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Do capped data plans make LTE connectivity a waste for tablets? Perhaps, but don’t tell that to the millions of people who are adding their tablets to their monthly shared plans. New research from Strategy Analytics has found that more than 40 million tablets are hooked up to either 3G or 4G mobile networks, roughly double the number of tablets that had data plans for 3G and 4G networks in 2012. The firm projects that there will be around 165 million tablets on mobile data plans by 2017, an eight-fold increase from the number of tablets on data plans in 2012. Strategy Analytics analyst Susan Welsh de Grimaldo notes that “while direct mobile broadband subscriptions on tablets represent less than 10 percent of the total tablet installed base in 2012, they were a key driver of positive postpaid net additions at leading operators AT&T and Verizon Wireless in Q1 2013.” The firm’s full press release is posted below.

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Your Roomba can’t jump, can it? UPenn researchers presented the acrobatic feats of their X-RHex-Light robot today at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Germany.

Their research paper “Toward a Vocabulary of Legged Leaping” details how they taught the robot the tricks to not only run, but also jump and execute the equivalent of robotic back flips and triple jumps. The nearly 15-pound, 20-inch long robot can jump up ledges, and can even do leap grabs that let it ascend an impressive 28 inches. Now that the robot knows the leaping lingo, it could use it to take instruments or sensors to the right locations, or right itself when it flips over.

Image via UPenn Kod*lab

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The iPhone 5 has come under a lot of scrutiny lately, with both analysts and Apple suppliers claiming that they’ve seen disappointing demand for the device, but now it seems that demand for the iPad mini may be falling as well. Bloomberg reports that iPad mini manufacturer Pegatron is projecting that its second-quarter revenue “will drop 25% to 30% from the previous three months,” which marks the biggest drop since “a 37% decline in the fourth quarter of 2011.” Pegatron CEO Jason Cheng said that falling demand for Apple’s smaller tablet was a significant part of the plunge in revenues, while adding that it’s “not just tablets, also e-books and games consoles, almost every item is moving in a negative direction.” Bloomberg says that the iPad mini accounts than more than 50% of Pegatron’s revenue.

Although it is still seen by many as a place for networking with colleagues and/or posting a digital curriculum vitae, LinkedIn has been behaving a lot more like a media entity recently — and a revamp of its LinkedIn Today offering that launched on Wednesday is one more step in that evolution. The site now offers “channels” or categories of news, much like a magazine would, and users can follow or subscribe to those channels, as well as to individual authors who are part of LinkedIn’s Influencer program, another relatively new addition.

When a user clicks on the News heading in their LinkedIn toolbar, they now get a splash screen that outlines the different categories or channels of news they can subscribe to. There are some fairly obvious examples such as Economy, Entrepreneurship and Leadership, as well as broader categories such as Healthcare, Technology and Social Media — and a few somewhat more unusual channels too, like “Things I Carry” and “My Best Career Mistake.”

Once you pick your categories, the site shows you a redesigned LinkedIn Today page that looks very much like the front page of a magazine website: there is one larger story with a big image at the top, and then smaller stories by category. But the biggest difference between a traditional magazine and LinkedIn’s offering is that the stories on LinkedIn Today come from everywhere — hundreds of different sites and publications, from Wired to the New York Times. In other words, the site is acting more like a Flipboard-style aggregator, which probably isn’t surprising since it recently bought Flipboard competitor Pulse.

Whether or not this is just another attempt by LinkedIn to make the site more “sticky” and get users to spend more time there, it has the potential to become a real competitor to other news aggregators and providers. As I mentioned in a recent post about why it would make sense for LinkedIn to buy Pulse, one of the tools the site has going for it is an understanding of a user’s “interest graph” as it pertains to their business and/or professional life. That’s a valuable commodity.

