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)

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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.



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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



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phillytechnews twitter feed 7/8 to 7/9 2012

phillytechnews: Daily Links 7/9/2012: QlikTech sees Q2 revenue shortfall http://t.co/eWruXuul Posted: 09 Jul 2012 04:08 PM PDT phillytechnews: Daily Links 7/9/2012: QlikTech sees Q2 revenue shortfall http://t.co/eWruXuul

phillytechnews: Inquirer, Daily News, http://t.co/XY7ddCMF move into new home on Market Street http://t.co/TiJff8wM Posted: 09 Jul 2012 03:30 PM PDT phillytechnews: Inquirer, Daily News, http://t.co/XY7ddCMF move into new home on Market Street http://t.co/TiJff8wM

phillytechnews: DC City Council’s “Uber Amendment” Would Force Sedans To Charge 5x Taxi Prices (And Kill UberX) | TechCrunch http://t.co/0TtgovzM Posted: 09 Jul 2012 03:16 PM PDT phillytechnews: DC City Council's "Uber Amendment" Would Force Sedans To Charge 5x Taxi Prices (And Kill UberX) | TechCrunch http://t.co/0TtgovzM

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Daily Links 7/9/2012: QlikTech sees Q2 revenue shortfall

QlikTech Announces Preliminary Second Quarter 2012 Financial Results (Businesss Wire)
QlikTech now says it expects revenue in the range of $84.0 million to $86.0 million, down from its previous forecast of $91.0 million to $96.0 million. Blames it mostly on Europe.

Qlik Issues Q2 Rev Warning, But Shares Trade Higher (Forbes)

Will Bipin Shah's $179M deal end 'rip-off' card fees? (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

UBPS to Acquire and Consolidate Three Business Payment Companies in Proposed $179 Million Transaction (Business Wire)

Inquirer, Daily News, philly.com move into new home on Market Street (Philly.com)

Verizon's cable deals make headway but regulatory doubts linger (Reuters)

Cloud Is ‘Bright Spot’ in Global IT Spending (Wall Street Journal: The CIO Report)

Selling SAP HANA: Enticing Customers—and SIs and Resellers (ASUG News)

Salesforce Is About To Buy This Two-Year Old, 12-Person Startup For $70 Million (Silicon Alley Insider: Enterprise)

ERT scoops up Invivodata for ePRO clinical trials tech (FierceBiotechIT)


PA Pushes Direct Messaging For Health Data Exchanges (Information Week)



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Philly Tech People News 7/8/2012

PRWeek reported that Abernathy MacGregor Group SVP Kate Finn will join Comcast as director of corporate communications this fall, reporting to VP of corporate communications Jennifer Khoury (subscription required).

Fortune's Term Sheet reports that Michael Madden has left Edison Ventures, where he has been a Boston-based principal since 2010.

SAP Australia gets new Aussie MD(ZDNet)
Joins SAP from Unisys.

SAP Appoints Harry Thomsen As German Head, Euro Am Sonntag Says (Bloomberg)

Former HP Channels VP Frank Rauch Joins VMware (The VAR Guy)
A Drexel graduate, Rauch has spent his career based out of Philadelphia.

Motorola Home Adds M&A Expertise
(Light Reading Cable)

Maiden Media Group welcomes three new hires (Philly Ad Club News)




Subscribe to Philly Tech People News by Email



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To Subscribe Or Not Subscribe? That Is The eCommerce Question (Phineas Barnes/TechCrunch)

Netflix: ‘We’re bullish on the cloud’ despite outage (Gigaom)

phillytechnews twitterfeed 7/6 to 7/7 2012

phillytechnews: Loves this Braves rookie SS Simmons. Also from Curacao Posted: 07 Jul 2012 07:00 PM PDT phillytechnews: Loves this Braves rookie SS Simmons. Also from Curacao

phillytechnews: Andruw Jones rejuvenated, playing like 19 year old kid again Posted: 07 Jul 2012 06:43 PM PDT phillytechnews: Andruw Jones rejuvenated, playing like 19 year old kid again

phillytechnews: Bryce Harper going to All-Star game? Ridiculous! Posted: 07 Jul 2012 06:31 PM PDT phillytechnews: Bryce Harper going to All-Star game? Ridiculous!

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Canada’s vanishing tech sector (The Globe and Mail)

Google TV Needs To Decide: Platform Or Closed Ecosystem (TechCrunch)

Daily Links 7/6/2012: Report says sale of Comcast's stake in A&E for $2.8 billion close

'Hatfields & McCoys' helps boost value of Comcast’s A&E stake (New York Post)
15% stake said to be worth $2.8 billion; sale may be imminent.

This Ex-Salesforce Exec Wants To Save The Planet—And Kill Oracle, SAP In The Process (SAI: Enterprise)

Informatica Slumps After Quarterly Sales Miss Estimates (Bloomberg)
QlikTech was down as much as 15% at one point.

Could Oracle ruling lead to used e-book, music sales? (ZDNet Blogs)

Cloud vendors rub their hands over European licensing ruling (Dennis Howlett/CloudPro)

Oracle-SAP Retrial Set to Begin in August (PC World)


SAP Schools Workers Apple-Style on Making Most of Mobile Devices (Bloomberg)

Will Anyone Switch On Cable's Upstream Booster? (Light Reading Cable)



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Daily Links 7/5/2012: Verizon Wireless says cable deal won't affect backhaul

Building and dismantling the Windows advantage (ASYMCO)
Though losing ground on the client side, Microsoft still has tremendous strengths in providing much of the backend plumbing that enterprises rely on.

News Analysis: UsedSoft Vs Oracle Ruling Opens Up Monopolistic Practices By Software Vendors (Ray Wang/Enterprise Irregulars)

Oracle’s ‘Exalytics’ No Threat to SAP’s ‘HANA,’ Says Bernstein (Barron's: Tech Trader Daily)

Fans Howl After Weather Site Buys Out Rival (New York Times)
The Weather Channel is partly owned by Comcast.

CBS, NBC and Fox head to court over Dish ad-skipping feature (LA Times)

NBC Sports Network's Olympic Ambitions (Bloomberg)

VZW: AWS deal with cable ops won't affect backhaul (Wireless Week)
Comcast is big in backhaul, which is critical to providing wireless bandwidth.


Luring Online Shoppers Offline (New York Times)

PA DCED: Venture Capital Investments Support New Companies, Job Growth (PR Newswire)

3D Printer Used to Print Vascular Networks (Medgadget)
Research done at UPenn and MIT.



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