StartUp Beat

5/31/07 – Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis today launched Mahalo.com, what he describes as a "human-powered" search engine, at the Wall Street Journal's D Conference in San Diego.  The company is based in Santa Monica.

Calacanis says the site is currently being launched in Alpha with the Internet’s 4,000 most popular search terms completed.  The company says it hopes to reach 10,000 search terms by the end of the year, at which point it will enter Beta, and launch shortly thereafter.

Mahalo also announced the closing of two rounds of financing to date.  Lead investors include Sequoia Capital, Elon Musk and NewsCorp.  The company says additional investors include CBS Corporation, Hubert Burda Media, Allen & Co., David Bradley, Gigi Brisson, Sandy Climan, Mark Cuban, Matt Coffin, Ted Leonsis, Jonathan Miller, Mark Pincus, Ryan Scott and Fred Wilson.

Mahalo – www.mahalo.com

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5/31/07 – Unstrung and SoCalTech are reporting that IdeaLab startup ClearMesh Networks has closed its doors.  Citing multiple sources, Unstrung says the company officially shut down last Friday after IdeaLab stopped funding the Pasadena-based wireless optical broadband mesh company.  It was apparently unable to attract other investors.

ClearMesh offered Ethernet connectivity that enabled large corporate, medical, education or government campus environments to integrate data, voice-over-IP, and surveillance video and other applications that demand large amounts of network capacity.

In March, the company released what it called “its next-generation wireless mesh solution”—the ClearMesh Sentry Mesh.  A company spokesperson told StartUp Beat at the time that it had 3 customers and was running ten trials of its technology. 

Unstrung says that the company is now trying to sell its technology, according to an unnamed source.

ClearMesh – www.clearmesh.com

IdeaLab – www.idealab.com

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5/31/07 –  Touting the success of its wi-fi network deployment at last week’s Interop show in Las Vegas, Westlake Village-based Xirrus today announced that it has been selected by Interop for a third time to deploy its Wi-Fi Arrays—this time at the upcoming Interop New York 2007.

Xirrus, which has been one of the most active early-stage companies in the region recently in terms of customer wins and service deployments, provides high performance, long range wi-fi products.

The company says it needed only 12 of its Wi-Fi Arrays to provide coverage for the entire Interop event.  The Xirrus network successfully supported voice, video and data applications for the 20,000 Interop attendees, according to Xirrus.

Interop, part of the CMP media company, is a major showcase of IT innovations and solutions that takes place in various locations throughout the world several times a year.  The New York show will be held in late October at the Jacob Javits Center.

Xirrus, which was founded in 2004 by former Xircom (sold to Intel in 2001) executives, is backed by investors that include U.S. Venture Partners and August Capital.

Xirrus – www.xirrus.com

Interop – www.interop.com

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5/31/07 – El Segundo-based Siderean Software has received $2.5 million in new debt financing from BlueCrest Capital Finance, L.P., according to the companies.

Siderean’s information access platform, Seamark Navigator, uses patented relational navigation technology that allows customers to keep pace with information access requirements.

Siderean was founded in 2001, and its backers include Clearstone Venture Partners, InnoCal Venture Capital and Red Rock Ventures.

Siderean Software – www.siderean.com

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5/30/07 – Los Angeles-based Spot Runner, the Internet-based television ad agency, and LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell, the provider of client development solutions for the legal profession, today announced a strategic alliance that enables Martindale-Hubbell-affiliated law firms to purchase local television advertising campaigns to help promote their services in select areas of practice.

Spot Runner says its platform brings law firms affordable, targeted TV advertising campaigns on top-rated broadcast and cable channels such as CBS, CNN, ESPN and Fox News at a fraction of the cost of traditional ad agencies.

As a result of the partnership, TV advertising will now be a part of the suite of marketing services Martindale-Hubbell offers to its client base, allowing law firms to choose from an exclusive library of high-quality, pre-produced ads in a variety of practice areas, according to the companies.

In collaboration with Martindale-Hubbell, Spot Runner says it will personalize the ads with the firm’s specific information, logos and even their own images.  Martindale-Hubbell’s account representatives will work directly with law firms to guide them through the process.

The program will be launched initially on a limited basis in specific states, with expanded availability expected through the rest of the year, according to the companies.