Under former Fortune magazine editor Dan Roth — who talked about LinkedIn’s media ambitions on a panel at our recent paidContent Live conference in New York — the company has been expanding its reach for some time, including the launch of the Influencer program. That involves bringing in prominent personalities like Sir Richard Branson and giving them a place to host their writing, something that is similar to what Evan Williams is trying to do with his new company Medium (although it is focused more on literary content).

LinkedIn may not have created a “massive media empire” — as one rather breathless piece posted (on LinkedIn Today, of course) described it — but there is no question the site has media-related ambitions, and it is following through on them. And its ability to target specific users based on their interest graph gives it a potentially powerful weapon that other media entities lack.

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Digital rentals and downloads through sites like iTunes and Amazon are the main factor in the healthy growth of News Corp’s home video business, News Corp president and COO Chase Carey said in the company’s Q3 earnings call Wednesday afternoon.

Fox’s cable TV business made up the vast majority of News Corp’s profits for the quarter ending March 31, contributing $993 million of the $1.36 billion in operating income for the period. Total revenues were $9.54 billion, up 14 percent over the previous year.

The overall home video market is up five percent and “we’re up a bit more than that,” Carey said. “The driving force is digital…the overall marketplace continues to grow really well, and digital is becoming a growing part of what we do.” He also said that the DVD business has stabilized, “with Blu-Ray offsetting the decline in the older formats,” and that “really low-priced rentals” through services like Redbox  are “becoming less of a force.”

In response to an analyst’s question about the future of Hulu, Carey said that the service has “great momentum,” and “we’re particularly excited about subscriptions” through Hulu Plus. “There’s an important role for Hulu Classic in the marketplace,” he said, but “we need to develop the dual-revenue side of it.” In a few years, he said, “Hulu will look a bit different than it does today,” partly in response to changes in Netflix’s business: “Netflix talks about evolving their business to somewhat different business models” (he didn’t elaborate on what those are).

When asked to offer general advice to the broadcast networks, Carey said they are still the “viewership leaders,” but acknowledged the networks might need to “be a bit more targeted in the types of series [they] invest in…networks have been more about the volume game, stuck in historical practices…Do you need to break some of those rules? The answer is clearly yes.”

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Tesla’s shares are soaring — even more than they already did this week — on news that the company has hit the milestone of delivering the first quarterly profit in the company’s history.

Tesla’s shares rose at one point almost 30 percent in after hour trading to over $70 per share. Earlier this week Tesla’s shares had hit an all-time high of over $60 per share.

When Tesla held its IPO and started trading back in the summer of 2010, it went public at $17 per share. It’s $70-per-share milestone in after hours trading is more than four times that initial IPO price.

Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have ambitions far higher than this current marketcap and stock price. Musk has a payout package that allocates shares when Tesla’s marketcap adds $4 billion up until it reaches $43.2 billion, along with accompanying operating milestones.

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The 911 operator who took the call from kidnap victim Amanda Berry has come under fire and is reportedly being investigated by her superiors after the recording was released this week.

Berry, who went missing at age 14 in 2003, has been held captive with two other women for ten years in a Cleveland home by Ariel Castro, who allegedly kept them as his sex slaves. She gave birth to a daughter during that time, and investigators are doing tests to determine who the girl’s father is (Castro’s two brothers are alleged accomplices). With the help of a neighbor who heard her cries for help, Berry was able to escape to a nearby home and call police while Castro was out of the house.

After Berry screams her name and says she needs help because she’s just escaped, the dispatch operator can be heard telling Berry to “talk to police when they get there” and says that a car will be sent as soon as it’s available. And though 911 operators are expected to say calm in any situation, many think this woman didn’t show any compassion to a woman who was frantic to get help before her captor came back.

Berry, her daughter, and the two other women have been examined by doctors and are reportedly in good condition, although there were allegedly repeated pregnancies and miscarriages between the three adults over the years as they suffered the abuse of Castro and his brothers.

