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Apple patents point to slimmer battery tech by Paul Marks NewScientist Tech

Posted in Apple, Apple Battery, Mobile Applications, NewScientist Tech, tagged , , , on June 1, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Apple patents point to slimmer battery tech

Graphene, the wonder material whose glittering array of electrical and thermal properties won its discoverers a Nobel prize in 2010, could soon be helping Apple’s iPhones and iPads pack more power.

The company has filed a US patent application (2013/0136966) on a graphene-based heat sink for the lithium batteries and circuit boards in its tablets and smartphones.

Graphene is a form of carbon that comes in sheets one-atom thick, with its atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. It is 10 times better at conducting heat than graphite, which is often used as a heat sink in mobile gadgets.

But in order to adequately cool a battery, a graphite coating is typically 30 micrometres thick. That eats up space within the gadget enclosure that could be used for a bigger battery, explains inventor Ramesh Bhardwaj of Fremont, California, in Apple’s patent application.

Hot stuff

By coating a polypropylene battery casing with graphene, he says, the heat sink can occupy a fraction of the space of the graphite version for the same heat dissipation – allowing for a bigger, longer-lasting battery to be installed.

Graphene is also being explored as a substance for storing electricity in next-generation batteries and supercapacitors. At the University of Manchester, in the UK – where Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov isolated graphene in 2004 – researchers have just embarked on a £2.2 million research programme to create high-capacity energy-storage devices with the wonder material at their heart.

In another battery patent application filed this week, Apple gave still more clues that it is indeed working on a wristwatch-shaped device, as CEO Tim Cook hinted last week.

In US patent 2013/0136967 the firm describes the precision-manufacturing techniques behind making a curved battery – including how to apply pressure for sustained periods to a flexible lithium cell to create the curve, a little like an acoustic guitar maker might with a wooden panel.

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February Cupcake Digital Update – Special Partnership Announced with National Fire Prevention Association

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Dear Friends,

In my most recent update I mentioned that I would be making a special announcement.

It is with great pleasure I not only present of our latest, delightful App, Wubbzy’s Fire Engine Adventure, but also announce the start of our partnership with the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA).
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You may learn more about the App and to view the it’s trailer by visiting:
http://www.cupcakedigital.com/apps/wubbzys-fire-engine-adventure/

fir2

This partnership includes:
·      A paid sponsorship of the Wubbzy’s Fire Engine Adventure App itself during National Fire Prevention Week (Sunday, 10/6 – Saturday, 10/13); and,
·      A commission for Cupcake to produce an App dedicated to fire safety featuring Sparky the Fire Dog.

To read the first in a series of press releases about our partnership please visit:
http://www.cupcakedigital.com/blog/the-nfpa-and-sparky-the-fire-dog-partner-with-cupcake-digital/

To highlight this association, Wubbzy’s Fire Engine Adventure includes a special learning section providing children and caregivers with important fire safety information. It is a strong proof point of our belief in “the power of play” and its ability to drive awareness and educate children about very important causes such as fire prevention.

sparkyThis content is a further enhancement to our mission of incorporating educational opportunities and Common Core State Standards into all our Apps.

In the months to come we will be making other exciting partnership announcements regarding additional licenses we will be “on boarding” and cause-related sponsorships.

I would encourage you to download the application by visiting http://www.cupcakedigital.com/apps/wubbzys-fire-engine-adventure/
and click on the store icon of your choice (iTunes, Amazon, Google Play or Nook).

Give it a test drive, and write a review about it.

As this is a special partnership for us, please do take a moment to post or write about it on your social networks, blogs etc., and encourage your friends, family and loved ones to do the same.

Thank you again for your continued support.

Sincerely yours,

Brad Powers
Chairman

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IVP’s Steve Harrick is looking for a few good B2B startups

Posted in Angel Investing, Apple, Blog of Intellectual Capital, Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Business Strategy, Capitalism, Date Certain M&A, Distressed IP, Entrepreneurship, FaceBook, Gerbsman Partners, Intellectual capital, Investments, IPO news, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Article from Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Institutional Venture Partners’ Steve Harrick sees a lot of opportunity in the enterprise and B2B startup space and has a $1 billion fund that was raised last year to work with.

His Menlo Park firm focuses on later-stage venture and growth equity investments, so it’s not the small fry they have their eyes on.

IVP is looking for startups that already have $20 million to $30 million in revenue and the potential to grow that by tenfold or more.

