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Months after Hurricane Sandy left New York scrambling for power, the city is unveiling 25 solar powered charging stations in parks and public spaces throughout the five boroughs, starting today. The pilot project between AT&T and the city of New York is officially called AT&T Street Charge. (DUMBO firm Pensa handled design, and Goal Zero provided the solar technology, AT&T handled the cash.) The stations will move to new locations at the beginning of July, rotating throughout the city until September. After that, we’ll see what becomes of them. Most are a little out of the way for those who don’t go to Fort Greene Park, the Brooklyn Bridge Park, or Riverside Park on the reg, but solar powered, public, and free is a pretty great thing. Definitely better than those public charging stations that also charge you money. Since the Union Square location won’t open until tomorrow, I headed up to Riverside Park to see what the good people of New York thought of it. If I was hoping for a rare Upper West Side mob scene — and I was — I was sorely disappointed. To be fair, it was an overcast Tuesday at 2:30pm. On a sunny Saturday afternoon when the adjacent Pier 1 Cafe is busier, I’m sure the station will be getting more love. Joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, and people who were otherwise not at work stopped by the charging station regularly and gave the attendant an “I’m just taking a look” or “I just wanted to see what it was” before moving on. It is a 12.5′ metal pole with six phone chargers at hip height and three arms at the top that resemble whimsical helicopter blades, so that is a valid reaction. The most enthusiasm came from a group of 16-year-olds, who rushed the pole going, “Ooohhh, coool.” When I asked them if they’d feel safe leaving their phones there, all five of them gave an immediate and decisive no. “Are you guys from New York?” “Yes.” So there you go. But two of the boys did stick around for a few minutes to plug in their phones. “It’s okay if you’re standing right next to it.” “I’d pull up a chair.” Another man checking out the pole said that while he wouldn’t feel comfortable stepping away from his phone — “I hardly like to leave the house with it” — he could see imagine huge lines in the event of another blackout. The attendant, who works for a company hired by AT&T for the launch, estimated that about 20 or 25 people had charged their phones on the pole in the four hours since she arrived at 11am. In the hour that I was there, only three did, teenage boys included. A 24-year-old cyclist named Shana reclined in a nearby cafe chairs waiting for her iPod to charge. Asked if she felt comfortable sitting 15 feet away from it, she replied, “Well, it’s about 6 years old, so…” Most people seemed to think it was a great idea, especially in light of Sandy, but no New Yorker is going to leave their stuff lying around. I think a nearby Park Enforcement official put it best: “Never leave anything unattended.” And so the charging stations stood in the June drizzle waiting for the public to stand right next to them. [Image: AT&T]

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now FindTheCompany launched out of beta today to give you the lowdown on businesses. The business research site provides information on more than 30 million US companies. Consumers, business owners, investors, analysts, sales people etc… can use the engine to learn more about a company before doing businesses with them or refine searches with filters for location, industry, employee count, annual sales etc… The engine aggregates information from various sources. Financials for public companies come from Xignite, information on government contracts from the US government, business histories, and product and service listings from sister site FindTheBest. All this data is collected into profiles and then turned into visualizations based on the data, so consumers are looking at more than just spreadsheets of statistics. “We’re putting the power of knowledge in the hands of consumers and small businesses – people who normally don’t have easy access to all the incredible information that’s available on US companies,” said FindTheBest founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor in an email. “Now it’s simple to make informed decisions about companies, products and services based on the facts.” O’Connor said that people now expect better,  more-tailored search portals for finding the information they need. He founded FindTheBest.com in 2009 after growing tired of all the sites claiming to tell you what was best, whether it was colleges, credit cards, or insurance, when often they were eating paid to promote certain products and services. FindTheBest is meant to provide an objective comparison tool for consumers, and FindTheCompany is the next extension of that idea. Competitors include Manta, MerchantCircle, Yellow Pages, and YellowBot. To a lesser extent, the company also competes with social networking sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook Pages and paid providers like LexisNexis, Factiva, and Bloomberg. O’Connor said FindTheCompany has better data and a platform, and is free while still providing the same caliber of information as paid providers. The site currently monetizes through display advertising and affiliate revenue, and will soon release a sponsorship product. Before founding FindTheBest, O’Connor founded DoubleClick which sold to Google for $3.1 billion and was an initial investor in ISS which sold to IBM for $1.4 billion. FindTheBest raised $11 million in March from Keliner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New World Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $17 million. It is based in Santa Barbara, California and has 90 employees. Photo Credit: Shutterstock Filed under: Big Data, Business .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae

