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Jack Pouchet is vice president of business development and director of energy initiatives for Emerson Network Power.

Data center energy efficiency has been an increasing focus since the issue emerged in 2007. We believe dramatic energy savings can be realized without heroic measures that compromise availability. The key is to focus on the core IT systems, rather than just support systems. This is based on the cascade effect, which shows that focusing first on saving energy at the server-component level will drive energy savings throughout the data center.

In 2007, Emerson Network Power introduced a free, vendor-neutral roadmap to saving 50 percent of your data center energy use. While many of the roadmap’s core principals –- such as the cascade effect –- still hold true, the industry has evolved at rapid rate over the past five years. The need to maintain or to build highly available data centers remains the same, but IT and critical infrastructure technologies have changed, creating new opportunities to optimize efficiency and capacity strategies.

As a result, we’ve updated the approach to incorporate advances in technology and new best practices that have emerged since 2007.

Ten updated strategies serve as a roadmap. In total, they have the potential to reduce a data center’s energy use by up to 74 percent in a typical 5,000 square-foot data center with a PUE of 1.9 and energy consumption of 1.5 MW.

• Low-Power Components: The cascade effect rewards energy savings at the server component level, which is why low-power components, such as high-efficiency processors, represent the first step. [Save 172KW or 11.2%].
• High-Efficiency Power Supplies: Power supply efficiency has improved since our original approach in 2007, but power supplies continue to consume more energy than is necessary. The average power supply efficiency is now estimated at 86.6 percent, well below the 93 percent that is available. [Save 110KW or 7.1%].
• Server Power Management: Server power management can significantly reduce the energy consumption of idle servers. Data center infrastructure management systems that collect real-time operating data from rack power distribution systems and then consolidate that data can track server utilization, aiding in the effective use of power management. [146KW or 9.4%].
• ICT Architecture: Unoptimized network architectures can compromise efficiency and performance. Implementing a cohesive ICT architecture involves establishing policies and rules to guide design and deployment of the networking infrastructure, ensuring all data center systems fall under the same rules and management policies. [Save 53 KW or 3.5%].
• Server Virtualization and Consolidation: Virtualization is facilitating the consolidation of older, power-wasting servers onto much less hardware. It also increases the ability of IT staff to respond to changing business needs and computing requirements. Most data centers have already discovered the benefits of virtualization, but there is often opportunity to go further. [Save 448KW or 29%].
• Power Architecture: Historically, data center designers and managers have had to choose between availability and efficiency in the data center power system. Now, new advances in double-conversion UPS technology have closed the gap in efficiency, and new features enable double-conversion UPS systems to reach efficiencies on-par with line-interactive systems. [Save 63KW or 4.1%].
• Temperature and Airflow Management: Take temperature, humidity and airflow management to the next level through containment, intelligent controls and economization. From an efficiency standpoint, one of the primary goals of preventing hot and cold air from mixing is to maximize the temperature of the return air to the cooling unit. [Save 80KW or 5.2%].
• Variable-Capacity Cooling: Cooling must be sized to handle peak load conditions, which occur rarely in the typical data center. Cooling systems that can adapt to changing condition and operate efficiently at partial loads save energy. [Save 40KW or 2.6%].
• High-Density Cooling: Optimizing data center energy efficiency requires moving from traditional data center densities to an environment that can support much higher densities. High-density cooling makes that possible. [Save 23KW or 1.5%].
• Data Center Infrastructure Management: Data center infrastructure management technology can collect, consolidate and integrate data across IT and facilities systems to provide a centralized real-time view of operations that can help optimize data center efficiency, capacity and availability. DCIM also delivers significant operational efficiencies by providing auto-discovery of data center systems and simplifying the process of planning for and implementing new systems. [Because DCIM is integral to many Energy Logic 2.0 strategies, it isn’t possible in this model to attribute an isolated savings percentage to DCIM.]

This new process demonstrates the potential that still exists to optimize the data center. The introduction of a new generation of management systems that provide greater visibility and control of data center systems, and a continued emphasis on efficiency, serve as proof that there is no time like the present for the industry to begin taking significant actions to reduce the overall energy consumption of data centers.

To see how much each strategy can save your data center visit the Cascading Savings Calculator. This online tool lets you explore the impact of each strategy by entering information that is specific to your data center, such as the load and facility PUE.

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

Windows software management is a tedious business. If you want to download a particular program, you have to find the relevant website, then the download link, save the file locally, grab any other components the program might need, and install everything in the right order. You’ll need to start again for every new program. And they’ll all have their own procedures for updating, or uninstalling.

What if you could automate all of this, though? Manage downloads, updates and everything else, just with a few keypresses? That’s the aim of Chocolatey, a tool which brings Linux-like package management to the PC.

