Media Placement Portfolio Volume 4

October 2014- August 2016

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United Capital Using Yodlee to Power FlexScore Wealth management.com August 5, 2016 Unique visitors per month: 435,000

Envestnet Yodlee announced Tuesday that it will provide its aggregation technology to power FlexScore, the financial planning tool acquired by United Capital in February. FlexScore provides investors with a credit score-like rating of a client’s financial health and requires a comprehensive look at various accounts and assets. United Capital said Yodlee’s aggregation capabilities would improve FlexScore’s functionality. United Capital plans to offer FlexScore as part of FinLife Partners, its white-labeled advice and planning platform for independent advisors, and Yodlee will serve as the primary data aggregator.

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United Capital Partners with Envestnet for Data Aggregation By Alex Padalka Financial Advisor IQ (part of the Financial Times Media Group) August 5, 2016 Unique visitors per month: 100,000

Envestnet’s Yodlee will become the primary account data aggregation provider on client- and advisor-facing platforms at the registered investment advice firm United Capital, according to a press release from Envestnet.

Envestnet’s Yodlee outside data-aggregation platform will feed United Capital’s FlexScore, the digitized financial planning platform United Capital acquired earlier this year for primary account aggregation, according to the press release. The API from the Yodlee aggregator will link accounts from various financial institutions and generate an overall score for a client’s or prospect’s financial health to help United Capital advisors with the onboarding process, Envestnet said in its press release. Meanwhile, FlexScore will soon be offered to United Capital’s advisors though the white label advice and planning platform FinLife Partners, Envestnet said in its press release.

United Capital, which now manages around $16 billion in client assets, according to the press release, made the FinLife platform available to outside firms in March, as reported previously.

The deal is perhaps further proof that Envestnet’s strategy to appeal to advisors is paying off. When it bought financial data aggregator Yodlee last August, Envestnet made a $600 million bet that financial advisors would want comprehensive access to consumer and financial data in addition to the investment management applications it already offered, as reported previously.

More than 1,000 firms — including 11 of the 20 biggest U.S. banks, the firm claims — use Envestnet | Yodlee’s platform already, according to the company’s press release.

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Envestnet | Yodlee Forges Strategic Partnership with United Capital By David Penn Finovate August 2, 2016 Unique visitors per month: 65,000

Envestnet | Yodlee’s data aggregation technology will power United Capital’s FlexScore solution. And yes, that’s the same Finovate alum FlexScore that was acquired by United Capital earlier this year.

“By delivering innovative financial planning solutions and new data-driven insights, our partnership will empower FlexScore users to take control of their financial destiny,” Envestnet | Yodlee VP Julie Solomon said. As United Capital’s primary account data aggregation partner, Envestnet | Yodlee will securely link user’s financial accounts, seamlessly onboarding customers and aggregating the necessary data to generate each user’s individual financial health rate or FlexScore. The FlexScores eventually will be offered as part of FinLifePartners, United Capital’s white-label advisory platform for independent advisors.

“Our business has helped transform the traditional wealth management industry, United Capital Head of Platform Mike Capelle said. “For us to continue innovating and benefiting customers, we needed a proven data-aggregation partner that could provide the tools our customers need to take control of their financial lives.”

United Capital is one of the fasted growing RIAs in the country. The firm has $16 billion in assets under management and more than 80 offices in the U.S. United Capital CEO called FlexScore “the missing piece” when the acquisition was announced in February, and anticipated that the technology would be used to help promote customer engagement with retirement plans.

In acquiring Yodlee just over a year ago for $680 million, Envestnet president Bill Crager said he hoped the addition would make it easier for Envestnet to ink deals with independent and smaller financial advisors unaffiliated with the larger firms such as Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. The company’s new strategic partnership with United Capital is a big step in this direction.

Headquartered in Redwood City, California and with offices in London and Bangalore, India, Envestnet | Yodlee provides data aggregation and analytics to more than 1,000 companies, including 11 of the top 20 U.S. banks. The company trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “ENV” and has a market capitalization of $1.6 billion. Yodlee,

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which went public a year before being acquired by Envestnet, demonstrated its latest technology at FinovateSpring 2016.

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New Envestnet | Yodlee Product to Target Online Lenders? By Ryan Weeks altfi.com April 12, 2016 Unique visitors per month: 25,000 (approximately)

Envestnet | Yodlee has launched its new “Risk Insight” solution – which will provide lenders with a more holistic view of consumer bank account and spending activity. Envestnet | Yodlee is a data aggregation and analytics platform which caters to digital financial services providers. Over 950 companies – including 12 of the 20 largest US banks – subscribe to the platform. Yodlee was acquired by Envestnet in August 2015 for approximately $590m. Online lenders will be one of the primary target customer groups for the newly minted Risk Insight solution. Yodlee already counts hundreds of internet services companies amogst its users. The company yesterday participated in the “Product Development Using Data” panel at LendIt USA – one of the best-established shop windows in the online lending industry. Practically speaking, Envestnet | Yodlee believes that the Risk Insight tool will allow lenders to make more informed, data-based decisions when evaluating borrowers. Borrower information is collated electronically and transmitted directly and seamlessly to lenders. The Risk Insight tool contains data from a borrower’s bank and other accounts, including transaction information. The emphasis here is on the present. Credit bureau data, conversely, tends to be backward looking – centred instead upon a borrower’s historical interaction with credit. The new Risk Insight product may well be of interest to platforms like SoFi, which famously cut ties with FICO in January this year. The cause of this disconnect was that SoFi – which lends exclusively to young professionals – is built around a credit process which is forward-looking, rather than backward-looking. The new Envestnet | Yodlee offering may or may not be of interest to SoFi, but one would have to think that it stands a better chance of providing value than traditional credit bureau data. Terry McKeown, Practice Manager in Credit Analytics at Envestnet | Yodlee, offered his thoughts:

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“By introducing this new solution we are essentially enabling lenders to make more informed underwriting decisions, and ultimately improving approval rates to help mitigate credit losses. Our solution is fast, comprehensive, and precise. We’re looking forward to seeing the results for financial institutions on our platform as they begin to use the data provided by the Risk Insight API.”

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IVP VC Somesh Dash on Mutual Fund Markdowns, Big Data and not selling young CEOs short By Cromwell Schubarth Silicon Valley Business Journal April 11, 2016 Circulation: 8,262 / Unique visitors per month: 7,661,449

Somesh Dash, who has been investing in later stage technology startups for 11 years at Institutional Venture Partners, believes that mutual funds are here to stay as investors in venture-backed companies.

And he is OK with that, telling me in a recent conversation that companies like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price can be important allies for enterprise business startups to have on their side.

Dash also believes that the mutual fund markdowns of the valuations of some high-profile venture-backed companies has been misunderstood.

Among the investments that Dash has been actively involved with in the past are Akamai, Dropbox, LivingSocial, Netflix, Pure Storage, Tanium, Zynga and, quite recently, Qubole.

The following Q&A from our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Has the increase in activity by new late stage funders, including mutual funds, and their markdowns of some unicorns affected what you guys do?

We don’t actually see the mutual funds too often in the growth rounds we get involved in because we look at companies when they are just starting to ramp up their sales forces. That's usually a round or two before the mutual funds ever take a look at companies. We do we see them more, though, on the pre-IPO rounds.

I think one of the things that's worth noting is how these investors value a company. A lot of that has to do with their own internal accounting. I mean, private companies are private for a reason. If we all mark to market every single day, it would be impossible to value these companies.

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Each mutual fund gets branded together, but each one has a different set of investors, a different structure and a different target return. There are a lot of allocations and reallocations that happen. Those reallocations happen sometimes because they need to rebalance the portfolio.

What’s interesting is the problem with the way the data is filtering to the public. The headline hits and everyone says, “Oh, my god, they are writing down this company. That means this company must not be doing well.”

What people don’t notice is that sometimes another mutual fund will come in on the same round and buy the same security and actually not write it down. So that's the first interesting quandary. Why is one mutual fund writing it down and the other one doesn’t? The second is sometimes the same mutual fund will write it back up the next quarter, and then write something else down.

So, these are basically methodologies that are, I would say, 99 percent internal accounting. They are trying to manage their risk exposure. They are not necessarily indictments of teams.

Another thing is that these are are all illiquid securities. What really matters at the end of the day for all of us who invest in private companies is terminal value. If you look at any startup, there are good days and there are bad days. If you look at the hourly flow of data, it looks kind of like a Richter scale. It’s going up and down really fast. But if you stretch that out over the course of a five- to seven-year time horizon — which is the way we look at things — overall you find companies in the aggregate scale up and to the right. They end up having terminal values that are pretty incredible. You can sometimes end up with a 3X to 5X return in 5 to 7 years, which is great.

Do you think the influx of the mutual funds, hedge funds and other late-stage investors is a long-term phenomenon?

Many are getting in because late-stage companies are remaining private longer. These investors are afraid of missing out on the big growth they used to get by investing in an IPO.

I think any time you have a bull market, you see new people come in and different asset classes come in. They get excited during bull markets and they get very fearful during bear markets. I think you have to give the venture capital industry a lot of credit because for the last 40 years, they have been through some really ugly years. But there’s also been some really great years.

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I think from a scale standpoint, companies will continue to invest in growth. Regardless of what’s happened in the stock market, the need for new enterprise technologies continues to accelerate. The pace of innovation and disruption continues to be robust. The global budgets allocated to IT continue to increase each year. If you take a longer view, there are going to be ebbs and flows. But things will continue to be trend over 20 years that will be up and to the right.

Many of the mutual fund investors will return to the markets when things look a little bit better. I also think a lot of the companies that go public will actually end up having share prices that are above their IPO price and far above their last round price. Once they see that sort of data that validates the idea of getting involved before an IPO I think they will come back.

One thing people don’t realize, to give the funds a little bit of credit, is they actually are big customers for many of these enterprise technology companies. If you think about the assets under management for the large mutual funds, one of them would can dwarf about 50 venture funds put together. So from a scale standpoint they actually have resources that can make them very valuable customers. They have research resources that can really be helpful as the company looks to expand internationally. So there is a value and a brand that comes with having those guys as investors.

But on the other side, I think what these write-downs have shown entrepreneurs is that if it bothers you to have your name out there in the headlines of the Wall Street Journal because someone is doing portfolio reallocations — irrespective of what you are doing in your business — then you should think twice about taking capital from them. If it doesn’t bother you and you are happy to withstand the potential headlines and you see value in their money, then I think there is going to be that capital available for you over the long term.

I know you recently invested in Qubole and are quite interested in the Big Data space that they are in. Tell me about that investment and how it fits into what you and IVP are interested in.

We look for companies that are growing at breakneck speed, have already launched products in market and have a few sales reps. We also like to see that they have developed the product pretty fully in terms of feature functionality and have investors that have preceded us that we know and have working relationships with.