From their work ethic to their idealism, people in Silicon Valley tend to do things a bit differently. Turns out those differences extend to the way many of Silicon Valley’s newly rich think about generational wealth. So suggests Jim Cody, a managing director of estate, trust and philanthropy advisory services at Harris myCFO, a wealth management firm that caters to ultra-high-net-worth clients, or people with $25 million in investable assets and a net worth of about $100 million. Though the firm has seven offices nationwide, including in Seattle, Chicago and New York City, Cody says there are disparities between the clients the firm sees in the Bay Area compared to elsewhere. In California, for example, high net worth individuals tend to be slightly younger, with 27% under age 40, compared to 24% nationally. (The data comes from BMO Private Bank, the parent company of Harris MyCFO.) Also, less than 1% of California’s ultra-rich individuals inherited their wealth, compared to 3% nationally. Perhaps most meaningfully, Cody says that in Silicon Valley, the super wealthy think there’s always another home run around the corner. We talked with Cody yesterday. Following is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. How do  venture capitalists differ in the ways they manage their wealth from your other customers? The VCs vary. Some are younger people who are just getting started and getting their first carried interest and who are more akin to entrepreneurs who are having their first wealth event. Then you have VCs who have been around 10, 15, 20 years and who’ve seen liquidity events and are, by necessity, more diversified, given that their wealth has come from different funds with different maturities. [The latter group] tends to be more savvy from a business point of view and taking holdings off the table. We see them distribute to themselves when they distribute shares to their [firm’s] investors, and often, they’ll use those shares – which are often very low basis shares – for charitable giving. Or they may have a standing order with us to sell the shares right away when the shares hit their account. Many entrepreneurs and former VCs have become angel investors. How much of their overall wealth is it safe to invest in startups? The percentage of overall wealth that someone can afford to put back on the table depends on their individual risk level and the magnitude of their wealth. Billionaires only “need” several hundred million dollars to live off of, so they can invest more. If someone’s wealth is between $10 million and $20 million, we wouldn’t counsel those folks to put a meaningful percentage of their wealth into high-risk investments. The person with $20 million might considering [reinvesting] $1 million or $2 million [into startups]. Our advice is: You’ve hit a grand slam. These types of events should be considered once-in-a-lifetime. Let’s make sure this money lasts throughout your lifetime to accommodate your needs and your family’s needs and, if possible, your philanthropic desires. Do you see differences among your clients nationwide? Across the U.S., we have clients who have what we’d call more mature and multi-generational wealth, where the clients aren’t necessarily the first-generation wealth creators, as they tend to be in the Bay Area. In the Midwest, and in the Chicago area, where it’s inherited wealth, the clients treat [the money] more like they are stewards and like it has purposes beyond their immediate needs, meaning for family members, future generations, and philanthropic organizations. Older wealth is more conservative and less risky. In the Bay Area, you meet these young entrepreneurs who are very bright and who, when we tell them to consider a wealth event as a one-time [happening], they tell us that one of their friends has [hit a home run] three times. So their experience tends to be clouded by what they see others doing. We also see people who’ve made it and lost it and get back on the horse

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now You’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Funding Daily? We think we can help you with that. We had another whopping 11 funding announcements today, but of all of them, the top two biggest deals went to health startups. We think health is one of the biggest topics of this year. So much so, that we held an entire conference around it. But you don’t need to believe us; the money speaks for itself! For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published. Health care tech startup COMS Interactive grabs $21M COMS Interactive, a startup that produces an SaaS products for the health care industry, has secured a new $21 million round of funding, the company announced today. COMS’ main product is Daylight IQ, a software suite that manages health and disease profiles for elderly residents at senior living facilities. The software suite helps track changes in a person’s condition and alerts attendance and doctors accordingly, which basically helps patients from going to the doctor multiple times before finding what’s actually wrong. Read the full story on VentureBeat. CareCloud raises $20M to vanquish ‘walking dead’ and ‘dinosaurs’ of health IT CareCloud has raised $20 million to break the healthcare system out of the Jurassic era. CareCloud offers cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) software. It provides tools for practice management, EHR, and medical billing that connect providers to each other and to patients, creating a complete digital healthcare ecosystem. Tenaya Capital led this round, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. It brings CareCloud’s total funding to $44 million. CareCloud is based in Miami. Read the full story on VentureBeat. FiftyThree raises $15M to unleash your creativity with Paper FiftyThree is going on fifteen. Fifteen million dollars, that is. FiftyThree is the company behind Paper, an iPad app that Apple named 2012 iPad App of the Year. Today FiftyThree closed a $15 million deal led by Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and Jack Dorsey. Read the full story on VentureBeat. Personetics raises $11.5M to improve bank customer service Personetics has raised $11.5 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners for its predictive analytics solutions for the banking industry. The technology aims to predict customer needs and provide quick resolutions so financial institutions can improve their customer experience and reduce their operational costs. This funding will be used to drive sales and scale operations. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures also participated in this round. The company has offices in New York, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv. ‘Big data’ startup SpaceCurve raises $10M SpaceCurve — a startup that lives to suss out massive amounts of location, social, sensor, and timeline data — has just raised $10 million. This round, led by Triage Ventures, is the company’s second institutional round of funding. Since it was founded, the startup has taken a total of $17.3 million, including a $3.5 million Series A last summer. The startup is trying to organize and make useful just about every kind of data imaginable. Read the full story on VentureBeat. Nok Nok Labs improving 2-factor authentication with $4M in debt financing Nok Nok Labs, a security startup focused on making two-factor authentication even stronger, raised a $4 million round of debt financing today from existing investors Onset Ventures and DCM. Nok Nok is working on its Unified Authentication Infrastructure product — a form of two factor authentication that companies can build off of. The technology takes advantage of existing features in the devices their employees already have. For example, if an employee is trying to access so