The program comes in the form of a PowerShell-based command line tool. And yes, we know, that’s less than ideal, but don’t let it put you off just yet. Chocolately doesn’t require any PowerShell knowledge to use; if you use the command line occasionally then you’ll be able to try out.

Getting started is simple, as there’s nothing for you to download. Just paste the text below into a command prompt (copy it to the clipboard, launch cmd.exe, right-click in the window, select Paste) and press Enter.

@powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy unrestricted -Command “iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString(‘http://chocolatey.org/install.ps1′))” && SET PATH=%PATH%;%systemdrive%\chocolatey\bin

The Chocolatey code should download automatically, while status messages keep you up-to-date with the installation process. And when it’s done, close and reopen the command window and you’re ready to go.

Installing programs is now as simple as using the “cinst” command. Would you like a copy of Skype, for instance? Type “cinst skype” (less the quotes), press Enter, and Chocolatey will handle the rest. Or try “cinst keepas” to install KeePass Password Manager, “cinst procexp” for Process Explorer, “cinst gimp” for the GIMP image editor, and more. (Enter “clist” at the command line for the full list of packages, or use “clist | clip” to copy the list to the clipboard).

This isn’t just a matter of downloading an installation file and leaving you to do the rest, either. If a program needs something else installing before it’ll work, Chocolatey will grab that first. And as long as the application allows it, installation is silent – there’s no working your way through some tedious setup program.

Better still, Chocolatey can also handle updates for you. So if you need the latest version of Firefox, just enter “chocolatey update firefox” (or “cup firefox” for short) and it’ll be downloaded and installed.

Or, if you really want to save time, using “cup all” will check everything you’ve installed via Chocolatey and update it to the latest version.

Plainly the command line approach here is still a hassle, but the key is that it’s scriptable, and that brings some very interesting opportunities.

If you want to set up a PC to your specifications, then you could create a batch file with the appropriate “cinst” commands (as you’ve seen, they’re not exactly complicated). Once Chocolatey is installed on the target system, run the batch file and all the programs you need will be downloaded and installed. Add another shortcut to run updates – or maybe a batch file which you have Task Scheduler run once a day – and suddenly your software maintenance has become a whole lot easier.

Photo Credit: Yellowj/Shutterstock

On Wednesday, Jawbone announced that the companion app for the UP wristband is finally available for Android. Green droid users can now track the way they “sleep, move and eat 24/7” on a number of popular Android smartphones, ranging from the HTC Droid DNA to the Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Alongside the announcement, Jawbone also revealed a couple of interesting statistics related to the UP wristband community. The company says that the community “gets the most sleep on the weekends”, “is most engaged in logging meals on Mondays”, “has shown that activity doesn’t necessarily mean working out: users get the steps on Fridays, but workout most on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays” and “take the least steps on Saturdays and Sundays”.

Jawbone says that through the Android companion app, UP users can track their physical and sleep activity, log their drink, food and track nutritional info, set idle alerts to remind them to get some exercise and “Smart Sleep Alarms” to wake up feeling “refreshed”, join friends and receive insights into establishing and completing goals.

The UP companion app is currently compatible only with a limited number of Android handsets (no tablets to speak of in case you are wondering). For the United States the list includes the LG-made Google Nexus 4 and Optimus G, Motorola Droid Razr Maxx HD, Samsung Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II and Galaxy S III and Sony Xperia TL. European UP users have to use an LG Nexus 4, Samsung Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II Plus or Galaxy S III or the Sony Xperia Acro or Xperia S.

Jawbone also announced that the UP wristband is available in Europe with Asia, Australia and the Middle East to follow the old continent in April. This brings the tally up to more than 25 additional markets worldwide, a move complemented by introducing support for 11 new languages in the iOS companion app.

The UP by Jawbone app is available to download from Google Play.

Launch most photo editors for the first time and they’ll try to impress you with their serious credentials: flyout toolbars, feature-packed menus and so on.

Run the free PhoXo, though, and what you’ll notice first is the Clip Art window, all smiling emoticons and cartoon pigs. Not much chance of doing any serious work here, you might think, but wait — give the program a little time and you just might change your mind.

Close the Clip Art and Frame windows and PhoXo looks a little more like a regular image editor. It can open a basic range of formats (JPG, PNG, PSD, BMP, TIFF, TGA, ICO), and supports all the usual core editing options: crop, resize, rotate, sharpen and so on.

Keep exploring, though, and you’ll find the program often gives you more functionality than you might expect. There’s not just the standard Blur filter, for instance. You also get a Zoom Blur, a Radial Blur, a very effective Motion Blur, even a despeckle option.

