Sunday Highlights: Inside the FCC's audacious plan to blow up the cable box; Inquirer profiles Universal Display
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Small-Screen Giant (Philadelphia Inquirer)
On Universal Display.
Comcast customer's Raspberry Pi bot tweets when speeds are lousy (Engadget)
Inside the FCC's audacious plan to blow up the cable box (The Verge)
Tech Valuations In 2016: The End Of The Line For Sloppy Growth (TechCrunch)
Philly Tech People News 1/31/16: SevOne adds new CFO; Nutter to teach at Columbia
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SevOne, which the Boston media correctly identifies as Boston-based as Philly Tech News readers first found out, announced this week that it had appointed a new CFO.
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| Rafe Brown |
Rafe Brown, who had previously served as CFO of Pegasystems, a publicly traded Cloud software company, was named to the position. Brown had an earlier stint as a senior vice president of finance for Salesforce.com. Over the course of his nine years at Salesforce.com, Mr. Brown led the treasury and tax functions, real estate, and collections teams. Presumably, his appointment might be seen as another step towards an IPO, or whatever kind of exit or capitalization event SevOne may eventually seek.
CEO Jack Sweeney said in an interview with the Boston Business Journal late last year that the network monitoring company expected to exceed $100 million in revenue for 2015, up from about $65 million in 2014.
The bulk of SevOne's engineering workforce employment remains located in Delaware and Pennsylvania, though top managerial and administrative staff is ensconced in Boston's Prudential Center. SevOne is backed by Bain Capital and other mostly Boston-based investors.
A September round may have valued SevOne at or very close to the $1 billion mark, although the company didn't confirm that.
Chris Satchell's job: Make Comcast products more fun (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Nutter to teach at Columbia (Philly.com)
Frank Quattrone to Step Down as C.E.O. of Qatalyst (New York Times: DealBook)
Controversial South Philly native will be Executive Chairman.
IBM Closes Weather Co. Purchase, Names David Kenny New Head Of Watson Platform (TechCrunch)
Local lawyer becomes CEO of entertainment company (Philadelphia Business Journal)
TierPoint Appoints Morrison, Morales, Hicks and Markley to Technology and Operations Leadership Positions
(Business Wire)
Bob Hicks, who has been responsible for TierPoint's 6 data centers in Southeastern Pennsylvania, takes on broader geographical responsibilities.
USA Technologies Announces Appointment of Interim CFO (Business Wire)
Michael Connor Joins Alpha Card Services as VP of Finance (Business Wire)
Phillies snag new hire from Google (Philadelphia Business Journal)
SAP UK and Ireland shuffles management cards
(The Register)
Google's long-term plans to disrupt / destroy the cable industry
Tom Paine
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Two pieces of news out concerning Google could threaten to completely decompose the cable industry as we know it, although these things either take a long time to develop or frequently never come to fruition.
The first is Project SkyBender , in which Google is (secretly?) testing the use of solar-powered drones to provide high-speed internet service to the public on the ground. This approach offers theoretical data speeds 40 times faster than today's 4G LTE signals. Though there are challenges to this, as the website Phone Arena points out.
Google recently entered the wireless market with Project Fi , which resells wireless
carriers' capacity as an MVNO while using WiFi when available (an approach Comcast is also working on).
According to Phone Arena, Project SkyBender is being developed by the same Google Access team that is working on a way to deliver wireless internet using high-altitude balloons.
Less is known about the second initiative. But according to Broadcasting & Cable, invites were sent out for a demo scheduled Friday at Google's DC offices, of a video access solution (the function served by the set-top box) potentially bringing to an end the "era of being forced to rent a box from your cable company," according to Google.
Saturday Highlights: HSN Looking for the Next Joy Mangano; Philadelphia agency caught teaming up with taxi companies to fight Uber
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A Philadelphia agency was caught teaming up with taxi companies to fight Uber (Vox)
Comcast Lashes Out at FCC Set-Top Proposal (Multichannel News)
Google Gears Up for Set-Top Set-To (Multichannel News)
Gift of Joy: HSN Looking for the Next Mangano (Cablefax)
Links 1/29: Birchbox layoffs; Microsoft Cloud growth, but which cloud?
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NetSuite Q4 Beats Street on New Business From Snapchat and Lucky Brand (Re/code)
CenturyLink deal boosts options for SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (SearchSAP)
Cloud growth? Take a number, Microsoft. Two engines have stalled (The Register)
Birchbox lays off 15% of staff, citing funding environment and a need to rebalance the company (PandoDaily)
Congress to probe Juniper 'back door' exposure, possible U.S. involvement (Reuters)
Google Fiber testing home phone service to bundle with TV, Internet (The Next Web)
Fandango buys online video retailer M-Go to boost 'super ticket' sales (LA Times)
Links 1/28: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft's Cloud both show tremendous growth
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Amazon Sales Soared 22% in Holiday Quarter, but Profit Fell Short (New York Timea)
Amazon Web Services is now an $8 billion-a-year cloud-computing machine (Quartz)
Microsoft Profit and Revenue Fall, but Cloud Computing Grows (NY Times)
12 minutes with Rob Enslin on SAP’s 2016 outlook (Denn Howlett/Diginomica)
Comcast Wants to Limit Your Netflix Binges (Bloomberg)
College Ave Student Loans Secures $20 Million To Fuel Growth (Business Wire)
Round in Wilmington-based company led by Comcast Ventures.
Salesforce causes partner pain with SteelBrick acquisition (Computerworld)
A not surprising reaction from a guest contributor.
