phillytechnews twitter feed 7/10/2012

phillytechnews: Chipper gets seeing eye single. My night is made Posted: 10 Jul 2012 07:03 PM PDT phillytechnews: Chipper gets seeing eye single. My night is made

phillytechnews: @BrianMFloyd @neiltyson Well, they tried changing name to California Angels, also Anaheim Angels Posted: 10 Jul 2012 06:42 PM PDT phillytechnews: @BrianMFloyd @neiltyson Well, they tried changing name to California Angels, also Anaheim Angels

phillytechnews: Matt Harrison, yet another piece of the absurd Braves giveaway trade to rent Mark Teixera, makes first All-Star game

Continue Reading

Highlights: Last week on Philly Tech News (7/2/2012 to 7/8/2012)

Slow week with the 4th in the middle of it.

SAP and Ariba received a second request for information from the Department of Justice relating to SAP's bid to acquire Ariba. Not particularly unusual at this point.

After a period of being the unnamed but widely known bidder for Quest Software against Quest's existing PE backer Insight Venture Partners, Dell finally reached a deal to acquire Quest for $2.4 billion. The acquisition could have some synergistic effects for Dell Boomi in terms of products and channels.

First Round Capital was among the investors in Newark Mayor Cory Booker's personalized news startup for teens, #waywire.

The Inquirer reported on how Old City-based WebLinc survived the tech bust and came back to become a very successful ecommerce software firm.

Verizon Wireless claimed its proposed deal with a group of cable operators would not have an anticompetitive impact upon the wireless backhaul industry, which is becoming a big business for Comcast.

Continue Reading

Congratulations to NJTechWeekly.com (PTN partner) on one year anniversary

Tom Paine

NJTechWeekly.com, a website Philly Tech News has been proud to partner with in providing shared coverage of area tech news, yesterday announced its one year anniversary.

As one who strongly believes in taking a broader regional approach to covering the area's tech scene, I value NJTechWeekly.com and Editor & Publisher Esther Surden's contribution in providing unique coverage of New Jersey. I believe that tech happenings in Princeton, New Brunswick, Camden County and Trenton are often closely related to developments in Philadelphia. I would encourage New Jersey and Pennsylvania readers of Philly Tech News to take a close look at NJTechWeekly.com if you haven't already done so.



permalink

Daily Links 7/10/2012: Five Below sets IPO price; another Salesforce outage

Five Below sees IPO priced at $12-$14/shr (Reuters)

Why Is Enterprise Software So Bad? (Electronic Ink Blog)

Eurotunnel selects QlikView over SAP for business intelligence applications (ComputerWeekly.com)

Oracle Buys Involver (Involver Blog)
Another Oracle play in social media space.

Oracle Adds to Social-media Software Arsenal With Involver Acquisition (PC World)

Major Outage for Salesforce.com (Data Center Knowledge)

Continue Reading

SEC filing: Comcast to sell A&E stake for $3.025 billion

Tom Paine

In an SEC Filing released this morning, Comcast said A&E Television Networks, LLC had agreed yesterday to redeem NBC Universal's entire 15.8% stake in the networks for $3.025 billion. The imminent sale had been widely reported, though the final price is slightly higher than some had suggested. Disney and Hearst are the other two owners of A&E, and each will now own 50% stakes.

Update: see Bloomberg story.



permalink

The Neat Company introduces its first Cloud, Mobile offerings

Tom Paine

Philadelphia-based The Neat Company, the pioneer in providing technology for scanning and digitizing information from paper sources such as receipts and business cards, today announced the general availability of NeatCloud and NeatMobile, two products that could potentially be transformative for its business, said Neat Company Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Garton in an interview with Philly Tech News. The products had been previewed in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and have been in private beta since.

NeatCloud will be priced at three tiers between $5.99 and $24.99 per month depending upon the number of users. It is intended to be a cloud-based digital filing system not only for data that originates from paper sources but also for other data that comes directly from digital sources. It will run off the Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 platform.

NeatMobile, which will initially be available for iOS only (an Android version is scheduled for August, the company says), will enable users to take photos of paper documents with the cameras in their mobile devices, from which the content can then be converted into digitized information fields using optical character recognition (OCR). It is available for download from the Apple App Store and is available free of charge to those subscribing to the two highest tiers of the NeatCloud service.







Among the features of its Digital Filing System Neat emphasizes are its abilities to sync Neat data across all devices, to share files or folders with whomever one chooses, to create Neat email addresses through NeatCloud and request vendors or others send receipts or documents directly into your Neat Digital Filing System, and secure backup.

Another feature of NeatCloud is its expanded search capability, through which Neat users can now find information they may have stored in multiple cloud services including Google Docs, Dropbox and Evernote. Users can search across their different cloud services from a single Neat interface.

Neat is also introducing NeatVerify, a subscription service somewhat like that provided by LinkedIn's CardMunch. Blurry or faded images that can't be deduced through OCR receive human verification if necessary.

These new offerings by no means replace Neat's existing NeatDesk and NeatReciepts scanner products, although I could see the possibility of that eventually largely being the case. NeatDesk retails for about $400, NeatReciepts for about $200. The company says it has sold about 1 million of the two devices combined. The aspect that would be difficult to replace would be NeatDesk's capability for scanning a large volume of documents. But for many smaller customers, NeatCloud and NeatMobile could provide the complete solution. Overall, the new offerings should make Neat more hardware independent and more retail channel independent in the long run, and give it greater potential for broadening its customer base.

Garton said while there are other larger players in the Cloud document repository and backup market, Neat planned to focus primarily on the applications it (and its software) know best: receipts and business card information. However, moving into the Cloud should give Neat considerably more ability to integrate that information with other sources and collaboration tools. Garton also said Neat would continue to concentrate on the Soho (small office, home office) market.

After hitting a brief trough in 2009 following several years of rapid growth, The Neat Company's 2010 revenue was $33.3 million, according to its listing in the 2011 Inc. 5000. An article in the Philadelphia Business Journal in late 2011, citing CEO Jim Foster, said 2011 sales were expected to reach $65 million with additional growth of 40% anticipated in 2012. However, the turn towards mobile apps for handling the types of things Neat Company does in turning paper input into digital information has been dramatic in recent years, presumably necessitating Neat's response with the new offerings.

Edison Ventures has been the primary investor in The Neat Company, along with MentorTech Ventures.


Neat press release



permalink