There are plenty of colour adjustments, too: hue and saturation; RGB; color tone, level and balance; gamma; automatic contrast and enhance options, and more. And the layer support provides plenty of creative opportunities.

As we explored elsewhere, PhoXo kept coming up with surprises. For example, we expected the Shape tool to just draw a few basic shapes on top of the current image. But in reality the shapes immediately acted as a frame for your photo, so drawing a heart shape around a couple, say, would crop to that part of the image. (And there are some interesting shapes, including some with rough edges.)

The Effects menu is another area which initially looks disappointing, as many of the filters sound extremely familiar. But again, PhoXo really delivered. The “Oil Painting” option gave us particularly good results, right away. And “Lens Flare” was similarly effective, while also being so easy that just about anyone could use it.

As ever, it’s not all good news, and there are a few interface oddities here. In particular, the program always opens full-screen, regardless of how you closed it; we were constantly reaching for the Edit menu, just through habit, but annoyingly there isn’t one; zoom handling is a little awkward, and the program would benefit from more keyboard shortcuts.

Overall, though, PhoXo is an excellent editor, easy enough for beginners yet with the power to do more serious work.

Photo Credit: Imageman/Shutterstock

Today, March 20, 2013, marks the first ever International Day of Happiness. This was decreed last year by the United Nations following a meeting on well-being attended by government officials, economists, scholars, and business and spiritual leaders from around the world. It was hosted by Bhutan, a small but visionary country which famously uses Gross National Happiness (GNH) instead of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to index its progress.

The King of Bhutan, Jigme Khesar, has described GNH as “the bridge between the fundamental values of kindness, equality and humanity and the necessary pursuit of economic growth.” He’s talking, of course, about the well-documented connection between well-being and productivity — an interplay that should interest business leaders as much as it does political ones. As this issue of HBR makes clear, happy, engaged employees are good for the organization. Research shows they have better health, are more creative, produce better results, and are willing to go the extra mile. What’s more, happiness is contagious; it creates a virtuous spiral that leads to further engagement.

So how can leaders create happier organizations?

Perhaps the first step is to clarify what we mean by “happy”. Psychologists typically identify happiness by three distinct pathways. The first is the pleasant life, which involves positive experiences including contentment, hope, and sensory enjoyment. This kind of well-being is often referred to as hedonia, based on the Greek term for pleasure. The second is the engaged life, or eudaimonia. The ancient Greeks believed in a “daimon”, or guardian spirit, that would guide you toward your destiny; the word also means genius. The engaged life thus refers to a person’s ability to deploy his personal genius — to use his unique strengths and talents in a way that engages and absorbs him. The third pathway is the meaningful life, which relates to the desire to be part of something bigger than oneself — to belong and contribute to an institution that has purpose.

All three of these pathways — pleasure, engagement, and meaning — are important. And business leaders can use this knowledge to ask some important questions about their organizations:

• Do my employees enjoy their relationships and their environment at work?
• Do they laugh?
• Are my people in the right roles — ones that fit their skill sets and offer appropriate challenge?
• Do they get to use their genius?
• Do they understand the purpose of the organization?
• Do they feel they’re a part of something that matters?

On this first International Day of Happiness, it’s worth pausing to consider what contributes to happiness in your organization — your own happiness, as well as that of the people around you. I hope you will share what you discover.

SunGard Availability Services believes business continuity services should be simpler for its customers to manage. This isn’t a hunch: SunGard engaged more than 100 customers every three weeks in its effort to design and develop a better way to deliver business continuity services.

The result is SunGard Assurance(cm) a continuity management software as a service offering. The end result is a product that is more user friendly – “Facebook easy,” one might say. It also serves as a platform for  democratizing the entire process, allowing less technical stakeholders to provide valuable input.

SunGard Assurance(cm) is a secure SaaS solution available anytime from any device, including mobile devices, with a service level agreement (SLA) guaranteeing 99.9 percent uptime. Its interface is simplified and designed to be accessible for even those who aren’t disaster recovery experts. The solution also incorporates dynamic plan templates that dramatically reduce the amount of data entry needed to create plans that meet the test of disasters. There’s also Integration with Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) to provide a real-time view of data center infrastructure configuration.

“This solution is designed for all people involved in business continuity planning and execution,” said  Louis Grosskopf, general manager, Business Continuity Software. for SunGard, who said there’s a good reason to involve more personel in the planning and execution. “There’s a common misperception that the team of business continuity (BC) planners are the only ones responsible for BC. However, these teams – usually five to 10 people depending on the size of an organization – must rely on others in their organization to understand and be prepared to act on their BC plan.

