In December, WinBuyer announced a strategic partnership with Overstock.com, one of the world’s largest online retailers. Overstock successfully implemented WinBuyer’s Onsite Comparative Pricing solution in numerous product categories, including electronics and books and media.

WinBuyer’s technology allows online retailers to display competitors’ prices for a specific item on that item page. When shoppers click on a product page, they see a box with other retailers’ pricing for the same product.


Clicking the links in the comparative pricing box takes shoppers to the product pages at the other stores. By utilizing the WinBuyer solution, online retailers can present their customers with a better shopping experience, while increasing transparency and customer confidence.
“Consumers come to Overstock seeking the best deals. Now we can give them additional confidence in their purchasing decisions by offering them a confident shopping experience,” says Patrick Byrne, chairman and CEO. “The agreement with WinBuyer will deliver added value to Overstock's consumers."
In addition, WinBuyer recently announced two significant appointments to its Board of Directors. Avichay Nissenbaum, co-founder of Yedda, Inc. and Vice President at AOL, has been appointed Chairman of the Board and James Flach of Accel Partners and former Walmart.com CEO has joined as a Board member.

In December, ActionBase announced the availability of ActionBase for Microsoft SharePoint. ActionBase for SharePoint extends SharePoint functionality to support unstructured, human processes and to act as a system of record for all process-related items. It tracks and links group collaborative process-related activities and documents within the SharePoint group site and provides management and status reports on organizations’ unstructured, human processes.

“Extending SharePoint’s content and workflow with human process management capabilities opens up tremendous opportunities for companies to manage their group collaboration around ad-hoc, unstructured human processes improve process efficiency and performance with lower cost and increased customer satisfaction,” said Eyal Maor, CEO of ActionBase “Organizations will no longer need to choose between the flexibility of e-mail for reviewing the follow-up around team project and process activity, and the inflexibility of structured prebuilt processes. With ActionBase for SharePoint, teams can continue to use their familiar e-mail as their primary execution environment for unstructured processes, while collaboratively working on all group-related activities and processes within their SharePoint sites.”

Viewfinity completed a $9 million B round of financing. The funding round was led by Giza, alongside existing investors JK&B Capital and with participation of new investors Longworth Venture Partners.

As part of the new financing round, Longworth’s Nilanjana Bhowmik will join Viewfinity’s Board of Directors. In addition, Viewfinity has recruited Greg Butterfield to join the Board.

Butterfield is a well-known and respected expert on systems management and the former CEO of Altiris. Butterfield brings to the Viewfinity board many years of experience in business expansion and mergers and acquisitions.
In addition, Viewfinity has recruited key business and technology figures to serve on its Advisory Board. These include Dwain Kinghorn, former CTO of Altiris, VP with Symanteca and Founder & CEO of Computing Edge; Stuart Schaefer, former CTO and Founder of Softricity and Partner Architect at Microsoft; and Srinivasan Venkataraman, former CEO of Appstream and VP R&D for ZoneLab.

Altair Semiconductor announced a number of new strategic partnerships that will help expand its recently announced FourGee LTE chipset. In December, Altair announced cooperation with SkyCross, a global antenna designer and manufacturer, to integrate integrated SkyCross’s iMAT MIMO antenna in the FourGee LTE USB ExpressCard UE (User Equipment).

The two companies initially began their cooperation with a focus on mobile WiMAX technology utilizing Altair’s FourGee-2150/6150 chipset and have been closely working on field testing and optimizations for more than a year.

“SkyCross is pleased to work with Altair to set the bar for high performance in small LTE devices using our iMAT MIMO antennas,” said Dennis McKenna, CEO of SkyCross. “Together, we have developed a winning reference design that device manufacturers and network operators can confidently leverage to offer end users a sleek device design with an impressive LTE experience.”

In January, Altair announced a partnership with ANADIGICS, Inc. to integrate ANADIGICS’s power amplifiers (PAs) into FourGee LTE USB UE. ANADIGICS provides industry-leading radio frequency integrated circuit (RFICs) for the growing broadband and wireless communications markets.


“ANADIGICS is proud to play a role in the development of 4G solutions such as LTE. By working with leaders like Altair, not just to enable but to drive 4G and LTE adoption, we make it possible for operators to migrate their networks to new technologies that support the next generation of wireless applications,” commented Greg White, senior vice president of RF Products at ANADIGICS, Inc. “Our collaboration with Altair emphasizes the importance of having innovative RF products that provide our partners and customers with industry leading solutions for advanced 3G and 4G applications.

Altair believes LTE is the natural evolution to existing, widespread 3G networks around the world. It is gaining strong momentum worldwide, with 42 LTE network operators in 21 countries already announcing a commitment to the 4G technology.

Odysii continues its vertical expansion with the launch of its Teller solution for retail banks. The Teller solution uses individual, customer-facing screens at the Teller station to display highly attractive visuals of deals and promotions which implement targeted suggestive selling. Odysii’s solution allows retail banks to increase sales, enhance client relationships and improve customer education regarding bank products and services.

