SigEx Ventures : Investors are becoming increasingly interested in green technologyby Corina Ciubotaru

As climate change becomes a reality we are all responsible for, and governments start raising awareness, venture capital investors seem to be increasingly attracted to clean tech. In 2006, $2.9 billion were invested in this field in the US, compared to $1.6 billion in 2005, and a big part of this money went into energy-related ventures. This figure increased by nearly 60% in the first quarter of 2007 making the clean tech venture market the third most significant after biotechnology and software. GE was a big investor in clean tech in recent times; in the beginning of the year, they invested in a company that researches batteries for hybrid vehicles, and the American giant probably won’t stop here, aiming to invest $4 billion in renewable energy by 2010. Other companies have also announced they want to join the race: Citigroup is willing to invest $50 billion in the next ten years in companies that address climate change issues, while Bank of America intends to invest $20 billion in the same area. In Europe, the level of investment is significantly lower and it’s decreased in 2006 compared to the previous year. What should concern European leaders even more is that not only are they significantly behind the US when it comes to investments, but that the Americans have invested more in European ventures than the actual people benefiting from them. Part of this problem is due to insufficient state involvement in the issue, but some potential investors consider that there aren’t enough opportunities for them in Europe.

related story: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070606-clean-tech-investments-pull-in-10-percent-of-us-venture-capital.html

by Corina Ciubotaru for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

SigEx Ventures's matrix of properties are quickly becoming leaders in digital telebroadcasting, free content delivery allowing people to easily talk, view, upload and share through free online TV broadcasting, free unlimited global calls, video blogs and SMS. SigEx Ventures invests in projects deploying "free" to add-on royalty revenue models

SigEx Ventures : Private equity companies going publicby Ioana Madalina Tantareanu

As a result of the tech-bubble bear market, most asset classes outside of U.S. large cap stocks, U.S. government securities, and municipal debt have been deemed "non-traditional" or "alternative" in some way.One of the biggest beneficiaries of this trend was private equity and the investors have flooded firms such as Blackstone and KKR with cash.Opportunities in the marketplace are researched by private equity. They are different from the standard stock analysis,which tends to focus on relatively arbitrary quarterly earnings per share estimates, because they analyze companies to determine whether the lines of business are worth more together or apart and they try to find unexploited opportunities. Richard Gere's character in "Pretty woman movie" would be the personification of today's "private equity." There are many options in having and managing a company. Sometimes it`s the best thing to do to tear the company apart and sell it, but sometimes you may leave it whole and shake up the business model.Going public doesn't necessarily take away these company`a flexibility.Warren Buffet's company Berkshire Hathaway has as it`s core business insurances.Geico and General Re are some of the primary lines of business.This hasn`t stopped Berkshire Hathaway from investing in, or acquiring, a host of other companies, like companies from high-tech electronics to making candy. Investors buy shares of the holding company, not the private equity subsidiary, refering to taking the private out of private equity.These will be publicly traded companies who engage in private equity portfolio management as their primary line of business, in order to cash in on the recent boom and successes and to provide liquidity for the firm's shareholders.

by Ioana Madalina Tantareanu for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

SigEx Ventures's matrix of properties are quickly becoming leaders in digital telebroadcasting, free content delivery allowing people to easily talk, view, upload and share through free online TV broadcasting, free unlimited global calls, video blogs and SMS. SigEx Ventures invests in projects deploying "free" to add-on royalty revenue models

SigEx Ventures : Private equity picking up steamby Delia Cruceru

Although market commentators said that New Zealand’s global buyout is going down, in here the private equity activity is blooming. This year the many deals regarding private equity firms like Yellow Pages and MediaWorks have been transacted. Corporate raider Carl Icahn said “the global boom has reached its peaked” and Blackstone Group, Kravis, Kohlberg, Roberts (KKR) and Carlyle Group capable of paying high prices are waiting for better offers and deals. Paul Chrystal, head of private equity from Goldman Sachs JBWere said that in New Zealand assets are becoming very expensive: “not all people paying high prices are overpaying, but if they are, there's always more risk that they will have a difficult time later. I don't think there's any serious investors in the private equity market who haven't felt the pressure of prices, are worried by it, and are probably more cautious." AMP Capital Investor’s boss says "base interest rates and risk spreads are rising. While we'd seen private equity interest, we hadn't seen transactions on the smaller part of the market. That's clearly changed with Tourism Holdings and MediaWorks.” Chief economist and head of investment strategy of AMP Capital Investors says the boom in the private equity takeover activity will get bigger and will have positive effects.

