me, adding that the deal would give both parties better data:

“All those resources will help us do two things. One is more integration — the biggest gap in our product offering is that it’s too difficult for users to get to full text content. When people found something on Mendeley it was usually just the metadata with a link to the publisher’s website. Elsevier publishes around 20pc of the world’s scientific output and has deals with other publishers for its Scopus database. We’ll be working to integrate Mendeley with Scopus and ScienceDirect to make it easier for our users to enrich and clean up the content we already have — our content is crowdsourced. Elsevier has a lot of clean structured data we can use to clean it up, and our data can enrich Elsevier’s because we have rich social information.

“We can now also take a more long-term perspective about monetization versus feature development and user growth. As an independent startup we were always trying to break even as soon as possible, and were under pressure to monetize new features. Now we can pick up certain things for the roadmap, for example hiring a fully-fledged mobile team. There will be a new iOS app soon, and we’re going to start building an Android app from scratch.”

Henning added that Elsevier’s existing 17 million author profiles would also have a positive effect. “Now, once we’re integrated, when you sign up to Mendeley we will immediately be able to present you with your profile to claim,” he said. “It will make it easier for users to get started.”

But what about all that criticism of Elsevier? There, Henning insisted there was little risk of users taking flight:

“People have criticized Elsevier for things they’ve done in the past but, particularly last year when they were subjected to criticism for their stance on open access publishing, they’ve taken that feedback to heart. They’ve doubled the number of open access journals that they publish. They do support open access publishing and they will expand on it in the future. Another move they made last year is, people were saying they’d like to text-mine content that you have, and they opened up to the community about that.”

Elsevier, meanwhile, also said in a blog post that Mendeley was “open, social and collaborative, and it is important to [Elsevier] that it retains all of those traits”.

“Elsevier has all the power”

However, not everyone is sounding so positive. One notable perspective is that of Jason Hoyt, Mendeley’s former R&D head and, since leaving the company, founder of open access publisher PeerJ.

Hoyt said in a post on Tuesday that Elsevier had previously hampered or outright stymied open access projects at Mendeley, including the service’s PDF preview functionality and a scheme to automatically put papers filed with Mendeley into the open access archive of the author’s institution:

“If one is honest, from a business perspective the Mendeley founders did the right thing to comply with Elsevier’s demands. My personal passions about Open Access hindered that, so no surprise it didn’t work out for more than a few years… I think that Mendeley as it stands today will continue to be useful even at Elsevier. That said, I think it will be challenging for Mendeley to become a truly transformative tool in science, which is what had originally convinced me to move from San Francisco to London four years ago.”

Meanwhile, open access blogger Mike Taylor noted that “Elsevier has all the power in the relationship” with Mendeley:

“So Mendeley say things like ‘very little will change for you as a Mendeley user’ and ‘we will continue to support standard and open data formats’, and I’m sure they believe them. But it’s dependent on the whim of Elsevier. The moment it becomes inconvenient or financially disadvantageous for them to do these things, they’ll stop.”

It will be worth keeping an eye on the user numbers of Mendeley and its main academic community rivals (such as ResearchGate) and reference management rivals (such as Zotero) to see which way the scholarly users themselves feel the wind is blowing.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

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EndoEvolution, an innovator in automated suturing devices is closing on a $5,000,000 Series C round of venture financing led by its current investor, Spring Bay Companies. Ron Rudowsky has also been named president and chief executive officer.

PRESS RELEASE

EndoEvolution, LLC, the leading innovator in advanced automated suturing devices announced today that it is closing on a $5,000,000 Series C round of venture financing led by its current investor, Spring Bay Companies and that Ron Rudowsky has been named President and Chief Executive Officer. Founder Jerry Brecher, formerly EndoEvolution’s CEO, will remain closely involved with product development and clinical use initiatives.