“The ‘novice planners’ also called the ‘innocent bystanders,’ are the people that outnumber the BC plan team and usually have no disaster recovery (DR) experience,” Grosskopf added. “However, they’re expected to provide the information critical for recovery (e.g. the manager of accounts payable, or a bank branch manager; someone with no DR experience).”

Business continuity assurance helps customers deliver on the core business benefits of disaster recovery and business continuity planning at the time of need:

• Providing service to customers with less interruption
• Safeguarding customers and employees before, during and after disaster scenarios
• Protecting corporate reputation-Enhancing shareholder value

Since the 1980s, business continuity management (BCM) has seen numerous shifts in regulatory pressure, and each issue forced customers to react swiftly, according to Grosskopf.

“First it was data center recovery, then Y2K and next was terrorism,” he said. “The current issue disrupting BCM is state-sponsored cyber threats. As the world of business continuity stays focused on ever-increasing pressures from regulators, business leaders today demand broader participation in the planning process and increased confidence that today’s plans will lead to better outcomes. These changes in market dynamics are driving a need for a new business continuity approach.”

The company gives the example of natural disasters like Superstorm Sandy and the business risks they pose to customers.

“”The outcome we all seek is to keep the business running, our employees safe and our shareholders protected from risk,” said Grosskopf. “With higher engagement from the whole organization, assurance aids customers by increasing confidence at the time of need that the plan meets the test of disruption.”

It’s been nearly three years since Steve Jobs wrote his famous takedown of Adobe’s Flash platform as a battery-draining, Mac-crashing, insecure mess. Since that time, Jobs has largely been proven right since the mobile industry has moved on from Flash as a video platform in favor of HTML5, the open-source alternative that Jobs predicted would “win on mobile devices” going forward. All of this makes it somewhat surprising that Apple (AAPL) has decided to hire former Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch as a vice president of technology, especially because Lynch was one of Flash’s most prominent public defenders during Adobe’s spat with Jobs.

Continue reading…

The German software-as-a-service firm Open-Xchange, which provides apps that telcos and other service providers can bundle with their connectivity or hosting products, is adding a cloud-based office productivity toolset called OX Documents to its OX App Suite lineup.

Open-Xchange has around 70 million users through its contracts with roughly 80 providers such as 1&1 Internet and Strato. Its OX App Suite takes the form of a virtual desktop of sorts, that lets users centralize their email and file storage accounts and view all sorts of documents through a unified portal. However, as of an early April release it will also include OX Text, a non-destructive, collaborative document editor that rivals Google Docs, and that has an interesting heritage of its own.

The team that created the HTML5- and JavaScript-based OX Text includes some of the core developers behind OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office that passed from Sun Microsystems to Oracle before morphing into LibreOffice. The German developers we’re talking about hived off the project before LibreOffice happened, and ended up getting hired by Open-Xchange.

“To them it was a once in a lifetime event, because we allowed them to start from scratch,” Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna told me. “We said we wanted a fresh office productivity suite that runs inside the browser. In terms of the architecture and principles for the product, we wanted to make it fully round-trip capable, meaning whatever file format we run into needs to be retained.”

This is an extremely handy formatting and version control feature. Changes made to a document in OX Text get pushed through to Open-Xchange’s backend, where a changelog is maintained. “Power” Word features such as Smart Art or Charts, which are not necessarily supported by other productivity suites, are replaced with placeholders during editing and are there, as before, when the edited document is eventually downloaded. As the OX Text blurb says, “OX Text never damages your valuable work even if it does not understand it”.

“[This avoids] the big disadvantage of anything other than Microsoft Office,” Laguna said. “If you use OpenOffice with a .docx file, the whole document is converted, creating artefacts, then you convert it back. That’s one of the major reasons not everyone is using OpenOffice, and the same is true for Google Apps.”

OX Text will be available as an extension to OX App Suite, which also includes calendaring and other productivity tools. However, it will also come out as a standalone product under both commercial licenses – effectively support-based subscriptions for Open-Xchange’s service provider customers – and open-source licenses, namely the GNU General Public License 2 and Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which will allow free personal, non-commercial use.

You can find a demo of App Suite, including the OX Text functionality, here, and there’s a video too:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Carl Marks Advisory Group has made six promotions. The business is a consulting and investment banking advisor to middle market companies.

PRESS RELEASE

Carl Marks Advisory Group LLC, a leading consulting and investment banking advisor to middle market companies, sees potential among its talent pool under 40 years of age. The firm announced today the following promotions:

“We are delighted to see these team members continue to broaden their knowledge base and grow into expanded roles to support our client demands,” said Duff Meyercord, partner of New York-based Carl Marks Advisory Group, LLC.