related story: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/3/story.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10451724

by Delia Cruceru for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

SigEx Ventures's matrix of properties are quickly becoming leaders in digital telebroadcasting, free content delivery allowing people to easily talk, view, upload and share through free online TV broadcasting, free unlimited global calls, video blogs and SMS. SigEx Ventures invests in projects deploying "free" to add-on royalty revenue models

SigEx Ventures : Russia makes its first steps in nanotechnologyby Corina Ciubotaru

In recent times, Russia has apparently set a goal for itself to become once again a leader the scientific world. The IT industry has grown rapidly to around $1.5 billion in 2006 and it’s reached 1.5% of GDP, but it still has a long way to go before it can compare itself to IT leaders like the US, India or Ireland. And since this business has developed mainly by itself, it is now time for Russia as a state to set its sights on other areas of science it can develop. After being the first nation to send a man into space, today’s Russians want to return to greatness by heavily investing in nanotechnology research labs. Vladimir Putin intends to set up a state corporation worth $5 billion to implement state policy in the field. It will be under the umbrella of First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, who oversees industrial development projects in Russia and is likely to become the next president of the country. Putin acknowledged nanotechnology as a priority industry in April, in his yearly address to the nation. Though Russians are aware of the importance of foreign investment in developing sectors, the actual investors don’t seem all that interested. Suspicions of political favors appear in each of these attempts to develop Russian industry, and sometimes for good reason. With a good educational system and highly trained scientists, the country stands a fighting chance in the nanotech war, but it will all come down to how accurately the billions will reach their intended destinations.

by Corina Ciubotaru for SigEx Ventures (http://sigexventures.com)

SigEx Ventures's matrix of properties are quickly becoming leaders in digital telebroadcasting, free content delivery allowing people to easily talk, view, upload and share through free online TV broadcasting, free unlimited global calls, video blogs and SMS. SigEx Ventures invests in projects deploying "free" to add-on royalty revenue models

What Is The Foundry?

The Foundry is an advanced training, research and development organization based in Pau, France. A new European headquarters in Paris and an advanced training center in Pau, France have recently been established to develop retraining programs, promote technology research and launch new ventures as part of a major job creation initiative that the Foundry is undertaking on behalf of its client, SigEx, Inc., pioneer of the new Enhanced Communications industry. SigEx has mandated the Foundry to oversee an initiative to re-train and re-deploy three thousand communications professionals over the next three years to participate in this emerging industry. The new Enhanced Communications industry will require a minimum critical mass of newly trained engineers to deliver and install enhanced telecommunications products and services on a global basis.

This job creation initiative is driven in part by current circumstances in the telecommunications industry and opportunities to improve upon available services. After exceptional growth for several years, the telecom industry is facing a major downturn amid drops in equipment purchase, massive layoffs, dried-up venture capital investments and the failure of the incubator model. As a consequence, the industry needs to reinvent itself to create the high-value services and products of the Enhanced Communications industry.

The Foundry’s Mission

The Foundry's objectives are to re-train engineers and business people to launch sustainable project companies for the Enhanced Communications industry; promote research and provide a global platform for our strategic customers to deliver valued services and applications; and build the Enhanced Communications industry. SigEx, Inc., a technology holding company based in Sarasota, Florida, and SigEx Ventures, Inc., a private investment fund, are driving the Enhanced Communications initiative. SigEx SuperPBX and SigEx NanoData have mandated the Foundry to train and select the best development, business and strategic communications teams to build their broadband service delivery and terabyte data warehousing platforms.

The Foundry’s development programs provide fully-funded viable structures for business R&D, to address alpha-beta development projects for strategic customers that include global telecommunications carriers, network equipment manufacturers, information technology companies, and digital content providers. The projects developed by the Foundry are all pre-funded by the SigEx Ventures investment fund and are sustainable for a period of 12 to 18 months. The most successful of these may become sustainable practices. The first Enhanced Communications project companies have emerged since the Foundry's opening in early 2003.

The Foundry has established a global European training and development center in Pau, France, which is accepting student-candidates for pre-funded project-practices. The mission of the center in Pau will be to promote technology research, prepare engineers and business professionals for positions in the Enhanced Communications industry, and launch project-practices into emerging US, European and Chinese markets. The facility will also offer educational programs to SigEx clients on a global basis through distance learning. The Foundry will be accepting research grant applications and Ph.D. candidates in telecommunications, applied mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, economics and business, and marketing communications practices.

Description of the Foundry

The Foundry projects for SigEx will support numerous technology leaders including: SAP, Vivendi, SONY, AOL Time Warner, eBay, Cisco, IBM, Sun, Apple, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel and international carriers. The mandate to build the new communications industry and support existing telecommunications infrastructures will be deployed with Fortune 1000 strategic customers.