“On behalf of Spring Bay, I would like to express our thanks to Jerry Brecher for his efforts and determination”
“We are extremely enthusiastic about our investment in EndoEvolution and we’re pleased to continue and increase our support for the Company,” said Spring Bay Managing Director Dan Ryan. “EndoEvolution’s Endo360° Minimally Invasive suturing devices are in production and ready for market, and so we are extremely pleased that such an outstanding industry leader as Ron Rudowsky has come on board to lead the commercialization of EndoEvolution’s outstanding technology.”

Founder Jerry Brecher said, “We could not have selected a better person for the position. Ron brings tremendous leadership, vision, and high-level experience at some of the most successful medical device start-ups in recent years, and particularly in the minimally-invasive surgery (MIS) space. I know he will lead us to incredible heights and even greater success.”

Ron Rudowsky: An Established Medical Device Industry Executive

Over the course of his 36 year career in the medical device industry, including 30 years of executive management and leadership experience, Rudowsky has led highly successful global sales and marketing efforts, product development and manufacturing, and corporate development in both major companies and notably successful medical device start-ups, including SurgRx, Novacept, and Focal.

“EndoEvolution has established itself as the technology leader in automated suturing devices,” said Rudowsky, “particularly in the field of minimally-invasive surgery, where its Endo360° MIS suturing device is the world’s most advanced product. I’m excited about the opportunity to create market leadership for this terrific technology. It’s great that our investor is so solidly behind the Company and I’m pleased that our Founder Jerry Brecher will continue as a key member of our leadership team.”

“On behalf of Spring Bay, I would like to express our thanks to Jerry Brecher for his efforts and determination,” said Ryan. “Jerry and Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer John Meade have been instrumental in developing EndoEvolution’s world-class technology and its portfolio of automated suturing device products and establishing their clinical importance and visibility in the marketplace. We’re pleased they’re staying on with the Company.”

About EndoEvolution

EndoEvolution, LLC, the leading innovator in advanced automated suturing device technology, is a privately held medical device company introducing and developing the most advanced MIS (Minimally Invasive Surgery) automated suturing devices delivering significant clinical advantages and substantial cost-savings to hospitals. EndoEvolution’s devices, including the commercially available reusable Endo360°® MIS suturing device and in-development revolutionary 5mm EndoTransformer™ are the only automated suturing devices using curved needles that precisely replicate the traditional method used by surgeons to place stitches and tie intracorporeal knots. The only automated suturing devices available with a full complement of standard sutures, EndoEvolution’s reusable automated suturing products are easier to use with demonstrated clinical effectiveness in a broad range of surgical procedures including bariatric, colorectal, and general surgery, as well as gynecology and urogynecology. In May of 2012, Edwards Lifesciences (EW – NYSE), the world’s leading cardiac surgery company, licensed EndoEvolution’s advanced automated suturing device technology for use in cardiac surgery.

Contacts

EndoEvolution, LLC
Jerry Brecher, 978-251-8088
[email protected]

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EndoEvolution, LLC

Headquarters: North Chelmsford, Massachusetts
CEO: Jerry Brecher
Employees: 5
Organization: Private

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FairSearch.org, the organization made up of Google competitors mostly in (but not limited to) the the travel industry, has filed a new complaint with the EU. The angle this time is Android, which the coalition has deemed “a deceptive way to build advantages for key Google apps in 70 percent of the smartphones shipped today”.

The organization says:

FairSearch.org has filed a complaint with the European Commission laying out Google’s anti-competitive strategy to dominate the mobile marketplace and cement its control over consumer Internet data for online advertising as usage shifts to mobile.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data,” said Thomas Vinje, Brussels-based counsel to the FairSearch coalition. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system.”

The New York Times reports that EU antitrust chief Joaquin Almunia said he’s receiving proposals from Google this week aimed at clearing up concerns about search practices, as he has been leading an investigation into them. The Times says he’s not commenting on the Android complaint from FairSearch, but noted that the EU has been looking into Android separately.