Bushnell, 38, specializes in providing analytical advisory services with regards to workouts, loan restructurings, bankruptcies, due diligence, evaluation, and exit strategies. His experience includes preparing financial projections, construction budgets, and cash-flow analysis for numerous real estate projects. He holds a BA from the College of the Holy Cross. Bushnell is a Licensed Real Estate Appraiser and is an active member of the Urban Land Institute and the Turnaround Management Association.

Chabina, 30, specializes in investment banking and financial restructuring, primarily responsible for mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity capital raises, corporate finance and financial restructuring advisory services across a wide range of industries. Mr. Chabina graduated from Colgate University with a BA in Economics. He is registered with FINRA as a General Securities Representative and holds the Series 7 and Series 63 certifications. Mr. Chabina is on the Board of Directors of the Turnaround Management Association (NYC Chapter) and is the Chair of the NextGen Committee of the Turnaround Management Association (NYC Chapter).

Roberts, 39, focuses on providing financial and operational restructuring advisory services including bankruptcies, financial restructurings, cash forecasting, and mergers and acquisitions. He is responsible for the firm’s business administration including legal documentation and engagement oversight. Mr. Roberts graduated with a BS in Finance and Management from Montclair State University and is registered with FINRA as a General Securities Representative and holds the Series 7 and 63 certifications.

Killion, 29, specializes in financial restructuring and investment banking. He serves as an advisor to public and private corporations. His experience includes providing financial advisory and investment banking services across numerous industries, including manufacturing, retail, food service, consumer products, media, healthcare, transportation, and real estate. He holds a BS in Business Administration with a concentration in Accounting and Finance from Georgetown University.

Endo, 27, specializes on investment banking and financial restructuring assignments with a focus on mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity capital raises, and corporate finance and financial restructuring advisory services. Mr. Endo graduated with a BS in Economics from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is a member of the Turnaround Management Association and is registered with FINRA as a General Securities Representative and holds the Series 7, Series 79, and Series 63 certifications.

McInerney, 25, focuses on various financial advisory assignments including mergers and acquisitions, debt and equity capital raises, and financial restructurings. Mr. McInerney graduated with a BS in Finance and International Business from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, where he was a Dean’s Scholar, served on the Dean’s Honor Council, and was a member of the Stern Scholars Program. He is a member of the Turnaround Management Association and registered with FINRA as a General Securities Representative (Series 7, 63, and 79).

About Carl Marks Advisory Group LLC and Carl Marks Securities LLC
Carl Marks Advisory Group LLC, a New York-based consulting and investment banking advisory firm serving middle market companies, provides an array of financial and operational services including mergers and acquisitions advice, sourcing of capital, financial restructuring plans, strategic business assessments, improvement plans and interim management. The award-winning firm was the recipient of the 2012 M&A Advisor Sector Financing Deal of the Year (Real Estate); the 2011 M&A Advisor’s Debt Financing Deal of the Year; and the 2011 Turnaround Atlas Awards Chapter 11 Reorganization of the Year (Middle Market). Carl Marks has additional offices in Charlotte, NC.

Carl Marks Securities LLC, based in New York, assists its clients in executing private placements of debt and equity. The firm is a member of FINRA and SIPC.

Media Contact:
Phil Nourie
Stanton Public Relations & Marketing
(212) 922-1226
[email protected]

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Young Innovations has been acquired by Linden Capital Partners. BB&T Capital Partners also invested equity to support the acquisition. Young Innovations is a developer, manufacturer, and marketer of consumable and diagnostic supplies and equipment for dental professionals and consumers.

PRESS RELEASE

Based in Earth City, Missouri, Young Innovations is a leading developer, manufacturer, and marketer of consumable and diagnostic supplies and equipment for dental professionals and consumers. The Company’s consumable products include preventative, infection control, micro-applicators, practice enhancement, and endodontic supplies, and its diagnostic equipment includes digital imaging, film X-ray systems, and related consumables. Young Innovations commands a leading position in the dental products market as a result of its excellent customer service and focus, high-quality preventative consumables product focus, and blue chip brand name recognition among its major dental brands.

BB&T Capital Partners invested equity to support the acquisition of Young Innovations by Linden Capital Partners.

