April 2010 Archives

The UK saw a reasonably healthy growth in investment in technology startups last quarter, except for the semiconductor sector.

Amplifier chip startup Audium Semiconductor has closed and its assets have been bought by flat panel speaker maker NXT.

NXT said it has been monitoring Audium's ultra-low power technology for some time and plans to use it for its Balanced Mode Radiator technology ("BMR").

London-based embedded software house Creativity Software has been backed by investment house MMC Ventures to build worldwide sales of its location based services (LBS)  network infrastructure, middleware and end user applications.

Creativity is one of only a few companies that provide a 'one stop shop' suite of software so that mobile network operators can deploy revenue generating location-aware services.

Yorkshire startup Akya has launched the second generation of its dynamically reconfigurable logic (DRL) IP.

ART2.1 can now run up to twice as fast as its predecessor and will work significantly better with code generated by high-level-language compilers. It also expects to announce its first customer soon.

DRL technology has huge potential advantages over other programmable technologies in terms of power, speed and size, in equipment from portable media players to telecommunications backbones. It makes the design and implementation of reconfigurable chips simpler by separating dataflow circuitry from control logic, and by providing a large, ready-made library of IP building blocks for designers to work with.

Bristol startup Xintronix has raised private finance and appointed a new chairman as it ramps up for samples of its high speed transceiver technology later this year.

(Nick Weiner is pictured, right, with chairman John McPate, left).

The company is developing transceiver technology that will cover a wide range of standards, from SuperSpeed USB3 and high speed SATA links to 100Gbit Ethernet and Intel's LightPeak high speed protocol.

It has raised £100,000 from the SouthWest regional Development Agency for research and already has a customer for the IP, says Nick Weiner, founder and CEO. Weiner is a founder of analogue chip maker Phyworks and was CTO at Microcosm Communications.

Business angel Brian Dorricott of Meteorical has put together a list of the seven classic ways for entrepreneurs to lose the support of investors.

Having spent years speaking to entrepreneurs who are looking for investment, he has see these key ways that entrepreneurs lose his interest and with it, his investment, contacts and expertise. And they don't get a second chance!

So, don't:

Two PhD researchers from the mobile robotics lab at the University of Oxford have sold their startup to Google, the first acquisition by the company in the UK.

Plink was set up two years ago by Mark Cummins and James Philbin who developed algorithms for visual search.

The first product, PlinkArt, was launched four months ago for smartphones, and allows users to identify works of art and click through to buy the picture as a poster.