Daily Links 5/15/2013: RJMetrics closes $6.25 million Series A

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RJMetrics Closes $6.25M Series A Financing (PR Web)

Business Intelligence Startup RJMetrics Raises $6.25M From Trinity Ventures For Ecommerce Boom (TechCrunch)

Activist Shareholders Target MSNBC During Comcast's Annual Meeting (Audio) (Hollywood Reporter)

Comcast Checks into Hotel Services Opportunity (Multichannnel News)

DirecTV Looks to Test Off-Air Antenna in Set-Top (Multichannel News)

Netflix ISP Speed Index for April (Netflix Blog)

Drones and Airware: Why We Invested (Kent Goldman/First Round Capital)

InsPro Technologies Corporation Announces First Quarter 2013 Financial Results (Business Wire)

MeetMe® Enhances Mobile Subscription Product MeetMe+
Company extends mobile monetization leadership among mobile social apps (Business Wire)



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Highlights from SAP's Sapphire 5/15/2013: SAP unveils Fiori app suite

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SAP unveils 'consumer-friendly' Fiori app suite (PC World)

SAP updates line-of-business cloud apps (PC World)

SAP Gives ERP A Facelift (Information Week)

SAP co-CEO Snabe: In business, eat (or be eaten) (ZDNet)

Have We Been Properly Introduced? Dispelling Misconceptions About SAP HANA (Silicon Angle)

IBM PureSystems, SAP and business transformation (ZDNet)

Port of San Diego finds value in SAP cloud apps, but not HANA (Computerworld UK)

PACT, Ben Franklin Northeastern PA honor top entrepreneurs

Tom Paine


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Two of the area's most prestigious tech associations held their awards banquets last week.

On Thursday evening, May 9, PACT (The Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies) held its 20th Annual Enterprise Awards. The event was held at a new venue this year, the Valley Forge Casino, intended to provide a bit more of a "red carpet" atmosphere (though hopefully it didn't lead to any startups wagering away their VC funds).

The IT winners of Enterprise Awards this year were:

· Technology Startup Company: ThingWorx
· Emerging Technology Company: InstaMed
· Investment Deal of the Year: Liquent
· IT Innovator Award of Excellence: Relay Network
· Technology CEO of the Year: Tim Wallace, iPipeline
· Technology Company of the Year: Quintiq

Comcast Executive VP David L. Cohen was named Legend Award Honoree.

You can see all the finalists here.


Also, on the evening of May 7, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania held its annual i xchange at Zoellner Arts Center at Lehigh University, with some 550 attendees present.

Award winners included Ed J. Coringrato Jr (Entrepreneurial Achievement), CEO of CyOptics, the Breinigsville optoelectronics maker for the telecom industry that was recently acquired by Avago Technologies Limited for $400 million. Also honored was Anthony J. Salvaggio (Incubator Graduate), President of ComputerAid Inc., Allentown. The IT consulting firm, which started with two employees in the early 1980s, now has more than 3,000 full-time associates.

Michael Whitman, President & CEO, Micro Interventional Devices, Langhorne, was honored for product innovation. Started out of Ben Franklin TechVentures in 2010, Micro Interventional Devices developed a minimally invasive product for use in heart valve repair and replacement procedures.



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News from SAP's Sapphire: 5/14/2013: SAP says HANA will power all cloud applications

SAP Unifies Comprehensive Cloud Portfolio With SAP HANA® Cloud Platform to Serve Companies of All Sizes (PR Newswire)

SAP says HANA will power all cloud applications (PC World)

Dell gooses HANA appliances, loads up SAP Business Suite
Looks ahead to those Ivy Bridge-EX machines later this year (The Register)

SAP Exec To Partners: Huge Incremental Revenue Opportunities Ahead (CRN)

SAP introduces Mobile Secure; mobile device management (ZDNet)

NetSuite's aims for SAP's manufacturing heart (ZDNet)

Qualcomm's CIO Says Oracle Is A 'Dinosaur' That's Losing Ground In The Enterprise (SAI Enterprise)

Two visions of the future of Healthcare IT; John Glaser and Agent Smith of "The Matrix"

First, John Glaser, PhD, CEO of Malvern-based Siemens Healthcare, Health Services, and an acknowledged industry visionary, gives a 3 minute presentation at this past winter's HIMSS Conference in New Orleans on the future of the Electronic Health Record. Glaser sees the EHR moving from being largely a transactional record to becoming an "intelligent" record.







GE Healthcare came up with this curious commercial using Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving) of "The Matrix" fame. The result is rather odd but perhaps strangely effective.