About BB&T Capital Partners
BB&T Capital Partners manages committed capital across three fund strategies, all of which are focused on the middle market. The firm makes direct equity investments in control transactions of privately-held companies; provides subordinated debt or mezzanine capital in support of transactions led by financial sponsors and others; and invests in other private equity funds. Since 1998, BBTCP has invested in over 45 privately-held, middle-market companies in a variety of industries, providing patient capital to facilitate buyout, acquisition, growth and recapitalization transactions. BBTCP’s investing strategy focuses on a partnership approach with management with a common goal of long-term value creation.
For additional information on BBTCP, please visit our website at www.bbtcp.com or contact Brent Kulman at 336-733-0354 or [email protected].
BB&T Capital Partners
101 N. Cherry St.
Suite 700
Winston-Salem, NC 27101-4019

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Foundation Medical Partners has appointed Ted Laufik as a partner and CFO. Laufik joins Foundation’s team to manage investments in the connected health and healthcare IT sectors. Most recently, he served as partner and CFO at venture capital and private equity firm Morgenthaler.

PRESS RELEASE

Foundation Medical Partners, a national healthcare venture capital investment firm, today announced that Ted Laufik has joined the team as a Partner and CFO. Mr. Laufik joins Foundation’s team to manage investments in the connected health and healthcare IT sectors.
Mr. Laufik has had a long and successful career in venture capital. Most recently, until 2011, he served as Partner and CFO at Morgenthaler, a national venture capital and private equity firm. He served as CFO since 1985 and Partner since 1995. During his tenure, Morgenthaler raised $3 billion in capital, made investments in over 300 companies, and managed a diverse portfolio from early stage IT and healthcare technology companies to middle market buyout businesses.

“Ted brings significant depth and financial capability to Foundation,” said Lee Wrubel, Managing Partner of Foundation Medical Partners. “Ted has worked in the industry with top notch LPs, general partners, and entrepreneurs — and he brings that experience to our firm.”
Mr. Laufik joins the investment team at Foundation Medical Partners that includes partners Andrew Firlik, Lee Wrubel, and Kevin Sharer. The firm actively manages over $200 million in venture capital targeted toward start-up and early-stage companies. Foundation has remained exclusively focused on the healthcare technology market since the firm was founded in 2001, with a current market capitalization of its healthcare investments totaling approximately $2.0 billion.
About Foundation Medical Partners Foundation Medical Partners is a national venture capital investment firm formed in 2001 with the vision of bringing together cutting edge healthcare expertise with deep company building experience. Foundation specializes in early stage venture capital for healthcare technology companies. Foundation Medical Partners was an early, active venture investor in many companies that subsequently went public or were acquired in strategic transactions, such as AtriCure (NASDAQ: ATRC), CardioNet (NASDAQ: BEAT), Combinatorx (NASDAQ: ZLCS), Immunicon (NASDAQ: IMMC, later acquired by Johnson & Johnson), Northstar Neuroscience (NASDAQ: NSTR, later acquired by St. Jude Medical), and Visiogen (acquired by Abbott), as well as a portfolio of other market-leading privately held firms

For press correspondence, please contact:
ANDREW D. FIRLIK, MD
Managing Partner
Foundation Medical Partners
105 Rowayton Avenue
Rowayton, CT 06853
telephone: 203.851.3913
e-mail: [email protected]

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Roche Holding AG and a buyout group comprising KKR & Co LP and Hellman & Friedman LLC have joined the bidding for Life Technologies Corp, a genetic testing company coveted for its advanced diagnostics and steady cash flow, writes Reuters. Roche’s interest in Life Tech, a biomedical laboratory equipment maker with an $11 billion market value, signals the Swiss drugmaker’s continued interest in gene sequencing a year after its $6.8 billion hostile offer for Illumina Inc failed over price.

Reuters – Roche Holding AG and a buyout group comprising KKR & Co LP and Hellman & Friedman LLC have joined the bidding for Life Technologies Corp, a genetic testing company coveted for its advanced diagnostics and steady cash flow, according to people familiar with the matter.

Roche’s interest in Life Tech, a biomedical laboratory equipment maker with an $11 billion market value, signals the Swiss drugmaker’s continued interest in gene sequencing a year after its $6.8 billion hostile offer for Illumina Inc failed over price.

The potential bidders are joining what is turning out to be a competitive auction, as cheap financing and growing confidence in the U.S. economy prompt more companies and private equity firms to contemplate deals costing more than $10 billion.

Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc, Danaher Corp and a buyout consortium of Blackstone Group LP, Carlyle Group LP, TPG Capital LP and Singapore’s state investor, Temasek Holdings, are among the parties weighing bids, Reuters previously reported.

Healthcare companies have been attracted to Life Tech by the scale and synergies that a tie-up could bring while private equity firms have found the Carlsbad, California-based company’s reliable cash flow appealing, people familiar with the matter said.

Bids are due in early April, said the people, who asked not to be named because details of the auction are not public.

Life Tech shares, which were down 1 percent before the news, ended up 1 percent at $63.58 on Tuesday. They are up more than 30 percent since the start of the year on hopes that the company’s exploration of strategic alternatives will lead to a sale.

