Every single company with treasuries, every insurance fund, every — every requirement that — it will start snowballing. Automatic, you don’t pay your debt, there will be default by ratings agencies. All short-term financing will disappear. I would have hundreds of work streams working around the world protecting our company for that kind of event. [PBS via BI]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
Few tech startups actually save lives. Sproxil may be the rare exception.
The company tags pharmaceutical products in Africa with a scratch-off code (like the code you use to top up a prepaid cell phone). The customer sends the code in a text message to Sproxil’s product authentication service, which verifies if the product is genuine.
Sproxil just received an investment of $1.8 million investment from the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund addressing poverty in South Asia and East Africa. The $1.8 million investment will be used to build sales teams in the U.S. and Nigeria, begin Sproxil’s expansion into India and Kenya and to improve the technology.
Drug counterfeiting is a major problem in the developing world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), up to 30 percent of drugs sold in developing nations are counterfeit. Up to 50 percent of medicines in countries like Ghana and Pakistan, are substandard, meaning they do not contain doses high enough to be effective. WHO calculates that 200,000 of deaths caused by malaria alone could be prevented if all antimalarials sold were genuine.
There is also a huge financial loss to the drug companies. The counterfeit drug market worldwide estimated at $200 billion by the World Customs Organization (WCO). As a result drug makers have tried many different schemes to verify the authenticity of their products including RFIDs, barcodes and holograms on packaging, chemical tests and laser scanning.
Unfortunately most of those techniques are too expensive or require technology not widely available in the developing world. All Sproxil’s technology requires is a basic mobile phone.
Sproxil has already sold more than 5 million anti-counterfeit labels in Nigeria. The company’s customers include both local companies and global pharmaceutical giants like GlaxoSmithKline, who will add the codes to an antibiotic product that sells around 2 million units a year in Nigeria, and Johnson & Johnson. Sproxil can provide the mobile authentication technology more cheaply than the pharma companies themselves by aggregating multiple pharma clients.
When I talked to CEO Ashifi Gogo last year, he foresaw the codes being used to verify the authenticity of other items such as wines and spirits (fake versions are a major problem in Asia, apparently) and luxury goods. But for now the focus remains on the, potentially lethal, fake drug market.
Sproxil was founded in 2009, has 12 staff members and offices in Somerville, Mass. and Lagos, Nigeria. Prior to this investment the company is privately funded and, according to Gogo, profitable.
Tags: counterfeit, drugs, fake, health, mobile
Companies: glaxosmithkline, Johnson & Johnson, Sproxil
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
Bloomberg’s Jun Yang has a brief note from covering Warren Buffett’s trip to South Korea today, noting that Buffett remarked he maintains his long-term wariness toward technology stocks, including Apple (AAPL), given the lack of predictability in their businesses.
“Even though Apple may have the most wonderful future in the world, I’m not capable of bringing any drink to that particular party and evaluating that future,” Buffett is quoted as saying. “I simply look at businesses where I think I have some understanding of what they might look like in five or 10 years.”
Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily
“We held very few [electronics makers such as Apple] in the past and we’re likely to hold very few in the future,” the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway said in Daegu, South Korea, today. Coca-Cola, based in Atlanta, is “very easy for me to come to a conclusion as to what it will look like economically in five or 10 years, and it’s not easy for me to come to a conclusion about Apple,” he said. “Even though Apple may have the most wonderful future in the world, I’m not capable of bringing any drink to that particular party and evaluating that future,” Buffett said.[Bloomberg]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
Snaptu confirmed this morning that it has been acquired by Facebook. The social network reportedly paid as much as $70 million for the Israeli startup, which makes apps for feature phones.
The deal shows that Facebook is serious about extending its social network across the entire globe and that most of the world accesses the internet not via smartphones or PCs but through old-fashioned feature phones. To cover the whole market, Facebook needs its app to run on the least expensive phones on the market.
The purchase price wasn’t officially disclosed but the Israeli media came up with the estimated price. Facebook worked with Snaptu earlier this year on a Facebook mobile app for a broad range of feature phones, now numbering 2,500 devices.
“We soon decided that work as part of the Facebook team offered the best opportunity to keep accelerating the pace of our product development,” Snaptu said in a blog post today. “And joining Facebook means we can make an even bigger impact on the world.”