Spot Runner’s investors include Index Ventures and Battery Ventures.

Spot Runner – www.spotrunner.com

LexisNexis – www.lexisnexis.com

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5/30/07 – Irvine-based Integrien has announced the release of the latest version of its Alive integrity management software.  The company says the new features included in Alive 5.6 add to its ability to predict and prevent slowdowns and failures in mission-critical business services.

Through its patent-pending Problem Fingerprint and self learning capabilities, Integrien says Alive 5.6 helps organizations predict and prevent problems and application outages before they occur.

Integrien says Alive 5.6 includes new features that leverage current investments in IBM Tivoli, as well as providing insight into how the performance of IT systems impact business services.  Through its partnership with IBM, the company says Alive now provides enhanced IBM monitoring integration to add value to existing IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) implementations by auto-correlating and analyzing the data ITM collects from disparate devices, systems and applications to predict, prevent and resolve problems.

Integrien also cites the addition of Linux support, new JBOSS and WebSphere adapters and bulk server configuration tools in the new version, which the company says enables organizations to quickly and easily implement Alive without having to worry about interoperability issues with other infrastructure components.  Integrien says Alive 5.6 includes high availability and disaster recovery support, which it describes as a co-located passive system that takes over monitoring within five minutes of an event, with a maximum of 10 minutes of data loss.

Integrien was founded in 2001 and, after initial funding from the Tech Coast Angels, has secured investments from Clearstone Venture Partners and Acartha Group LLP.

Integrien – www.integrien.com

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5/29/07 – Los Angeles-based mobile content and service provider Amp’d Mobile is no stranger to media speculation about its business, and now several high profile blogs are writing that the company’s founder and CEO, Peter Adderton, may have left the company.  Amp’d has not yet commented about the rumor.

The company, along with Westwood-based Helio, operates in the highly-competitive mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) market.  Amp’d has raised a ton of cash, through five rounds of funding.  The company has also had a big year in terms of expansion and partnerships, announcing that it is approaching the 200,000 subscriber mark, expanded internationally into the Japanese and Canadian markets and signed multiple content deals with major players in entertainment—including MTV, actor Jack Black and producer Howard Gordon.

Although there has been much debate about the viability of MVNOs like Amp’d, perhaps the company’s best argument for its future growth is the strong average revenue per user the company reports—more than $100 per user, according to the company’s latest announcement.  Industry experts say this is nearly twice the average for mobile providers. 

The company also has built a strong executive team, in addition to Adderton, that includes former senior executives at Verizon Wireless, T-Mobile USA and Boost Mobile.

Amp’d Mobile – www.ampd.com

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5/29/07 – LogicalApps, based in Irvine, is opening a research and development facility in Hyderabad, India.  The plan was announced earlier this month, and the company says the new Indian facility will augment research and development efforts at its Irvine headquarters and its New York City office, while also extending the company’s customer support capabilities.

Jag Padala was tapped to head the new Indian office.  LogicalApps says Padala, who has led the company’s engineering team since 2002, has over 15 years of IT experience in the enterprise software industry.

The company provides embedded governance software for enterprise applications through its ACTIVE Governance flagship product.

LogicalApps – www.logicalapps.com

Posted by startupbeat at 09:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

5/25/07 – Buzznet, a Hollywood-based social media network, today announced it has closed a $6 million round of financing led by Redpoint Ventures and Anthem Venture Partners.

Buzznet, founded in 2005, says it now counts more than 6 million users and claims the fastest growing social networking audience, according to market research firm Hitwise.

Initially focused on music, Buzznet says it distinguishes itself by offering unique tools and versatility that enable web users to program, participate, interact and create multimedia communities.

The company says it is also focused on attracting musicians and other celebrities to create and grow their own active online communities where they can personally interact with their fans.

Buzznet – www.buzznet.com

Posted by startupbeat at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

5/25/07 – Low.com, a consumer financial portal owned by Los Angeles-based Oversee.net, has introduced new products that it says improve the current industry standard for FICO and Social Security mortgage leads.

Called Choice and Choice Plus, Low.com says the new products protect consumers and lending partners from the negative effects of extraneous credit pulls, leads without a consumer’s consent, and improve consumer security by protecting data and adhering to a rigorous privacy policy.