Representatives for KKR, Hellman & Friedman and Life Tech declined to comment. Roche said it does not comment on market speculation.

Analysts see a good fit between the laboratory equipment and scientific instrument businesses of Thermo Fisher and Life Technologies, with the exception of Life Tech’s genetic sequencing, which Thermo Fisher could choose to divest after a deal.

Industrial and healthcare conglomerate Danaher, which has a life sciences and diagnostics division, agreed to buy Life Tech’s stake in a mass spectrometry joint venture with MDS Analytical Technologies for $450 million in cash in 2009.

Private equity firms have tried to compete in the auction by teaming up, a move that helps them reduce the size of their individual equity commitment but does not improve their returns.

The so-called club deals have become less popular in recent years over concerns about corporate governance in acquired companies and a backlash from some fund investors who see little point in having exposure to a company through more than one buyout fund.

People close to the Life Tech sale process said buyout firms could struggle to achieve internal rates of return of 15 percent or more on the deal based on the leverage Life Technologies could take on to capture a sufficient portion of the financing market in a transaction.

(Reporting by Soyoung Kim and Greg Roumeliotis in New York; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick, Matthew Lewis and Steve Orlofsky)

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Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread may soon be back in stores after a bankruptcy court judge on Tuesday approved sales of several iconic brands that had been owned by the failed Hostess Brands Inc, writes Reuters. Buyout firms Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Co teamed up for Hostess’s snack cake brands, paying $410 million for Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs and Donnettes.

Reuters – Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Wonder Bread may soon be back in stores after a bankruptcy court judge on Tuesday approved sales of several iconic brands that had been owned by the failed Hostess Brands Inc.

Buyout firms Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Co teamed up for Hostess’s snack cake brands, paying $410 million for Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs and Donnettes.

Flowers Food Inc, which makes Tastykakes snacks, picked up most of Hostess’s bread business, including its Wonder and Nature’s Pride brands for $360 million. The No. 2 U.S. baking company also bought 20 bakeries and other operations.

The Beefsteak brand of bread was sold for $31.9 million to Mexico’s Grupo Bimbo S.A.B. de C.V., the world’s largest bread maker. Bimbo already owns Entenmann’s cakes, Arnold bread and Thomas’ English Muffins.

Hostess also said on Tuesday that United States Bakery had the winning bid in the March 15 auction for its remaining bread brands: Eddy’s, Standish Farms and Grandma Emilie’s. United States Bakery agreed to pay $30.9 million.

Hostess filed for bankruptcy last year and gave up on its plans to emerge from bankruptcy in November, blaming a strike by its bakers union for its failure to emerge from Chapter 11.

The bakers union said in a statement on Tuesday its members would be “indispensable partners” in restarting the former Hostess facilities and getting the products back into stores.

The money raised from the sales will be used to pay off Hostess’s creditors, which the company said totaled $1.43 billion when it filed for bankruptcy.

Hostess will return to court on April 9 to ask U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Robert Drain to approve the sale to United States Bakery and a separate sale of its line of Drake’s snacks. Drake’s Coffee Cake, Ring Dings and Devil Dogs were sold to McKee Foods Corp for $27.5 million.

The bankruptcy is: In re Hostess Brands Inc, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, No. 12-22052.

(Reporting By Tom Hals in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Leslie Gevirtz)

The post Reuters – Judge OKs Hostess’s Twinkies, Ding Dongs sale appeared first on peHUB.

If you’re a regular reader of GigaOM you know that we’re big believers in the power of data — both big and, well, bigger — to change the way we think about our world. Until relatively recently, it hasn’t been possible to gather enough data at scale to truly understand the patterns around us. But as our smartphones turn us into walking sensors and we live ever-increasing amounts of our lives online, we’re generating massive amounts of data that can improve the health of a business (or a person), help us make rational decisions about resource prioritization and finally convince NFL coaches that they should go for it more often on fourth down.

The key is developing the tools and techniques to properly collect, harvest, and analyze that data. On Wednesday and Thursday this week, we’ve gathered some of the top minds in this emerging field in New York at Structure:Data to help you understand how data and data analysis can improve your business and your life. They include Paul Maritz, chief strategist at EMC and a leader of The Pivotal Initiative; data experts from companies like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM and a host of startups; and even the CTO for the Central Intelligence Agency, Ira “Gus” Hunt.

More information about the conference can be found here. If you can’t join us in New York, follow along with the livestream here, or join the conversation on Twitter with #dataconf. We’ll also post a roundup of all our coverage from what should be a very interesting two days of data.

Thumbnail image courtesy Thinkstock Images.