The firm had several big exits last year, including the $223 million IPO of CafePress and the $745 million sale of Buddy Media to Salesforce.

Harrick took some time to speak to me this week about the startups that are exciting him today and why IVP often remains an investor long after a startup has gone public.

Here are excerpts from that conversation:

There has been a lot said about a shift away from social and consumer-focused startups since Facebook’s IPO last year. What does that mean at Instiutional Venture Partners?

IVP has always invested in enterprise companies and we’ve been investing since 1980. We’re on our 14th fund, IVP-14. It’s a billion-dollar fund and we’re just beginning to invest that.

But enterprise has always been a mainstay of our investment effort. It ebbs and flows with budgets and where we see growth. But right now we’re seeing a lot of good activity in the enterprise space, a lot of innovation being brought to bear and the opportunity for new high-growth companies. So we’re actively investing there.

Can you tell me a little bit about the companies that are exciting to you right now from your portfolio?

There are a number of them. The most recent investment was AppDynamics. AppDynamics does application performance management. It’s really a very exciting area. The company allows anybody that’s creating an application to bug test it, to test it for security, to see if it can support high volume loads, all while they are designing the application.

The reason that this is such an interesting space is that every enterprise has applications that reach out to customers that they use internally and that they connect to partners with. It’s a real competitive edge for companies that do it correctly.

All the old stuff doesn’t support mobile. It doesn’t support the latest programming techniques. It’s long in the tooth. The market has been desperate for a more modern solution and AppDynamics really delivers that. We were really impressed with the growth the company has shown and just the massive demand for the product offering.

A lot of our portfolio companies were already using AppDynamics. That’s how we found out about the company and it’s a space that right now is at about $ 2 billion market size. It’s growing and it’s a very good management team. So we’re excited to be part of it.

Another one I understand you invested in last year is Aerohive.

Oh, yeah. David Flynn is the CEO over there. It’s a great company to watch in Sunnyvale. It’s a next generation Wi-Fi company. What Aerohive did very early on is it realized that a controller can be costly and also is a choke point for an enterprise deployment. If your controller goes down, you can’t change configurations. A lot of the old vendors had built a lot of cost around the controllers, which increased the cost of deployment for a customer.

Aerohive took that controller and put it in the cloud. You can manage your Wi-Fi deployments remotely from any computer. It doesn’t go down and their Wi-Fi deployments are enormously successful at scale. They’ve got a lot of enterprise and education and government customers. It’s a business that more than doubled last year and really one to watch going forward.

Are you finding a lot more company these days looking at the enterprise and B2B space than there were a couple of years ago?

Enterprise budgets have come back. People are recognizing that they have to refresh their technologies. They’ve got a lot of new demands in terms of supporting new trends in the enterprise.

Take another one of our companies for example, MobileIron. It is a software company that solves the bring-your-own-device problem for businesses. People are bringing iPhones and Android phones into the enterprise and they’re viewing enterprise information. They’re putting things in a Dropbox account and they’re leaving with it.

IT can’t control that and that is a big problem, particularly when you want to maintain rights and provisioning and state-of-the-art security and be able to track confidential information.

So MobileIron’s products allow you to do all that. It allows you to push out patches, security, rules and provisioning. It allows you to take control of a mobile environment in the enterprise.

Five, six, seven years ago, this wasn’t a problem. It just wasn’t happening. Now, it is and it is being driven by consumer behavior that has flown over to the enterprise.

So people are saying, I have a budget for this. I have to spend. We have to be on top of these issues or it’s going to be a big problem for us.

You know those kinds of trends are really unstoppable.

Are there other trends you are watching?

Another is Wi-Fi, which is being kind of taken for granted, how to be able to connect if I’m visiting your company or I’m in your auditorium or I’m having lunch in your corporate cafeteria. These are all things you need to have infrastructure for. You need to do it cost effectively. So these fund-smart entrepreneurs are seeing an opportunity and people are spending for it.

As a venture capitalist, we look for those tailwinds in terms of budget because that allows you to grow. It accelerates the sale cycle. It becomes less of a missionary sale and that’s how you have rapid growth in businesses. It is different from five or six years ago. There are a lot of people paying attention to it.

There is a lot said about the consumerization of IT, the trend where shifts in consumer technology is requiring IT departments and enterprises to change how they do things.

It’s a massive change in behavior. Enterprises are organizations that are comprised of employees that have jobs to do. Their behaviors change and the enterprises have to change with them.