The Choice product allows lenders to receive an Internet lead with a FICO range of the consumer’s credit score.  According to Low.com, unlike other lead companies, the service provides lenders with the ability to pre-set an optimal band of FICO scores aligned with their lending objectives.

Low.com says the Choice Plus product will allow lenders to not only see the FICO range, but to also receive verified social security information with that lead.  The company also says that while the Choice Plus lead will pass on the verified social security information, the lenders will not have the ability to pull credit without first receiving the consumer’s consent.

Oversee.net operates a wide ranging network of web sites and services in addition to Low.com that include LiveDigital.com, DomainSponsor.com, Revenue.net, LowFares.com and BlogSource.com.

Oversee.net – www.oversee.net

Low.com – www.low.com

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5/25/07 – Los Angeles-based Shipwire.com this week announced that it has partnered with Stone Edge Technologies to offer its fulfillment services with the Stone Edge ecommerce product for small businesses.

Shipwire’s technology will be integrated into the Stone Edge Order Manager, an e-commerce business management operations tool that Stone Edge says is currently used by nearly 2,000 merchants to automate and streamline operations.

The companies say that the integration will allow small businesses to reduce the time spent managing inventory and fulfilling customer orders.  Businesses will also have the ability to add a new sales channel, such as eBay auctions, and arrange to have inventory sent directly to Shipwire warehouses and on to customers.  In addition, Shipwire says it offers the ability to import shipment tracking data for emails and customer lookups along with automatic synchronization of inventory information.

Shipwire, a participant in DEMO 07 earlier this year, is a fulfillment service focused on small businesses and allowing companies to outsource the process of receiving, warehousing and shipping merchandise.  The company says it offers quick set-up and “hands-off” administration, enabling an account to be configured and operational in less than 15 minutes.

Shipwire.com – www.shipwire.com

Stone Edge Technologies – www.stoneedge.com

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5/24/07 – Sonos, the Santa Barbara-based developer of wireless multi-room music systems for home entertainment, has introduced the Sonos Bundle 130, which includes three of Sonos’ key products—the Sonos ZonePlayer 80, the Sonos ZonePlayer 100 and the Sonos Controller 100.  Sonos says the bundle enables customers to wirelessly stream music to two rooms and control it from anywhere.

The company says that in a recent survey, new customers said they strongly preferred a mixed bundle as the ideal way to get started with Sonos’ home entertainment service. 

As part of the launch of the new Bundle 130, Sonos says all previous bundles—the ZP100 and the ZP80—will be discontinued.

The Sonos Digital Music System is a multi-room music system with a full-color Controller that allows users to listen to digital music all over a home.  The company also announced this week that it has integrated the Pandora personalized radio service into its digital music system.

Sonos – www.sonos.com

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5/24/07 – Santa Monica-based Boingo Wireless, the wholesale network aggregator and operator of neutral-host wi-fi networks, today announced the signing of a roaming agreement with FON, a Madrid-based wi-fi company.  Boingo says the agreement will provide access to an additional 130,000 hot spot locations—more than doubling the company’s network size.

Boingo says the additional locations provide a broader network of wi-fi connections in areas that complement Boingo’s existing commercial locations.

Boingo touts the benefits of the expanded network for business users in particular.  The company says it gives business travelers the best choice of wi-fi hot spots by combining worldwide locations from more than 150 leading wi-fi operators into one network.  Boingo says users can connect to any of these locations with a single account using Boingo’s free wi-fi client software, which it says combines more than 660 network names into one Boingo Wireless network and stores the user name and password to simplify identifying and connecting to commercial wi-fi.

Boingo Wireless – www.boingo.com

FON – www.fon.com

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5/24/07 – Irvine-based Integrien, which provides integrity management solutions, has announced the filing of three patents for new technology that addresses the measurement and management of distributed, interdependent systems in order to predict and prevent failures.

The company says these patent-pending methods are key to its competitive advantage and enable users of its Alive integrity management software to predict and prevent service slowdowns or outages before they impact the business.

Integrien says the first patent-pending technology, “System and Method for Generating and Using Fingerprints for Integrity Management,” relates to Integrien Alive’s Problem Fingerprint technology.  A Problem Fingerprint is a capture of the time series of abnormal events building up to a class of distributed application problems, which according to Integrien, provides an IT support team with a trail of application-specific evidence needed to determine resolution rapidly for the first occurrence of a problem and captures it for future reference.

