Phorce is the world’s first smart bag that has hit $120,000 on Kickstarter in 5 days. The company surpassed their $150,000 goal in under 2 weeks. Phorce is a bag that powers all of your devices and connects you to your bag through an app. This bag will remind you if you forgot it somewhere too.
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Influitive is an advocate marketing company that has raised $7.3 million in Series A funding. Investors in this round include Hummer Winblad, Relay Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, Illuminate Ventures, Resolute.VC, Common Angels, and several angel investors. Lars Leckie of Hummer Winblad and Alexa Baker of Relay Ventures will be joining the Influitive board of directors. The company plans on using the funding to ramp up their marketing, sales, and services teams.
Dropbox is one of the largest storage solutions companies in the world. Dropbox has acquired a cloud-based photo library company called Snapjoy. Dropbox and Snapjoy were both incubated by Y Combinator. Snapjoy’s platform is able to collect photos from multiple sources like Flickr, iPhones, desktops, etc. Snapjoy users can share all of their photos or some of them. They can also invite certain friends from different social networks to view the photos.
General Motors is spending $5.5 billion to buy back 200 million shares back from the U.S. Treasury by the end of the year. The Treasury is planning to sell their remaining stake in General Motors over the next 15 months. The government is planning to sell their remaining stake of 300 million shares on the open market in the next 12-15 months. GM is paying $27.50 per share, which is an 8% premium over the company’s closing price of $25.49.
Steven Sinofsky is the former head of Windows that stepped down last month. He had worked as the head of Windows and was in charge of fixing the Windows Vista mess. Sinofsky is returning to Harvard University as a professor starting this spring. He served as a “visiting scholar” at the university in 1998. He made the announcement about joining Harvard’s faculty on Twitter. He will be teaching courses on product development and will be writing journal articles about the same subject. His title will be the Executive in Residence at Harvard.
Excited to return to @harvardhbs to teach again this spring!New perspectives, recharge, share experiences, write.#sabbatical
— Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) December 19, 2012
Verizon and Redbox have set up a joint venture to launch a service called Redbox Instant. Redbox Instant is being rolled out in private beta mode. The service has unlimited streaming movies with 4 DVD credits and a free one month trial. Redbox Instant will cost $8 per month and is competing directly against Netflix.
Around 7,000 Nintendo Wii U consoles were stolen at the Seattle SeaTac airport. Thieves at the airport managed to steal a cart with 7,000 consoles. Since each console has a $300 price tag, this means that $2.1 million worth of consoles have been taken. It is unknown whether Nintendo will be able to expedite a new set of consoles to the parties that were expecting the Wii U consoles that were stolen.
International Business Machines (IBM) has acquired an information management company based in Austin, Texas called StoredIQ. StoredIQ specializes in analyzing and managing unstructured enterprise data. IBM is going to integrate StoredIQ’s software into their big data strategy with a focus on governance, secure data disposal, and storage cost reductions. StoredIQ will be integrated into IBM’s Information Lifecycle Governance suite.