Slacker is on track to partner with a major telco provider later this year to offer its audio service to the company’s subscribers, CEO Jim Cady told me during an interview this week. Cady expects that the partnership, which sounds a lot like Cricket’s Muve Music venture, will net Slacker “million of paid subscribers.”

Slacker, which competes with both Pandora and Spotify, relaunched its service in February with a bigger focus on a general-consumer audience as well as mobile listening. Cady told me that Slacker used to be geared towards hardcore music fans, but now tries to appeal to everyone looking for a combination of a curated radio experience and a subscription music service.

That revamp seems to be paying off: the company has added 100,000 paying subscribers as well as a total of six million listeners to the fold. Cady didn’t want to tell me the total number of people who currently pay for Slacker, only stating that it was somewhere between 0.5 and 1 million. But he did point towards a big growth in mobile, with 3.5 million new listeners on mobile devices since the relaunch.

Given that kind of mobile momentum, doubling down on carrier relationships does make sense for Slacker. Cady said that the company already has its app bundled on select handsets, and has billing relationships with all major carriers in place.

He didn’t spell out the details of the upcoming carrier partnership, which Slacker plans to announce in the second half of this year, but the logical next step would be to offer Slacker’s service as a default radio and music package to all subscribers of a certain tier, or even a carrier’s entire customer base.

That’s something the prepaid wireless provider Cricket has pioneered in the US with its Muve Music service. The company has been selling Muve as part of the data plan for all of its Android phones, and it now has more than 1.4 million paying subscribers. 

Another area of growth that Slacker is looking to is automotive integration. Slacker is already part of the Tesla S console, and Cady said that Tesla owners listen two to three times as much as the average Slacker user, with some even clocking more than 100 listening hours a month.

Cady said that the car is an ideal platform for Slacker because it uses a more radio-like model. The service offers curated radio stations with DJS announcing titles, and even has news programming and other non-music content – all of which works great in the car. Said Cady: “People want to listen to more than just music.”

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Bunker Hill Capital, a Boston-based private equity firm, has acquired Dyno Holdco, LLC, the exclusive licensee of the Singer brand for sewing accessories and a large producer and marketer of holiday decorative home products. Dyno, based in Pompano Beach, Fla., was previously owned by TG Capital Corp. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE:

Bunker Hill Capital, a Boston based private equity firm, announced today that it has acquired Dyno Holdco, LLC (“Dyno” or the “Company”), the exclusive licensee of the Singer brand for sewing accessories and one of the largest producers and marketers of holiday decorative home products in North America from TG Capital Corp. The exclusive license enables Dyno to sell a large and diverse portfolio of sewing products, including cutting instruments, fasteners, needles, thread and a wide variety of other sewing related notions and accessories from an iconic sewing and craft brand.

Dyno’s sewing business is complemented by its holiday decorative home products that include holiday-oriented home décor, holiday decorations and ornaments, tree stands, decorative bows, light-hanging accessories and storage solutions. Like its sewing products, a portion of Dyno’s holiday products are marketed under proprietary or licensed brands, or are protected by product design patents.

Jim Moynihan, CEO of Dyno, stated that, “We are excited about the opportunity to partner with Bunker Hill Capital to continue to grow the company’s diverse portfolio of sewing, craft and holiday products. The management team believes that Bunker Hill Capital provides the company with extensive strategic expertise that will accelerate our growth both domestically and internationally. Importantly, we share a common vision of becoming the market leader in each of our core businesses.”

“Dyno’s two major product categories sell to a substantially similar demographic mix of consumers at recession resistant price points and offer both organic and acquisitive growth opportunities. We are excited to partner with Jim Moynihan and his team.”

Headquartered in Pompano Beach, FL, and with offices in Chicago, IL and Hong Kong, Dyno has achieved strong revenue and earnings growth driven by its Singer license and expansion into new holiday product categories both organically and through acquisition. Mark DeBlois, a Managing Partner of Bunker Hill Capital, said, “Dyno’s two major product categories sell to a substantially similar demographic mix of consumers at recession resistant price points and offer both organic and acquisitive growth opportunities. We are excited to partner with Jim Moynihan and his team.”