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Qubole actually hit that on the mark and we’ve been co-investors with both Lightspeed Venture Partners and Charles River Ventures on lots of other enterprise companies. We knew both Devdutt Yellukar of CRV and Arif Janmohamed of Lightspeed, who were on their board. They said, hey, you remember these two guys from Facebook — Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma? They left Facebook and they are doing an interesting new thing that we’re backing.

I knew of those guys but didn’t know them well. I heard about some of the work they had done at Facebook on the infrastructure team. So I’d been tracking them.

The other way we connected with them was that we’d spent a lot of time in the last few years understanding the Amazon Web Services ecosystem. We were at AWS Reinvent where one of our associates, Alex Lim, met with 10 to 20 interesting growth companies there. He came back from those meetings and said this is the one that is really interesting. They weren’t fundraising quite yet, but he said we should meet them and learn about the company. So we went over there right after the conference ended and Ashish was kind enough of let us in and tell us a bit about what the company had done. We got so interested that we went back with an even more expanded team and met the rest of their team. A few weeks later we said, “We know that your plan is to try and raise a little bit later, but we would love to find a way to preempt that process. We ended up securing the commitment from the company that let us be investors and we led the round with a significant participation from all the existing investors.

Big Data is something that gets talked about a lot but it seems to mean different things sometimes. What does it mean to you in this situation?

I think these words help sometimes to narrow down the ambiguity of certain new markets, helping you say, hey, this is in this bucket or that bucket. But it’s kind of like the term Software-as-a-Service. It doesn’t really tell you what the company does. It just creates a bucket that you can use to categorize the business model.

The whole notion of using horizontal computing with scaled processing to uncover data and uncover insights is a model that really got kicked off a few years ago. But the idea of analytics and business intelligence is nothing new. The big difference now is that it’s no longer just the development group that uses the product and has the budget. Now business analysts, data scientists, solutions engineers, all of them want access to tools like Qubole versus just the engineering org wanting them.

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That's where Big Data gets interesting. It’s no longer just in the confines of the engineering org. It’s extended its tentacles outside of that into a lot of different disciplines that work with engineering. That’s really important because that will lead to increased budgets and more C-level visibility.

With Qubole, what really got our attention is that if you want to run production analytics and you really have intense heavy workloads, you are likely to be storing that data on one of the public clouds — Amazon Web Services, Google or Azure.

Qubole basically integrates with all of those and it’s a plug and play solution. You don’t have to rip anything out. You can run all your analytics and if you run Hive, if you Spark, if you run Presto — even in certain instances some of the new languages coming out — you can run all that on Qubole. It doesn’t matter what public clouds you are running. It doesn’t even matter what proxy language you are running. It’s the Switzerland of platforms, encompassing all those. The hard work they did is in doing all the plumbing to enable seamless integrations of all those different languages.

They have a really nice front-end, too. If you are a business analyst and you aren’t trained on how to use Hive,

Spark or Presto Qubole lets you run queries and get the answers and insights you want. It combines a visualization layer with an analytics layer and looks a lot like high-end business intelligence tools. That's what they cornered and that's what got our attention.

Are there any other companies you are involved with in Big Data that are doing interesting things? One of our investments that's pretty interesting is Ayasdi. They take the most complex data sets and apply machine learning to those.They take the datasets and visualize them and run computational analytics on them. Suddenly you can figure out what the data says. You can use a shape-driven model to basically find insights that would be hard to recognize in a linear math model.

The National Institutes of Health, for example, is using it to run really advanced analytics on clinical breast cancer trials. Airline manufacturers are running this to figure out depreciation schedules of engines. Ayasdi is helping solve really big problems for Fortune 100 companies by using Big Data.

It was actually founded by a professor who was the pioneer of topography at Stanford, Gunnar Carlson, and two of his students. It is a situation where the math and computer science kind of came together. The founder said, the

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computer science guys usually get all the credit and now the math guys actually look cool, too. So, that's another one in the Big Data space that we’ve backed.

Are there any other trends going on right now in venture or in tech that you think are very interesting that you are watching very closely, that you might something to say about?

I think that what I’ve invested in and what I am probably most excited about is security. When you look at the last 10 to 15 years of security, you would hard pressed to find a lot of exits over a $1 billion. The typical path for liquidity was an acquisition by Symantec or McAfee or Trend Micro and those are typically under $500 million. So I think there was a lot of carnage in the security space historically and which led to a lot of people maybe looking away from it.

But what’s amazing is you don’t have to go much beyond the headlines to know that security is not a back-of-the-IT-department issue anymore. It’s literally a board issue with committees being formed on public company boards to manage security. The CEOs of major corporations like Home Depot and Target and Sony have been either fired or publicly reprimanded for mismanaging security issues at their companies. So I think that’s one of the big trends that we’ve invested.

We’ve invested in companies like Tanium and Pindrop Security and Alien Vault and Anomoli, all in the security space. It’s kind of fascinating to me that security spending is no just longer concentrated in the CIOs and CTOs. The operations guys are figuring out when we’re looking at the nuts and bolts of running an enterprise application stack, how do we integrate with security tools so that we have visibility to threats as they are coming in. We need visibility to breaches as they are about to occur. We need visibility into our own organizations and where we’re most vulnerable. We’ve made several investments that touch on each of these.

Tanium, in particular, that is worth looking at a little bit. It basically has made the entire process of endpoint management so seamless that you can literally type in a search box, “How many of my mobile users are running an outdated version of box.net?” Within 15 seconds you see all the IP addresses of all the devices that are running that outdated version and then you can remediate that, on the spot. It’s been one of the fastest growing companies that we’ve ever invested in. It was founded by an amazing father-son team, David and Orion Hindawi,who founded BigFix before that, which was sold to IBM. So we have pretty high hopes for the prospects for that company.

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Area there any companies that you didn't invest in when you had the chance to that rises to the top of your regrets list?

Luckily for us, I would say the majority of the companies that we admire we found a way to be investors in. Sometimes we wish we came in a round earlier. Sometimes we wish had put a little bit more capital in. But hindsight is always 20/20.

I think the obvious one that for me was a learning experience, was not investing in Facebook about 10 years ago. But I would say that the decision to not invest was rational because at the time that we got a chance to look into Facebook the product was still only for college students. They hadn’t even launched in high schools yet. They didn’t have a national sales team, and they basically had just a handful of sponsored buyers that were basically covering the cost of infrastructure.

It was unclear to us what they were building, in terms of their own proprietary IP stack, which only became visible years later. Perhaps most importantly we just didn’t realize how the scope of the company’s ambitions would continue to increase and their success would propel themselves to new heights. That's a company where I just marvel at how well they have executed and what they have done in the social web in a very short period of time.

I think the lesson — and people still don’t internalize this lesson enough — is that it's not always the most experienced CEO that brings the biggest hits. It is a very common phrase that people use and I hear it all the time: You want the experienced CEO. But if you look at the founders of the most iconic Internet companies and, historically, the most iconic enterprise companies like Microsoft and Oracle and Cisco, the vast majority of them had somebody at the top who was in their first time at the rodeo.

It’s very easy to dismiss a young, 22-year-old CEO. But then you see what he grows into and you see what impact he’s going to have on the world in the next 20 years. So Facebook is definitely one that I look back at. There’s just a lot to learn from the way they have executed that business.

Cromwell Schubarth is TechFlash Editor at the Silicon Valley Business Journal.

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Play The Division With Your Eyes: The Division Tobii EyeX (Video) Huffington Post February 18, 2016 Unique vistors per month: 79M

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New Fundings: Qubole By Connie Loizos StrictlyVC January 21, 2016

Qubole, a four-year-old, Mountain View, Ca.-based big data-as-a-service company, has raised $30 million in a Series C round that brings its total funding to $50 million. Institutional Venture Partners led the financing, with earlier backers CRV, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Norwest Venture Partners participating.

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You can now log in with your face using Tobii devices and Windows Hello By James Vincent The Verge December 17, 2015 Unique visitors per month: 20,700,000

Microsoft's Windows Hello is a smart feature, letting Windows 10 users sign into their machines with just their face But it's only available on the newest devices with special depth-sensing cameras or, if you buy Intel's RealSense developer kit. Now, to expand Windows Hello's availability, eye-tracking company Tobii is introducing support for the software on its stand-alone cameras, including the €119 ($129) EyeX controller and €249.99 ($271) Steel Series Sentry Gaming Eye Tracker. extended entry

“WITH WINDOWS HELLO, A PERSON NEVER NEEDS TO REMEMBER THEIR PASSWORD TO LOGIN.”

"Technology has a fundamental duty to understand humans better and improve their daily lives. With Windows Hello, a person never needs to remember their password to login," said Tobii's president Oscar Werner in a press release. "Microsoft’s interest to make Windows Hello work with Tobii eye-tracking devices is a testament to the value, both now and in the future, of our joint ability to enhance the Windows experience for consumers."

Perhaps more importantly, Tobii isn't just supporting Windows Hello for its peripherals, but also its enterprise products. Windows Hello will work with the company's recently-announced IS4 software and the Tobii EyeChip — an eye-tracking system-on-chip mean to appeal to OEMs. Hopefully this means we'll be saying hi to Windows Hello on more PCs and laptops in the future.

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VC David Chao on Unicorn Reckoning, Why SoFi’s different and Passing Up Alibaba By Cromwell Schubarth Silicon Valley Business Journal October 19, 2015 Unique Visitors: 5,416,780

David Chao, cofounder and general partner at DCM Ventures, is a Midas List venture investor (No. 50 on Forbes 2015 list) with a long vantage point on the ups and downs of Silicon Valley and Asia — his Menlo Park firm's focal points.

So when we talked recently about volatility in the IPO market and his investment in San Francisco lending startup SoFi, he spoke as tech and investment veteran who has seen a lot since his early days of helping to establish Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) in Japan.

So when we talked recently about volatility in the IPO market and his investment in San Francisco lending startup SoFi, he spoke as tech and investment veteran who has seen a lot since his early days of helping to establish Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) in Japan.

In addition to SoFi, he invested early in Chinese social network Renren, which went public in 2011 (NYSE:RENN), and in SlingMedia, which was acquired in 2007 for $380 million by Dish/EchoStar. He was also involved in flash storage processor company SandForce, which was acquired in 2011 by LSI for $370 million. So it was natural to ask him about the recent IPO of Mountain View-based Pure Storage (NYSE:PSTG). This conversation came in the days after Pure's stock dropped below its IPO price and before the EMC-Dell deal helped the newly public company jump well above its target range.

The following Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.There was a lot of focus recently on the Pure Storage IPO and what it means for other tech IPOs. Do you have any thoughts on that?

I think that people have been fearing that late-stage private rounds have been more frothy than the actual public market will support. I think this is kind of proof that sometimes that is the case and there‘ll be risks associated with it. I think that’s the first takeaway.

