{"id":260444,"date":"2010-02-01T14:25:35","date_gmt":"2010-02-01T19:25:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/?p=95847"},"modified":"2010-02-01T14:25:35","modified_gmt":"2010-02-01T19:25:35","slug":"squeezed-cell-networks-lead-to-dealmaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/260444","title":{"rendered":"Squeezed Cell Networks Lead to Dealmaking"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>Two startups making hardware for the mobile industry scored investments today: Pulsus, a Korean company that has a chip aimed at making handsets more efficient, has taken $4 million from Qualcomm Ventures, and SpiderCloud<\/a>, a startup that helps with mobile offload, has gotten $25 million from a group of VCs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As users, application developers and carriers bump up against the technical constraints around mobile broadband’s popularity, expect more and more hardware investments and dealmaking in the mobile sector. A venture partner involved in the $1.3 billion program to fund startups that will benefit Verizon’s LTE network<\/a> has even detailed to me what types of companies he and other participants in the program are looking to invest in.<\/p>\n

But back to today’s funding. SpiderCloud is building out hardware that allows for cell phone traffic to be kept on a proprietary local network, which the company has dubbed eRAN. So instead of all the mobile traffic that a business might generate in its building and send back to the web over the carrier’s cellular network, all the phone in the office can now communicate via a smaller in-house network that connects to the web using the business’ own web connection — it’s kind of like a femtocell in idea, but not in execution<\/a>. Today’s infusion, from Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Matrix Partners, brings its total to $40 million.<\/p>\n

Pulsus makes a mixed signal chip that converts analog signals to digital signals before it amplifies them. That allows a greater ability to modulate those signals for better sound quality but could also be used to increase the power efficiency of the handsets, possibly in\u00a0 a manner similar to Quantance<\/a>. It also makes a variety of other audio chips and its CEO has said it hopes to one day “be the Qualcomm of Korea.”<\/a><\/p>\n

In a related move, today Austin chip startup Black Sand Technologies purchased an intellectual property portfolio <\/a>from Silicon Labs, a mixed-signal chipmaker. Black Sand is building a power amplifier that will make some of the components inside mobile handsets cheaper to manufacture and will boost battery life on mobile phones. Black Sand raised $10 million last September.<\/p>\n

Image courtesy of Flickr user Jurveston<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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Two startups making hardware for the mobile industry scored investments today: Pulsus, a Korean company that has a chip aimed at making handsets more efficient, has taken $4 million from Qualcomm Ventures, and SpiderCloud, a startup that helps with mobile offload, has gotten $25 million from a group of VCs. As users, application developers and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mobile","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260444\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}