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Daily Links 5/14/2013: ABC launching trial of free online streaming in Philly today

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ABC starts free online streaming in Philly today (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

Aereo Lands in Atlanta on June 17 (Multichannel News)

Verizon, Vodafone Stalement Seen Amid $7B Dividend (Investor's Business Daily)

Daily Report: Surging Data Center Industry Blurs Boundaries (New York Times)

Connectify Kickstarts Cloud Service For Faster Internet On Mac & PC (PR Newswire)

Connectify brings its broadband channel bonding service to the cloud (Gigaom)

Here's Why The Founders Of Fusion.io Left Last Week (SAI Enterprise)




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Daily Links 5/13/2013: Alteva, MeetMe earnings

Q&A: Plaintiffs' lawyer Barry Barnett on the Comcast class action (Thomson Reuters News & Insights)

Alteva Reports First Quarter 2013 Financial Results (Marketwire)

MeetMe® Reports First Quarter 2013 Financial Results (Marketwire)
Mobile revenue growing rapidly, but not enough yet to offset decline in non-mobile revenue. Mobile now accounts for 70% of daily users in US and Canada.



First area health-information exchange forming (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Health IT Accelerator Launching at University City Science Center (Business Wire)

Instem Enters Early Phase Clinical Market; Acquires Logos Technologies and ALPHADAS (Business Wire)


David’s Bridal launches a mobile planning tool for brides-to-be
(Internet Retailer)

Some pre-SAPPHIRE SAP news

Bluefin on SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (Diginomica)

SAP Sapphire 2013 preview: Five big questions (ZDNet)

Sapphire Now 2013 – the discerning preview (Diginomica)

HP wanted to offload Autonomy on SAP, says SAP co-chief (The Register)
But HP says it was SAP that was trying to buy from them.

Philly Tech People News 5/12/2013: SAP names former Comcast exec Clarke to head marketing communications function

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Victoria Clarke Becomes SAP's Fourth Comms Head In Three Years (The Holmes Report)
Previously with Comcast, the Pentagon.

Comcast’s Pick joins ValueVision board (CED Magazine)

InterDigital Adds Todd Simpson to Lead Innovation Partners (Globe Newswire)

Seasoned Specialty Retail Leader Named CEO of David’s Bridal
Pamela B. Wallack, Former Gap Executive Vice President, to lead largest specialty bridal market retailer (Business Wire)

GROM Hires Analytics Practice Lead
SAP Partner Engages Leading BI HANA Expert to Spearhead Analytics Practice (PR Web)

Checkpoint Systems, Inc. Appoints Jeff Richard Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (Business Wire)

Peter Illari Joins iCorps Technologies to Grow Philadelphia Market (PR Web)

DMi Partners Continues to Grow, Adding Three Associates to Creative Department (Marketwire)




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Today in Philly Tech History 5/12/2010: SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8 billion (Updated 5/16)

Tom Paine


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On May 12, 2010, SAP announced it had agreed to acquire Dublin, CA-based Sybase for $5.8 billion. The first big strategic bet under co-CEOs Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe since they took over the top spot from Léo Apotheker on Super Bowl Sunday of that year, the Sybase buy offered benefits in at least three important areas: database technology (the core of Sybase's original business although it was now a distant runnerup to Oracle, IBM and Microsoft) , strength in vertical sectors like financial services and telecom, and advancing SAP's position in mobile technology.

Sybase CEO John Chen left the company last year to join PE giant Silver Lake Partners, and Sybase became a fully integrated part of SAP rather than a standalone unit.

I asked R "Ray" Wang, Principal Analyst & CEO of enterprise software research firm Constellation Research, Inc., to reflect on how the Sybase acquisition has turned out for SAP three years later. He responded by email that "while the acquisition was on the expensive side, SAP used it to leap frog from super legacy ERP vendor to a more forward path of innovation. In general the Sybase acquisition set into motion 3 areas for SAP:

1. Mobility - this helped them move into the mobile device management and mobile app dev market.
2. China presence and credibility - this gave them a good footing in China based on John Chen's market development and credibility with the Chinese government.
3. The underpinning of database and HANA - the movement to reduce dependency on Oracle and set a path for in-memory computing came from these efforts."

When I asked Wang to be more specific about how Sybase contributed to the development of HANA, he said "The key thing was having access to some of the smartest database minds in the world. They say HANA is home grown, but I think they learned from Sybase and built from scratch."

Also, this thread on the SAP Community Network from earlier this year provides some interesting perspectives on what was gained from the acquisition.

Update 5/16/2013: Hasso Plattner speaking at SAPPHIRE: "Guess why we bought Sybase? They have a whole package of columnar store. Probably will be useful."



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Patent Court Torn on Whether Software Deserve Patents (Bloomberg)