The second patent filed, according to the company, titled “Self-Learning Integrity Management System and Related Methods,” covers Integrien’s overall capability to learn automatically what is normal in an enterprise’s IT infrastructure and analyze events in real-time to automatically identify potential problem areas.

Integrien says it also filed for a patent for the “Non-Parametric Method for Determination of Anomalous Event States in Complex Systems Exhibiting Non-Stationarity,” which it says is a method for determining out of normal behavior while simultaneously resolving issues with non-stationarity and data churn of network type data.

The company, which has a host of strategic partnerships with leading vendors, was recently awarded a High Tech Innovation Award from the AeA Orange County and Inland Empire Council.

Integrien – www.integrien.com

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5/24/07 – Fulcrum Microsystems, the Calabasas-based fabless semiconductor company, and Irvine-based Solarflare Communications have announced a collaboration on a new 10GBASE-T switch reference design that the companies say is the highest density, most cost-effective 10G Ethernet switch on the market today.

The companies made the announcement at the Interop show this week in Las Vegas, where they are conducting demonstrations of the switch.

Fulcrum and Solarflare say the new platform combines Solarflare’s 10Xpress 10GBASE-T physical layer technology with Fulcrum’s FocalPoint 24-port, low-latency Ethernet switch chip to create a 1U-high switch that features 20 10GBASE-T ports and four XFPs.

Fulcrum says its FocalPoint 10-Gigabit Ethernet switch chip family features the industry’s highest density and performance, lowest latency and greatest power efficiency for 10-Gigabit Ethernet switching.

Solarflare says its 10Xpress is the industry’s first standards-compliant 10GBASE-T PHY chip.  10Xpress enables 10-Gigabit connectivity via twisted pair copper—what the company says is a cost-effective alternative to expensive fiber infrastructures—while providing the familiar ease-of-use, which has helped copper fuel past Ethernet expansions.

Solarflare Communications – www.solarflare.com

Fulcrum Microsystems – www.fulcrummicro.com

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5/23/07 – Sonos, the Santa Barbara-based developer of wireless multi-room home music systems, today announced it has released a new version of the Sonos System Software that brings the Pandora personalized radio service to the Sonos Digital Music System.

Sonos says the addition of Pandora expands its home audio experience, providing access to more music services than any other whole-home digital music system on the market.   The free software upgrade is available to all registered Sonos customers via Sonos’ wireless handheld Controller, according to the company.

The integration of Pandora with the Sonos system allows users to create and play up to 100 radio stations based on their favorite songs or artists, according to Sonos.  Users can rate the music they hear to further refine the station’s playlist on the fly.

The partnership allows Sonos Digital Music System users to create and play Pandora radio stations all over the home without installing an application or turning on a computer.  

Sonos says it is offering new and current customers a free 30-day trial of Pandora starting today.

Sonos – www.sonos.com

Pandora – www.pandora.com

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5/23/07 – Monrovia-based Prolacta Bioscience, a biotech company that provides the only commercially available human milk fortifier made exclusively from human milk for infants in the neonatal intensive care unit, announced today that it has secured more than $12 million in funding.  It also says that former Baxter Bioscience president John Bacich has been named chairman of the board.

Alta Partners led the financing and was joined by DFJ Frontier, Arcturus Capital, DFJ Mercury, Funk Ventures, Phillip Capital, Gideon Hixon Fund and Draper Associates, according to Prolacta.  The company says Alison de Bord, director at Alta Partners, joined the board in connection with the financing.

Prolacta says it currently sells the first and only human milk fortifier, made from 100 percent human milk, for use in the neonatal intensive care unit.  Fortifier is added to a mother’s own milk, or to donor milk, which is critical for a preemie or sick baby’s ability to grow and develop.

The new funding will support greater commercialization and sales of Prolacta’s successful product line, as well as the development of additional products that meet the specific nutritional needs of these critically ill and premature infants, according to the company.

Alta Partners – www.altapartners.com

Prolacta Bioscience – www.prolacta.com

5/22/07 – Westlake Village-based wi-fi provider Xirrus today made a spate of announcements at the Interop show in Las Vegas.  Perhaps most significantly, the company debuted a solution for the remote powering of Xirrus Wi-Fi Arrays over Gigabit Ethernet data connections.  Xirrus says the solution streamlines wi-fi installation by reducing cabling and increasing deployment options.