There is also a lot of talks about what is being described as Network 2.0, involving things like software-controlled networking and flash storage. Are you guys involved in that at all?

On the network side, a lot of that is cloud computing and services around the data center. We are involved in that.

We invest in a company called Eucalyptus Systems, which is the leader in hybrid cloud deployment. They allow you to manage and test software on your own premises and switch seamlessly back and forth between Eucalyptus and the Amazon Cloud.

Cloud computing is still an area where people are trying to figure out exactly what their needs and specs are. It’s still early in the market. But there have been some large successes that have kind of changed behavior.

Salesforce is one of those. Salesforce is widely deployed. It really took customer relationship management and managing your sales force to the cloud. They’ve offered additional cloud applications and people have gotten used to paying by subscription.

That’s also a change from seven or eight years ago, when everything was license dominated. The old world was you paid for licensing and maintenance, 80-20. That was what you paid.

Those are perpetual licenses and they were often expensive. Sometimes, they were underutilized or never deployed and the world gradually shifted to paying on subscription.

Customers like it because they say, hey, if I’m not using it, I can turn it off. I don’t have to renew.

The vendors like it because it’s a more predictable revenue stream. You’re no longer biting your nails at the end of each quarter to figure out if you’re going to get those two or three deals that are going to make or break your quarter.

You get a lot of smaller deals that recognize revenue monthly and that provide a more predictable business and that have been a reward in the public markets. Networking and application functionality is being delivered that way now. The economics have changed and I think that is a very exciting trend. I think it leads to more sane management for software businesses.

How about the security? Are you into that at all?

We are. We were investors in ArcSight, which Hewlett-Packard bought. That was an example of a dashboard for enterprise security.

We’ve been involved with a number of other security companies. I think two to watch are Palo Alto Networks and FireEye. We aren’t investors in either of those, but they’re both very good companies. We’re looking at a lot of security companies currently.

The challenge with security is that it can often be a point solution and a small market. To be a standalone security company, you really have to have a differentiated broad horizontal functionality that could stand on its own.

You can’t have customers saying, I want that, but it’s a feature and should be delivered with a bunch of other things. A lot of small companies fall into that trap in security.

So we’re on the lookout for the broader security places that you know really can get the $50 million, $75 million or $100 million revenue.

Have there been any companies that you passed on that you wished maybe in retrospect you hadn’t? The ones that got away?

Yeah, you know, there always are. That would be the anti-portfolio. You run into those things and you try to see what you learn from it. Sometimes, they’re very hard to anticipate.

We passed on Fusion-io, the Salt Lake, Utah, flash drive memory company. They have done well, but I think they have fallen off recently in the public markets. That one would be in the anti-portfolio.

We also looked at Meraki. Cisco bought them for $1.2 billion, more than 10 times revenue. It’s hard to predict when somebody’s going to buy a company at that kind of multiple. We believe Aerohive is the superior company. That’s why we invested in Aerohive instead of Meraki. You can’t really invest in both. They’re competitors.

Then there was Yammer, which was acquired for $1.2 billion. That was also a company we were familiar with, good technology acquired for huge multiple of sales and it was hard to predict that happening, too. So I wish all those guys well. Sometimes you miss on big returns like thoses, but we like the investments that we have made.

What is it that you’re looking for at the top of your list when you’re considering a company that you might invest in?

Well, you know, the old adages in venture capital have some merit in them. But things change and you can’t rely too much on just pattern recognition. There’s always seismic shifts in technology where old assumptions have been disproven. You have to adapt to those.

But the adages that do hold are quality of management. We really look for companies and management teams that can take a company to $50 million to $500 million in revenue.

That’s a very mature skill set. They have to show the ability to hire, the ability to supplement the businesses, to attract great board members and to build a company that can be public.

There are a lot of demands on being public today. The industry is still dominated by mergers and acquisitions, as it always has been, for exits. Probably about 80 percent of the exits happen from M&A.

But we really look to exceptional management teams that we can be in business with for many, many years.

How does being a later stage investor change what you are looking for?

We have a long-time horizon for investment. We often hold after a company goes public and even invest in the company after it’s gone public. That’s in our charter.

So we really look for these management teams that are really exceptional and deep.

As a late stage investor, you can’t really invest in small market opportunities. The early stage can do that, and they can exit nicely. You know they can invest $10 million valuation, the company sells for $60 million and they do great.

