Category: News

The sale of German energy metering firm Ista is heating up as a number of buyout houses including Axa Private Equity and BC Partners prepare to submit second round bids, Reuters wrote on Wednesday. Private equity groups Charterhouse and CVC Capital Partners kicked off the sale of Ista last year, hiring Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs to run the process.

(Reuters) – The sale of German energy metering firm Ista is heating up as a number of buyout houses including Axa Private Equity and BC Partners prepare to submit second round bids, banking sources said on Wednesday.

Private equity groups Charterhouse and CVC Capital Partners kicked off the sale of Ista last year, hiring Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs to run the process.

The sellers are hoping to tap into a growing appetite for deals among private equity groups sitting on large cash piles after a dearth of M&A activity last year, with Ista seen as a solid earner with growth potential.

First round bids were submitted last month for Ista which has a price tag of around 3 billion euros ($3.85 billion), making this one of the biggest private equity transactions in Germany this year.

Charterhouse bought Ista at the height of the buyout boom in 2007 for 2.4 billion euros from CVC, backed with 2.1 billion debt, according to Thomson Reuters LPC data. CVC later bought back 24 percent.

Axa and BC are due to submit second round bids later this month as are Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan and Wendel, bankers said.

Bain Capital, Blackstone, Canada Pension Plan and Cinven are not going through to the second round. Apax expressed initial interest but did not submit a first round bid, bankers said.

All potential bidders and sellers declined to comment or were not immediately available to do so.

The successful buyer will need to write an equity cheque of around 1.1-1.2 billion euros and the rest will be financed with debt.

Bankers are working on debt packages of around 2 billion euros or seven times Ista’s approximate 290 million euros of earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA), bankers said.

There is enough liquidity in the debt markets to raise around 2 billion euros to back the buyout but senior leveraged loans, mezzanine loans and the high-yield bond market could all need to be tapped to raise it, bankers added.

Deutsche and Goldman Sachs have also put together a ‘staple’ financing package that offers all potential buyers money to pay for the acquisition, to speed the deal along and give buyers confidence that debt can be raised.

Ista, which has energy meters installed in 11 million flats and commercial sites, posted sales of 700 million euros in 2011 and employed 4,600 staff in 25 countries.

The post Reuters – Second Round Bids Due for Ista appeared first on peHUB.

Reddit AMAs are fascinating in general, but when a Facebook product engineer submits to the free-form Q&A session, it’s right up our alley.

Facebook product engineer Bob Baldwin, who has worked on products like Groups, Events, Photos, and more, took some time to answer some questions yesterday. In that time, he discussed a wide range of Facebook-related topics including Android, Messages, Groups, and even that never-going-to-happen “dislike” button.

Here are some of the best questions and answers from the AMA:

Why did Facebook decide to put time-stamps for when messages are seen?

I didn’t build this feature, but I’m a big fan of it and started working on Messages just after it was introduced. Before read receipts were added, we’d often here from friends and other users that they didn’t feel like the person they were messaging actually got their message. By adding read receipts, it makes messaging through Facebook feel more reliable. It also aimed to decrease the time to it takes for friends to reply, making messages feel more like SMS than email.

Which product are you currently most proud of?

Groups. At launch, it became one of the fastest growing products we’d ever launched, and I was really proud to have worked on it. I think communicating with small groups of people you know in real life is really personal and directed in a way that public sharing cannot match. Over time, I believe more sharing will shift into private sharing (via groups, messages, and other products).

Will Facebook’s Android app ever not suck?

For this question, he referred to mobile guy Joel Seligstein:

Well, we’ve been pretty happy with our trajectory and our last few releases. We’re currently investing a ton in architecture and long-term planning for performance, data usage, stability, and reliability.

He also said…

Next release should have some battery work done in it, and its something we now have a couple people looking into fulltime.

Which product did you build that turned out to be the most difficult and why?

Questions. It was too hard to build a community around this on Facebook, so quality was never that great. It’s also difficult to compare usage of a specialized content type, like questions, to the types of content that can be posted everyday (status updates, photos, etc).

Facebook has done a lot of work making it easy to keep track of events. However, for the average person, they still need to maintain an external calendar (and potentially use some tool to sync Facebook events to it). Are there any plans to add the ability to use Facebook as a full personal calendar?

I don’t think our users currently think of Facebook as the place to store content that isn’t shared in someway, so I think it wouldn’t be used much. Facebook events are primarily about meeting up with friends. Though, I hope our events continue to have better integration with existing calendar systems. iOS integration is really nice, for example.

Will Facebook ever have a dislike button??

Actions on Facebook tend to focus on positive social interactions. Like is the lightest-weight way to express positive sentiment. I don’t think adding a light-weight way to express negative sentiment would be that valuable. I know there are times when it’d make sense, like when a friend is having a rough day, or got into a car accident like my sister yesterday (she’s okay!). For these times, a nice comment from a friend goes a long way.

Speaking of AMAs, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s name recently popped up on the AMA calendar – but disappeared as of Wednesday morning. We’ ve reaching out to find out what’s going on and will let you know when we hear anything.