The timing of this complaint from FairSearch is interesting, given that just days ago, Facebook introduced the Android-specific “Facebook Home,” which lets Android users have a Facebook app that dominates the device, and pushes everything else (including Google apps and even search) into the background. Clearly some Google competitors are not only finding ways to compete on Android, but are even making the basis for their new mobile strategies Android-specific.

Even if Facebook Home doesn’t directly compete in search right now, Mark Zuckerberg has indicated that Graph Search will make its way to the product in time. Remember, that hasn’t even rolled out to mobile yet. It’s also worth noting that vertical search services, particularly on mobile, have already shown they can chip away at Google searches. Facebook, for that matter, recently renamed the “Nearby” feature in its mobile app to “Local Search”.

FairSearch consists of 17 companies whose members including Microsoft, Oracle, Expedia, Nokia, and TripAdvisor. Microsoft, by the way, isn’t very happy about Facebook Home either. Considering Bing’s partnership with Facebook, perhaps that will change once Graph Search makes its way to it.

Incline Equity Partners, a Pittsburgh based lower middle-market private equity firm, has sold Orthotic Holdings to Frazier Healthcare. OHI, headquartered in Markham, Ontario, is a manufacturer, marketer and distributor of custom and branded medical products that treat foot, ankle and leg related conditions and diseases.

PRESS RELEASE

Incline Equity Partners, a Pittsburgh based lower middle-market private equity firm, announced today the sale of Orthotic Holdings, Inc. (OHI) to Frazier Healthcare. OHI, headquartered in Markham, Ontario, is a leading manufacturer, marketer and distributor of high quality, predominantly custom and branded medical products that treat foot, ankle and leg related conditions and diseases. The company is recognized as a North American market leader with entrenched relationships in each of its core healthcare provider sales channels through the development and deployment of its innovative foot scanning technology solution.

Incline Equity Partners’ strategic insight enabled the company to double earnings during its ownership, highlights of which include noteworthy process enhancements through the implementation of foot scanning technology, significant growth achieved by entering new sales channels and three targeted acquisitions. “We are proud of what we accomplished over the course of our four-year investment in OHI,” said Jack Glover, Partner of Incline Equity Partners. “Our synergy with the talented management team enabled us to achieve our strategic investment goals, providing the desired returns to investors and leaving the company well-positioned for future growth.”

Bruce Marrison, former Chief Executive Officer of OHI, said, “On behalf of the management team and our employees, I thank Incline Equity Partners for their collaborative partnership that acted as the catalyst for achieving our growth objectives.”

Charlie Rossetti, Senior Associate of Incline Equity Partners, added, “It has been a pleasure working with Bruce and his team over the years, and we wish them all the best in their future endeavors.”

Incline completed the investment in conjunction with MTN Capital Partners.

The sale transaction was led by Glover; Rossetti; and David Hamerling, Associate of Incline Equity Partners.

About Incline Equity Partners
Incline Equity Partners focuses on making private equity investments of $10 million to $25 million in support of leveraged buyouts, recapitalizations, and large minority financings of lower middle market growth companies with enterprise values between $25 million and $100 million across a variety of industry sectors including specialized light manufacturing, value-added distribution, and business and industrial services.

The post Incline Equity Partners Sells Orthotic Holdings appeared first on peHUB.

Advent Software, a provider of software and services for the global investment management industry, has made two senior sales appointments. Jad Fares has been appointed regional sales manager for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and will be based in Advent’s Dubai office. Jesper Steiness has been appointed as director of business development for EMEA.

