Dealership software motors onto market
After the excitement of Facebook’s $104bn IPO and the subsequent fall in its shares, something more modest is coming onto London’s alternative investment market.
Incadea, an Austrian company that provides software for BMW and other car dealerships, will raise around £17m on Friday, in a stock market float expected to value the company at £47m.
It’s a lot smaller than Facebook, but it is a rare technology listing in London, where the tech IPO market has been considered closed for a long time.
Judith Masthoff, a Dutch researcher in artificial intelligence, was a doctoral student in the mid-1990s when she came up with her first invention.
The outline of the idea – a way of “enabling a user to fetch a specific information item from a set of information items” – hardly hinted at the starring role her brainwave would play in the legal battles sweeping through the technology industry.
Path closed a $30m round of Series B funding on Monday, giving the mobile social network a $250m valuation.
The current round was led by Redpoint Ventures, with several other investors participating, including Sir Richard Branson, head of the Virgin empire, who said he is betting as much on Path’s chief executive, Dave Morin, as his product.
Path was founded as a smaller, more private alternative to Facebook, limiting users to 150 friends, and has since found a cult-like following among Silicon Valley technologists and designers. It had 2m users as of last month.
Other investors who participated in the current funding round include Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Mark Pincus, chief executive of Zynga, Yuri Milner, founder of investment firm Digital Sky Technologies, Jerry Murdock, co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, and Allen & Company.
“It is important to us to work with investment partners who share common values around quality and building for the long term,” Mr Morin said. “Our ‘Path’ has only just begun.”
The company said it will use the new financing for international growth and expansion. The round bring Path’s total funding to more than $41m.
Domain name applications hit by software glitch
The deadline to apply for a new top level domain name has been extended by just over a week to Friday, April 20th after the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) was hit by software problems.
The deadline to apply for new, generic internet suffixes such as .london and .nyc was meant to close at midnight on Thursday, but California-based Icann said there had been technical issues with the software handling applications.
Box OneCloud has silver lining for app developers
While cloud computing promises to simplify our lives by keeping our information in one readily accessible place online, it fails to deliver when clouds are scattered by users relying on too many different apps and services.
You may have photos spread across Picasa, Flickr, Eye-Fi and Facebook and documents held on different services as well. But Box has announced an enterprise-focused solution on Wednesday with its OneCloud, while Quickoffice is tackling the same problem from a different direction with Connect.
Behind Monday’s headlines of Misys’s board accepting a £1.27bn cash bid from Vista Equity Partners, the perennial takeover target also updated the market on recent trading – and the figures were not exactly glowing.
Third-quarter revenues fell by 12 per cent year-on-year fall to £89m, which the London-based group attributed to customers procrastinating over software licence purchases.
Joe Green, NationBuilder co-founder
In the summer of 2004, Joe Green, then 21, lived in a trailer with a 70-year old roommate in the 120-degree Arizona desert, while his college friends holed up in a house in Silicon Valley were building a website called TheFacebook.
Green led the grassroots campaign for John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, for four months in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, mobilising local residents to knock on their neighbours’ doors and win votes for Kerry.
Today he’s become the president of NationBuilder, a start-up company that builds software to make jobs like the one he toiled at during that hot summer easier.
RIM: Down but not out?
It has taken Research in Motion 10 months to update the software running its PlayBook tablet and deliver features like native email that should have been there to start with.
Aside from email, RIM’s PlayBook 2.0 software, released as a free upgrade for users today, adds features including support for Android apps in a belated effort to address weaknesses that have attracted widespread criticism and rendered the PlayBook an afterthought in the fast growing PC tablet market.
BNP Paribas has launched an iPad app in the hope that hedge fund managers will want to check out their stock holdings on the move, writes Dan McCrum.
“You can get off an airplane and in one minute see everything that’s happening in your portfolio,” says Sam Hocking, head of prime brokerage sales for the French Bank.
Tech news from around the web:
Microsoft, a 20-year stalwart of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, has decided to pull out of the event after the 2012 show in January, the Los Angeles Times reports. The company, whose keynote address has been one of the main highlights of the show, said it felt that it would be better to make announcements on its own time.
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