Mobile social gaming company PlayPhone has added Bhaskar Roy as chief product officer. Roy joins from Skype, which he joined after his mobile video software and services company Qik was acquired. Based in San Francisco, Calif., PlayPhone is funded by Menlo Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital, Coral Group, and Scale Venture Partners.

PRESS RELEASE
PlayPhone, Inc., a global leader in mobile social gaming, today announced that mobile product veteran Bhaskar Roy has joined the company as chief product officer. Roy will take primary responsibility for innovation and evolution on the platform underlying the renowned PlayPhone Social Gaming Network. His appointment is effective immediately.

“Bhaskar has a very distinguished track record with some of the tech industry’s most iconic and disruptive brands,” said Ron Czerny, founder and CEO of PlayPhone, Inc. “With proven leadership at companies like HP, Skype, Oracle and Microsoft – along with experience at successful startups like Qik and PlaceWare – we are confident Bhaskar will continue to extend PlayPhone’s leadership position in the mobile social gaming ecosystem.”

Prior to PlayPhone, Roy was co-founder and senior vice president of products at Qik, a provider of mobile video software and services. Following Qik’s acquisition by Skype (and Skype’s acquisition by Microsoft), Roy continued at the helm of Qik products and led the charge in bringing asynchronous communications and new mobile experiences to Skype’s core offering. Prior to Qik, Roy was senior product director for SMB products and director of product management for real-time communication at Oracle. And before Oracle, Roy led product management and channel marketing at PlaceWare, which is now a division of Microsoft Lync following an acquisition.

“PlayPhone’s social gaming network has already demonstrated outstanding traction in the marketplace as is evidenced by the recent Games Portal on Verizon announcement, and is on track to become the favored platform among global operators, developers and consumers alike,” said Roy. “I am very excited to help PlayPhone leverage its technology to open new strategic doors – and to helping the management team both fulfill its commitment to investors and deliver healthy new revenue streams to our collaborators.”

About PlayPhone, Inc.
PlayPhone(R) is a global leader in delivering mobile social gaming via smartphones and tablets through its cross-platform PlayPhone Social Gaming Network. With a presence in more than 25 countries throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Latin America, PlayPhone’s mobile gaming platform provides developers with the ability to launch and monetize social games around the globe. The PlayPhone developers program includes support for all leading platforms: Android, iOS, Adobe AIR, HTML5, WP7, with full support for Unity. Based in San Francisco, Calif., PlayPhone is funded by top venture firms Menlo Ventures, Cardinal Venture Capital, Coral Group, and Scale Venture Partners.

The post Bhaskar Roy Joins PlayPhone appeared first on peHUB.

Watch for an updated Google Nexus 7 tablet as early as July, sources tell Reuters on Wednesday. Aside from a higher-resolution display, the refreshed 7-inch Android slate should also have a chip inside from Qualcomm instead of Nvidia. Pricing could change, say Reuters sources, but the focus will be on keeping the cost low in an effort to ship up to 8 million units in the second half of 2013.

With Google’s I/O developer conference scheduled for mid-May, I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long to see if this report pans out. And I suspect it well. The cycle of hardware technology improvements for mobile devices is running around 12 to 15 months and the original Nexus 7 debuted in June of last year. The current model has already seen a very minor refresh with a boost of internal storage at no additional cost: the original $199 model went from 8 GB of memory to 16 GB and Google later added a 32 GB model with integrated mobile broadband for $299, for example.

It’s likely that Google will hold the $199 price point for the lowest new Nexus 7 model and drop the current model pricing by $50 until the older units are sold out. As for what to expect in a refreshed Nexus 7? Here are my thoughts, which are mostly minor improvements:

• The same 7-inch screen size, but a higher-resolution panel of 1920 x 1080 for a pixel density of 315 pixels per inch (ppi). The current device uses a 1280 x 800 resolution display at 216 ppi.
• It’s possible that Google keeps an improved 1280 x 800 model at $199 and offers the higher-resolution panel as a more expensive option; say $249.
• Google opts for Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset. The company often switches hardware components between manufacturing partners on Nexus devices, but if this happens, it’s certainly not good for Nvidia and its Tegra 4 chip.
• With a Qualcomm chip inside, it’s highly likely the Nexus 7 gets an LTE option due to the chipmaker’s solid modem integration on its silicon.
• The new Nexus 7 will get a memory boost: 2 GB of RAM up from the current 1 GB.
• A rear camera is added but it won’t be a top-of-the-line sensor: Just good enough for Google+ photos and such.
• The refreshed tablet will ship with at least Android 4.2 software and a later version to quickly follow via software update; that software will be what Google announces at its developer event.
• I expect the current metal pins to be in the same place on a new tablet model; this would keep the new device compatible with the Nexus 7 dock which only arrived on the market recently.