When you’re investing at a later stage, you know looking for companies that have $20 million or $30 million of revenue so the valuation is higher and you have to get these companies to a higher exit value to get a great return.

So you have to able to identify large market opportunities and AppDynamics, Aerohive, MobileIron, Spiceworks, all have really large market opportunities. That’s why we’re excited about them.

Interviewer: Tell me a little bit more about the philosophy of holding on to companies after they’ve gone public.

Our perspective is that going public is a financing event. It’s also a branding event for a company. It raises awareness. It creates liquidity in the stock.

But valuations fluctuate with market conditions. We say this is just the beginning of growth. That valuation that it’s at now may not be the right place to exit .

If you look back historically, venture capitalism left a lot of money on the table by exiting companies prematurely. You know if you exited when Microsoft or Apple or Cisco went public, you probably left a 10X, 20X, or 50X return on the table by doing so.

Obviously, that requires a lot of judgment. Not every company is going to be an Apple or a Cisco.

So that’s a judgment call and when we make the judgment that there’s a lot of growth ahead and the current valuation doesn’t reflect that, we’re happy holders. We establish price targets for exit and when it reaches that price target, we make a new assessment.

We do have to exit eventually, but we raise 10-year funds and our holding period is typically 3 to 5 years and then oftentimes its 5, 7, 8 years.

Is there a specific example to illustrate this from your portfolio?

Sure. One would be HomeAway. HomeAway is a remarkable business. People list homes on the website. If you’re traveling with your two kids, you get a home for 800 bucks for the week and you would’ve paid 500 bucks a night for a hotel. It’s a great service. It’s public. We invested, my gosh, about five years ago and we’re still holding that stock.

Read more here.

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Apple Ad Alumni Get Backing From Google Ventures

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Entrepreneurship, Investments, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 5, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

Google’s venture capital arm is investing in a start-up founded by Apple alumni that is seeking to make mobile users a little less anonymous to advertisers.

Adelphic Mobile, based in Boston, has raised $10 million from Google Ventures and Matrix Partners, a firm that invested in the company during an earlier fund-raising round. The company has raised $12 million to date.

Adelphic was founded in 2010 by Changfeng Wang and Jennifer Lum, both of whom used to work for Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising start-up that was acquired by Apple and became the foundation for iAd, Apple’s mobile advertising network.

Mobile advertising has been a disappointment to many people in the technology industry. The explosion of mobile devices initially prompted exhilaration among marketers about the potential for peppering people with ads on the cellphones that are always at hand. Google and Apple both bought start-ups to help bolster their mobile advertising efforts.

But many companies, including Facebook, have found it more difficult to make money from mobile advertising than through traditional Web sites. That is in part because of the limited screen real estate people have on their smartphones and their wariness about having it filled up with advertising.

“It’s not growing nearly at the rate it should have been given mobile media consumption rates,” said Ms. Lum, the president of Adelphic.

Adelphic is focused on another problem with mobile advertising: the relative poverty of data that advertisers have about the mobile users they are trying to reach. Through Web browsers on computers, it is easier to deliver targeted ads to users by keeping data on their browsing habits employing tools like browser cookies, the small identification files advertising networks place on computers.

Mobile advertisers do not know as much about users because mobile browsers and apps are not as commonly configured to allow the kinds of identification techniques that work on computers. As a result, advertisers do not know much more about the audiences they are trying to reach other than the type of cellphone they have and the wireless network they are on, Ms. Lum said.

Adelphic seeks to paint a more detailed picture of mobile Web users by using complex software to analyze dozens of “signals” about mobile users’ online activities, though Adelphic is not willing to go into too much detail about how the process works (it says it respects the privacy policies of the publishers that show its advertising).

Through its data mining, the company says it can identify the likely age of mobile users, as well as their gender and general location. In turn, the company tells advertisers it can deliver ads to the specific audiences they are after.

Rich Miner, general partner at Google Ventures, said in an interview that mobile advertising would become more effective over time and that Adelphic’s service was helping to push the market forward.

“With the growth of mobile, we’re still very early and, just like in traditional online ads, there’s still a tremendous amount of innovation and value to be created,” said Mr. Miner, who also co-founded Android. Google acquired that company and used its technology as the basis for its Android mobile operating system.

Read more here.

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In Shake-Up, Apple’s Mobile Software and Retail Chiefs to Depart

Posted in Board of Directors, Economy, Market research, tagged , , , , , , , , , on October 30, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Article from NYTimes.