Clients are classified according to business rules defined by the bank. As clients approach the Teller station, Odysii analyzes the bank's strategy and the client's profile to find the perfect promotion or message for that specific client. For example should the client be a university student with good credit, Odysii might promote student loans or a special student bank account. Messages can also be educational and inform clients about new financial services and products which are relevant to their customer profile.

IMScouting has recently launched its revamped and redesigned consumer-facing Web site. The new site opens up many features of the IMScouting database on global football players for the benefit of hundreds of millions of football (soccer) fans around the world. The new site features a wealth of statistics and information on over 50,000 football players as well as statistical reports on teams from more than 50 countries.

In addition, the new IMScouting.com site provides exciting match reports and video highlights, as well as original news articles on global football.

The new site has already proven to be extremely popular with Internet users and has been recognized as one of the world’s leading news sources on football transfer news by the BBC and other news outlets. In addition, IMScouting was chosen as the Best Statistics Site by Soccerlens, a leading destination site for football fans.

Continuity Software’s RecoverGuard version 4.0 has won the Silver Award in both TechTarget's Storage magazine’s and SearchStorage.com’s 2009 Products of the Year awards, in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. The awards reflect the industry’s growing recognition of the value of Continuity’s offering

“Getting a disaster recovery plan right requires testing, which can be an expensive, time-consuming and disruptive process. Some companies roll the dice and skimp on testing, but others have found that DR testing tools, like Continuity Software’s RecoverGuard, can provide a measure of assurance to their DR plans,” TechTarget’s storage editors wrote. “RecoverGuard provides a sanity check for a DR plan. With that information in hand, the odds of crafting an effective disaster recovery plan vastly improve, or as one judge put it: ‘What better way to do DR is there?’”

In December, Flash Networks was named as a winner in the eighth annual Mobile Star Awards™ program, hosted by mobile technology news portal MobileVillage.com. Flash Networks’ Harmony Mobile Internet Services Gateway won the Rising Star Award in the Operator Software: Application or Service Delivery category.

Mobile Village is an online news site covering the mobile world. Winners were chosen by subscribers of MobileVillage's influential “Go Mobile” information service.

“Because 'Go Mobile' readers are the industry's most savvy mobile business users, Mobile Star Awards winners can claim they are the users’ choice,” says Jon Covington, MobileVillage founder and president. “Winners are chosen by real users based on real results, not hype. Brand new mobile services competed on equal footing with well-established solutions, and both nominees and winners are respected in the mobile industry as the new leaders to watch.”

Flash sees the award as validation of the strength of the Harmony Mobile Internet Services
Gateway as a platform which enables operators to enhance user quality of experience, reduce operational expenses, and manage and monetize access to the open Internet.

Most recently, leading Russian CDMA operator SkyLink expanded its deployment of Flash Networks’ solutions with an upgraded version of Traffic Management and the addition of the Harmony Web & Optimization solution, both part of the Harmony Mobile Internet Services Gateway. SkyLink leads Russia’s 3G services market, offering high-speed mobile Internet access and voice communication to nearly 1.2 million subscribers.

In January, CircuLite announced that it had extended its Series C round to $32.5M.

The additional funding will support the completion of enrollment in a European trial now ongoing in patients with New York Heart Association Class IIIb/early Class IV heart failure.

CircuLite's Synergy Pocket Micro pump is a partial circulatory-support device that increases blood flow and relieves some of the burden from a diseased heart, which may help it to recover. The device, implanted in a minimally invasive procedure, provides up to three liters per minute of blood flow.

The company aims to fill a void in the treatment of heart failure. Patients who are not responding well to medications and rhythm-management therapy, but are not yet candidates for a heart transplant, could benefit from CircuLite's implant.

The company expects to complete enrollment of its European trial and to file for a CE Mark this year. The financing will enable it to begin marketing the device in Europe in 2011. In addition, the company intends to launch a 15-patient pilot study in the U.S. this year and to complete it in 2011. A pivotal U.S. clinical trial is expected to begin in 2012.

The company has also secured grant financing from the National Institutes of Health to support development of a pediatric circulatory-support device based on the Synergy Micro-pump platform.

Giza has maintained close ties to Taiwan for nearly a decade. In 2009, this was reflected in three investments made as part of Giza’s Taiwanese mirror fund:

• Danen Technology - A manufacturer of solar-grade polycrystalline silicon wafers for the solar energy industry
• AOI – A designer and developer of advanced optical semiconductor devices, packaged optical components, optical subsystems, laser transmitters, and fiber optic transceivers
• Aleees – A manufacturer of Li-ion (LFP-NCO) cathode powder and battery packaging technology for the emerging electric vehicle market.


In January, Rafael Gamzou, the head of the Israeli Cultural and Economic Interest Office in Taiwan, visited the offices of Danen Technology in Guanyin to see the site of the company’s second plant. Danen, w has begun construction on its second site which it hopes to have running at full capacity by Q4 2010. The construction of the new site reflects the strong demand for silicon wafers and Danen’s growing share of the market.

Gamzou was joined by Ophir Gore, the Director of Israel’s Economic and Trade Office in Taiwan, and Yishai Klein, Giza’s representative in Asia.