As Reuters correctly notes, this is a low- or zero-margin strategy for Google. The company isn’t looking to earn a high profit margin on the hardware. Instead, it wants to get as many Android devices out in the wild so it can collect data and earn money through targeted ads and services. An improved Nexus 7 tablet at current pricing would help do just that.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
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Just so you know, stunts like the one you’re about to see between Pikes Peak record holder Rhys Millen in a new McLaren 12C Spider and Chanelle Sladics, Winter Games Medallist are completely rigged. That does not however mean that they’re any less entertaining to watch. The story is something straight out of Top Gear and pits Millen against Sladics in a made-for-the-camera race to the bottom of the mountain. Check it out after the jump.

Source: Youtube.com

Apple (AAPL) continues to feel the heat after a monumental shift in sentiment that saw the company’s share price plummet more than 35% after hitting a record high in late September. Though Apple posted record earnings for its most recent quarter, the Street continues to voice concern over the company’s future growth prospects. On Tuesday, Goldman Sachs became the latest high-profile Apple bull to cut its outlook as the firm voiced some worrisome concerns in a note to clients.

Continue reading…

Early stage investor Ignition Partners announced Wednesday that it had closed its fifth fund with $150 million in commitments. Ignition also said it had added Nick Sturiale as a partner based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that the firm had opened a new office in Palo Alto, Calif. Sturiale previously worked at JAFCO Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and the Carlyle Group.

PRESS RELEASE
BELLEVUE, WA and PALO ALTO, CA—April 4, 2013—Ignition Partners, an early-stage venture-capital firm, announced it has closed its fifth fund. The $150 million vehicle will target early-stage investments in enterprise-technology companies located throughout the U.S., with a strong emphasis on the West Coast.
Ignition also has added a new partner, Nick Sturiale, based in the San Francisco Bay Area and opened a new office in Palo Alto, Calif. The moves are part of a transition toward creating a more-focused partnership with a larger Silicon Valley presence—and one with deep operational experience in the enterprise. The new dual-geography presence will give the firm access to innovative ideas, and talent, in both markets.
The core team behind Ignition Venture Partners V includes partners John Connors, Frank Artale and Sturiale, who previously worked at JAFCO Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and the Carlyle Group. Connors, a former top Microsoft executive who served as its chief financial officer, joined Ignition in 2005. Artale, a longtime software-industry executive who has held top positions at companies including Citrix, XenSource and Microsoft, joined the firm in 2011.
Artale and Sturiale are also former entrepreneurs: Artale co-founded Consera Software, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in 2004, and was an early employee at XenSource. Sturiale’s company, Timbre Technologies, was purchased by Tokyo Electron in 2001.
Investors in Ignition’s new fund, which was oversubscribed and raised by the current team in less than three months, include returning and new university endowments, pension funds and investment firms.
“With approximately $450 million in distributions in the last 12 months, our firm has strong momentum going forward, and we are honored to receive such strong support and validation from our limited partners,” said Connors. “We are extremely upbeat about the current market and view the recent string of successful, enterprise-software IPOs as the start of a decade-long run of innovation that will usher in major productivity enhancements, and new ways of doing business, for companies worldwide.”
Recent Ignition exits include the initial public offering of Splunk, a “big-data” company that went public in April and stands as one of the most successful new technology stock offerings of the last several years, and the acquisitions of portfolio companies StorSimple, Azaleos and Zenprise. Previous Ignition successes include virtualization company XenSource (acquired by Citrix) and cloud-development firm Heroku (acquired by Salesforce.com).
Other, current Ignition investments include Cloudera, DocuSign, Parse, Hipmunk, Opscode and Bromium. The new fund will invest more narrowly in areas such as “consumerized” enterprise software, cloud technologies and big data, building on Ignition’s technology “platform” expertise.
“We applaud Ignition’s refined, more-focused approach to early-stage investing and believe the enterprise-IT landscape is poised to create important new companies and substantial new wealth,” said Tom Gladden, a partner at Adams Street Partners, which has invested in the new fund.
Other team members in Ignition V include Administrative Partner Robert Headley; Venture Partner Cameron Myhrvold; Chief Financial Officer Jack Ferry; and Principal Kristina Kerr Bergman. Partners from prior Ignition funds will continue to serve in their current roles to maximize returns from existing portfolio companies.
About Ignition
Ignition Partners helps entrepreneurs build innovative, category-defining businesses of lasting value. The firm, with offices in Bellevue, Wash. and Palo Alto, Calif., specializes in early-stage investments in “consumerized” enterprise IT, cloud computing and big data.

The post Ignition Partners Closes $150M Fifth Fund appeared first on peHUB.

According to The Next Web…

Twitter has been served a DMCA copyright complaint for content that was published using the Vine video platform it acquired and launched earlier this year. …

In this particular case, the takedown request came from NPG Records, the 20-year old record label owned by Prince. ‘NPG’ is short for New Power Generation, the name of the artist’s former backing band.

A representative of NPG Records wrote to Twitter to say eight video clips hosted on Vine contained “unauthorized recordings” and “unauthorized synchronizations” and asked the company to remove them immediately.

The request was sent on March 22, 2013.

The links to the Vine clips were included in the letter and no longer lead to playable videos, so it’s safe to assume Twitter followed up on the NPG representative’s request rather swiftly.

