Tuesday, January 16, 2007


Geni.com Launches Venture Backed Family Tree Site
Los Angeles-based startup Geni.com said Tuesday that the firm has launched a new web site to allow people to create their own family trees. The firm, which has received venture funding from the Founder's Fund, is headed by former PayPal COO David O. Sacks. Other co-founders of the firm include Alan Braverman, former co-founder of Xoom. The firm is applying Web 2.0 techniques to genealogy.
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AcuFocus Gets Investment From Bausch & Lomb
Irvine-based AcuFocus has received a strategic investment from Bausch & Lomb, which also has secured an exclusive option to purchase the firm, according to Bausch & Lomb. Amount of the investment was not disclosed. AcuFocus said that it would use the investment to accelerate and broaden the company's efforts to bring its technology to market. AcuFocus is developing corneal inlay technology for the treatment of presbyopia.
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Interview with Dave Gross, Great Pacific Capital
Dave Gross is the co-founder of Santa Barbara-based FastClick, one of the great local success stories in Internet advertising. He recently started a new venture fund, Great Pacific Capital (www.greatpacificcapital.com), to invest in the region. We spoke with him about the fund, what it is looking to invest in. FastClick was also well known for having been very successful without taking any capital, and socalTECH's Ben Kuo also got Dave's insight on the pros and cons of taking venture capital. (More info...)
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Enterprise Partners Appoints Managing Director
San Diego-based Enterprise Partners Venture Capital announced today that the firm has added another managing director. Enterprise has added Marios Fotiadis as Managing Director in the firm's life sciences practice. Fotaidis was most recently at Advent International. Fotiadis has also served as CEO of Achillion Pharmaceuticals and has also been at SG Capital Partners. Fotiadis joins Drew Senyei, Kleanthis Xanthopoulos, Krisztina Zsebo, and Steven Brauer, the other life sciences focused members of (More info...)
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Amp'd Mobile Inks Basketball Deals
Los Angeles-based Amp'd Mobile has inked a string of deals that will provide basketball content to its mobile phone service. Amp'd said today that it is in content distribution deals with the NBA, CSTV, and Dime and Bounce Magazine, which will offer a comprehensive lineup of live basketball games and highlights for both NBA and NCAA games. The new content will become part of Amp'd Live, the company's mobile entertainment service. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The NBA deal call (More info...)
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Evolution Robotics Gets Win
Pasadena-based Evolution Robotics Retail, a provider of robotic vision systems for the retail industry, said today that it has sigined on Shoppers Food & Pharmacy, a division of SUPERVALU, as a customer. Shoopers Food will deploy Evolution Robotic Retail's LaneHawk visual scanner at six stores. Evolution Robotics develops a system used to detect items in the bottom of shopping baskets. Shoppers Food operates 64 stores in Baltimore, northern Virginia, and Washington D.C.
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Gamma Gets SAP Certification
Woodland Hills-based Gamma Enterprise Technologies announced this morning that it has received SAP certification for its ArchiveBridge software. Gamma provides applications software for managing data running SAP. The firm's software provides archiving and retrieval of business documents, scanned images, and files.
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Xirrus Adds Customer
Westlake Village-based Xirrus, a provider of Wi-Fi networking hardware, said today that smplsolutions, a provider of business solutions, has begun deploying the firm's Wi-Fi arrays. Xirrus said that smplsolutions has begun using the firm's hardware in several vertical applications, including education, warehousing, and medical facilities. smplsolutions is a voice, data, and video integrator focused on business.
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