In addition, the company announced the successful integration of the DiVitas Networks mobile-to-mobile convergence solution with its wi-fi technology.  DiVitas Networks operates in the converged-mobile market and is now the first vendor to ship a solution that converges cellular and wi-fi networks, thus enabling seamless roaming, back and forth, among disparate networks, according to the companies.

Xirrus also announced that its Wi-Fi Arrays have achieved Polycom’s VIEW (Voice Interoperability for Enterprise Wireless) Certification for use with SpectraLink wireless telephones.  Polycom says it is deploying 50 SpectraLink NetLink 8030 Wireless Telephones to the InteropNet team at the show that will utilize the Xirrus wi-fi network throughout the event to facilitate mobile communications for the tradeshow’s wireless environment.  Through extensive interoperability testing, Polycom’s VIEW Certification Program guarantees excellent voice quality on converged wi-fi networks, according to the companies.

As the official wi-fi network provider of Interop Las Vegas 2007, Xirrus says its Wi-Fi Arrays will be on display throughout the conference and live SpectraLink voice over wi-fi demonstrations are available at the Xirrus and Polycom booths.

Xirrus – www.xirrus.com

Interop – www.interop.com

5/22/07 – Santa Monica-based linguistic search technology startup Cognition Technologies announced that founder and CTO Kathleen Dahlgren, Ph.D., is a featured speaker today at the 2007 Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose.  The company says that Dahlgren’s presentation “Improved Precision and Recall with Linguistic Semantics,” will discuss how computational linguistics and an understanding of word meanings can dramatically enhance the capabilities of search technology.

Cognition is the creator of CognitionSearch, an evolutionary meaning-based linguistic search technology that the company says dramatically increases the precision and recall of search results when compared to traditional search methods and technologies.  Based on computational linguistic science, Cognition says the technology, in essence, teaches the computer the meaning of virtually all of the words and phrases in the common English language.  As a result, CognitionSearch “understands” both the user query and the content of the documents being searched, thereby delivering higher performance in the areas of precision and recall, the two main metrics that are commonly used to evaluate the effectiveness of search engine technology.

Dahlgren, an adjunct professor at UCLA, is the author of Cognition’s primary patent, “A Natural Language Understanding System,” which the company says describes a linguistic method for controlling the explosion of potential parses.  She has also published several scholarly articles on Linguistic Science and is the author of “Naïve Semantics for Natural Language Understanding.”  She has a doctorate in linguistics and has done post-doctoral work in computer science at UCLA.

Cognition Technologies – www.cognition.com

CognitionSearch – www.cognitionsearch.com

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5/21/07 – Leads360, the Los Angeles-based provider of on-demand lead management solutions, has announced the release of what it describes as a “Pull Distribution” engine.

Based on the functionality of its “Push Lead Distribution,” the company says Pull Distribution allows salespeople to review lead information prior to taking a lead and adding it to their queue.  The information available to users can be customized by an administrator to encourage users to take leads that best match their selling abilities, according to Leads360.

As a result, the company says that Pull Distribution’s main value lies in its ability to restrict sales people from getting leads unless they are ready to work them—addressing the problem of lost or unworked leads, and ensuring that leads are getting to the most appropriate team member in the shortest possible time by analyzing past performance trends and lead quality.

The service also allows a vendor to increase competition among users, ensure that leads are being worked by available resources, reduce the need for distribution recycling programs and increase the variety of distribution methods available to a sales team, according to Leads360.

Leads360 – www.leads360.com

5/21/07 – MyNextDeal.com, the Thousand Oaks-based vertical search engine for commercial real estate listings, has announced a new data sharing agreement with the Commercial Investment Multiple Listing Service, CIMLS.com.

MyNextDeal says it will index commercial property listings from CIMLS, further extending the exposure CIMLS members receive for their available property listings.

MyNextDeal’s commercial real estate search engine includes all commercial property categories, including office, industrial, retail, multifamily, hotel, land and specialty properties, according to the company.  The site currently features more than 400,000 commercial property listings and claims that it is the world's largest search engine for commercial real estate.

CIMLS.com is an open commercial real estate listing service.

