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GC Capital has acquired a majority stake in Med-Tech Resource. Med-Tech supplies EMTs, fire departments, police departments and the military with critical emergency medical supplies. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

PRESS RELEASE

GC Capital, a private investment firm based in San Francisco, announced today that it has acquired a majority stake in Med-Tech Resource. Med-Tech supplies EMTs, fire departments, police departments and the military with critical emergency medical supplies. Michael Modrich, the founder of Med-Tech Resource, will remain as President; Modrich’s father and business partner, Gene Modrich, is retiring from the business. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 1996 in Eugene, Oregon, Med-Tech is the premier designer, manufacturer and distributor of first-responder emergency medical equipment and supplies. The Company offers over 20,000 high-quality products to the emergency medical market. Med-Tech sells these products through its dedicated sales team and website.

Michael Modrich, President and Founder of Med-Tech said, “I am pleased to have GC Capital as my new partner. They share our vision of growing Med-Tech while maintaining the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Their operational and financial expertise will help us expand our product portfolio as we continue to serve our customers with high-quality products and service.”

Greg Chiate, Partner at GC Capital stated, “Michael, along with the rest of his management team, built a strong and growing base business in the emergency medical supplies market. We are excited to partner with Med-Tech both financially and operationally to support their continued growth in this market as well as penetration into adjacent medical fields.”

About Med-Tech Resource
Med-Tech Resource is a designer, manufacturer and distributor of medical supplies and equipment to EMTs, fire departments, police departments and the military. The Company is dedicated to providing quality and cost-effective emergency medical equipment and supplies.

Med-Tech’s mission is to provide the highest level of customer satisfaction through innovative, high-quality products that improve health care delivery for caregivers and those they serve. With personalized Account Management, dedicated Customer Service, dependable Product Quality, and continued growth of Product Lines, the Company focuses on exceeding the demands of its customers.

www.gomed-tech.com

About GC Capital
GC Capital is a San Francisco-based private investment firm focused exclusively on acquisitions, recapitalizations and equity financings of lower middle market companies. The firm’s investments provide liquidity for owners, capital for growth and acquisitions, and a partnership to achieve equity appreciation.

GC Capital brings strategic, operational, and financial expertise to each investment to help its partners maximize their potential. The company’s two senior partners collectively have 40+ years of investing, acquisition and operational experience and have made equity investments totaling over $900 million. The partners’ transaction experience, diverse backgrounds, and track record of value creation offer a unique strategic partnering opportunity for founders and business owners interested in selling or recapitalizing their company.

The firm is privately funded utilizing its partners’ capital; it does not require outside equity capital to consummate transactions. GC Capital invests in a wide array of industries including healthcare, manufacturing, business services and specialty distributors, targeting companies with EBITDA of at least $1 million.

For more information contact:

Greg Chiate
415-547-0033
[email protected]

The post GC Capital Invests in Med-Tech Resource appeared first on peHUB.

GameStick, a would-be OUYA competitor that we wrote about back in January when it launched its Kickstarter campaign, has been delayed. The device achieved backing on Kickstarter in February and originally planned to start shipping in March, with “fulfilment to customer” pegged for April. But the launch has now been delayed until June — with the project creators saying it’s been a victim ”of the success we have created”.

Close to $650,000 was pledged via Kickstarter by almost 5,700 backers — more than 6x more money than the GameStick’s creators original goal of $100,000. When funding hit $560,000 they added a stretch goal introducing one more console colour to the mix, and giving backers the option to vote on a fourth colour choice via Facebook.

In an update to backers, the GameStick creators pointed to greater than expected production volumes as the reason for the three month delay, along with switching from air freight to sea shipping to keep costs down. ”The main production run has gone from a few thousand units to tens of thousands of units. This has meant that we have had to change production methods and move to high-volume tooling,” the message said.

The first backers are not expected to receive their GameSticks until the last week in June.

Initially we had hoped to deliver GameStick to you at the end of April. We now expect to complete mechanical tooling about 4 weeks later at the end of May. Then the units are assembled, tested and assuming there are no issues, packed prior to shipping to each territory. We expect to ship around the 10th June. The volumes are now too large for us to be able to afford to air-freight them, which was our plan, so now we are going to have to use sea freight to deliver them. That’s going to take around 2 weeks. Then we have fulfillment in territory – which we estimate will take between 1 and 5 days depending on where you are located. This means we think the likely date of arrival of your hand crafted GameStick will be at the last week of June.