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I think the second takeaway is storage is a tough space because every day storage costs per gigabyte keep decreasing. You have so many players both from the incumbents like EMC to even the Seagates all the way to PC server players, and then you have the cloud players and now you have Amazon, as well. So it is inherently a very, very competitive space. The natural order of things is that cost per gigabyte just constantly gets cheaper. It’s a tough space.

People have been talking awhile about fears that some of the highly valued private companies could see their values drop when they go public — that IPOs are the new "down round."

Well, it’s come. It's here. That’s the reality and I think people will be a little bit more cautious about doing these later stage big rounds. But I think in Pure Storage’s case it also does have a lot to do with the sector they’re in, as well.

Do you think there is a potential for other unicorns to face lower valuations when they go public?

I think the unicorns that have a business model and that have profitability now will probably continue their success and do decently. I think the unicorns without profitability — who maybe have a lot of users but haven’t monetized yet or they haven’t figured how to monetize — I’d say the chance of them not being a unicorn in three years is pretty high. I’d give it a 50-50 shot.

We have seen this before right, in the 1999 and 2000s time frame. I think people like you and me who’ve seen that and experienced it look at it with a completely different lens than an entrepreneur who was a junior high student when that last tech bubble occurred. I think there are various schools of thought here. But I think maybe a good handful of those unicorns that don’t really have a true business model are going to fizzle. There continue to be companies that are spending a lot of the money that they raise to acquire customers, yet they have a very murky return-on-investment analysis about when they’ll even make that money back, about whether those users either start paying or never start paying.

Do you think there is a danger of snowball effect if the unicorns don’t hit their marks on the public markets?

Could that hurt some of the better companies, too?

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It depends. If we assume that the stock market is efficient, which I tend to believe it is, the contrarian view is there could be a IPO bonanza. That’s because people will believe they are getting in the IPO at a much more fair price than these extremely high late-stage private rounds. That will make people want to participate in the IPO because many of these companies are actually very viable, very good companies. Otherwise they wouldn’t command those high late stage rounds in the first place. So they probably have value and will create a lot of solid market caps. The public market may price them lower than the private equity investors did but while I think that is a major issue, it’s also an opportunity for public investors.

Let’s talk a little bit about the unicorn that you’re involved in. What makes SoFi a viable unicorn in your eyes?

There are multiple reasons. One is that it is profitable. Look at the other unicorns that have gone public in this space. There has been LendingClub and OnDeck. Lending Club is still not profitable, whereas SoFi is. I think that’s a big difference. I am sure you remember what happened in the 2000 crash, right? People stopped talking about revenue. They started talking about profits.

There is one caveat here and Amazon is a good example of that. I don’t think Amazon has had a profitable quarter since they’ve gone public. They keep reinvesting very heavily in their business. So there will always be some superstar that may not show profitability for a long time. But as a general rule of thumb, I think profitability is a differentiating factor, particularly when the market is softening up. The other difference is that SoFi — compared to many other peer-to-peer lending, social lending and financial services startups — has the cream of the crop customer base. It started by providing student loans to college graduates from the top 10 percent to 20 percent of the schools. That directly correlates to a good earning power.

I can talk days on days about their product. It is just fundamentally very different from other financial service companies. For example, if you want a mortgage loan today, filling out the papers and going through the process, end to end, is just a pain in the butt. But if you look at the SoFi process it’s almost like the first time you use an iPhone. You can get almost real time loan approval from a financial institution, while you’re looking at a house, instead of preparing a form for a loan that might take three to four days at a local bank.

So between profitability, the customer base and the ease of use in the product along with a lot of innovation around leveraging mobile and technology, these guys are quite differentiated from both financial incumbents and a lot of the companies that have already gone public in the financial service space.

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Your firm has a unique focus, investing in China, Japan and the U.S. and one of your big investments was Renren — sometimes called the Facebook of China. What do you see going on in China and how do you see what is happening there affecting U.S. companies and particularly companies here in Silicon Valley?

Over the last couple of years, three big giant of China — Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent — and a handful of active companies like Renren or have been fairly actively investing in Silicon Valley, both for access to innovation as well as their own plans to extend their global presence. I think one of the biggest impacts is going to be that will slow down. I don’t think it will go to zero but it will be slower than the last couple of years. I think there will be a little bit less Chinese money coming here and it is going to take a little bit longer for a decision. But I think there’s still a little bit of a wait-and-see mode on whether the Chinese market is going to rebound or stay flat.

What sectors are you particularly interested in right now?

There are two or three areas. One is the whole virtual reality ecosystem, which we think is right at the cusp of a break out. There’s going to be a whole ecosystem of content created, games developed and real life use of VR. For example we have a company called Matterport that allows you to take simple pictures and make incredible VR content. You can look at 10 houses virtually instead of having to visit all ten. Then you can go visit three of them and filter out the other seven.

Another area we still really like is anonymous social networking. We believe that the premium for anonymity is pretty high in the U.S. Now that colleges and employers check your Facebook, there is a whole culture of not leaving everything permanent online and being anonymous in American society now. That’s why I think Snapchat has done well. We’ve invested in a company called Yik Yak that provides geography-based anonymous posting. It’s done extremely well in the college market.

Of course, financial services is a big interest of ours and SoFi is a great example of that. We’ve also backed the former ING Direct CEO and founder Arkadi Kuhlmann. He built the largest online bank in Canada and the U.S. and sold it to Capital One for $11 billion. Now he has started a next generation mobile bank where you can bank multiple currencies and transfer money around the world. It’s called ZenBanx. We have great hopes for that one, as well.

Has there been a shift at all in how much investment you’re doing in the three countries you focus on?

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There hasn’t been major shift in recent years. But if you look at it over a 10-year horizon, I think China has grown as a piece of the pie. We were one of the earliest from Sand Hill Road to start investing in China, investing there in 1999. So we’re one of the early birds and proportionately it has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger.

Japan has been fairly constant for us. You’re not going to have a huge quantity of deals there but you’re going to have one or two great deals a year. With the U.S, I think it’s less about the proportion but it’s more about shift in what we invest in. When we first started we were very skewed towards telecom and in our middle period we did Internet and we also did a lot of semiconductor test deals. Now it’s more mobile, digital media and financial services. Telecom hardware and semiconductor are the two areas where over time we have de-emphasized. That’s largely because those markets have matured and there is less room for startups who really make a big difference.

What’s at the top of your anti-portfolio, the biggest opportunity you could have invested in and didn’t?

Alibaba. We had one discussion with Jack Ma a long time ago and the price was 500 pre. He was only doing kind of a business-to-business auction model, with no revenue whatsoever. But looking back it’s an obvious miss.

Was that before Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang invested in them?

Oh yeah.

What was it that made you guys pause on that one?

It was right after the Internet bubble popped. It was the business-to-business auction site, which really hadn’t proven anywhere in the world back then. Alibaba did the whole consumer side of their business and everything way afterwards. In the beginning they were more just pure business-to-business kind of auction and people finding vendors and stuff. Those were the two reasons.

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BMW Really Wants to Help You Park Your (BMW) Car By Kia Kokalitcheva Fortune.com September 4, 2015 Unique Visitors: 9,000,000

The German automaker is pouring a lot of resources into making parking less of a headache.

Cruising down the street in your slick and sexy BMW might be feel great in the moment. But one thing may kill that high, particularly in a big city: finding a parking spot.

Despite the rapid rise of alternative cab services like Uber and Lyft, many people still own and drive cars, making parking a problem that’s here to stay. New parking services that let drivers use apps to arrange valets and pre-book parking spots are popping up in a number of cities.

German automaker BMW is also on the quest to do something to make parking less painful. Over the past few years, the automaker has invested big money in into parking-related projects, both in-house, as well as through its venture capital arm, BMW i Ventures.

Earlier this week, the company’s VC fund invested an undisclosed amount into Zirx, a San Francisco-based startup that lets customers summon a valet to meet them at their destination and park their car for them. Drivers can skip the parking headache, for a fee, of course.

In 2011, BMW i Ventures also invested in another parking startup, JustPark. The nine-year-old U.K. startup lets people and businesses rent their parking spaces to others in need. JustPark collects a commission for connecting the parties.

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“Since 2011, BMW i Ventures has invested in 13 start-up companies that are offering mobility services,” Dr. Ulrich Quay, managing director for BMW i Ventures, told Fortune via email, referring to services that help people get around. “All of the companies are offering services that make it easier to get from A to B.”

He continued: “Parking is one of the relevant sectors because it is a pain point for many drivers and can be improved by using technology. JustPark and other apps have been integrated into BMW and MINI vehicles, and many other portfolio companies have the potential to be integrated in vehicles in the future in order to make driving a better experience.”But that’s not all. Earlier this summer, at a conference in Detroit, BMW unveiled a new feature on car dashboards that help drivers find parking faster. They can glance at a screen to see where they will likely find street parking available.

The technology, branded iPark in BMW cars, works by using data to predict open parking at any given time. If no on-street parking is available, it will direct the driver to a paid parking lot.

Other car manufacturers have also ventured into building parking-related features, like Ford’s assist feature, which parallel parks cars on its own. Ford has also run a series of other experiments including in Atlanta and London that are similar to BMW’s iPark feature. Another is a short-term car rental service that comes with guaranteed parking at destinations in several countries.

One thing is clear: for as long as cars will be around, we’ll need to park them. BMW’s pitch seems to be that buying one of its cars will help drivers avoid at least some of the inconvenience.

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Student Loan Debt 101 at Indiana University By Gail Buckner FoxBusiness.com August 31, 2015 Unique Visitors: 1,600,000

Although their football program undoubtedly gets more headlines, there’s another squad on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus that has a much more lasting impact on students: the I.U. “Money Smarts Team” – specially-trained students who provide one-on-one financial counseling to other students.

This is not MBA-level material. It’s about basic, everyday topics such as: How to create- and stick to- a budget. Managing credit card debt. And how to “make more informed financial decisions so they can borrow less,” explains Phil Schuman, director of the school’s Financial Literacy program. (1)

It all started because of a growing concern on the part of university officials: an increasing number of graduates were walking away with a diploma and a significant amount of student loan debt. Recognizing that students might be more receptive to advice that’s provided by someone their own age, creating the Money Smarts Team was the first step toward addressing this.

In addition to helping with current money issues a fellow student might have, counsellors also try to inject a dose of reality to prepare them for what life will be like once mom and dad are no longer paying the bills: What kind of salary can you realistically expect to make after graduation? That you probably won’t be able to just buy anything you want because your paycheck has got to cover rent, utilities, food, healthcare and commuting expenses. Any by the way, it’s really important to start contributing to your company’s 401(k).

“We Interrupt This Loan Offer….”

Phase two was to re-structure the way the university communicates with students about financial aid.

Today, this means clearly breaking down each student’s aid package- by type of assistance, amount and responsibility. Such as, “These are your grants. You don’t have to repay these,” explains Financial Aid Director Jim Kennedy. Loan amounts are listed separately and it’s made clear that these do have to be re-paid. Students are

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also informed that just because they qualify for a certain level of loan, they don’t have to accept the whole amount. Work-study aid is another category.