Dyno sells to over 50,000 retail locations across nearly every major sales channel in North America. Customers include major food, drug and mass retailers, home improvement/DIY retailers, fabric and craft retailers and wholesale clubs, such as Walmart, Jo-Ann, Lowe’s, Walgreens, Target, CVS, The Home Depot, Kmart, Kroger and Canadian Tire. Jared Paquette, a Principal at Bunker Hill Capital, commented, “The Dyno management team has done an excellent job in building a well-diversified products platform across multiple sales channels and two complementary product categories, providing a strong foundation for future growth.”

Bunker Hill Capital’s investment was the first investment from its second fund. Bunker Hill Capital owns a majority and controlling interest in Dyno and was joined in the transaction with equity and subordinated debt investments from management and The Hartford Investment Management Company, and senior debt was provided by SunTrust Bank.

About Dyno

Founded in 1953, Dyno is the exclusive licensee of the Singer brand for sewing accessories and one of the largest producers and marketers of sewing products in North America. The exclusive license enables Dyno to sell a large and diverse portfolio of sewing products, including cutting instruments, fasteners, needles, thread and a wide variety of other sewing related notions and accessories. Dyno’s sewing business is complemented by its holiday decorative home products that include holiday-oriented home décor, holiday decorations and ornaments, tree stands, decorative bows, light-hanging accessories and storage solutions.

About Bunker Hill Capital

Bunker Hill Capital is a private equity firm that makes investments in lower middle market companies with enterprise values up to $120 million. The principals of Bunker Hill Capital have invested over $450 million in 31 transactions and target opportunities across four industry sectors including industrial products, business services, consumer products and specialty retail. Bunker Hill Capital’s current portfolio company investments include California Family Fitness, the leading owner and operator of fitness centers in the greater Sacramento, CA area; Papa Gino’s/D’Angelo, a dominant quick service restaurant operator in New England; Smith & Wollensky, a premier steakhouse concept in the United States; SunBriteTV, the world’s leading designer, manufacturer and supplier of all-weather outdoor televisions and related accessories; and IT Consulting Services Holdings, a leading SAP services firm. For more information on Bunker Hill Capital, please visit www.bunkerhillcapital.com.

The post Bunker Hill Capital Acquires Dyno Holdco appeared first on peHUB.

Nancy Grace has almost as many detractors as she does loyal followers, so it’s no surprise that after an odd interview popped up on CNN between her and Ashleigh Banfield, screenshots began making their way around the web faster than you can say, “When I was a prosecuting attorney”.

Grace has been in Arizona to cover every moment of the Jodi Arias trial, but found herself at a disadvantage when news broke earlier this week that three kidnapped women had escaped their tormentor in Cleveland, Ohio. Unable to get to the scene, Grace had to rely on CNN to patch her through to Banfield so she could get caught up via a split-screen interview. The thing is, Banfield was in Arizona, too. In the same parking lot.

Video of the interview shows the same cars rolling by in the background of both women, just a few seconds apart. Apparently, they’re chillin’ in the same forty feet of space, but are squinting into the camera and holding the earpieces firmly in their ears as though they’re on opposite sides of the world. It should also be noted that Banfield held another split-screen interview with someone else who was in the same parking lot.

“File Storage Costs Less in the Cloud Than In-House”
Pay-as-you-go pricing can save you as much as 74 percent over in-house storage, making the cloud an attractive choice. But as this report from Forrester Research, Inc., makes clear, analyzing the real costs of internal versus cloud storage is difficult without a reliable methodology — like the one this report provides.

“Four Ways to Relieve Data Storage Stress”
As the glut of data grows, businesses of all types are grappling with the same basic problem: where to put it all. According to this report, the cloud can be an important part of the answer for your company, especially if you know how and when to use cloud storage to the best advantage.