Vine is a quick video sharing platform. As a content producer, you film, upload and share your videos. As a consumer you follow or view videos from friends and others. Kind of a streamlined YouTube platform.

It’s an interesting conundrum. Producing and posting content is so easy. But is it fair if what you’re producing is someone else’s work? Some musicians are Very OK, in fact encouraging of audience members posting content; others, such as Prince, are not. Chilling Effects is a project/website that, with the help of everyone, tracks copyright issues…

Chilling Effects aims to help you understand the protections that the First Amendment and intellectual property laws give to your online activities. We are excited about the new opportunities the Internet offers individuals to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses. But we’ve noticed that not everyone feels the same way. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some individuals and corporations are using intellectual property and other laws to silence other online users. Chilling Effects encourages respect for intellectual property law, while frowning on its misuse to “chill” legitimate activity.

I’ve written about copyright before, but I always like to take the time to hammer on home again the importance of copyright and education about copyright. The lines between content producers, creators and consumers blur the optic gets trickier! Having someone high profile such as Prince take umbrage with copyright infringement may help smooth the path for emerging artists who want to own their artistic endeavors.

Microsoft announced the first major update for Exchange Server 2013, the software giant’s server for calendars, contacts and email. Called Cumulative Update 1, it brings along a number of new features and improvements as well as a couple of bug fixes.

Cumulative Update 1, build number 15.0.620.29, touts improvements for monitoring and high availability, as one of the most noteworthy changes. The update introduces support for auto-reseed for disks encrypted with Bitlocker and Exchange Server 2013 Management Pack for Systems Center Operations Manager (also known as SCOM), Best Copy Selection algorithm compatibility with MaximumActiveDatabases, a streamlined Get-HealthReport cmdlet and refreshed probes, monitors and respondents.

Microsoft also included an Address book Policy Routing Agent alongside Cumulative Update 1 and the ability to access favorited Public Folders hosted on Exchange Server 2013 from either Outlook or the Outlook Web app.

Cumulative Update 1 also improves groups support, with users now being able to own groups, and Exchange Admin Center (also known as EAC), which includes management for Unified Messaging, enhancements for the migration UI (User Interface) and general improvements for the overall user experience.

Cumulative Update 1 for Exchange Server 2013 is available to download from Microsoft’s Download Center.

It’s pretty much assumed at this point that Google will be showing off the new Nexus 7 at Google I/O next month. Now we just need to know its specs, and its launch date. Lucky enough, a new report out today tells us just that.

Sources told Reuters that the Asustek-made Nexus 7 successor will be launching in July. If true, the next Nexus 7 will be launching a year after its predecessor hit the scene. It would also give Google plenty of time to build up excitement for the tablet after a reveal at Google I/O.

As for specs, Reuters’ sources say the tablet will indeed be ditching Nvidia’s Tegra CPU in favor of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon. The previous rumor said Google chose Snapdragon because Qualcomm gave the company a better deal, but this latest report chalks it up “power reasons.”

Beyond a change in CPU manufacturer, the report also says that the new tablet will feature a higher resolution and a thinner bezel design, both of which suggest that we may see a larger screen in the Nexus 7 as well.

Apple lambasted the Nexus 7 last year during its iPad Mini reveal event for having a smaller display, while conveniently failing to mention that Google’s tablet still had a higher resolution. The new Nexus 7 could give Google a chance to create a tablet with a higher resolution while matching the 7.9-inch display of the iPad Mini.

We’re sure to hear more details on the new Nexus 7, including its assumed use of a new Android operating system, at Google I/O or soon after.

Jane Henson, wife of Muppets creator Jim Henson, has died. She was 78.

According to The Jim Henson Company, Henson died at her Connecticut home yesterday after a prolonged battle with cancer. The company has set up a tribute page featuring photos from her life and audio from an address she made to The Jim Henson company made last year.

Jane Henson was born Jane Nebel, and met Jim Henson at a puppetry class at the University of Maryland. The couple went on to create the show Sam and Friends and the Muppets. The couple were married in 1959, and had five children together. Though they were separated in 1986, Jane would go on to continue her association with The Jim Henson Company.

Jane collaborated on several Muppet projects, including The Art of The Muppets museum exhibit, The Muppet Show on Tour, and Sesame Street Live She also served on the board of The Jim Henson Foundation, co-founded The National Puppetry Conference, and founded both The Jim Henson Legacy and The Jane Henson Foundation.

(Image courtesy The Jim Henson Company)

Arsenal Capital Partners, a New York-based buyout shop focused on lower-middle-market specialty industrial and healthcare companies, has closed its third fund with $875 million in commitments. The firm said the fund, Arsenal Capital Fund III LP, exceeded a $750 million target. Arsenal Capital Partners II LP, was raised in 2006 with $500 million of committed capital.

