Technology Investment Dot Info

This sale surprises me. E Ink is one of the most promising and successful private tech companies, with its technology key to the Kindle, the Sony e-reader and many other new consumer products, yet it’s selling itself to a key supplier at only a 50% premium to capital invested over a decade. That is not a win for the VC’s.

E Ink Corp. said it has agreed to be acquired by Prime View International, a Taiwanese company, for $215 million. Prime View has been E Ink’s partner in making “electronic ink” displays for Amazon.com Inc. and Sony Corp. The deal will help the combined company develop color versions of its displays and mass produce them by the end of 2010… Current models show shades of gray. E Ink’s displays are used in e-book readers because they look similar to regular paper and consume very little power. However, they take a relatively long time to switch between images, making navigation slow.

More hype on the Plastic Logic e-reader coming out next year from the UK. Big build-up for a vapor device.

Semi sales have moved up month-on-month, but still down 25% yoy. Lots of people are mistaking seasonality for “green shoots”. Autos use a lot of chips.

Global chip sales rose to $15.6 billion in April, up 6.4 percent from March… still down 25 percent from April sales of $20.9 billion a year ago… PC demand is better than expected as inventory is replenished… now expected to fall 6 percent [vs] expected decline of 12 percent… Cell phone sales also aren’t as bad as expected… Cell phones and PCs account for 60 percent of chip sales.

Not sure if this is material, but it is interesting. Does it say anything that Facebook needed to go as far as Russia to get a valuation of $10bn. Do you wonder, as I do, where the $200m came from in a country reportedly in a deeper financial crisis than the USA? Is it now the case that for everything there is a price; and for Microsoft a price 50% higher? Does anyone wonder where the other $400m has gone and whether a site to share photos and gossip really costs that much to build?

A Russian investment firm, Digital Sky Technologies, has invested $200 million in the social networking company Facebook in return for a 1.96 percent stake… Digital Sky Technologies also plans to buy at least $100 million of Facebook stock from current and former employees… Founded in 2005, Digital Sky has raised and invested more than $1 billion in over 30 companies… The investment values Facebook’s preferred stock at $10 billion, a $5 billion drop from October 2007 when Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake. With the latest round of financing, Facebook has raised about $600 million since it was founded in 2004… Facebook had 307 million visitors worldwide in April, almost triple the number a year ago, and 79 percent of them are outside the United States…

Bharti Airtel of India and MTN of South Africa will merge, creating a mobile phone company with 200m subscribers, lagging only China Mobile and Vodafone. Does it say anything that two of the three largest mobile companies are based in emerging markets?

Bharti, the largest mobile phone company in India, with 100 million subscribers, would acquire 49 percent of MTN, which has an equal number of customers in Africa and the Middle East. MTN, in turn, would acquire 36 percent of Bharti Airtel. The two companies would merge completely in the future…

Cringely debunks the ‘GPS is failing’ story.

If your GPS equipment was purchased in the last couple years it probably makes use of the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS)… For WAAS-enabled GPS receivers, then, it is possible to maintain acceptable accuracy with only ONE (not three) of the regular GPS satellites in view… The chances of the GPS system going down are very remote — FAR lower than the 20 percent suggested by the GAO.

The expanding portion of the handset market is smart phones, and the race is 3-way – RIMM, Apple and Nokia with generics running Google’s Android coming up the outside. MOT, PALM, SNE are falling away.

Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone sales grew from 5.3 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 10.8 percent in the first quarter of 2009. In terms of unit sales, Apple jumped from 1.7 million in the first quarter of 2008 to 3.9 million during the same period in 2009… Research In Motion saw its BlackBerry market share rise from 13.3 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2009. The company’s unit sales grew from 4.3 million to 7.2 million over the same period. Nokia saw its market share drop almost 4 percent, from 45.1 percent in first quarter of 2008 to 41.2 percent in 2009… Mobile-phone sales for the first quarter of 2009 totaled 269.1 million, a drop of 9.4 percent over the same period last year… Smartphone sales for the first quarter of 2009 were 36.4 million, representing a 12.7 percent increase over the first quarter of 2008.

On my wishlist: The SPOT device is a great solution for personal safety when travelling – transmitting your GPS position and a short text message from anywhere on earth via the low-earth orbit satellite system to emergency services or friends who simply want to track your progress.

A second generation of satellites, which are about to be launched by Globalstar atop trusty old Soyuz rockets from Baikonur in Kazakhstan, will whisk data around the planet at a far more respectable speed of 250 kilobits a second. By later next year, when Globalstar has all 24 of its new satellites in orbit, high-quality voice and 3G data transmission will be possible from anywhere on the planet, except for polar latitudes. Globalstar already sells a tempting little $170 [plus an annual subscription fee] device called SPOT, which can send your GPS location to friends and family, along with a preprogrammed message and a link to Google Maps that lets them track your progress.