MyNextDeal – www.mynextdeal.com

CIMLS.com – www.cimls.com

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5/21/07 – Calabasas-based fabless semiconductor producer Fulcrum Microsystems and Teranetics today announced a collaboration on what the companies describe as two pizza box-style switching platforms—a gigabit ethernet switch with 10GBASE-T uplinks and a dense 10GBASE-T switch.  Fulcrum and Teranetics made the announcement at the start of the Interop show in Las Vegas and say that both platforms represent complete reference designs that enable original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers to go to market quickly with differentiated solutions.

Both platforms will be a part of the Ethernet Alliance technology demonstrations taking place at the Interop show this week.

Fulcrum says its FocalPoint chip family is a breakthrough in 10-gigabit ethernet switch chips and features an industry-leading 200 nanoseconds of total latency.  Teranetics says it has developed innovative 10-gigabit ethernet solutions over copper infrastructures based on the 10GBASE-T standard with increased scalability and improved throughput at a dramatically reduced cost that makes ownership of 10-gigabit ethernet links possible for more data centers and enterprise networks.

Santa Clara-based Teranetics is a provider of silicon solutions that enable higher data rates over structured copper cabling. 

Fulcrum Microsystems – www.fulcrummicro.com

Teranetics – www.teranetics.com

Posted by startupbeat at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

5/18/07 – Placentia-based VidShadow, an online video-sharing network, has acquired a minority interest in Los Angeles-based MyNuMo, an online community that lets its members create, share and sell mobile content.  The companies say the investment includes a partnership that will give users of both services unique content-sharing opportunities through a platform that is now expanded to include both desktop and mobile devices.

MyNuMo says its portal delivers independently created content that is rated and promoted by its users and delivered to any mobile phone.  The company recently announced a content partnership with SuperStock, a stock photography company, to convert images for download to mobile devices.

MyNuMo – www.mynumo.com

VidShadow – www.vidshadow.com

5/18/07 – Fonality, the Culver City-based open-source telephony company, today announced that after an in-depth evaluation to select a new voice-over-IP-capable phone system, BLADE Network Technologies, a former subsidiary of Nortel, selected Fonality’s PBXtra over a comparable system from Nortel.

Fonality says it was able to deliver a sophisticated and easy-to-use phone system at less than 50 percent of the cost of a proposed Nortel system.  The company claims that, in addition to Nortel, it is regularly beating out incumbents including Cisco and Alcatel in the small to medium size business market.

BLADE ultimately chose PBXtra because it is a fully-functional IP PBX system that is easier to scale, use and manage than a Nortel system, according to Fonality.

Fonality says PBXtra is now deployed in more than 2,000 businesses with over 45,000 users in 37 countries.

The company says all flavors of  PBXtra—Standard, Professional and Call Center—support advanced enterprise features like voice-over-IP calling, advanced auto-attendant features, telecommuters, branch offices, drag-and-drop call control, conferencing and intra-office intercom for a fraction of the cost of traditional phone systems with similar features.

Fonality - www.fonality.com

BLADE Network Technologies – www.bladenetwork.net

5/17/07 – The AeA Orange County and Inland Empire Council has announced that early-stage companies Axiom Microdevices and Integrien are winners of its 2007 High-Tech Innovation Award.

Axiom Microdevices, based in Irvine and founded in 2002, received the award in the Semiconductors category.  The company provides fully integrated power amplifiers for the cell phone market. 

Integrien, also based in Irvine, was given the award in the Software category.  The company provides integrity management solutions that help businesses maintain application availability and service levels.

The AeA says the theme of the awards, “The Race to Innovate,” focused on global competitive challenges facing America.  In conjunction with Project Tomorrow, AeA Orange County and Inland Empire Council recognized educators and students for their innovative use of math, science and technology in the classroom and the community, according to the group.

Last week’s award ceremony featured City of Anaheim Mayor Curt Pringle as master of ceremonies, as well as a keynote address from Ed Coleman, chief executive officer of Gateway.

AeA – www.aeanet.org/orangecounty

Integrien - www.integrien.com

Axiom Microdevices - www.axiom-micro.com 

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5/17/07 – RCR Wireless News reports that Los Angeles-based mobile phone service and entertainment provider Amp’d Mobile has raised prices for its handsets across the board.  According to the article, the price hike ranges from $100 to $10, depending on the phone model.