What is Enhanced Communications?

The Practice: The Foundry is much more than a think tank where great practices and ideas get nurtured. The Foundry is a model of real economic life that tests the ideas, the teams, the technology, the revenue models and the culture against actual business scenarios to see whether they have the right to succeed in the outside world. The validation includes direct practicing with strategic customers, publications and patents as well as financial modeling and analysis. A short intense process creates the right competitive environment to breed excellence.

The Project Leaders: The training also includes new advanced business practices and technology methodologies such as extreme programming or user profiling and best of practices like Real Options, Fifth Discipline and Strategic Marketing. In addition, Enhanced Communications training is provided at all layers of technologies from chips to applications. Thus, the Foundry’s re-training and job creation delivers excellence and positions the new Enhanced Communications industry on a successful path lead exclusively by our elite project leaders.

Enhanced Communications is a new approach to telecommunications that can provide secure access to data at any time, anywhere and on any communications device as a result of new system architecture that builds upon the existing telecom infrastructure. The scalable Enhanced Communications approach can bridge IP and non-IP networks using an open-pipe, multi-protocol, peer-to-peer architecture that will provide the foundation for the next major paradigm shift in the telecom and datacom industries.

After massive investments in more fiber optics and capacity, the telecommunications industry is realizing that the problem is not about the bandwidth, it’s about traffic. The underlying problems in the telecom industry today result in part from under-utilization of network resources and the inability to bridge incompatible networks to deliver data when and where customers want it. Network utilization, and with it communication industry revenue, could be increased significantly by perfecting the ability to deliver high-flow interactive services such as video on demand and real-time access to massive corporate data. These are long promised services that the current industry has failed to deliver. This inability today is not due to limited bandwidth, as is often thought, but to system architecture.

Technologies to enable the new Enhanced Communications industry include optimization of bandwidth usage (today at less then 1 percent in average), bridging of incompatible networks, advanced rights management, multi-channel wireless, new security models, and embedded and nano technology, among others.

Components of the Foundry

Candidates enter the Foundry on a voluntary basis and are awarded full scholarships by SigEx Ventures for the training they receive. Although the Foundry values candidates with certain profiles, candidates are assigned to two unique groups when entering the Foundry.

Project leaders step up to taking the lead and will need to prove and show their ability to lead, recruit and attract customers and capital on a weekly build basis. Not all candidates are suited for this extreme leadership responsibility and the challenges and rewards that it leads to. Strategic Customers and Foundry staff assist, promote and select only the best of practice project leaders.

Practitioners are challenged by the needs of Strategic Customers to develop their practice plans to deliver only the most advanced and best of practices tempered by "practical" deliverables that can lead to sustainable billable careers. Successful practitioners who complete the Foundry program will be hired with their project practices.

The SigEx Ventures investment fund provides pre-funding for all projects presented to the Foundry. Dedicated staff will be available in the Foundry to assist and support the constant grant, practice and new business development process around Enhanced Communications project practices.

Professional services is a consistent activity of the Foundry to address immediate Strategic Customer and project practices development needs. Candidates will be recruited from within the Foundry for these groups.

Research is an essential part of making progress on Enhanced Communications. Patents and publications are generated on a regular basis and collaboration with existing scientific labs as well as Ph.D. programs is promoted.

Words from the Founder, Chris Cantell - What is it really like ?

Foundry, which is known to be an uncommonly collaborative and supportive, practice leadership school is a seriously competitive environment and you have to be ready for anything. Thus, you should eliminate any false notions in your head of a gentle work-training, graduate engineering school, or M.B.A. type experience -- which is as it should be, for in real practice world, Darwinism rules. You should understand and appreciate the unique opportunity that you have at The Foundry to be challenged on many fronts (and on many practice fields), including working with people from various backgrounds and cultures.

In that regard, you should connect with a diverse group of student-candidates from around the world whose professional experiences range from working in Boston on the automation of General Electric's Factory-of-the-Future, conducting telecommunications and advanced Linux/PHP engineering for premier U.S. real-estate private equity investors to consulting on technology systems in the insurance industry. Fortunately, many of these new friends you will meet will temper the competitiveness of The Foundry. Just as you prepare for an exam on the economics of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations", a new friend of yours who knows you are struggling to master these concepts will encourage you to work on your strategic customers - to secure those practice hours! All of these classmates will become rays of goodwill in a survival-of-the-fittest environment -- even when it isn't in their best interest to help you, since candidates are selected on a sustainability curve.

Christopher M. Cantell
Founder and CEO
The Foundry