“When we start the financial aid process,” says Kennedy, “we want to have as many interruption points as possible.” This goal is to make a student stop and think about their future financial responsibility.

The first interruption occurs after the student completes the financial aid application (FAFSA) and receives their award notice. “We require the student to accept the loan on our website. There they get the option to look at the loan and reduce it. To decide how much they really need.”

In addition, each year a student is sent a letter that sums up their accumulated loan amount. In Kennedy’s words, it makes them stop and realize, “‘I’m a sophomore. Here’s my debt.’”

Upon graduation, I.U. students go through an exit loan process. According to Kennedy, the best part is that this approach “creates a lot of questions from students. We want [them] to know the composition of their loans, what their estimated payments will be and their repayment options.” Links to the university’s website provide additional information.

Helping students understand the amount and ramifications of their loans also reduces the shock-and-awe impact upon graduation. “There are no surprises,” says Kennedy. Students are encouraged talk with the university’s financial aid counsellors as well as seek peer-to-peer advice from the Money Smarts Team.

The 4-Year Rule

At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, back when I went to college, the expectation was that you would walk away with a degree in 4 years (or less). Students who took longer to graduate were considered slackers, as in, “Geez, I can’t believe he still hasn’t passed English 201!”

But in the past 20 years the opposite trend has emerged: students who finagle a way to postpone graduation are often considered not just lucky, but smart. After all, college is the last stop before you hit the real world. Why not extend it another semester- or two- if you can?

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“For financial aid purposes, you only need to take four courses per semester,” explains Kennedy. That’s considered ‘full-time’. Why kill yourself?” The problem is, the longer you extend campus life, the more debt you rack up. It’s not just the cost of tuition. There’s rent, food, books, visits home, concert tickets, etc.

Enter the third phase of I.U.’s initiative to reduce student loan debt: the “Take 5” campaign. Students are encouraged to sign up for five courses each semester so that they can accumulate the credits they need to graduate in four years. Interactive degree maps online show a student what classes toward their major they’ve completed and which ones are left so that they can clearly see what they still need to take in order to graduate in four years.

According to Kennedy, the message is sinking in. “Now more students are taking more credits.”

However, the real measure of the success of Indiana University’s financial literacy campaign is this: In two years, undergraduate borrowing dropped $44 million.

1. If your student doesn’t attend Indiana University, follow this link to Student’s Guide to Credit http://assets.creditrepair.com/students-guide-to-credit.pdf

Ms. Buckner is a Retirement and Financial Planning Specialist and an instructor in Franklin Templeton Investments' global Academy. The views expressed in this article are only those of Ms. Buckner or the individual commentator identified therein, and are not necessarily the views of Franklin Templeton Investments, which has not reviewed, and is not responsible for, the content.

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This App Actually Makes Email Triage Fun By Christina Bonnington Refinery29 August 27, 2015 Unique Visitors: 8-10M

Successful email management is a very real and constant struggle. But, it doesn't have to be quite so bad. A new app called Geronimo completely rethinks the email experience, and in doing so, makes inbox triage far more manageable, and almost...fun.

Geronimo (free on iOS) makes changes to your traditional email experience in three ways: Through its layout, the way you navigate the app, and the customization it offers. The app makes it easy to see how much email you get each day, note which emails are read and unread, and take action on those emails so your inbox remains clutter-free. And when your inbox is successfully conquered, you can go about your day with far less stress.

The differences start as soon as you open the app. Once you've linked your Google email address, Geronimo groups your emails chronologically by day. You can swipe downwards to peruse the emails you've gotten that day, or swipe horizontally to travel back through time to make sure you didn't miss any important emails on Sunday. A timeline at the top of the screen shows the volume of emails you get each day, and which day you're currently on. (This feature is interesting on a personal level — now you can see which days of the week you tend to get the most email, or if there's no pattern at all.)

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PHOTO: COURTESY GERONIMO.

Each email listing features a customizable, circular contact icon, as well as thumbnails of any attachments. In the app's settings, you can choose to turn read emails black-and-white, which offers a nice visual cue to differentiate them from full-color unread emails.

Once you open a message, you can choose to snooze it so it reappears in your inbox hours or days in the future (you can customize exactly how long), or you can flick the email to one of the four corners of your handset to put it into a folder, archive it, delete it, or some other action of your choosing, like adding it to your to-do list. This flicking gesture — which the app's creator calls a "toss" — is fun, simple, and fast, allowing you to sort through your inbox more quickly than with other email apps. You can toss emails into a corner whether the app is open (by tapping and holding the subject line of the email) or closed (by tapping the email listing itself). And if you want to check what's on your to-do list or what you've recently deleted, you can tap a corner to be taken there.

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PHOTO: COURTESY GERONIMO.

Geronimo has a handful of other clever tricks that make it stand out from Gmail or your stock email app. Using the iPhone's built-in accelerometer and gyroscope, you can tilt your phone to navigate up and down through your emails — handy if your other hand is busy holding a handle on the subway. You can also customize five VIP contacts that sit at the top of your screen. You can drag and drop an email to each person's icon to quickly forward him or her something, and if you tap that person's icon, it automatically opens a new email draft.

The app also goes further, optionally sorting out the "robots" (things such as email notifications) from emails from actual human beings that require a response.

If you can learn — and remember — the app's gestures and interactions, Geronimo has the potential to make email management far less time-consuming and almost game-like. If you want to dive in yourself, you can download it here.

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The Power of Voice By Tom Kevan Electronics 360 July 17, 2015 Unique Visitors: 40,000

Powerful forces, old and new, have come together to dramatically change the way humans interact with devices. The voices of Siri, Cortana, and Echo have heralded this change to consumers and electronics developers alike, potentially marking the end of an era when tap, pinch, slide, and swipe dominate user interfaces. Very soon, the most natural form of communication—speech—will dominate human-machine interactions, and the pace of this change is taking everyone’s breath away.

“The velocity of the improvements we have made with voice is like nothing I have ever seen before,” says Kenneth Harper, senior director of mobile technical product management at Nuance Communications. “But what we have today is just the tip of the iceberg. This vision of ubiquitous speech will become a reality in the future. In the next year, we are going to see a lot of new interfaces come to market, where speech actually is the primary interface.”

The Need for Speech The shift to voice-enabled interfaces has been accelerated by the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and broad adoption of mobile and wearable devices. As the IoT takes shape, promising to provide ubiquitous connectivity to almost limitless information, consumers increasingly expect easy and convenient access to data. Unfortunately, traditional device interfaces often hinder, rather than facilitate, such access.

Safety concerns preclude users of connected cars from shifting their attention from the road to interact with onboard systems via keyboards or touchpads. As a result, voice becomes the only distraction-free input medium for many automotive and infotainment systems.

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! Voice-based interfaces make it much easier to perform on even the most complex procedures on mobile

devices. (Courtesy of Expect Labs.)

Use of traditional smartphone interfaces has its own drawbacks. The devices’ small screens handicap their ability to perform all but the simplest functions well. “Most people access the Internet from their mobile devices, but only 10% of all e-commerce transactions are done on mobile devices,” says Tim Tuttle, CEO of Expect Labs. “This is because it is so tedious and cumbersome to shop for a hotel room or airline ticket. The screen is so small, and you have to navigate through a labyrinth of choices.”

These factors make voice a prime candidate for the next-generation device interfaces. Speech-recognition systems promise to provide a simpler, more efficient mechanism for handling such applications. Until recently, however, these systems lacked the intelligence required to handle complex Web searches, open-ended questions, and extensive vocabularies. The technology simply was not good enough for these kinds of applications. Speech-recognition system providers focused more on transcribing audio into words, and relied on systems that tried to match the spoken words with predefined vocabulary assembled by the developers. Unfortunately, when users spoke naturally and used words not included in the set of defined terms, the system accuracy decreased sharply.

This is, however, no longer true. The best systems today respond with almost human levels of accuracy in terms of vocabulary because the developers’ arsenal has recently been enhanced with powerful technologies.

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Something Old and Something New To make this leap forward, developers needed a technology that could process the complexities of language and information retrieval in much the same way that the human brain does. This translates into nonlinear, parallel processing that learns from data instead of relying on large sets of rules and programming.

For this, developers have turned to neural networks—a branch of machine learning that models high-level abstractions using large pools of data. Although neural networks (also known as deep learning) has been sidelined as a computing curiosity for several years, researchers have begun harnessing neural nets’ ability to improve speech-recognition systems.

Neural nets use algorithms to process language via deeper and deeper layers of complexity, beginning by identifying phonemes (perceptually distinct units of sound), learning the meaning of key words, and progressing to the point where they understand the importance of context. Ultimately, the algorithms put words together to form sentences and paragraphs that conform to the rules of grammar.

What makes neural nets so relevant now? Increased use of speech recognition and information retrieval systems like Siri, Cortana, and Echo has created large pools of data that train neural nets. The appearance of this data coincides with the availability of affordable computer systems capable of handling very large data sets. These two resources have enabled the developers to build bigger, more sophisticated models to create more accurate algorithms.

These new and improved models have increased the effectiveness of voice interfaces in two ways; they have improved speech-recognition systems’ ability to transcribe audio into words, and enabled a technology called natural language understanding, which interprets the meaning and intent of words.

“Natural language can take any word that a user might speak—even if it is out of bounds [not defined in a pre-established vocabulary]—and still identify some of the key words and language patterns that allow it to infer what the speaker wants or what the intent is,” says Nuance’s Harper. “So speech [recognition], which is now making use of deep neural nets to more accurately transcribe what the user is saying, is also combined with natural language understanding’s ability to look at those words and understand what some of them actually mean, doing a much better job of completing a full range of tasks that users expect these systems to perform.”

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! The best voice systems today offer high levels of accuracy and task completion thanks to remarkably

effective speech-recognition and natural language understanding systems. (Courtesy of Sensory.)

As a result of these technological advances, voice interfaces have improved significantly in the past two years. Task completion accuracy has increased from 20% to 40%.

Processors Built for Voice

While these software developments have greatly enhanced speech-recognition systems, hardware advances also have played a key role. Researchers credit graphics processing units (GPUs) by providing the computing power required to handle the large training data sets, which is essential in developing speech recognition and natural language understanding models. These processors possess qualities that make them ideal for voice systems.

To begin, GPUs do not burn as much power or take up as much space as CPUs, two critical considerations when it comes to mobile and wearable devices. It is their capacity for parallel computing, however, that makes GPUs so well suited for neural network and voice processing applications. These highly efficient systems provide the

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bandwidth and power required to convert large training data sets into the models. The graphic processors are not as powerful as CPUs, but developers can still divide larger calculations into small pieces and spread them across each GPU chip. As a result, GPUs routinely speed up common operations, such as large matrix computations, by factors from 5 to 50, out pacing CPUs. “As we have gotten more sophisticated GPUs, we have also gotten more sophisticated ways of interacting with products through voice,” says Todd Mozer, CEO of Sensory Inc.