Amp’d offers enhanced mobile phone service on a 3G network that includes original content and entertainment features.  Its handsets are specially equipped for Amp’d’s unique content services.  The company operates in the tough mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) space, along with Helio, another Los Angeles-based firm, among others.

Over the first five months of the year, Amp’d has announced several big content partnerships and  expanded to international markets.

Amp’d Mobile – www.ampdmobile.com

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5/16/07 – Pasadena-based Evolution Robotics, the provider of robotic technologies for consumer products, has announced that there are now more than two million products in the market powered by the company’s technologies.  Evolution Robotics, which made the announcement at the RoboBusiness 2007 show in Boston, partners with companies to help make their products smarter by delivering solutions for robotic vision, navigation and intelligence at a low cost.

The company says that over the last year, it has partnered with Bandai Networks, WowWee and Bandai Toys among others on a range of products including visual search applications for mobile phones to navigation solutions for smarter robotic vacuum cleaners.

Evolution says solutions currently being deployed on the market include ViPR, a vision solution that gives electronic devices the ability to detect and recognize complex visual patterns; NorthStar, a low cost localization solution that enables mobile robots (think robotic toys and vacuums) to intelligently navigate within indoor settings using a proprietary micro-GPS system; vSLAM, a vision-based navigation solution that lets robots autonomously build a map of their location and keep track of where they are based on what they see; and ERSP, a software development platform for robotics that includes tools for ViPR, vSLAM and the Evolution Robotics Software Architecture.

The company is an IdeaLab startup.

Evolution Robotics – www.evolution.com

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5/16/07 – Siderean, the El Segundo-based provider of relational navigation solutions, this week debuted Seamark Navigator 4.5, the newest version of the company’s information access platform.  Through its patented relational navigation technology, Siderean says Seamark Navigator 4.5 provides users with the ability to dynamically identify relationships between sets of information, create the context to drive action and increase user participation in the information flow.

Siderean says the new version of Seamark Navigator leverages semantic technology to enable users to harness content from across the enterprise and on the web, allowing users to master information access and discovery.  The product also enables more user participation, providing users with new tagging, voting, ranking and reviewing capabilities, according to the company.  

Siderean cites improvements in usability, scalability, security and management capabilities as key highlights of this release.

Siderean Software – www.siderean.com

5/15/07 – Irvine-based WiSpry, the fabless semiconductor company that develops low-cost, high-performance radio frequency micro-electro-mechanical systems for the wireless industry, today announced that Russell Garcia has been named president and CEO.  Jeffrey Hilbert, the company’s co-founder, former president and CEO, will remain on the company’s board and with WiSpry as executive vice president of development.

Garcia has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, previously serving as vice president of marketing for Silicon Systems/Texas Instruments Storage Products.  He also led and executed the integration of product, customer and organizational strategies for Texas Instruments Storage Products Group.

Most recently, Garcia served as president and CEO of u-Nav Microelectronics, a venture backed fabless GPS semiconductor company.  In this role, he developed a new entity from a Finland research and development operation to a global semiconductor company.  Previous roles include technical and management positions at Plessey Semiconductors and Hughes Aircraft Company.

WiSpry - www.wispry.com

5/15/07 – Xirrus, the Westlake Village-based provider of high-performance, long-range wi-fi products, will be the official wireless provider for Interop Las Vegas 2007 this month.  Xirrus says its network will deliver over 8 gbps of wi-fi bandwidth across 500,000 square feet of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center using 11 of the company’s Wi-Fi Arrays.  Xirrus says it was awarded the deployment based on merit after a lengthy selection process and after providing a seamless wi-fi network at last year’s Interop New York.

The Xirrus Wi-Fi Array is the only device that utilizes high-gain, sectored antennas that deliver twice the range and four times more coverage than any current generation Access Point, according to the company.  The patented Wi-Fi Array platform integrates four, eight, or 16 radios with an onboard gigabit switch, wi-fi controller, firewall, and dedicated wi-fi threat sensor into a single ceiling mountable device.

Xirrus – www.xirrus.com

Interop – www.interop.com

Posted by startupbeat at 07:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

5/14/07 – Amp’d Mobile, the Los Angeles-based mobile phone service and content provider, and