PRESS RELEASE

Advent Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADVS), a leading provider of software and services for the global investment management industry, today announced two senior sales appointments. Jad Fares has been appointed regional sales manager for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and will be based in Advent’s Dubai office. Jesper Steiness has been appointed as director of business development for EMEA. The announcement comes as Advent continues to expand its client base in EMEA across a wide range of market segments, including asset management firms, hedge funds, wealth management firms, funds of funds and family offices.
Jad Fares joins Advent as regional sales manager for the MENA region, from Bloomberg where he served as Middle East and Africa Manager for Electronic Trading and Execution. He has over ten years’ experience working for companies providing high-end solutions to markets in the Middle East and the US as well as has an extensive background with sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, global asset managers, hedge funds and investment banks. In his role, Mr. Fares will be responsible for continuing to develop Advent’s position as one of the leaders in the market in Saudi Arabia, as well as the broader MENA region.
Today more than 30 MENA-based clients use Advent’s local solutions along with its world-class investment management systems. As evidence of the company’s commitment to the region and understanding of the unique needs of clients in MENA, Advent maintains a full-service office in Dubai, which includes sales, relationship management, professional services and client support professionals.
Jesper Steiness will serve as director of business development for the EMEA region with a focus on the Luxembourg market. Mr. Steiness has over 20 years’ experience in the global fund industry in Hong Kong, Singapore and Luxembourg. He has an extensive background in fund administration, custody and asset management and has held a number of independent directorships on fund boards.
“We’re thrilled to have Jad Fares and Jesper Steiness on board as part of the Advent team as we continue to strengthen our position in the region by adding more clients and developing a larger footprint with existing clients,” said Håkan Valberg, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Advent Software EMEA. “They bring an impressive background that will be a valuable asset in supporting Advent’s goals of eliminating boundaries between people, information and systems. Our growth in the region is the result of investments in the local solutions as well as Advent’s service delivery. Our new appointments reinforce our strong commitment to building long-term relationships with our clients throughout Europe and the Middle East.”
Advent, the Advent logo and Advent Software are registered trademarks of Advent Software, Inc. All other company names or marks mentioned herein are those of their respective owners.
About Advent
Advent Software, Inc. (www.advent.com), a global firm, has provided trusted solutions to the world’s financial professionals since 1983. Advent’s proven solutions can increase operational efficiency, reduce risk, and eliminate the boundaries between systems, information and people so you can focus on what you do best. With more than 4,500 client firms in over 60 countries, Advent has established itself as a leading provider of mission-critical solutions to meet the demands of investment management operations around the world. Advent is the only financial services software company to be awarded the Service Capability and Performance certification for being a world-class support and services organization.

The post Advent Adds to Senior Team in EMEA Region appeared first on peHUB.

If you’re the kind of person who throws caution to the wind when choosing who to invite to your events (otherwise known as the “select all” crowd), it looks like Facebook is beginning to get more serious about restricting you.

Some users are getting a message from Facebook when they attempt to invite a large number of users to a single event.

“We’re sorry, but you seem to be sending invitations to people who aren’t interested in accepting them. Please make sure you’re only inviting people you know and think would enjoy this event. You’ll only be able to send invitations again once more people have accepted.”

So, what gives?

Facebook seems to be enforcing an event-oriented rule that only allows for 100 invites at a single time – and more importantly only 300 pending invites. That means that if you have over 300 invites out there with no response, you can’t send any more until a few people join, maybe, or decline your event.

Facebook explains the rules on its help page:

You can invite an unlimited number of people to events, but you can only invite 100 people at a time. Once you invite the first 100 people, you can then start inviting more.

Also, you can only have 300 pending invites at one time for an event. Some people will have to respond to your event invite before you’ll be able to add more.

Remember, Facebook isn’t capping invites to a single event. You can invite as many people as you want. But you just have to do it a bit more slowly.

[Mari Smith via AllFacebook]

Max Niederhofer has joined European venture capital firm Sunstone Capital as a partner in its Copenhagen office. He joins Sunstone Capital from Accel Partners, where he was a Vice President in the firm’s London office, focusing on investments in internet and mobile services.

PRESS RELEASE

Sunstone Capital, a European venture capital firm, today announced that Max Niederhofer has joined the firm as a Partner in its Copenhagen office. In this role, he will focus on early stage technology investments and support existing companies in Sunstone’s portfolio.