Cloud vs. Local…or Something in Between

Speech-recognition systems come in three flavors: cloud-based implementations, locally residing systems, and hybrids. To determine the right design for an application, issues to consider are processing/memory requirements, connectivity, latency tolerance, and privacy. The size of a speech-recognition system’s vocabulary determines the RAM capacity requirements. The speech system functions faster if the entire vocabulary resides in the RAM. If the system has to search the hard drive for matches, it becomes sluggish. Processing speed also impacts how fast the system can search the RAM for word matches. The more sophisticated the system, the greater the processing and memory requirements, and the more likely it will be cloud-based. However, this may not be so in the future.

“All of the best intelligent system technology is cloud-based today, says Expect Labs’ Tuttle.” “In the future, that is not necessarily going to be the case. In three to five years, it’s certainly possible that a large percentage of the computation done in the cloud today could conceivably be done locally on your device on the fly. Essentially, you could have an intelligent system that could understand you, provide answers on a wide range of topics, and fit into your pocket, without any connectivity at all.”

Despite the advantages of cloud-based systems, a number of factors make speech systems residing locally on a device desirable. First and foremost, they do not require connectivity to function. If there is any chance that connectivity will be interrupted, local voice resources are preferable. In addition, local systems often offer significantly better performance because there is no network latency. This means that responses are almost instantaneous. Also, if all data remains on the device, there are no privacy concerns.

Some companies, however, adopt hybrid configurations in an attempt to cover all contingencies. By combining cloud-based and local resources, the designer gets the best of both worlds. Cloud-based resources provide high

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accuracy in complex applications, and local resources ensure fast responses in simpler tasks. Hybrid designs also mitigate the issue of unreliable connectivity.

Predictions of what voice systems will look like in the future indicate that there will be a place for each of these approaches. “The cloud will continue to play a big role for many years,” says Harper. “We will continue to push more advanced capability to the device, but as we do that, we will start inventing new things that we can do only in the cloud. But the cloud will always be a little bit ahead of what you can do on the device.”

Inflection Point

! Voice systems represent an amalgam of technologies that will grow in complexity, eventually

understanding the meaning and intent of words and answering queries with the most applicable information available. (Courtesy of Sensory.)

Rapid advances in speech-recognition and information retrieval technology put consumers and the electronics industry on notice that voice-based interfaces are about to fundamentally change the way humans interact with machines. “Within the next couple of years, speech, natural language understanding, and intelligent interfaces are going to start showing up more and more across the board in every connected device that we purchase and interact with,” says Harper.

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As impressive as these advances are, it is important to remember that this is just the beginning. Significant obstacles still confront electronic device developers, and researchers still have huge artificial intelligence (AI) challenges to address before voice systems reach their full potential. With this in mind, it would be fair to say that this is the end of the beginning of the voice revolution.

“We will look back on this period we are in now, and the next five years, as the golden age of AI,” says Tuttle. “The numbers of advances we are seeing are remarkable, and they look like they will continue for the foreseeable future.”

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Great Debate: Tech Bubble or Boom? Bloomberg West June 4, 2015 Viewership: 350,000,000 (globally)

Note: secured live, in-studio interview for Scott Sandell of NEA to discuss the tech bubble as well as NEA’s $3.1B 15th fund raise news.

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Digital Concierges Face a Daunting To-Do List in the Ecommerce Fight By Richard Waters FT May 22, 2015 Circulation: 269,121 / Online Audience: 3,330,377

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The 100 Brilliant Companies: Tech June 2015 Issue Entrepreneur Magazine Circulation: 666,987 / Online Audience: 15,564,642

Note: Expect Labs was featured as the number one tech company in the 2015 100 Brilliant Companies issue of Entrepreneur Magazine, in print and online

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IVP Reloads With $1.4B For Late-Stage Venture Investments By Cromwell Schubarth Silicon Valley Business Journal April 24, 2015 Circulation: 8,262 / Unique visitors per month: 7,661,449

Institutional Venture Partners is the latest Silicon Valley venture firm to raise a big fund to keep up with the region's funding explosion. The 35-year-old Menlo Park late-stage investment firm announced the new $1.4 billion fund at an annual meeting with founders of portfolio companies at the Ferry Building in San Francisco.

The fund is the second biggest in the Valley this year, following New Enterprise Associates' $3.1 billion fund announced earlier this month.

"We’re seeing more companies reach our growth stage faster than ever," IVP said in a blog about the new fund. "Overall, the average private IVP portfolio company is growing at a staggering 209 percent annually. The quality of company in the later-stage market is higher than ever, and our new fund enables us to partner with the most promising entrepreneurs." Among the Bay Area's fast-growing companies that IVP has backed in big rounds are Dropbox, Zenefits and Pure Storage.

Norm Fogelsong, who is stepping into an advisory role after 26 years of active investing at the firm, told me at a reception following the portfolio meeting that IVP raised its biggest fund to keep up with the big rounds being raised by private companies.

"I expect companies will continue to choose to raise big late rounds rather than go public and venture firms will continue to raise big funds until the Federal Reserve changes its interest rate policy," he said.

For a long while now, investors have looked for alternative places to put their money to work because returns on bonds have been so low.

The firm said it plans to invest between $10 million and $100 million in 12 to 15 later-stage companies annually from the fund.

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StrictlyVC: New Funds By Connie Loizos April 24, 2015 StrictlyVC

Institutional Venture Partners has officially closed its newest fund with $1.4 billion, making it the second largest venture fund formed in the U.S. this year (right behind NEA's mammoth new fund). Forbes has much more here.

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Institutional Venture Partners Raises a $1.4B Fund to Keep Making Later-Stage Deals By Jordan Novet VentureBeat April 23, 2015 Unique visitors per month: 2,394,968

Institutional Venture Partners, a Bay Area venture capital and growth equity firm known for coming into deals once startups have figured out what they want to be, is announcing today a new $1.4 billion fund dubbed IVP XV. It’s the biggest fund ever for 35-year-old IVP, and it was significantly oversubscribed, according to a statement from the firm.

That’s not surprising given IVP’s track record. The firm has funded many companies that have gone on to hit public markets or get acquired, including Dropcam, Eucalyptus, Marketo, MobileIron, MySQL, Netflix, Twitter, and ZenDesk. Current investments include AppDynamics, Domo, Dropbox, Slack, Snapchat, and Zenefits.

Several other prominent venture capital firms — including Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and New Enterprise Associates — have been raising or announcing funds lately.

But unlike many of those firms, IVP doesn’t typically dole out small piles of money to lots of startups. It specializes in focused, late-stage deals. Others in that domain that have raised new funds recently include GGV Capital and Meritech Capital Partners.

IVP has offices in San Francisco and Menlo Park, California. The firm intends to keep backing 12 to 15 companies a year, consumer or enterprise, with $10 million to $100 million going to each company, according to today’s statement.

Todd Chaffee, Somesh Dash, Steve Harrick, Eric Liaw, Jules Maltz, Sandy Miller, and Dennis Phelps are general partners for the new fund, while longtime IVP general partner Norm Fogelsong will be an advisory partner on it, IVP said.

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Zirx Raises $30 Million to Save You From Parking Your Car By Kia Kokalitcheva Fortune April 22, 2015 Circulation: 844,023 / Unique visitors per month: 1,469,935

The parking wars are heating up among startups that want to serve as your valet and parking attendant.

Even if we give up driving in favor of ride-hailing services like Uber or Lyft, or we switch to self-driving cars someday, there’s one thing we’ll still definitely need: parking.

San Francisco-based Zirx, is looking to help with its on-demand valet parking service. Like competitors Luxe Valet, Vatler, ValetAnywhere, Zirx lets customers use a mobile app to summon a valet to meet them at a specific location. Once there, drivers turn over their car and later use the app to summon it back when they’re ready. Essentially, it puts a valet stand anywhere they want to avoid dealing with parking themselves.

On Wednesday, Zirx, which is available in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Washington D.C, said that it had raised $30 million in new funding. With its new investment, Zirx plans to continue expanding to other cities as well as by bolstering its operations where it’s already available.

On the price front, Zirx and number-one rival Luxe are neck and neck, both charging about $15 per day. Zirx customers can pay for valet service on a per-use basis or they can buy a monthly pass for unlimited parking, which includes overnight parking.

With parking quickly becoming a big battleground, mobile valet services will have to prove to drivers that they’re truly more convenient than street parking or pulling into a paid lot themselves. Two main niches are emerging in the space: on-demand valets like Zirx, Luxe Valet, and mobile services like SpotHero and ParkWhiz for booking parking spots in advance.

For SpotHero and ParkWhiz, which let their customers spontaneously, book a parking spot at a partner garage or parking lot, it’s all about inventory. The more partner garages and parking lots in their systems, the more options and better pricing they can offer their customers. And for many drivers, parking their car on their own in a garage a

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few steps from their lunch meeting or doctor’s appointment — at a good price, of course — is just as convenient as having a valet. Drivers can avoid the uncertainty and wasted time of driving around the block to look for parking.

For these companies, acquisitions like SpotHero’s recent purchase of rival ParkPlease in San Francisco, can help increase inventory. However, Zirx co-founded and CEO Sean Behr told Fortune that an acquisition spree is not in the cards right now.

So then how do valet companies like Zirx compete, and more importantly, justify their labor costs? The answer is additional services, like oil changes, car washes, and gassing up that Zirx offers as an option to customers. Zirx has been offering these as part of a secret menu, and Behr said that his company has carried out 3,000 additional services to date. This week, the company is finally introducing a formal version, called Zirx Care, in all of the cities where it operates.

But of course, Zirx’s rivals like Luxe, which announced $20 million in new funding last month, also offers such services to its customers, making it difficult to declare a winner yet.

Bessemer Venture Partners led Zirx’s latest round, with additional participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures, among others. This latest funding brings the company’s total to $36.4 million. Behr cofounded the San Francisco-based company last year with Shmulik Fishman, Boris Zamoruev, Boris Perlov.

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VC Pete Sonsini on 'Unicorn' Imbalance, NEA's Record Fundraising By Cromwell Schubarth Silicon Valley Business Journal April 20, 2015 Circulation: 8,262 / Unique visitors per month: 7,661,449

Pete Sonsini has had a good look at the ups and downs of Silicon Valley tech companies for a very long time, beginning when he hung out at the law firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in the 1980s, where his dad Larry Sonsini was one of the region's most influential tech lawyers.

It's definitely an up time for New Enterprise Associates, the Menlo Park venture firm where Sonsini has invested since 2005. NEA raised a record $3.1 billion in funds this year and is ready to start putting that money to work.