Apple fired the executives in charge of the company’s mobile software efforts and retail stores, in a management shake-up aimed at making the company’s divisions work more harmoniously together.

The biggest of the changes involved the departure of Scott Forstall, an Apple veteran who for several years ran software development for Apple’s iPad and iPhone products. Mr. Forstall was an important executive at the company and the one who, in many respects, seemed to most closely embody the technology vision of Steven P. Jobs, the former chief executive of Apple who died a year ago.

But Mr. Forstall was also known as ambitious and divisive, qualities that generated more friction within Apple after the death of Mr. Jobs, who had kept the dueling egos of his senior executives largely in check. Mr. Forstall’s responsibilities will be divided among a few other Apple executives.

While tensions between Mr. Forstall and other executives had been mounting for some time, a recent incident appeared to play a major role in his dismissal. After an outcry among iPhone customers about bugs in the company’s new mobile maps service, Mr. Forstall refused to sign a public apology over the matter, dismissing the problems as exaggerated, according to people with knowledge of the situation who declined to be named discussing confidential matters.

Instead, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, in September signed the apology letter to Apple customers over maps.

Apple said in a news release on Monday that the management changes would “encourage even more collaboration” at the company. But people briefed on Apple’s moves, who declined to be identified talking about confidential decisions at the company, said Mr. Forstall and John Browett were fired.

Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman, said neither executive was available for an interview. Mr. Forstall did not respond to interview requests over e-mail and Facebook.

Mr. Browett, who took over as head of the company’s retail operations in April, will also leave the company after a number of missteps. Apple said that a search for a new head of retail was under way and that the retail team would report directly to Mr. Cook in the meantime.

Mr. Forstall will leave Apple next year and serve as an adviser to Mr. Cook until then.

Eddy Cue, who oversees Apple’s Internet services, will take over development of Apple maps and Siri, the voice-activated virtual assistant in the iPhone. Both technologies have been widely criticized by some who say they fall short of the usual polish of Apple products.

Jonathan Ive, the influential head of industrial design at Apple, will take on more software responsibilities at the company by providing more “leadership and direction for Human Interface,” Apple said. Craig Federighi, who was previously in charge of Apple’s Mac software development, will also lead development of iOS, the software for iPads and iPhones.

Apple said Bob Mansfield, an executive who previously ran hardware engineering and was planning to retire from Apple, will lead a new group, Technologies. That group will combine Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams. Apple in a statement said the semiconductor teams had “ambitious plans for the future.”

Recently, Mr. Mansfield had been working on his own projects at the company, operating without anyone reporting to him directly. One of the areas of interest Mr. Mansfield had been exploring is health-related accessories and applications for Apple’s mobile products, said an Apple partner who declined to be named discussing unannounced products.

Mr. Forstall was a staunch believer in a type of user interface, skeuomorphic design, which tries to imitate artifacts and textures in real life. Most of Apple’s built-in applications for iOS use skeuomorphic design, including imitating thread of a leather binder in the Game Center application and a wooden bookshelf feel in the newsstand application.

Mr. Jobs was also a proponent of skeuomorphic design; he had a leather texture added to apps that mimicked the seats on his private jet. Yet most other executives, specifically Mr. Ive, have always believed that these artifacts looked outdated and that user interface design on the computer had reached a point where skeuomorph was no longer necessary.

Mr. Forstall, who trained as an actor at a young age, also shared with Mr. Jobs a commanding stage presence at events introducing Apple products, often delivering his speeches with a pensive style that echoed that of Mr. Jobs.

According to two people who have worked with Apple to develop new third-party products for the iPhone, the relationship between Mr. Forstall and Mr. Ive had soured to a point that the two executives would not sit in the same meeting room together.

A senior Apple employee who asked not to be named said Mr. Forstall had also incurred the ire of other executives after inserting himself into product development that went beyond his role at the company. One person in touch with Apple executives said the mood of people at the company was largely positive about Mr. Forstall’s departure.

“This was better than the Giants winning the World Series,” he said. “People are really excited.”

The departure of Mr. Browett was less surprising to outsiders. In August, the company took the unusual step of publicly apologizing for a plan by Mr. Browett to cut back on staffing at its stores. Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Company, said he was never convinced that Mr. Browett was a good choice to join Apple because he had previously run Dixons, a British retailer that is viewed as being more downmarket than Apple’s retail operations.

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