Company / App Name: FAQ Robo http://www.faqrobo.com What does it do? Providing accessible knowledge to the world in the form of FAQs Why do we need it? There is no one place for all the FAQs on the internet. We provide summarized answers to simple questions, this saves everybody’s time. Who is it for? For information evangelists. People who wants to see the world as a better place. What makes it stand out from the crowd? Our way of presenting the information: new, fresh and to the point. What’s next? Launch Pitch Video http://www.faqrobo.com

The Information Hub for Immigrants - Green Cards, H1B, F1 visa database.

This sponsored post is produced by Silicon Beach Fest. Los Angeles has long been associated with the iconic Hollywood sign that overlooks the expansive city, and a kitschy style that lights fire to fashion and glossy entertainment trends worldwide. But big plans are surfacing across the city near the blue water and popular beaches. It’s not just start-ups, established companies are vocalizing their support to building this community, as an earlier post from Cornerstone OnDemand CEO, Adam Miller illustrates in how to build a “killer tech company outside the valley.” The community is called Silicon Beach and it’s focused on integrating a new industry and perception into the city’s DNA: technology. The community is taking its biggest step yet to integrate technology into the city’s core with its third Silicon Beach Fest, which kicks off this Wednesday, June 19th. For four days, the brightest minds in tech, fashion, and entertainment are gathering in sunny Santa Monica for insightful panels, rousing parties, and cross-industry inspiration. What will you experience at Silicon Beach Fest? The event is split into a dozen tracks, encompassing a variety of panels, meet-ups, and showcases that represent the broad industry verticals within Los Angeles. Some of the most popular tracks from last year’s event include: Investor, Entrepreneur, Hollywood, Gaming, Digital Content, Advertising, Social Media, Software Development and Design, and Arts and Education. Keynotes include top Los Angeles venture capitalists such as Mark Suster; CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, Adam Miller; and Nely Galan, former president of Telemundo. Speakers include esteemed executives from: Warner Brothers, Disney, Fox, Rubicon Project, United Online, Virgin America Brand Marketing, Crosscut Ventures, Amplify.la, OMD, Machinima, Demand Media, CAA, GOOD, Upworthy and more. VentureBeat readers can join the fun by registering with the code VB30 code here and receiving 30% off of the normal registration. Come find out why The Genome Project rated Los Angeles as the second biggest tech market in the United States and why investors poured more than 3.2 billion into the bubbling Southern California startup ecosystem last year. Don’t miss your chance to become part of the discussion about the biggest innovations and disruptions taking place in entertainment, fashion, and tech. [Image credit: trekandshoot -Fotolia.com] Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com. Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Mobile, Small Biz

