Author Archives: Ajit Deshpande

Last week, Intel announced its acquisition of API enablement and management services player Mashery for $180 million. Since its establishment in 2006, Mashery has raised approximately $35 million in funding, and is one of multiple players in the space along with IPO bound MuleSoft (raised more than $80 million so far), Apigee, Layer 7 Technologies […]

Bitcoin, the online, decentralized commodity introduced by pseudonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto, had its most volatile trading day and week last week. The currency rose to more than $260/bitcoin on April 10th, then fell to less than $100 in a matter of hours on the same day, and eventually ended the week at $95. With approximately […]

The Series A crunch – is it for real? Is it actually happening? Folks in the innovation ecosystem have had a spectrum of views on it over the past couple years. Some have felt it is for real, while others have opined that it is a myth. Add Fenwick and West’s latest survey to the […]

Last week, global payments technology leader Visa announced it had added Overstock.com, its biggest online retailer partner yet, as a user of its V.me digital wallet. With over $1 billion in annual online sales across a variety of categories, Overstock represents a significant addition to V.me’s current list of 34 retailers, which includes LivingSocial and […]

Last week, cloud-based file storage leader Dropbox announced its acquisition of Mailbox, an iOS email management app created by a 14-person startup named Orchestra. Orchestra was established in early 2011, raised a $5 million round in late 2011, and was acquired by Dropbox for approximately $100 million. Since its launch in early February’13, Mailbox has […]

We discussed back in January about Open Compute, the Rackspace and Facebook driven open-source server initiative, and about how there was growing momentum for commoditization in hardware for the cloud. Well, last week brought news that signaled similar momentum for the OpenStack project, an open and scalable operating system for building private and public clouds, […]

For decades, the television industry had been driven by content from broadcast networks and advertising revenues from brands wanting to connect with a passive audience. Over time, digitization of TV content, deployment of broadband infrastructure, and development of IP TV technology have made it possible for television content to be delivered over IP, and as […]

Dropbox, one of today’s leaders in cloud-based file storage, syncing and backup, last week announced an update to its iOS app to provide easier PDF viewing capabilities, push notifications for changes to shared folders, and enhanced file-sorting features. While not the most path-breaking, these features represent another milestone in Dropbox’s continued journey from a simple […]

Acme Packet, a pioneer in and a leading manufacturer of Session Border Controllers (SBC) for VoIP (as well as for broader Unified Communications applications), was acquired last week by Oracle for approximately $1.7 billion in enterprise value. As of 2011, Acme Packet was the dominant player in the SBC segment, with ~57 % share of […]