“Top 10 Considerations for Cloud Computing”
As business users push for faster and easier ways to roll out the applications they need, cloud usage is on the rise. Unfortunately, many cloud projects are initiated outside the IT realm — and without clear requirements or measurable objectives. Here’s a checklist to help you take a more strategic approach to the cloud.

Rhode Island School of Design President (RISD) John Maeda, a well known author of popular and influential books such as Redesigning Leadership (Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life) and The Laws of Simplicity, believes that health and medicine are going to change for the better because of design-oriented thinking.

In a presentation at the TEDMED 2013 conference last month, he talked about how design principles lead to more discovery and better treatment. Maeda (a speaker at our RoadMap 2012 conference) is persuasive, to say the least. Enjoy the video, and make sure to check out our RoadMap 2013 conference in November in San Francisco, as Maeda is working with us on the event (tickets will go on sale in the summer).

Given that Samsung is one of only two smartphone vendors in the world to post significant profits, it’s not surprising that it has been accumulating a massive pile of cash that it can plug into research and development or even return to shareholders as part of increased dividend payments. The Wall Street Journal notes that Samsung’s latest earnings report shows that the company now has almost $40 billion in cash and cash equivalents, while its net cash position minus debt is around $28.5 billion.

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Universities have been pioneer participants in developing and using the internet since its inception. Now, the consortium of education and research institutions known as Internet2 has reached another milestone, with the announcement that the University of Florida has implemented Internet2’s next-gen computing architecture, the Innovation Platform. The platform should bring superfast connections and software-defined networking (SDN) to campuses across the country.

The 300 or so universities and government labs that belong to Internet2 have been able to access a 100Gb network backbone since its launch in 2006. But on Tuesday UF became only the fourth university to roll out a full 100Gbps connection to  Internet2 (most other schools are still at 10Gbps and working to expand to full bandwidth), and the only school so far to fulfill the other two Innovation Platform requirements: SDN and a Science DMZ, a kind of buffer between the campus network and the wider internet that lets research computing move freely without firewalls. The amplified bandwidth will let researchers share huge amounts of data or access supercomputer resources, like the simultaneously announced HiPerGator. With a peak speed of 150 teraflops, HiPerGator is Florida’s fastest supercomputer and one of the top 500 supercomputers globally.

Everything from genome sequencing to drug discovery and climate modeling relies on computing power, and 30-odd schools are working to realize the Innovation Platform to fully take advantage of big data research and long-distance collaboration. SDN, for example, will allow disparate machines to be programmed to communicate, share, and manipulate data, a step towards a massive academic data center. Another project that will be made possible by the Innovation Platform is the Global Environment for Network Innovations, a testbed for exploring future internets and developing network science and engineering breakthroughs that is supported by the National Science Foundation.

Internet2 has been a roll lately on other fronts, collaborating with the Smithsonian Institution on content distribution and launching a videoconferencing service from Vidyo. There are also over 30 cloud services available to Internet2 member institutions, including collaboration, storage, and productivity apps. While Internet2 is in no way designed to replace the commercial web, the tech it spawns will probably impact the cyberinfrastructure we depend on, and that will be crucial for fields like tele-medicine and big data.

Images via Internet2

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Electric car maker Tesla Motors delivered Wednesday on its promise that it would turn its first profit ever in the first quarter of 2013 and also generated a record amount of revenue, giving it the confidence to increase the guidance for its annual Model S sales by 1,000 cars. At the same time, Tesla admitted that $68 million, or 12 percent, of its revenue for the quarter came from selling ZEV credits, something which has been riling other auto makers.

For the quarter, Tesla generated $11.25 million in income, compared to a net loss of $89.87 million for the year for the first quarter of 2012. On a non-GAAP basis Tesla said net income for the quarter was $15.42 million.