Max has spent the last 11 years working with early stage businesses in Europe and the United States as an investor and entrepreneur. He joins Sunstone Capital from Accel Partners, where he was a Vice President in the firm’s London office, focusing on investments in internet and mobile services. Prior to joining Accel, Max started and sold Qwerly, a data marketing business, and was a Principal at Atlas Venture, where he worked with companies such as DailyMotion, Seatwave and Moo. His personal investments include Last.fm (sold to CBS), OneFineStay, Skimlinks, Boticca, Fliptop and Sofar Sounds.

“We are very excited to have Max join our team. As entrepreneurs ourselves, we are aggressively expanding Sunstone from our Nordic roots to all European markets. Max’s background and experience strengthen our strategy of supporting European entrepreneurs at the earliest stages of company building,” said Jimmy Fussing Nielsen, Managing Partner at Sunstone Capital.

“I am thrilled to be joining a partnership that allows me to be an investor as well as an entrepreneur,” said Niederhofer. “At Sunstone, we are building Europe’s premier, early-stage, West Coast-style venture capital firm. We want to be faster, more accessible and better to deal with than anyone else in the market.”

Max was born in Hamburg and has lived in Germany, Canada, the UK, France, India and the US. He holds a doctorate in management science from WHU in Germany and was recently named “Best Startup Advisor/Mentor 2012” at startup awards The Europas in Berlin.

About Sunstone Capital
Founded in 2007, Sunstone Capital is a leading European early-stage technology and life sciences venture capital firm. The partnership manages around EUR 700 million in committed capital across seven funds. The technology portfolio includes companies such as Amen, Gidsy, Issuu, Layar, Neo Technology, Paymill, Podio (sold to Citrix Systems) and Prezi.

The post Max Niederhofer joins Sunstone Capital appeared first on peHUB.

FairSearch, a coalition comprised of 17 global businesses including Expedia, Kayak, Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia and TripAdvisor, has announced that it has filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) against Google, citing an “anti-competitive strategy” and consolidating “control over consumer Internet data for online advertising” in the mobile space.

FairSearch uses two reports from Strategy Analytics (SA) and eMarketer to base its claims. According to the coalition, Google exerts its dominance in the mobile operating system space with Android, which held a 68.4 percent market share in 2012 per SA, and in mobile search advertising, which eMarketer says Google dominates with a 96 percent market share.

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data”, says Thomas Vinje, a counsel for FairSearch. “We are asking the Commission to move quickly and decisively to protect competition and innovation in this critical market. Failure to act will only embolden Google to repeat its desktop abuses of dominance as consumers increasingly turn to a mobile platform dominated by Google’s Android operating system”.

According to Google, “the Google apps for Android, such as YouTube, Google Maps and Navigation, Gmail, and so on are Google properties that are not part of Android, and are licensed separately” and “if the device is to include Google Play, Google will typically validate the device for compatibility before agreeing to license the Google Play client software”.

As a result, FairSearch also says that the search giant “uses deceptive conduct to lockout competition in mobile”. According to the coalition, even though Google gives “Android to device-makers for ‘free’”, the company requires manufacturers to “pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone”, in order to “include must-have Google apps such as Maps, YouTube or Play”.

Basically the group cries foul at the presence of Google services on Android, which it calls a “predatory distribution” of the green droid operating system. According to FairSearch, the “below-cost” policy “makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform”.

The complaint raises issues similar to the ones brought against Microsoft’s Windows in the last decades. At the time the operating system bundled Microsoft services and programs, including Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and others, and gave competition little room to grow and develop against the pre-installed offerings.

Now FairSearch seems to think that another major player — Google — is exerting its dominance a bit too much. Considering that Microsoft is part of the coalition the situation is a tad ironic. Nonetheless, the only question is whether the EC agrees with the complaint or not. If it does, any subsequent decision could dramatically change the mobile landscape.

Photo Credit: Sebastian Duda/Shutterstock