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now COMS Interactive, a startup that produces an SaaS products for the health care industry, has secured a new $21 million round of funding, the company announced today. COMS’ main product is Daylight IQ, a software suite that manages health and disease profiles for elderly residents at senior living facilities. (I would have said nursing homes but that seemed insensitive and politically incorrect.) The software suite helps track changes in a person’s condition and alerts attendance and doctors accordingly, which basically helps patients from going to the doctor multiple times before finding what’s actually wrong. The startup said it plans to use the fresh capital to expand the company, develop additional products in conjunction with Daylight IQ, and for redemption of COMS common stock holdings. The new round of funding was led by Summit Partners. Under terms of the deal, Summit Partners managing director Mark deLaar will also join COMS board of directors. Founded in 2010, the Cleveland, Ohio-based startup previously raised a $2.7 million round of funding and has a total of $23.7 million in funding to date from Summit Partners, Zapis Capital Group, Next Sparc LLC, and Portal Capital LLC. Health care image via Shutterstock Filed under: Deals, Health .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -ms-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: linear-gradient(to bottom,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#1f80e4', endColorstr='#1862ae',GradientType=0 ); }

(Reuters) – SunGard Data Systems Inc, the computer software maker that was taken private in 2005 for $11.4 billion, is exploring a sale of its data managing operations that could fetch up to $2 billion, several people familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. The business for sale, which offers data center space and technology infrastructure to clients looking to safeguard their data, has earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) of around $200 million, the people said. SunGard, owned by private equity groups Bain Capital LLC, Blackstone Group LP, Goldman Sachs Capital Partners LP, KKR & Co LP, Providence Equity Partners Inc, Silver Lake and TPG Capital LP, is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc on the possible sale, the people said. The people asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. SunGard officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment while representatives of the private equity owners either declined to comment or were not immediately available to comment. Goldman Sachs declined to comment. The assets for sale are referred to as “managed services” and are within what SunGard calls its “availability services” business, which has helped customers recover data following major disasters such as Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The exploration of the sale comes amid SunGard’s challenges in competing with rivals such as IBM Corp. Moody Investors Service Inc said in February that SunGard’s availability services business “has not executed effectively in a recovery/business continuity industry that is otherwise showing growth.” Availability services accounted for a third of SunGard’s $4.26 billion revenue and adjusted EBITDA of $1.25 billion in 2012. The company’s other main business, which it calls “financial systems” and which provides software and technology applications to financial services professionals, accounted for 62 percent of the revenue but just 28 percent of the EBITDA. Despite a torrent of private equity-backed initial public offerings that have capitalized on the strong stock market this year, SunGard has held back on seeking a flotation. Moody’s has argued that SunGard will have to show sustained organic revenue growth in its core financial systems business and stabilize the availability services business before it launches an IPO. The seven private equity firms carried out their first dividend recapitalization of the company last year, paying themselves a $720 million dividend by borrowing the money. Nevertheless, the company managed to cut its total debt to $6.7 billion as of the end of 2012, a decline of $1.2 billion from the end of 2011. It is not clear to what extent the buyout firms would use proceeds from the sale of the managed services business to deleverage SunGard versus paying themselves another dividend. At the end of 2006, SunGard had a ratio of total debt to adjusted EBITDA of 5.9 times. At the end of March, this ratio had improved to 4.8 times. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock The post SunGard Explores $2 Billion Data Unit Sale – Sources appeared first on peHUB.

Nok Nok Labs, a security startup focused on making two-factor authentication even stronger, raised a $4 million round of debt financing today from exist investors Onset Ventures and DCM. The company announced a $15 million first round of funding in February, though a spokesperson explained to VentureBeat that this funding actually closed in 2011. Two factor authentication is getting a lot of attention now that big companies such as Apple, Twitter, Evernote, and other are employing it. All of these companies have been the subject of hacking stories in the last year, and hope two-factor will be an extra bit of security for its users. As it stands, two-factor usually involves sending the user a code, which supplements the traditional username and password login combination. The code is sent either through an app, such as Google authenticator; a dongle, such as RSA’s SecureID; or through an SMS message. But even Nok Nok is saying that two-factor in its current state needs to be just the base-level for what this technology could be. “We think the market will come to the realization that much more will have to be done to address current authentication issues,” Nok Nok Labs senior director Jamie Cowper told VentureBeat in an earlier interview. “We expect to see the enthusiasm for SMS two-factor authentication to dim and the adoption of more innovative approaches in the future.” Nok Nok is working on its Unified Authentication Infrastructure product — a form of two factor authentication that companies can build off of. The technology takes advantage of existing features in the devices their employees already have. For example, if an employee is trying to access something on their smartphone, they may have to swipe a finger to prove they are really there. The infrastructure is just that — the scaffolding on which developers can come in and build their own forms of two-factor authentication. The debt funding comes in the form of convertible notes to existing investors. The spokesperson would not otherwise elaborate whether this financing would be put toward product or other areas within the company. Unified Authentication Infrastructure image via Nok Nok Labs Filed under: Deals, Security