PRESS RELEASE
Arsenal Capital Partners (“Arsenal”), a leading New York-headquartered private equity firm that invests in lower middle market specialty industrial and healthcare companies, announced today that it has successfully completed fundraising for Arsenal Capital Fund III LP (“Fund III”) with $875 million of committed capital, exceeding its target of $750 million. The firm’s previous fund, Arsenal Capital Partners II LP, was raised in 2006 with $500 million of committed capital. Arsenal now has over $1.6 billion of committed capital under management.

Commenting on the firm’s fundraising success during the current challenging fundraising environment, Terrence Mullen, Co-founder and Partner at Arsenal, said, “We are delighted to have surpassed our expectations for Fund III and achieved a 75% increase in committed capital from our last fund. We sincerely thank all our investors for their tremendous support. We are very gratified by the investors’ response, citing the institutional quality of our firm committed to the opportunities and needs of the lower middle market, our leading franchises in specialty industrials and healthcare, and track record of building high performance companies.”

“Fund III is a testament to the talented and experienced team that we have built and honed over 13 years and our strong culture of teamwork and collaborative value creation. Our uncommon balance of investment, industry and operating talent, working in unison enables us to be a partner of choice with management teams who are seeking to achieve differentiated strategic positioning with enhanced capabilities in growth, technology and operations. With offices in New York and Shanghai and a global team, our international experience and capabilities are a major differentiator in the marketplace. The Arsenal strategy and model continue to win in the market, as evidenced by the 57 investments we have completed since inception,” said Jeffrey Kovach, a Co-founder and Partner at Arsenal.

Bill Farrell, Head of Investor Relations for Arsenal, said, “Arsenal’s excellent performance and consistent track record of building high growth, high quality companies that strategic buyers desire impressed both existing Arsenal fund investors and attracted a terrific group of new investors in Fund III.” The Fund’s investor base is international in scope, with approximately half of the institutional investors from the U.S. and the balance from Europe and Asia. The investor base represents a diverse group of endowments and foundations, public and corporate pension plans, financial institutions and family offices, including PKA A/S, Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, PPM America, Northeast Utilities Service Company Retirement Plan, KIRKBI A/S, Partners Capital, Unigestion, Storebrand, Purdue University, Funds advised by Bowmark Capital and Cheyenne Capital Fund.

Arsenal, with a team of 29 experienced professionals, has deep sector expertise and leading franchises within the specialty industrials and healthcare industries. The firm has an exclusive focus on lower middle market transactions between $50 million and $250 million of enterprise value. Arsenal focuses on companies with headquarters in the U.S. and significant operations and growth opportunities in both the U.S and internationally. 2012 was a very active and productive year for Arsenal, as the firm completed eight substantial new investments, successfully exited its investment in portfolio company Novolyte in a sale to BASF, and recapitalized Charter Brokerage.

Arsenal has already completed four platform investments and deployed approximately $195 million of equity capital in Fund III. Commenting on the firm’s future initiatives, Messrs. Mullen and Kovach noted that the firm’s investment principals continue to review a robust pipeline of extremely high quality transactions and will select those that best fit within the firm’s “growth and improvement strategy” and offer attractive investment prospects for our investors.

Arsenal was assisted by Forbes Private Capital Group as a placement agent and Kirkland & Ellis LLP served as legal counsel.

About Arsenal Capital Partners

Formed in 2000, Arsenal Capital Partners is a leading New York-headquartered private equity firm that invests in middle-market specialty industrial and healthcare companies. Arsenal makes investments in sectors where the firm has significant prior knowledge and experience. The firm targets businesses that have the potential for further value creation by working closely with management to accelerate growth and leverage the firm’s operational improvement capabilities.

The post Arsenal Capital Partners Closes Fund III with $875M appeared first on peHUB.

Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he would be willing to draft Baylor women’s basketball star Brittney Griner if she’s the best available player at the Mavs’ spot.

ESPN quotes Cuban:

“If she is the best on the board, I will take her,” Cuban said before the Mavs’ Tuesday night game against the Los Angeles Lakers. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it already. Would I do it? Right now, I’d lean toward yes, just to see if she can do it. You never know unless you give somebody a chance, and it’s not like the likelihood of any late-50s draft pick has a good chance of making it.”

Here’s Griner dunking and “exploding” for 50 points:

Griner is 6′ 8″, 207.2 lbs, according to Google’s Knowledge Graph. She is said to wear a men’s show size 17 or 18 shoe and to have an arm span of 86″.

Griner is reportedly the first NCAA basketball player ever to score 2,000 points and block 500 shots. She won the 2012 AP Player of the Year.

Cuban reportedly said that if the Mavericks don’t draft Griner, he would Have “no problem whatsoever” inviting her to try out for a spot on Dallas’ summer league team.

Online marketplace provider Grand St. announced this week it raised a $1.3 million seed round that was led by First Round Capital. The funding included participation from individual investors David Tisch, Gary Vaynerchuk, as well as betaworks, Collaborative Fund, MESA+, Quotidian Ventures and Undercurrent. In addition to investing, Undercurrent plans to play a strategic role in advising the company as it grows. Grand St. announced the seed round in a blog post (see below).