Ten-year-old Tesla also set a revenue record for the quarter, which isn’t surprising given this was the first quarter where it had a full three months of full-scale Model S production. Tesla generated $561.8 million in revenue for the quarter, compared with revenue of just $30.17 million for the first quarter of 2012.

There’s been a lot of talk about how much of Tesla’s revenue and profit for this quarter would come from the sales of zero emission vehicle (ZEV) credits to automakers. The LA Times reported that Tesla can make $35,000 per Model S car sold in ZEV credits, which could generate up to $250 million for Tesla this year.

Tesla addressed that point in its shareholder letter and said that Tesla generated $68 million from ZEV credits for the quarter, or 12 percent of revenues. If Tesla generated that amount for each quarter it could bring in $272 million from ZEV credits for the year. However, Tesla said that it expects its use of ZEV credits to decline because the ZEV credits only apply to a sixth of international sales, compared to half of U.S. sales.

Tesla is so confident of its manufacturing capabilities this quarter that it raised its guidance for the year by 1,000 cars. Tesla now says it expects to ship 21,000 Model S cars, instead of 20,000. Tesla says it is receiving orders of over 20,000 cars per year.

Tesla’s margins are also improving significantly, and the company has a target of 25 percent gross margin by the end of 2013. This quarter Tesla delivered 17 percent gross margin, up from 8 percent in the last quarter of 2012. That 25 percent margin is without ZEV credit, Tesla noted.

Tesla shares jumped almost 30 percent in after hours trading on Wednesday to over $70 per share.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in the call with analyst and media:

• On ZEV credits: Musk said he expects a decline of ZEV credits in Q2, and Q3 and potentially no ZEV credits in Q4.
• Tesla plans to spend $200 million in capital expenses in 2013, and that includes things like Model S factory tooling, new product development, and building out the Super Charger Network.
• Musk said Tesla has no plans right now to raise more funding.
• Tesla has a seen a meaningful improvement on demand because of the financing product.
• 10,000 Model S sales are expected from Europe, 5,000 are expected in Asia. “China is a wild card,” said Musk. Up until the second quarter of 2013, all of Model S sales have been in the U.S.
• Tesla’s top focus this year is on improving the efficiency of production of the Model S.

Updated at 3:10PM PST, with information from Tesla’s call and the stock price.

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In his State of the Union address, President Obama laid out his belief that a thriving middle class is the engine of economic growth — one that we can reignite by investing in jobs, skills, and opportunity.

Tomorrow, the President is making his first stop on a series of Middle Class Jobs and Opportunity Tours, traveling to Austin, Texas to learn more about what's being done there to create stable and well-paying jobs that can support a middle-class family. He'll visit a high school where  students are learning real-world skills for today's jobs and meet technology entrepreneurs who are creating the tools and products that will drive America's long-term economic growth.

We checked in with Todd Park, the United States Chief Technology Officer, to find out more about the President's trip. Hear what he had to say below. 

This afternoon, Cecilia Muñoz sent the message below to the White House email list, asking people to share their American stories. If you didn't get the email, be sure to sign up.

Hi everyone —

This is the start of a national debate. Across the country, we're having a serious discussion about how we can build a fair and effective immigration system that lives up to our heritage as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

And we need your help to make sure that genuine, personal perspectives are part of the conversation. The truth is, that if we go back far enough, nearly every American story begins somewhere else — so often with ancestors setting out in search of a different life, carving out a future for their children in this place that all of us now call home.

We want to make sure that idea isn't far from the minds of policymakers here in Washington as we work to reach an agreement to reform immigration.

To kick things off, one of the President's senior advisors sat down to share his story with you.

Watch David Simas tell his American story, then tell us yours.

When Americans from all over the country — each with different backgrounds, each from different circumstances — all speak out with the same voice, it's powerful in a way that's hard to ignore. We've seen it again and again, in debate after debate.

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