Wednesday’s posts:

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• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Why the big data startup boom will likely be short-lived
• The Red-Hot Data Warehouse Market: Who’s Buying Next?

Team XBMC has released XBMC 12.1 FINAL, a major maintenance update for its open-source, cross-platform media server/center. Version 12.1 includes AirPlay optimizations, iOS 6 support on the AppleTV 2 and enables the full iPhone 5 resolution.

XBMC also recently unveiled the early developmental version of XBMC 13, codenamed “Gotham”. Early development for version 13 includes support for the UPNP “Play using…” feature, library improvements with new TV Show and Music Video tags as well as inbuilt support for alternative media art.

Many of XBMC 12.1’s fixes revolve around Apple devices. OS X users gain support for using their Mac’s native audio output device, plus hardware decoding in OS X. The volume buttons have been remapped to control the OS X volume rather than XBMC’s own volume control – a tweak replicated with the new Android build. AirPlay support has also been improved, with more reliable discovery of XBMC implemented.

Apple TV enhancements include support for iOS 6 on Apple TV 2, plus a fix that ensures XBMC doesn’t crash when listed on the Apple TV top shelf. The Raspberry Pi build sees the player optimized for more efficient playback, improved subtitle support and unspecified crash fixes.

There’s added support for additional Xbox 360 controller types as well as broader, more intelligent support for CEC devices, which enable users to control XBMC via their TV remote using the HDMI cable connected to their XBMC device.

Seven new languages — primarily Asian — have been added, while problems with several add-ons due to broken binary read/write in XBMC’s Python interface have also been resolved. The update is rounded off by a large number of stability improvements and crash fixes across all supported platforms.

XBMC 12.1 FINAL is available now as a free, open-source download for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android. For a guide to configuring it to work with a TV tuner — a feature introduced in version 12.0, click here.

Jawbone announced today that its app for UP, the company’s movement-tracking wristband, is now available as a free download for Android on Google Play. The $129 UP was previously only compatible with iOS. The wristband can also now be purchased in European Apple stores, and will be made available in Asia and Australia next month.

“We are excited to expand the UP community by introducing support for Android, 11 new languages for iOS, and product availability in more than 25 additional countries around the world,” said Travis Bogard, Jawbone vice president of product management and strategy, in a statement.

When coupled with its app, the UP wristband allows users to track their sleep, movement, food, and mood. Apple Stores in Asia and Australia will begin carrying the gadget next month, along with other retail locations in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East.

While Android users can now use Jawbone UP, the company says it currently has no plans to release the UP app to BlackBerry 10 or Windows Phone.

There are plenty of ways to launch programs using hotkeys, and even Windows has one of its own (right-click a shortcut, select Properties > Shortcut and click the “Shortcut key” box), but remembering enough of these to cope with all your applications is extremely difficult.

The open source MadAppLauncher takes a different approach, though, which is very much simpler. It uses a simple QWERTY-type layout, and allows you to assign one program to each key. The relevant application icon and name is displayed alongside the key letter, so if you press H, say, whatever is in the H box will be launched.

You also get ten tabs, which correspond to the number keys, and each of these have their own QWERTY layout. This allows you to separate your programs into ten groups of up to 30 applications, for 300 in total. And if that’s not enough, you can save your current layout with a descriptive name (“Internet”, “Work”, whatever fits) and then create and load as many others as you need.

Every application “key” can be customized in much the same way as a regular Windows shortcut. You’re able to set its name,icon, target, command line arguments, starting folder, window style (normal, hidden, minimized, maximized and so on).

Unusually, you even get some control over the window size and position, so for instance you might decide to launch a program in the bottom half of the screen (assuming the application supports that, anyway). This doesn’t always look good — the application may appear somewhere else, then move — but it does work.

And there are all kinds of options here. You can move an application from one key to another; keep MadAppLauncher on top of other windows; show or hide the program when Windows starts, and more.

We had some issues here, too. Some of the program’s default settings are a little annoying, so for example if you drag and drop the program window then it’ll just snap back to the centre of the screen. Just about everything can be reconfigured via the View menu, and the Hotkey and Options dialog, but it could still be annoying for beginners.

Elsewhere, there’s very little documentation. And if you expect your launchers to look stylish and glossy then, well, MadAppLauncher will leave you extremely disappointed. But, if you just want a simple way to organise large groups of applications, folders or files, then the program should serve you very well. Go check it out.

Photo Credit: Lilya/Shutterstock

The federal government has once again been exposed for lying about the safety of the infamous swine flu vaccine, also known as H1N1. According to a new study published in the journal The Lancet, people who received the swine flu vaccine during the 2009-2010 pandemic…