The deal is expected to close within a few weeks. Snaptu said it will work on offering richer and more advanced Facebook apps on virtually every mobile phone.
“Snaptu is a startup run by a highly innovative collection of engineers and entrepreneurs, who we already work closely with to offer a Facebook mobile application for feature phones,” Facebook said in a statement today. “As part of Facebook, Snaptu’s team and technology will enable us to deliver an even better Facebook mobile experience on feature phones more quickly.”
Snaptu was founded in 2007 with backing from Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures. Gartner reported that in the third quarter of 2010, smartphones were 19.3 percent of the market, or 81 million units of a total of 417 million.
[photo credit: Tech N' Marketing]
Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to the top 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. Request an invitation.
Tags: feature phones, social network
Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals
Despite reports by Charlie Gasparino, who said he’s heard from friends of Lloyd that he “might be planning to step down by the end of the year,” GS has reassured the world that LB will be with us for many years to come, and possibly even longer, if Lucas van Praag can get him to agree to be cryogenically frozen. Future generations shouldn’t be punished for not being born in his lifetime. [Reuters]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
Morgan Stanley analyst Bill Lu today raised his rating on the ordinary shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSM), the world’s largest contract chip manufacturer, to Overweight from Equal Weight, and raised his price target on the shares to 85 new Taiwan dollars from 69.
Lu sees and increasing share of chip production at TSM, especially from smartphones, and also the prospect for improving results from the company’s “thin-film” solar energy products.
Lu writes that the Street has been overly concerned about a potential glut in the supply of tablet computers this year. Tablets are a “structural positive,” but smartphones “constribute much more to foundry revenues than tablets.” Tablets are probably just 4% of manufacturing revenue for TSM this year, versus smartphones at 20% to 25%.
On that score, TSM should benefit as the world moves to smartphones from cheaper devices, given that TSM has a higher proportion of the manufacture of chips for smartphones than it does for the cheaper models. Smartphones require more advanced parts, thus benefitting TSM’s lead in contract chip manufacturer, opines Lu.
As for tablets, TSM benefits to the extent that its semiconductor content in a tablet is as much as a third higher than it is in notebook computers. The potential for an overall increase in semiconductor content inside of consumer electronics devices could help TSM outperform the overall semiconductor market, he thinks.
As for solar, “Our checks suggest that TSMC and partner Stion have made technology breakthroughs recently with the thin-film approach,” writes Lu. Capacity is likely to be low this year for the technology, dubbed “CIGS,” at a mere 100 megawatts, but it could “ramp significantly” next year, if successful, he writes.
Lu acknowledges that while Japan provided 4% of TSM’s revenue in 2010, it could have a larger adverse effect depending on how the disaster there impacts the overall electronics supply chain.
TSM’s ordinary shares traded in Taiwan traded down slightly today to 68.50. The company’s American Depository Receipts on the New York Stock Exchange were down 43 cents, or almost 4%, at $11.48.
Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily
Bill Gross has unloaded all U.S. government-related holdings, including Treasurys, in the world’s biggest bond fund. Mr. Gross, founder and co-chief investment officer of Newport Beach, Calif.-based Pacific Investment Management Co., slashed such holdings to zero by the end of February from 12% in January in the Total Return Fund, a Pimco representative said Wednesday. The selling reflects Mr. Gross’s stance as a major Treasury bond bear. He has fretted about the U.S. fiscal deficits in recent months, saying that a 30-year bull run in the Treasury market was over. [WSJ, Related: Bill Gross Tells Investors About The Time He Stiffed A Waitress]
Article courtesy of Dealbreaker
The French know fashion; they invented the little black dress (thank you, Chanel!) and pioneered the mini skirt (cheers, Courrèges!). Parisians look très chic every day of the year, which is to be expected from the fashion capital of the world. Read the full story
808 E 3rd Street, Downtown via
While we were all atwitter over the supposed “Banksy” hits popping up all over the city, another artist was busy making his mark around L.A., but not to rally for an Oscar. If you’ve seen large-scale black and white street art portraits around town recently, they’re all part of French street artist JR‘s plan to make the world a better place. Last night in Long Beach, as this year’s TED2011 winner, he accepted his prize of $100,000 and announced his “One Wish To Change The World”: a global street art project that will turn the world inside out. Read the full story