The GameStick is so named for its USB stick design, which means the console is even smaller than the cube-shaped OUYA. The GameStick controller has a space to fit the console inside for safe keeping when it’s being carried in a bag or pocket.

As for internal hardware, the GameStick has a dual-core Cortex A9 chip clocked at 1.5GHz, along with a dual-core Mali 400 GPU at 400MHz, plus 1GB of memory and 8GB of flash storage. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi for connectivity and runs Android Jelly Bean. Gamepads, mice and keyboards can be hooked up to it — with support for up to four controllers at once.

Tonka Bay Equity Partners has acquired CORWIL Technology Corporation. Tonka Bay partnered with investor/CEO and industry veteran Matt Bergeron and co-founders Rob Corrao and Finn Wilhelmsen in this transaction.

PRESS RELEASE

Tonka Bay Equity Partners LLC (“Tonka Bay”) announced the acquisition of CORWIL Technology Corporation (“CORWIL”). Tonka Bay partnered with Investor/CEO and industry veteran Matt Bergeron and co-founders Rob Corrao and Finn Wilhelmsen in this transaction. Mr. Bergeron has been appointed President and a member of the board of directors of CORWIL. The acquisition of CORWIL is Tonka Bay’s fifth platform company investment in Fund III which closed in November 2011 with $150 million in available capital.

CORWIL is based in Milpitas, California, and is a leading provider of assembly and test services for integrated circuits. Founded in 1990, CORWIL has developed into a strategic manufacturing partner to its customers in high reliability market segments including medical devices and military/aerospace.

Rob Corrao, co-founder and member of the CORWIL Board, stated, “I’m excited for the next phase of CORWIL’s profitable growth. Tonka Bay is the right partner to help develop and execute our strategy to take CORWIL forward as we continue strengthening our quality, service offering and engineering capabilities.”

Molly Simmons, Principal of Tonka Bay and a CORWIL Board member added “We are thrilled with the opportunity to invest in CORWIL and to partner with Matt Bergeron and the company’s management team. CORWIL has a strong defensible niche in the on-shore assembly and test marketplace, with unique capabilities and deep customer relationships.”

About Tonka Bay Equity Partners
Based in Minnetonka, MN, Tonka Bay Equity Partners is a private equity firm that acquires and invests in growth-oriented businesses in the highly-engineered manufacturing, business services and value-added distribution sectors.

About CORWIL
CORWIL provides high quality integrated circuit assembly and test services to the medical, military and aerospace, OEM electronics and semiconductor industries. CORWIL is the premier provider of wafer thinning and dicing, optical inspection, full assembly and testing of integrated circuits and complex modules.

The post Tonka Bay Equity Partners Acquires CORWIL appeared first on peHUB.

Google may find itself in trouble for bundling key applications in its lineup with the Android operating system, after a lobbying group including Microsoft, Nokia and others complained to the European Commission over the practice.

The Microsoft-led group, called FairSearch, was already behind a previous (and as yet unresolved) complaint to the Commission over Google’s desktop search practices, in particular its alleged tendency to rank Google services higher than those of rivals. However, Nokia (the handset maker) and Oracle (the anti-Android litigator) joined FairSearch last September, indicating that the fight would be extended to the mobile sphere.

That has now happened. According to a FairSearch statement on Tuesday, “Google uses deceptive conduct to lock out competition in mobile”. The main issue at play here is the way in which Google bundles its suite of services with Android: if a phone manufacturer wants to build an Android phone that includes consumer favorites such as Maps or YouTube, the manufacturer is then also obliged to “pre-load an entire suite of Google mobile services and to give them prominent default placement on the phone”, the complaint states.

The other issue is that of Google’s distribution method. FairSearch characterizes the giving-away of Android as “predatory” and “below-cost”, arguing that it “makes it difficult for other providers of operating systems to recoup investments in competing with Google’s dominant mobile platform”.

According to FairSearch counsel Thomas Vinje:

“Google is using its Android mobile operating system as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to deceive partners, monopolize the mobile marketplace, and control consumer data. 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.”

So far, Google’s only response has been to say: “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.” Meanwhile, a New York Times interview with EU Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia suggests that European antitrust officials had already been looking into Android separately from their long-running Google desktop search investigation.