BLOG POST

Hardware is Real: Living it at Grand St. and Growing Up (Just a Little)

Today we announced the Grand St. seed round. We are incredibly excited to be working with some of the smartest investors in hardware, commerce and digital communities around and are delighted to have the opportunity to grow the company and build more dope internets for our community. Much love to our earliest users, customers (!!) and friends for all the support so far.

In a way this moment in our (admittedly short) history has made all of us painfully aware of how much we want to accomplish. The hardware revolution is truly just beginning, and there is much to be done. This financing will help us grow our team (now at 7!) and continue to make the experience better.

Since December

There’s so much amazing innovation happening around new hardware, and our sole goal at Grand St. is to build a store that is just as innovative and delightful as the products we sell.

We launched Grand St. v0.1 on December 14 to the few thousand people who were on our email list. One of the best moments in the life of any small company is the moment when someone who is not your mom or your friend or your cousin buys something. Here is a random stranger who decided that you built something legit enough to hand over their credit card information (which btw is VERY SAFE TO DO thx stripe) … little do they know that four people are crouched around a computer screen cheering and mostly doing this. That day, we sold many thousands of dollars of creative technology to people across the U.S. and realized that maybe we weren’t the only ones who wanted a site like Grand St. to exist.

Creative Technology is Real

The democratization of hardware/consumer electronics is very real and should not be underestimated. Think about the number of really fantastic products that have launched in the last 12 months. Over time, that number will grow aggressively and the number of new products available not the market will become more and more impressive.

We feel privileged to work with so many independent (and even a couple of established) inventors. Putting together our April Fools roundup, I realized that 10 years ago it was an unthinkable fever-dream to try and launch a new electronics product. In the same way that the music industry has transitioned from top-down to bottom-up, the same thing is happening with consumer electronics.

The Future

Though by now we have had many customers who aren’t our friends or family, each and every new product sold is still exciting for us.

The future of Grand St., though, and the most profound thing for me (and Joe and Aaron too) is our fast-growing team. We are excited to show up every day mostly because everyone is effing genius-level talented and inspires all of us to work harder and better.

Like Phin said, we hope “…technology makers can focus on crafting experiences and utilize platforms to dramatically reduce the friction in their businesses. This means more craft and less commodity activity for the maker and it means more choice and creativity reaches the consumer.”

In some ways, we all know we have always been living in the future, and now we can get paid to do just that.

The post First Round Leads Funding of Grand St. appeared first on peHUB.

Today, we honor the anniversary of the passing of former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown. Secretary Brown was a dedicated public servant whose untimely death during a trade mission to Croatia on April 3, 1996 ended his life far too soon. His vision continues to be important and today’s work at the Department of Commerce builds on his legacy. 

Secretary Brown served his country in Korea as a soldier in the U.S. Army and in the halls of Congress as chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He also broke down barriers – becoming the first African American chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the first African American to serve as U.S. Secretary of Commerce. In this latter role, he made perhaps his largest impact.

During his tenure at Commerce, Secretary Brown pioneered a focus on exports that helped to boost the U.S. economy in the 1990s and contributed to one of the largest periods of economic expansion in our nation’s history. During a time when emerging markets in Asia and Latin America were opening up to trade, Secretary Brown led a concerted effort to support this advancement and to secure access for U.S. goods and services. He was a proponent of free trade, seeing business as a powerful force to create good jobs at home and to accelerate prosperity around the world. He also was an advocate of fair trade, seeking to ensure that U.S. workers would be helped and not harmed by new trading arrangements that would increase flows of capital and commerce.

read more

Even GE respects the wisdom of the crowd. The manufacturer joined up with Alaska Airlines, the Ochsner Health System and Kaggle in November to ask outside data scientists and designers to help give pilots actionable data and make hospital visits and subsequent care more efficient.

The organizers of the first Industrial Internet Quests have since received more than 3,000 submissions and were expecting to announce on Wednesday the contestants who will receive a total of $600,000. One submission for the flight competition has earned $100,000 for its developers, a five-person team from Singapore.

Kaggle has hosted data-science competitions for several other brand-name companies, from Facebook to Ford. Its publicly available leaderboards make data science a bit like a spectator sport, and open-source education on machine learning and natural-language processing makes it possible for lots of people to compete.

Demand is sky-high for data scientists and application developers, and farming out one-off projects is a common practice in all sorts of industries. That’s why it’s not surprising to see even big companies like GE turning to the crowd for data science solutions. And it’s why this sort of news could become more common in the future.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• A near-term outlook for big data

More evidence that boring enterprise IT is not so boring anymore: Ignition Partners has launched (and already closed) a new $150 million fund focused on technologies that businesses will buy and implement.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based early-stage VC firm will also open an office in Palo Alto, Calif. to better attack these opportunities, said Frank Artale, general partner who will run this new fund, informally dubbed Ignition V. The company brought on Nick Sturiale, a new partner, to run that office.

“We think that businesses and people who work in businesses have been largely underserved for the past 15 years,”  Artale said in a recent interview.

