Miscellaneous

For BTI, a little Silicon Valley office means a lot

BOSTON--What's more impressive: The view from Bain Capital's 40th floor offices here in the landmark John Hancock Tower or a little sales office in Palo Alto, Calif.?

If you're in the tech industry, the answer is probably that little office in Silicon Valley. For the rest of us, well, you really have to visit the company Mitt Romney founded on a clear day.

I was in Bain's offices to hear about a $10 million funding round for BTI Systems, a cloud-computing software company with major offices in nearby Littleton, Mass., and Ottawa, Canada. BTI has been … Read more

Was a texting pilot behind JFK runway fail?

We all know that we shouldn't use our cell phones while driving.

Yes, of course we do it anyway, but always with a tinge of guilt.

Surely, though, few would take that same cavalier attitude if they were piloting a plane. Somehow, one imagines that this task requires a little more concentration, amid the prospect of even more serious danger.

Yet it seems that one pilot of a small charter plane may have needed -- or perhaps merely wanted -- to use his cell phone while he was taxiing toward takeoff on Thursday evening.

As it happens, he wasn't wafting along the slipways of some tiny regional airport in Alberta. No, he was at JFK. … Read more

Social pollution masks? Winning wearable tech ideas

While anyone could dream up a spinning virtual GPS globe constantly updated with a slideshow of global Flickr photos emanating from a hat, competitors in Frog Design's contest for new wearable technology concepts had to keep their designs within the realm of feasibility.

The key requirement that keeps all the designs within reason is that they have to be able to come to market within three years. That doesn't necessarily mean they will come to market, but at least there's a chance.

The global design firm ran its internal competition for new wearable technology concepts last year and just unveiled the results (PDF). They include some fun and fascinating ideas that explore everything from communing with trees through technology to an urban compass that leads you into discovering unexpected parts of a city.… Read more

Qualcomm announces Snapdragon 200 and 400 mobile processors

Qualcomm today announced a pair of new mobile processors designed for entry-level and mid-range smartphones. Expected in handsets later this year, the Snapdragon 200 and 400 balance the high-end 600 and 800 processors introduced in January.

As the model number suggests, the Snapdragon 200 is the lower-tier processor that provides a balance of value and performance as well as improved battery life. Details include a quad-core ARM Cortex A5 with up to 1.4GHz per core, an Adreno 203 GPU, and support for HD video playback, dual SIM cards, and up to 8 megapixels in the camera.

The mid-range Snapdragon … Read more

Tesla sales up 500 percent in Q4, sees profit ahead

Tesla lost $89.9 million after charges as sales soared 500 percent sequentially to $306 million in the fourth quarter. At the same time, management delivered a bullish forecast for the company's first quarter.

"In the first quarter of 2013, we expect to generate slightly positive net income, on a non-GAAP basis," CEO Elon Musk said in a letter to shareholders today. He added that Tesla expects "to be near breakeven on cash flow from operations."

Musk wrote in a post co-authored with Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja:

These targets would be achieved through a … Read more

uBiome project to sequence the bacteria that live on us

Oxford University Ph.D. student Jessica Richman, who today finished raising some $350,000 from more than 2,500 people wanting to take part in the uBiome project, isn't shying away from reality: "Yes, we are going to be sampling people's poo," she told the Guardian this week.

And for the squeamish, she offered an asterisk: "You'll only have to wipe it on the toilet paper."

The uBiome project is a "citizen science" effort to sequence the genomes of the trillions of bacteria that colonize our bodies and likely play pivotal … Read more

Escaping the Iron Curtain for Silicon Valley

The one thing everyone wants to know about Christian Gheorghe's life is the one thing he won't talk about.

In Silicon Valley, where the top talent at the hottest companies -- the Zuckerbergs, the Brins, the Cooks, and so forth -- are household names and paparazzi bait, Gheorghe's name isn't in play. Though he is a Silicon Valley CEO, his company, Tidemark, makes enterprise-focused performance and financial management applications, certainly not the sexiest of products.

But to a category of people who matter a lot in Valley -- the VCs -- Gheorghe is a bona-fide hero, … Read more

Meteorite suspected of causing explosions, damage in Russia

A meteorite may have caused a series of powerful explosions about 900 miles east of Moscow that injured more than 100 people on Friday, Russian emergency officials say.

Witnesses said one meteorite damaged a zinc factory in the Chelyabinsk region and disrupted the city's Internet and mobile service. The blast reportedly set off a shock wave that broke nearby windows and set off car alarms.

"It was definitely not a plane," emergency officials told Reuters. "We are gathering the bits of information and have no data on the casualties so far."

Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim … Read more

Helping American designers make it in America (video)

As a graduate of the Pratt Institute with experience working for big names in the apparel and accessory industries, Matthew Bennett was ready to work independently to create his own watch label. While he might have had great ideas and a fabulous sense of design, he just couldn't seem to tackle the logistics of running such an operation. He found a manufacturer in Hong Kong that could produce his designs, but it wasn't always seamless. After OKing one production sample, Bennett later received a shipment of 1,000 pieces of defective goods -- goods he couldn't sell … Read more