Is there a case here?

The fundamental concept in antitrust regulation is that of market dominance – if the target of the regulation doesn’t dominate the market in a way that potentially lets them stunt competition, regulators can’t hold them back, as that would mean distorting the market unnecessarily. That’s why I don’t believe anything will come of complaints made over Apple’s carrier contract terms, for example – iOS devices don’t actually dominate their market.

The case for Android dominating the smartphone market, though, is much stronger. We’re not talking about the levels of dominance Google enjoys in desktop search – there, it owns just under 90 percent of the market – but, as FairSearch has noted, around 70 percent of smartphones shipped worldwide at the end of 2012 carried Android. That is a lot, but does it amount to market dominance?

There are three main problems with this theory. The first is that iOS, while not dominant, is very strong; much stronger than OS X was as a rival to Windows when Microsoft (oh, the irony) got hit with a $794 million EU antitrust fine for bundling Windows Media Player with its OS. Indeed, in the EU, iOS has a market share of around 25 percent, and Android has a market share of just over 60 percent (the 70 percent figure quoted by FairSearch is weighted somewhat by the high numbers of Android phones being shipped to developing countries).

Secondly, it is viable to fork Android and forego the standard Google suite. Amazon has done just that with its Kindle Fire range of tablets, which is doing just fine. In China, Baidu has done the same, replacing the Google suite with its own services. In Russia, Yandex is also developing its own set of rivals to Google’s services, although its strategy is more a case of piggybacking on standard Android than of rip-out-and-replace – in itself, this demonstrates that rival services can get a chance on Android, particularly if the operator rolling out the phone is keen.

Finally, this is a market in constant flux. Android’s rise has certainly been meteoric, but there is a chance that some alternative, whether it be Firefox OS or a Kindle phone or a de-Googlified Samsung OS, will stop it in its tracks. Microsoft and Nokia would certainly have something to gain from straitjacketing Google in the near future, as they want Windows Phone to succeed, but the regulators may be queasy at the thought of interfering in an already tumultuous scene.

In short, this one is complicated. Whatever happens, though, it’s a formal complaint, so the EU will be forced to acknowledge it and decide whether or not to launch a formal investigation.

Anything else?

Glad you asked! Almunia also dropped a few interesting tidbits in that NYT interview about the Google search case. He insisted that the Commission wouldn’t require Google to change its ranking algorithms, but he did say Google would need to start more clearly identifying results that link to its own services.

“Maybe we will ask Google to signal what are the relevant options, alternative options, in the way they present the results,” he suggested.

According to Almunia, Google will submit proposals this week about settling the investigation. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has already concluded a similar investigation without any major crackdown on Google, but that will not necessarily influence the Commission’s thinking, particularly as Google has a greater share of the European search market than it does in the U.S.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• What to watch in mobile in 2013
• Development strategies for the app-developer community
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

App developers are finding more and more ways to take advantage of Widgets in Android. As any Android fan knows, Widgets are one of the major benefits of using Android over iOS.  Widgets give us the ability to preview apps without having to open them time-and-time again (wipe the drool from your chins Apple fanboys [and girls]).

As awesome as Widgets are, developers continue to strive to make them that much better. Applay, headed up by XDA Senior Member liorry, has done just that with its “Overlays” app.  Overlays enables users to “take any existing widget and effectively pin it on top of any currently running application.” Hit the break for a gallery of images and download links for both the paid for and free versions of the app.There are some amazing uses for overlaying Widgets over running apps, such as placing music controls on top of a navigation app, or keeping a calculator hovering over a spreadsheet. Overlaying also lets you float your Twitter or Facebook feed over a running YouTube video (similar to Samsung’s Sense 5 on the GSIII and GS4).

Overlays enables the use of profiles that automatically float selected Widgets whenever certain apps are opened and then remove them when closed. The app also comes preloaded with overlays for commonly used information Widgets, like Battery Level, SMS/Missed Call Counts, Weather, and Time.

Unfortunately, Overlays is only available for users running Android 4.0 and higher. But with the number of devices running Jelly Bean on the rise, it won’t be long before everyone can take advantage of Overlay’s useful functionality.

Overlays Free

Play Store Download Link

Overlays Pro

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Overlays Android Application Floats Widgets Over Currently Running Apps

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