But Sonsini told me in a recent conversation that not all of the companies enjoying high times in the Valley are going to make it to the big exit their backers want. Before joining NEA, Sonsini worked at Hewlett-Packard, Mirapoint and VMware as a product and strategic alliance executive.

At NEA, some of his big investments include Pentaho (acquired by Hitachi Data Systems this year for between $500 million and $600 million), Teracent (acquired by Google in 2009) and XenSource (acquired by Citrix Systems in 2007). The following interview was edited for length and clarity.

We saw a slowdown in IPOs and M&A in the first quarter, but startup funding levels and valuations have continued to go up. How long can this go on?

At some point, there is going to have to be either a much bigger IPO market to catch up or there won’t be as many unicorns funded. It is at an imbalance, there is no question about that. A lot of the companies that were funded in the valuation run-up over the past two years aren’t going to make it to an IPO. They can’t all be billion-dollar companies on the public markets. I think that’s just the reality, right?

But that doesn’t mean that there are not great companies in there. It doesn’t mean that more of them aren’t going to get funded that are going to be $1 billion companies in the public markets at some point.

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There are exciting things going on in so many different categories. There are going to be many great companies that will continue to get funded and go on to greatness because of what is going on in the world. But, yeah, there are also a lot of them that aren't going to make it.

With the $3.1 billion NEA just raised it looks like you folks are ready to continue to invest as the rounds grow larger. W hat was different about this fundraising effort, if anything? This is our fourth time raising a fund that’s approximately this size. So I wouldn’t say a lot was different. it’s really more of the same with regard to our strategy. We use a model where we invest out of one large fund, from early stage to growth capital, both domestically and internationally.

One new feature is the opportunity fund, which allows us to invest in some of the companies that are staying private longer and getting larger late rounds. The opportunity fund is there to give us a little more flexibility to make some more sizable investments without stretching the investment ratios from the main fund. Companies are staying private a lot longer, and they're raising a lot more money. So the opportunity fund gives us the additional flexibility to adjust to that.

Has NEA been investing more in some of its portfolio companies as round sizes and valuations have gone up?

We always shoot for a certain ownership threshold. So as the valuations go up, you put more dollars to work to hit those ownership thresholds. So I’d say there's probably more dollars at work per company generally now. That’s just a sign of the times.

As companies have stayed private longer, there are mutual funds and private equity investors getting involved in the late stages that in the past years might not have been involved until the IPOs of companies. Has that changed the way that you guys are doing things at all?

We don’t really pay much attention to it. It doesn’t impact our decision-making process. When we look at a new investment, it’s really around whether we have a conviction that we can get a venture-like return.

What opportunities do you see for investing with the new fund that perhaps weren’t on your radar at the start of the last one? I think if you look at each sector we invest in, there's an individual story for each of them relative to where things were three years ago at the start of the last fund. In software — where I invest primarily — the velocity of new

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applications being developed these days is much greater. The emergence of a lot of micro services websites and cloud-based services for assembling applications has contributed to that.

This has been particularly true in mobile and Big Data. They were around three years ago, but it just feels like the velocity is even greater now than it was then. That's one of the great things about investing in software, new opportunities keep on popping up and making developers more productive, so things keep on accelerating.

If you look at our health investments, what’s going on with cancer therapies and marketing drugs is picking up. The IPO market has been very robust for the pharma market. What's going on with wearables and what's going on with healthcare services that are provided through a software-as-a-service model is getting big. I think the Affordable Care Act created a lot of opportunities there relative to three years ago.

Tell me about one of the companies in your portfolio as an example of what you are looking for these days.

Sure. So we invested in a company called Nginx that is really becoming a cornerstone, if you will, of the modern Web app development trend. Its software is used for the interconnectedness of cloud-based based services that are also known as micro services. Nginx is a software company, which is kind of providing the glue for all these modern Web applications. It is used in over 150 million websites today, and it’s just taken off like crazy.

What was it about Nginx that stood out for NEA? Was there a prior relationship with some of the people involved?

No. We actually didn’t know anybody there prior to investing in them. But we saw the trend of software being used to replace some hardware components within a network. And we saw the trend of cloud services that basically are all microservices that are culled from different Web services and presented in a unified manner to the consumer.

When you do a search on Amazon and then pull up a product review, it will tell you a lot of related things like showing you a similar product, showing you ratings, or showing other things people bought who looked at what you are looking at. These are all microservices that were culled from different Web services and presented in a unified manner to the consumer on that Amazon webpage.

We saw that trend two or three years ago. So when we learned about Nginx and saw that they were really the Web software that makes that all work, we moved on it super quickly.

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We actually did an inside round just four, five months ago after we heard they were thinking about going out to raise more money. We said, “Hey, we’d like to increase our position. We’ll do an inside round ourselves at a much higher price than what we paid the first time.”

Are there unique challenges that come with this speed of development that we’re seeing these days? Well, yeah. It’s more taxing on the infrastructure when you have all these different services culled from different places. So you need something that’s really fast like Nginx to be able to make it work in real time. It’s classic challenges of speed and scalability that they are addressing.

In that vein, we have another company called Databricks, which is involved in the Spark open-source project, which is really the compute engine for real-time data analysis. processing. Nginx is more on the presentation of the webpage in real time. Spark is the new technology for real-time data analysis. I just bring that up because they both play in this real-time trend. One is on the presentation layer and the other is on the analytics.

Do you have a company that you didn’t invest in when you could have that went on to make you regret that decision?

Yeah, I haven't nailed all of them. One was AppDynamics. That deal got done before I could put term sheets down on them.

Another is Zenefits. I had a chance to invest in them really early, when they were looking for seed funding. It remains to be seen about the long-term success of their model. But it sure looks pretty good right now. That’s’ the one that I wish I did. I had some questions about whether they could transfer their success in selling to small businesses up into a bigger enterprise sort of program. To be fair, the final chapter hasn’t been written in that story, but that was one of the questions that I had, and that was part of the reason why I backed out.

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VC Fund Cracks $3 Billion CNBC: Squawk Alley April 17, 2015 Estimated viewership: 35,000,000 – 40,000,000 viewers globally

Note: secured live interview with NEA’s Peter Barris to discuss the firm’s 15th fund raise news ($3.1B fund)

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These investors Are on The Hunt For The Next Uber, Google, Facebook By Tom Heath The Washington Post April 17, 2015 Circulation: 436,601 / Unique visitors per month: 22,034,638 Note: story ran in the Sunday business section of the Washington Post

New Enterprise Associates, the giant investment firm based in Chevy Chase and Menlo Park, Calif., sent shock and awe through the venture capital world last week with news that it had raised a record $2.8 billion from investors — a sign that the business of funding start-ups is hitting its stride again after years of uncertainty.

“It says that the ecosystem is healthy,” said John Backus, founder and managing partner of New Atlantic Ventures, a Reston venture capital firm that specializes in early-stage start-ups.

In fact, there was more activity in the venture capital sector during the first quarter of 2015 than since the heyday of the Internet bubble in 2000. Venture capital investors in the quarter steered $13.4 billion to 1,020 deals, according to a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, based on data from Thomson Reuters.

A robust ecosystem is critical to the Washington region because it is home to a burgeoning start-up industry, especially in technology. Without healthy funding, there are no small companies that grow into the next AOL. Jobs, housing, commerce, sports, education, philanthropy all follow from there. Venture capital comes in two parts: First, firms must find investors who want to steer money to early-stage companies.

The other half of the equation involves a talent for finding those companies in the first place: the Ubers, Facebooks and Googles of the world. Easier said than done. For every 10 or so investments, a bunch that fail and a few are mediocre. Then there is the occasional home run, such as Groupon, which earned NEA 100 times its investment.

Part of the reason behind New Enterprise Associates’ giant fund — known as Fund 15 — is that the firm plays in big pools, making several times the number of investments other firms make. In an industry where some firms raise

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$100 million funds, NEA’s past four funds have each been more than $2.5 billion. The company has raised $17 billion over its lifetime.

As NEA’s big score shows, the wellspring of money is alive and well. Some comes from traditional sources, such as foundations, university endowments, pensions and the wealthy. Others have joined in, including sovereign wealth funds and newly minted billionaires. “There is no question that the investment community sees the venture capital asset class as a great place to allocate capital,” NEA managing general partner Peter Barris said. “This sector, for probably six or seven quarters, has been distributing more capital than it has been calling down.” That is a reversal from recent years, when too much money and too many venture capital firms were chasing too few investments.

The result? Some funds with weak records fell by the wayside, either ending their fundraising or being bought by a rival.

“There were a number of funds coming out of the bubble that raised more money than could be put to use, and resulted in some right-sizing of the industry,” said Ralph Terkowitz, a former Washington Post Co. technology executive who is now a general partner at ABS Capital in Baltimore. “There were some firms on the margin that did go out of business.”

The new venture capital landscape is far different from the go-go ’90s and early 2000s, with most of the money now going to small or very large firms. Backus called it “the barbell effect.”

“You have hundreds of venture capital companies under $100 million that are raising money, and you’ve got a few dozen over $500 million,” he said. “The midsize firms are struggling.”

One reason for the weight toward small firms is the big home run, where a $500,000 or $1 million bet can earn returns 30, 40 or 50 times the original investment.

Many companies also are staying private longer, and venture capital firms are holding on to their investments longer, from four years in 2000 to eight years now. That creates a demand for the sums that NEA’s fund can feed.

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People have held investments longer as the market for initial public offerings has cooled since the 1990s. “If you look at the revenue and profitability of the cohort of companies that went public in the ’90s tech bubble, they were tiny. They went public with $10 million in revenue,” Terkowitz said. “Now people expect that a business will do $50 million or more in revenue and ideally is profitable before they go public. As a result, companies are staying private longer.”

And that creates demand for later-stage investing, which New Enterprise Associates and traditional public growth investors such as Fidelity and T. Rowe Price are filling with what is known as “growth capital,” which can fund a proven business that is growing but fragile and unable to support a lot of debt.

“There is a huge opportunity in growth equity,” Barris said. So big, in fact, that NEA — which concentrates two-thirds of its cash on tech companies and the rest on health — raised a $350 million fund at the same time as Fund 15 to invest in companies ripe for growth equity.

“You have the Ubers and Pinterests of the world that could have gone public but haven’t chosen to go public,” he said, “and they raise more dollars as private companies.”

The publicly traded technology giants of today — Amazon.com (led by Washington Post owner Jeffrey P. Bezos), Microsoft, Cisco — went public at below $1 billion.

Privately held Pinterest is valued at about $5 billion, putting it in league with other presumed IPO candidates such as Dropbox and Airbnb, estimated to be worth $5 billion to $10 billion each. Fidelity and T. Rowe Price have invested in Airbnb, according to reports.

Barris said there were 70 companies in 2014 that were in their sixth round of private fundraising, up from 19 in 2010. And 10 of those companies had raised $1 billion or more from private sources such as venture capital firms.