The goal of the dual offices is to promote cross-pollination and collaboration. ”We want to do real social networking here — not just Facebook stuff,” Artale added. “Palo Alto and the Bay Area are super important as great entrepreneurial engines — Cisco, Oracle and other companies down there spit out great entrepreneurs.”

Goal: Apps that combine consumer ease of use with enterprise utility

Ignition has some credibility in the enterprise. Several team members – including Artale, John Connors, and Cameron Myhrvold — are former Microsoft executives. And previous investments include Cloudera, Splunk, Zenprise, DocuSign, Opscode, Parse and Bromium.

New enterprise applications have to work well and look good on laptops and PCs, but also on tablets and phones as the consumerization of IT trend continues, he said.

Artale which described the new fund as “slightly oversubscribed”  took three months to fund. Investors include new and existing university endowments, pension funds and investment companies. Ignition V is smaller than the previous fund, which weighed in at $400 million but will also focus more — eschewing investments in telecom and consumer internet companies, Artale said.

The notion that enterprise IT is back as a hot category is cropping up all over. New vendors — large and small — are building consumer-grade products but for business use. Pivotal Initiative chief Paul Maritz spoke in depth about this at the recent Structure: Data conference in New York and the topic will doubtless crop up again at Structure in San Francisco in June.

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We all know based on M&A activity that marketing automation is big. Now, Marketo has filed for an initial public offering valued at $75 million, according to an SEC filing.

The news broke just hours after data visualization fan favorite Tableau filed for a $150 million IPO of its own. The public offerings are seen as validation that companies that build business-to-business software are hot right now.

In November, San Mateo, Calif.-based Marketo raised $50 million in venture funding from Battery Ventures, bringing total funding to date for the 7-year-old company. And category leader Hubspot raked in $35 million in mezzanine funding to bring its total trove to $100 million.

In December, Oracle dropped $871 million to buy Eloqua; a month later InfusionSoft, which focuses on marketing automation for smaller companies, netted $54 million in new funding.

Marketing automation vendors aim to help customers find and qualify sales leads — gleaning attractive prospects from sources including online ads but also from Facebook, Twitter and other sources. The goal is to prequalify these prospects and convert them into actual sales.

Many companies now use an inefficient hodgepodge of processes and products for this purpose. Given that chief marketing officers are now seen as having huge influence on IT purchases, vendors are chasing that constituency.

Marketo’s ticker symbol will be “MKTO” and shares will trade on NASDAQ. VentureBeat has more on the offering.

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For many Toyota Tundra fans the 2014 re-design was a huge disappointment, what does that mean for the 2015 edition? The truck landscape is going to change dramatically in 2014, will Toyota respond? If so, here is our list of changes we see or would like to see.

Before we begin with our list, let’s understand that in the fall of 2014, we will see the GM Twins re-introduced with some impressive MPG and towing gains on Ford without a big price increase. Ram will release their diesel version of the 1500. Ford will undoubtedly counter this challengers in 2015, will Toyota follow suit. If they want to keep their market share, they had better. Plus, we are getting closer to those 2016 CAFE standards that will force all manufactures to implement new systems to get better MPG.

Let’s also be clear that there will probably not be any big changes in 2015 rather just modifications. However, who knows with the fast pace of changes coming from other manufactures.

Definite Changes:

1. Trim Packages Changes – some of the trim package offerings will probably be “re-evaluated” and we could see tires and navigation systems moved up and down trim offerings. Granted not a big change and at all, but very likely to happen.
2. Minor Aerodynamic Improvements – odds are high that after substantial real-world testing by 2014 owners, Toyota engineers will improve the truck’s aerodynamics. This will probably be accomplished by enhancing the benefits of the Aerofins and by improving the fit and finish of exterior pieces. This won’t be a substantial change, rather small changes.
3. Direct Injection – You know it has to come out at some point. Why not in 2015? Toyota is really falling behind by not offering it yet.
4. Engine stop-start. We thought this system would have been in the 2014 edition, but it wasn’t. Look this system is not without its critics, however, with the looming CAFE standards looming in 2016, Toyota is going to have to start doing something.

Likely Changes:

We thought these would come in 2014. They should be coming, is 2015 the year?

1. Variable valve lift. Variable valve timing (VVT) is commonplace, but variable valve lift is still a newer feature on most vehicles. Toyota, long a fan of VVT, currently has a couple of engines running a variable-valve lift system. This should make it’s way into all Toyota vehicles in by the middle of the decade.
2. Electric steering. Hydraulic steering pumps are less efficient than electric motors. GM and Ford both plan to move this into their full-size trucks soon, and Toyota will likely follow. In fact, this will be a common feature industry wide.