Links 1/27: Aereo founder's next act; Salesforce Adds 'Private Spaces' On Heroku Platform
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The founder of Aereo is promising to bring gigabit internet to every home (The Verge)
Is box relief on the way for cable & satellite customers? (Philadelphia Inquirer)
AT&T Eyes TV Everywhere Gold (Light Reading)
Sinclair Found 'Right Fit' To Expand Into Cable (Multichannel News)
Bundling Tennis Channel With Retrans Was 'Palatable Ask'
VMware Cuts 800 Jobs, Narrows Cloud Business (Information Week)
SAP Takes HANA to China With Help From Lenovo (Re/code)
Salesforce Adds 'Private Spaces' On Heroku Platform (Information Week)
Venmo is taking on Apple Pay with in-app purchases (The Verge)
Trump says he might skip next debate (on Fox News), after Fox issues satirical 'press release'
Tom Paine
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The Fox release, in the form of a message sent to another media outlet, reads:
"We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings."
There's considerable debate about who put the statement out. Many attribute it to Roger Ailes, Chairman and CEO of Fox News. My own theory, based on a passing familiarity with his twitter account (@rupertmurdoch), is that Rupert himself may have authored it because of the nature of the language. But some have suggested that Rupert is moving closer to Trump, and this tweet supports that view:
Cruz bets uniting white conservatives/evangelicals enough, Meanwhile Trump appealing across party lines. Surely the winning strategy.— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 16, 2016The one thing for certain is that no one I heard tonight really knows what's going on.
I doubt many in my audience, which I know fairly well, cares much for Fox News. But one thing worth understanding is that it does not have a unified voice, particularly when it cones to Trump. Fox News gave the Trump candidacy oxygen, and several of its personalities were active cheerleaders. Living in New York, Trump had the opportunity to cultivate relationships with some of them.
But many of the more senior commentators thought the idea of a Trump candidacy ridiculous. My impression was someone (Ailes?) was orchestrating the pro-Trump concerto, but some more senior people weren't going to take marching orders.
The other big issue, of course, is Trump's continuing vicious attacks on anchor Megyn Kelly.
Links 1/26: First Round-backed Jelli brings programmatic buying to radio; Comcast offering new business WiFi service
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Seeing OLED as the future for displays, LG bets big on new factory (PCWorld)
Comcast Gets Down to Business With WiFi (Multichannel News)
Fourth Annual University of Pennsylvania $10K Y-Prize Competition Grand Prize Winner is “Fermento” as Best of Penn-Owned Biomedical Engineering Concepts (PR Web)
Jelli, Software Provider For Programmatic Radio, Eyes Growth (MediaPost)
First Round Capital was an early backer.
Companies, start your (hybrid) clouds: Azure Stack's first beta is coming (PC World)
Bioclinica continues expansion under PE ownership, acquires Clinverse
Tom Paine
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Considerable change has occurred since New York-based PE firm JLL Partners acquired Doylestown-based clinical trial management system (CTMS) vendor Bioclinica in early 2013.
In its latest move announced last week, Bioclinica acquired Edison Ventures-backed Clinverse, which is based in North Carolina.
Bioclinica, which had been a publicly traded company, reported revenue of nearly $100 million in 2012, and was acquired by JLL for $ 123 million.
It was also merged with CoreLab Partners of Princeton when the acqusition closed. In 2014, it merged with California-based SYNARC. At that time, the combined company said it would be a leader in four specialized areas of outsourced CTMS:
- medical imaging services that track the effectiveness of new drugs across multiple therapeutic areas, including oncology, neurology and musculoskeletal.
- an extensive worldwide network of research centers dedicated to recruiting patients for global trials.
- state-of-the-art technology and consulting services to support the overall drug development process, as well as services to monitor the cardiac safety of compounds under development.
- It also will offer central lab capabilities to analyze biological samples originating from clinical trials.
Bioclinica also made some smaller acquisitions in 2014-15, and one presumably reliable source reported 2014 revenue at over $200 million. At the end of 2014, long-time CEO Marc Weinsten departed, to be replaced by Dr. John Hubbard, who joined from Pfizer.
Last week, BioClinica announced it was acquiring Clinverse, a Durham, North Carolina-based provider of automated payment systems for clinical trial participants, as well as medical professionals making or receiving payments through involvement with trials. No terms were disclosed, and no financial data has been found for Clinverse.
New Jersey-based Edison Partners had led a $9.1 million Series C round in Clinverse in August 2014.
While some other payment tech firms dabble in the clinical trials market, the two main direct competitors to Clinverse are King of Prussia-based Greenphire and CFS Clinical of Audubon, which was acquired by DrugDev in 2013.
The 'Sunshine Act' reporting requirements, which went into effect in 2013, requires manufacturers of drugs, medical devices and biologicals that participate in U.S. federal health care programs to report certain payments and items of value given to physicians and teaching hospitals. This reporting need is the other side of the value proposition for the clinical trial payments vendors. Similar regulations are expected worldwide, although they may have been slower to materialize than expected.
Its not clear who is leading among the three clinical payment competitors, though Bioclinca must have liked what it saw in Clinverse's numbers. Greenphire ( see my 2013 profile ) in which PE firm The Riverside Company owns a controlling stake, reported revenue of $8.5 million in 2014, according to the Inc. 5000, up from $5.4 million in 2012. It moved into larger King of Prussia quarters in early 2015 and announced a goal to increase employment from 65 to 100 by year's end (LinkedIn currently shows 85). It just issued a release claimng "unprecedented year over year growth." CFS Clinical had 2012 revenue of $11 million, according to the Inc. 5000, though its a somewhat older business with a different revenue mix.
The Triangle Business Journal describes how the match between Bioclinica and Clinverse came to be. One issue that comes to mind is to what extent Clinverse will be able to serve the external market, rather than having all its energy sucked up by internal Bioclinica issues.
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