The incentive to stay behind the cloak of privacy is also regulatory, letting a firm stay out of the public eye while it grinds through the sometimes-ugly details of growing.

“When you expose yourself to the public when the sausage is being made, when they are running at 100 miles per hour, that’s difficult,” Barris said.

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A big fund can make that choice easier.

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NEA Closes Billions in Capital for Two New Funds By Kasra Kangarloo Washington Business Journal April 15, 2015 Circulation: 15,940 / Unique visitors per month: 7,661,449

New Enterprise Associates has closed more than $3.1 billion in new capital for its 15th fund and a joint "opportunity fund," the Chevy Chase venture capital giant said Wednesday.

The raise marks the fourth consecutive $2.5 billion-plus fund and brings the total capital under the firm's umbrella since its 1977 inception to nearly $17 billion.

The opportunity fund, which tacks $350 million onto the primary $2.8 billion fund, will be reserved for companies that show outsized growth potential and may exceed the capital reserved for such companies within the primary fund. The opportunity fund will only co-invest in companies alongside the primary fund, and will be treated as a reserve of sorts for unexpectedly promising companies.

As I reported in February, the reason the firm raises singular, bulky funds is to allow for a more flexible allocation of investments across different sectors, regions and companies at different levels of maturity. General Partner Harry Weller likened the strategy to a "Rubik's Cube."

Though NEA is arguably an international firm that only happens to be headquartered in the Greater Washington area (as opposed to a true regional player), the firm has invested in numerous local companies at both the growth and venture stage. They include Framebridge, Opower, EverFi, TrackMaven, Zoomdata, ScienceLogic and Cvent, among others.

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Windows Server 2003 End-of-Life Presents a $100bn Opportunity By Jamie Hinks Tech Radar March 18, 2015 Unique visitors per month: 3,260,454

Windows Server 2003 is heading towards its end of life (EOL) this coming July, yet a new study shows that just a small fraction of users have already migrated to a new solution and some don't even plan to move at all.

Spiceworks, the professional IT network, reports that 61% of the companies on its network still have at least one instance of Windows Server 2003 running within their company environment which means there are potentially still millions of installations out there.

This presents a significant opportunity to providers hoping to help companies migrate to a new platform. A report titled "The Great IT Upgrade" points out that on average companies have set aside £40,000 (approximately $59,500, or AU$76,800) to be used in migration-related projects. When scaled up, this amounts to a $100 billion (approximately £67 billion, or AU$129 billion) opportunity for hardware and software suppliers, cloud solution providers and companies providing associated services.

"IT professionals are taking steps to migrate prior to the end of life deadline and technology companies who can offer a clear, elegant migration path have a multi-billion dollar opportunity to help IT departments transition effectively," said Sanjay Castelino, VP of Marketing at Spiceworks.

Why not upgrade?

Of those still running Windows Server 2003, just 8% have no plans to migrate at all, and the reasons given for this were concerns about the security viability of updated solutions (85%), software compatibility (72%), and compliance risks (66%). For companies that are moving away from Windows Server 2003, 64% surveyed plan to migrate to Windows Server 2012 R2. Virtualised environments are also popular, and almost three-quarters will be taking some, if not all, of their applications running on Windows Server 2003 into the virtual space.

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At the last check, in November, there were between 2.6 million and 11 million global installations of Windows Server 2003 still in the wild and the situation is beginning to mirror that of Windows XP when millions of copies were still installed in the lead up to its EOL in April 2014.

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Op-Ed: Reimagining The Network For A Hyper-Converged Infrastructure By Kittu Kolluri, NEA TechCrunch March 14, 2015 Unique visitors per month: 15,494,649

Note: Secured guest column for Kittu Kolluri of NEA and worked with the client to draft the piece.

Editor’s note: Kittu Kolluri is a general partner at NEA, focusing on IT and energy technology investments. His investments include Box, Aerohive Networks, Braintree, BloomReach, VeloCloud and Cohere Technologies, among others.

You’re only as strong as your weakest link, and that’s the Internet’s biggest problem today. For more than two decades, the very backbone of the Internet — the network — has subsisted in the shadows, pinned beneath the weight of a fast-growing Internet economy and a powerful cohort of incumbents with much to lose.

Since the early days of SaaS, the tech world has set an astonishing pace for innovation. If the cloud breaks everything (and it does), we are nothing if not resilient — toppling each obstacle in a race to deliver anything-as-a-service, big data and mobility. We have evolved into device-addicted, app-devouring gluttons for bandwidth — all the while coaxing and cajoling the underlying architecture to manage a far greater load than it was ever designed to bear.

The impact of this top-down innovation is often illustrated from a wide area network (WAN) perspective — but if the sprawling WAN is a rising tide, the data center is scrambling to shore up against the floodwaters.

We weren’t turning a blind eye; quite the opposite, in fact. But from a technological perspective, the architecture couldn’t simply be fixed, it had to be reimagined. This is no small feat in a complex ecosystem of industry giants, legacy systems, and intra-organizational dynamics. Yet one thing has always been clear: The problem would only be solved by pushing technology forward. And push forward we did, albeit in silos: compute, storage, and network. Before cloud computing, applications segmented resources into those three tidy groups. This worked great until it didn’t: With virtualization came the horizontal scale-out of the compute layer.

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Now storage had to move closer to compute in order to ensure performance and scalability. Converged storage addressed the proximity issue, as demonstrated by companies like Nutanix, SimpliVity and Springpath but the resulting increase in east-west traffic shifts the bottleneck to the network.

Software-defined networking (SDN) in the form of host-based virtualization (as pioneered by companies like Nicira/VMWare and PLUMgrid), decouples the control plane from the data plane but is not addressing the underlying physical network infrastructure.

In today’s mobile-first, application-rich, always-on world, our approach to infrastructure must be more holistic, and that means a shift to cloud-based architecture. This has long been a dominant theme in NEA’s enterprise portfolio, but over the last year or two we’ve seen the transformation accelerating. Virtual overlays have rapidly emerged as the favored approach in this nascent market, with some very interesting startup plays and some big moves by incumbents. Despite being tethered to Cisco gear, Cisco’s Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) stack technology is conceptually similar to virtual network overlays. Interestingly, Cisco now plans to support open source protocols on its switches to make it easier to implement virtual overlays for customers not buying into its ACI stack.

Among startups blazing trails in network OS virtualization, Pluribus Networks stands out for several reasons. Its software-defined fabric allows organizations to converge compute, network, storage and virtualization.

Where earlier solutions relegated the network to a transport layer, Pluribus has built its value proposition around a more strategic, intelligent role for the network. There has been plenty of industry activity validating Pluribus’ open software-defined fabric approach; especially notable is Facebook Wedge.

With both hardware and software options for deployment, the company has raised nearly $100 million to date from an investor group that includes Valley insiders but also strategic global investors. Other startups have begun to pursue a similar model — Alcatel-Lucent spinout Nuage, which started off in the service provider space, focused on network functions virtualization but is increasingly focused on SDN in enterprise data centers. Similarly, Big Switch Networks shifted from host-based network virtualization to a fabric-based model. Thinking beyond the data center, a number of startups are addressing the widening gap between the enterprise and its branches — some under the umbrella of SDN solutions (i.e. Nuage’s Virtualized Network Services) and others with a direct focus on virtualizing the WAN environment.

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Velocloud is among the latter, building the cloud router to solve the problems that point-to-point WAN optimization no longer addresses, and enabling business-grade performance over a public Internet connection.

It seems a bit ironic that as the app world unbundles and functions decouple, the underlying infrastructure is transforming into a software-defined, single-tier mesh fabric — a hyper-converged infrastructure of compute, network and storage. But in light of the explosive growth in traffic and consumption driven by app proliferation, big data, content streaming and online collaboration, it makes sense that the underlying architecture would become increasingly fluid and dynamic.

The shift has been a long time coming, but the solutions are proving simpler and more elegant than anyone expected. To me, it looks like the unglamorous underbelly of the Internet may be the biggest opportunity yet in the cloud transformation.

Disclosure: NEA is an investor in Pluribus, Springpath, Velocloud.

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Op-Ed: Internet of Things: Where Does the Data Go? By Patrick McFadin, DataStax WIRED Innovation Insights March 5, 2015

Note: Secured op-ed for DataStax executive in WIRED Innovation Insights and worked with client on drafting the piece.

The Internet of Things means different things to different people. To vendors, it’s the latest in a slew of large-scale trends to affect their enterprise customers, and the latest marketing bandwagon they have to consider.

To enterprise organizations, it’s still a jumble of technical standards, conflicting opinions and big potential. For developers, it’s a big opportunity to put together the right mix of tools and technologies, and probably something they are already doing under another name. Understanding how these technologies work together on a technical level is becoming important, and will provide more opportunities to use software design as part of the overall business.

As Internet of Things projects go from concepts to reality, one of the biggest challenges is how the data created by devices will flow through the system. How many devices will be creating information? How will they send that information back? Will you be capturing that data in real time, or in batches? What role will analytics play in future?

These questions have to be asked in the design phase. From the organizations that I have spoken to, this preparation phase is essential to make sure you use the right tools from the start.

Sending the Data It is helpful to think about the data created by a device in three stages. Stage one is the initial creation, which takes place on the device, and then sent over the Internet. Stage two is how the central system collects and organizes that data. Stage three is the ongoing use of that data for the future.

For smart devices and sensors, each event can and will create data. This information can then be sent over the network back to the central application. At this point, one must decide which standard the data will be created in

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and how it will be sent over the network. For delivering this data back, MQTT, HTTP and CoAP are the most common standard protocols used. Each of these has its benefits and use cases.

HTTP provides a suitable method for providing data back and forth between devices and central systems. Originally developed for the client-server computing model, today it supports everyday web browsing through to more specialist services around Internet of Things devices too. While it meets the functionality requirements for sending data, HTTP includes a lot more data around the message in its headers. When you are working in low bandwidth conditions, this can make HTTP less suitable.

MQTT was developed as a protocol for machine-to-machine and Internet of Things deployments. It is based on a publish / subscribe model for delivering messages out from the device back to a central system that acts as a broker, where they can then be delivered back out to all of the other systems that will consume them. New devices or services can simply connect to the broker as they need messages. MQTT is lighter than HTTP in terms of message size, so it is more useful for implementations where bandwidth is a potential issue. However, it does not include encryption as standard so this has to be considered separately.

CoAP is another standard developed for low-power, low-bandwidth environments. Rather than being designed for a broker system like MQTT, CoAP is more aimed at one-to-one connections. It is designed to meet the requirements of REST design by providing a way to interface with HTTP, but still meet the demands of low-power devices and environments.

Each of these protocols support taking information or updates from the individual device and sending it over to a central location. However, where there is a greater opportunity is how that data is then stored and used in the future. There are two main concerns here: how the data is acted upon as it comes into the application, and how it is stored for future use.