Possible Changes:

1. Future Powertrain Engine Announcement. We all know that Toyota is really tight-lipped on future plans, but with the rush from Ram and GM to offer diesels in the compact and ½ ton market, Toyota HAS to be planning something. Or well, we HOPE they are planning on something. Could they pull a Nissan and make a major announcement at the Chicago Auto Show?
2. Rock Warrior with a Rear Locking Differential. It is unlikely that all Toyota Tundra’s will get a locking rear differential, but it should be part of the Rock Warrior package. When is Toyota going to get serious about competing with the other off-road machines (Ford SVT Raptor or Ram Runner)? Adding a stock rear locking differential to a small package truck isn’t rock science and can be integrated into the assembly process. There are after-market suppliers waiting in droves to help Toyota get this accomplished. With the new “truck” guy in Mike Sweers directing the future of the truck, this should be on the table.

Unlikely Changes:

HD version. There are a host of reasons that there won’t be a HD version with a diesel fuel option. Among the biggest? Lack of infrastructure and incredible obstacles in this category with regards to brand loyalty.

6.5’ bed. No we don’t really understand why they don’t offer it either, but they don’t. Unless, the 6.5′ foot bed catches fire with other truck makers, it is highly unlikely Toyota will offer this.

* We didn’t mention a larger fuel tank because, well, we don’t really know for sure if it is or it isn’t in the 2014 edition. Trust us though that if it isn’t coming, we will hammer our Toyota contacts to know why.

That’s our list, what’s yours? What was missing in the 2014 announcement that you would like to see?

The post 2015 Toyota Tundra What to Expect – 2014 Shortfalls? appeared first on Tundra Headquarters Blog.

Sometimes we have to be shocked into seeing something that was there all along.

For a senior executive I’ll call Karen, one of those defining moments came most unexpectedly when her boss tried to give her a one-line performance review for the third year in a row.

Before Karen was promoted to vice president, her annual evaluations had included detailed comments that guided her professional growth. This year, she was determined to elicit specific feedback, especially since she had just endured a stressful year leading a major project that defined the company’s future.

But when she pressed for more specifics, the president simply said, “I trust you to continue doing what you do so well, and I expect you’ll ask for my help if you need it.”

In that moment, she realized something profound: He was telling her that she was free. She was in charge of her own considerable domain — and her own life. Somehow, amid the pressures to meet operational goals and balance budgets, she had failed to notice the full implications of that shift.

She wanted to make sure she understood correctly. “You mean to say that I can push the envelope as far as I want, as long as I believe it is in the best interest of the company, and you’ll tell me when I’ve gone too far?”

He nodded his agreement. She was buoyed by the possibilities that her newfound freedom presented, and at the same time, she felt the weight of the responsibility this change implied. Before she even made it to the door, Karen started thinking about how she could take ownership — and advantage — of this situation.

What opportunities are right in front of you that you’ve yet to notice? I had one of those “aha” moments a few years ago when my then eight-year-old son asked me to pour him a glass of milk. As usual, I reflexively rose to get it for him even though he was standing right next to the refrigerator. This time, however, I noticed that he could easily reach everything he needed to get it for himself and probably could have done so for a couple of years already. Now that I’d noticed, I told him he could get his own milk from now on. Emptying the dishwasher soon made its way onto his chore list too.

Once back in her office, Karen acknowledged to herself that she’d been getting little pleasure from her work in the past several months. An increase in regulatory scrutiny in her industry required her to spend a great deal of time on compliance matters that bored her. She thought about how she could experience more joy at work. It would clearly require spending more time on projects she enjoyed and less on efforts that left her feeling drained. But how could she pull that off?

As she considered her options, she remembered that one of her colleagues had once contemplated a legal career. She wondered if he would be interested in taking over her compliance work. To her delight, he was excited to take on this project, which would involve his working extensively with the firm’s in-house counsel. In exchange, Karen took on one of his projects, an initiative that played more to her strengths in operations and large-scale project management and involved working with a vendor to implement a new computerized business-support system.

Once she was aware of her freedom, she took full advantage of it. In the process of breaking free of her least-favorite responsibility, she helped a colleague find more pleasure in his own work. What’s more, this redistribution of responsibilities better matched their respective skill sets. Within a few short weeks, both initiatives had advanced much more quickly than they had in the previous months.

Like Karen, you probably have more latitude to define your work than you realize. If you were free to approach your work differently, what would you change in order to boost your satisfaction and effectiveness?

• Give yourself time to think about your professional experience. What can you do to increase the percentage of your time devoted to projects that bring you joy and fulfillment?

• Give careful consideration to what you and your teammates can do to boost your levels of engagement, enjoyment, and contribution.

A major reason Karen hadn’t recognized, until her moment of truth, how much freedom she had was that she had never received formal leadership training. She is not alone. That’s often the case for people who are promoted because they are great engineers or physicians, for example. But the qualities that made them exceptional individual contributors didn’t prepare them for the challenges they later faced leading teams or projects.

Along with the freedom that comes with being the boss is the obligation to know what you don’t know and secure the resources you need to excel in your role. Seek out the professional development opportunities that will give you the tools you need to lead effectively. Consider working with an executive coach if you don’t know where to start or if you feel that you would benefit from individual attention.

You may not have much latitude to define the kinds of tasks you do at work. But no matter what your role, it’s likely that you have great freedom to define how you accomplish your assigned responsibilities. It’s up to you to find those opportunities and make the most of them.