Storing the Data Across the Internet of Things, devices create data that is sent to the main application to be sent on, consumed and used. Depending on the device, the network and power consumption restraints, data can be sent in real time, or in batches at any time. However, the real value is derived from the order in which data points are created.

This time-series data has to be accurate for Internet of Things applications. If not, then it compromises the very aims of the applications themselves. Take telemetry data from vehicles. If the order of data is not completely

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aligned and accurate, then it points to potentially different results when analyzed. If a certain part starts to fail in particular conditions – for example, a temperature drop at the same time as a specific level of wear – then these conditions have to be accurately reflected in the data that is coming through, or it will lead to false results.

Time-series data can be created as events take place around the device and then sent. This use of real-time information provides a complete record for each device, as it happens. Alternatively, it can be collated as data is sent across in batches – the historical record of data will be there, it just isn’t available in real time. This is common with devices where battery life is a key requirement over the need for data to be delivered in real time. Either way, the fundamental requirement is that each transaction on each device is put in at the right time-stamp for sorting and alignment. If you are looking at doing this in real time with hundreds of thousands or potentially millions of devices, then write-speed at the database level is an essential consideration.

Each write has to be taken as it is received from the device itself and put into the database. For more traditional relational database technologies, this can be a limiting factor, as it is possible for write-requests to go beyond what the database was built for. When you have to have all the data from devices in order to create accurate and useful information, this potential loss can have a big impact. For the organizations that I have spoken to around Internet of Things projects, NoSQL platforms like Cassandra provide a better fit for their requirements.

Part of this is due to the sheer volume of writes that something like Cassandra is capable of; even with millions of devices that creating data all the time, the database is designed to ingest that much data as it is created. However, it is also due to how databases themselves are designed. Traditional databases have a primary-replica arrangement, where the lead database server will handle all the transactions and synchronously pass them along to other servers if required. This leads to problems in the event of an outage or server failure, as a new primary has to be put into place leading to a potential data loss.

For properly configured distributed database systems like Cassandra, there is no ‘primary’ server that is in charge; each node within a cluster can handle transactions as they come in, and the full record is maintained over time. Even if a server fails, or a node is removed due to loss of network connectivity, the rest of the cluster can continue to process data as it comes in. For time-series data, this is especially valuable as it means that there should be no loss of data in the list of transactions over time.

Analyzing the Data

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Once you have this store of time-series data, the next opportunity is to look for trends over time. Analyzing time-series data provides the opportunity to create more value for the owners of the devices involved, or carry out automated tasks based on a certain set of conditions being met. The typical example is the Internet-connected fridge that realizes it is out of milk; however, Internet of Things data is more valuable when linked to larger private or public benefits, and with more complex condition sets that have to be met. Traffic analysis, utility networks and use of power across real estate locations are all concerned with consuming data from multiple devices in order to spot trends and save money or time.

In this environment, it’s helpful to think about when the results of the analytics will be required: is there an immediate, near real-time need for analysis, or is this a historic requirement? The popularity of Apache Spark for analysis of big data and Spark streaming for in near real time has continued to grow, and when combined with the likes of Cassandra it can provide developers with the ability to process and analyze large, fast-moving data sets alongside each other.

However, this is not just about what is taking place right now. The value from time-series data can come over time just as well. As an example, i2O Water in the UK looks at information around water pressure, taken from devices that are embedded in water distribution networks around the world. This data has been gathered over two years and is stored in a Cassandra cluster. The company uses this information for its analytics and to alert customers around where maintenance might be needed.

This data has its own value for the company. It has a ready-made source of modeling and analytics information for customers that can be used around new products too. This is down to the interesting way that the company has architected its applications in a modular fashion; when a new module or service is added, the time-series data can be “played” into the system as if the data was being created. This can then be used for analytics and to show how the devices on the water network would have reacted to the variations in pressure or other sensor data during that time.

For i2O Water, the opportunity here is to add services that demonstrate more value back to the utility companies that are customers. The value of water will only increase as more people need access, which in turn makes accurate and timely data more valuable. This is a good example of how connecting devices and data can improve lives as well as create new opportunities for the companies involved.

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The ability to look back at time-series data has the most far-reaching consequences for the Internet of Things as a whole. Whether it’s for private sector gain or public sector good, the design of the application and how that data is stored over time is essential to understand. When designing for the Internet of Things, the role of distributed systems that can keep up with the sheer amount of data being created is also important.

Automating The RFP Process Nets Scout RFP $2.75 Million By Jon Shieber TechCrunch January 27, 2015 Unique visitors per month: 15,494,649

Requesting, bidding, sorting and pitching new projects is a pain in the keister for most businesses. It’s a lengthy, time-consuming process still beset with reams of paperwork.

At least, that’s the way the folks at Scout RFP look at it and at least some investors agree with them. The company has raised $2.75 million in seed financing from New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Google Ventures and Zapis Capital, to sell their service aimed at making the process easier.

The cloud-based, sourcing-as-a-service platform automates several of the more labor-intensive aspects of the process for taking bids for new projects, and says it will use the new financing to build out its engineering team and expand the product for its big business customers.

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Using Scout RFP’s service, buyers can create a proposal in just a few minutes, because the company’s service is designed with a one-page bid template document.

Because the data is centralized in one place, reviewing and analyzing data is simpler, according to the company.

Based in Cleveland, Scout RFP was founded in 2013 and was initially backed by the company’s president, Stan Garber, and chief executive Alex Yakubovich, according to data from CrunchBase.

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2015 30 Under 30: Venture Capitalist – Slide Show By Alex Konrad Forbes January 5, 2015 Circulation: 930,391 / Unique visitors per month: 23,268,921

Note: secured two spots on Forbes’ inaugural 30 under 30: Venture Capitalist list for Nitesh Banta and Peter Boyce of Rough Draft Ventures (part of General Catalyst Partners)

! Nitesh Banta, 28 and Peter Boyce, 24 Co-Founders, Rough Draft Ventures

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Slide Show: VCs Look Ahead To 2015 By Jon Shieber TechCrunch December 30, 2014 Unique visitors per month: 15,494,649

Note: secured placement for year ahead predictions for several Spark clients, including: NEA, IVP, Cue Ball, General Catalyst and Mohr Davidow Ventures

Overview: • From cloud wars to the certainty that there will be hacks, venture capitalists believe that 2015 will be a year

of tumult and (in public markets anyway) triumph for the startup world. • Here are the visions that the general partners, managing directors and partners from firms such as NEA,

IVP, Cue Ball Group, General Catalyst Partners and MDV have when they gaze into their crystal balls. • Together these firms have more than $22 billion under management, so they’re not only seeing the future,

they’re often shaping it.

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Slide Show: Gifts Geeks Really Want for Christmas By Cecilia Galvin Channel Pro Network December 23, 2014 Circulation: 35,000 / Unique visitors per month: approximately 100,000

Overview: Still didn't find that special something for that special IT provider in your life? Here's your go-to gift guide, with ideas straight from the latest Spiceworks IT pro survey.

! What to Buy? In a quandary as to what to buy for your fave geek this holiday season? The results of a recent Spiceworks survey of more than 250 geeks polled in November and December can guide you to the perfect gift.

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Fortune Term Sheet By Dan Primack Fortune December 2, 2014

VENTURE CAPITAL DEALS Veniam, a Mountain View, Calif.-based developer of citywide WiFi networks of connected vehicles to expand coverage and enable the Internet-of-Things, has raised $4.9 million in Series A funding. True Ventures led the round, and was joined by Union Square Ventures, Cane Investments and individual angels. www.veniamworks.com

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Fortune Data Sheet By Heather Clancy Fortune December 4, 2014

Zipcar founder steers city WiFi startup. Technology from San Francisco-based Veniam turns municipal buses into wireless hotspots that spread Internet access across urban areas or controlled environments (think seaport or shipping container terminal). There's an early deployment in Porto, Portugal. Veniam is backed with $4.9 million in financing, including a Series A round (disclosed Tuesday) led by True Ventures, and the company's executive chairman is former Zipcar CEO Robin Chase.

STARTUPS & DISRUPTORS

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4 Top Companies Hiring Right Now Fox Business October 28, 2014 Estimated Viewership: 5,000,000 – 10,000,000

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Fortune Term Sheet By Dan Primack

Fortune October 23, 2014

New Enterprise Associates has promoted Jon Sakoda to general partner. He joined the firm's Menlo Park office in 2006, and sits on the boards of Blue Jeans Network, DataVisor, Desire2Learn, Hearsay Social, Opower, ScienceLogic, Suniva, Swiftype and WibiData. www.nea.com

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Bowery.io Wants to Set Up Your Web Developer's Work Environment in 30 Seconds By Kia Kokalitcheva VentureBeat October 21, 2014 Unique visitors per month: 2,394,968

Today, the startup is releasing the desktop app version of its product (previously only available as a command line tool) and announcing that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

Bowery.io is a cloud-based automation of a development environment, that is, the set up and configuration of a developer’s tools, software, and applications. Typically, developers spend hours setting up their environment, which includes loading and configuring software, to match their team’s.

But with Bowery.io, a Web developer can create an account, hook up his or her Amazon Web Services keys (Bowery.io is currently only compatible with AWS), and go through that initial configuration process. After that, a team member or new hire can set up an identical development environment … in under 30 seconds.

No, really. Zach Hamed, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, told VentureBeat his team’s tests have benchmarked at under 30 seconds. On the spectrum of Web development tools, Bowery.io sits somewhere near browser-based integrated development environments (IDEs) like Nitrous.io, Koding, and Cloud9. However, unlike them, it doesn’t work through a browser, and development is hosted in AWS, not on the company’s own servers. It’s also not as complex to set up as Vagrant, and it doesn’t require the use of virtual machines in order to do local development.

Next, the startup wants to grow beyond its user base of individuals and small team to land enterprise customers. Hamed assured me that its infrastructure is fully ready to take on this size of customers, despite being a small startup. I’m still skeptical about whether or not being limited to AWS (for now) and needing an Internet connection will still make the product attractive to larger companies.

The startup raised its funds from SV Angel, Google Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, RRE, Homebrew, Betaworks, BOLDstart Ventures, Magnet Agency, Deep Fork Capital, and angel investors Naveen Selvadurai, and Ryan Holmes. It plans on using this to expand its teams and growing a base of enterprise customers.

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Bowery.io was founded in 2013 by Zachary Hamed, David Byrd, and Steve Kaliski and is based in New York City.

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StrictlyVC: New Funding By Connie Loizos Strictly VC October 21, 2014

Bowery, a year-old, New York-based enterprise startup focused on simplifying the process of setting up, managing, and sharing development environments, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Google Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, RRE Ventures, Homebrew, Betaworks, SV Angel, BOLDstart Ventures, Magnet Agency, Deep Fork Capital, and angel investors Naveen Selvadurai and Ryan Holmes. The company had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital.