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Data Breaches: First half of 2015 saw venture firms invest $1.2 billion in cybersecurity startups

July 17, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Data Breaches Boost Funding for Cybersecurity Startups Extract: In the 2015 first half, venture firms invested $1.2 billion in cybersecurity startups, according to researcher CB Insights. That is down slightly from $1.4 billion a year earlier but up sharply from $771 million in 2013’s first half. The shift is particularly notable at Andreessen Horowitz, which used to view security companies as necessary for Internet safety but less lucrative than other technology niches. One reason is that cybersecurity startups were often acquired prior to an initial public offering, says Scott Weiss,…

Twitter Shares Rise After Faked Bloomberg Report

July 15, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Takeover rumors about Twitter surface with seeming regularity every couple of months. But one on Tuesday showed a new level of sophistication in an effort to pump up the company’s stock. Shares of Twitter, the social network, briefly spiked after an article that appeared to come from the Bloomberg News website contended that the company had received a takeover offer worth $31 billion. Analysts and Twitter users quickly started poking holes in the online piece and deemed it a fake. (No such report ran on the Bloomberg terminal, where its…

Women Entrepreneurs Are Key to Accelerating Growth

July 14, 2015May 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Latest Kauffman Policy Digest explores barriers to women entrepreneurs and offers five policy recommendations to address the gender gap (KANSAS CITY, Mo.) July 20, 2015 – While the number of women entering the workforce has significantly increased over several decades, they are still half as likely as men to start a business. According to the most recent Entrepreneurship Policy Digest released today by the Kauffman Foundation, the lack of women entrepreneurs is not just a gender issue, it’s an economic issue. The Policy Digest highlights the skillsets of women that…

Ethiopian Entrepreneur Sophia Bekele spoke on #GES Panel in San Francisco

July 13, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

DotConnectAfrica speaks at #GES-Global Entrepreneurship Summit #AfricanEntrepreneurs #SiliconValley

Sophia Bekele, Founder/ CEO DotConnectAfrica, Yes2dotAfrica was invited to speak on Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) forum, hosted by the White House and USAID on “African Entrepreneurs & Silicon Valley Forum: Bridging Gaps and Making Connections” The forum held at the Silicon Valley Bank’s WeWork Golden Gate location, San Francisco, California, and hosted over 100 delegates comprised of VCs, impact investors, African diaspora entrepreneurs, tech leaders, policymakers and U.S. government members from Washington DC and San Francisco, focused on spurring and supporting innovation ecosystems and investment in Africa. Various high-level panel…

Microsoft admits Nokia acquisition was a bad deal

July 9, 2015February 17, 2016 Staff Writer

Barely a year after Microsoft paid $9.5 billion for Nokia’s handset unit, the company says it has lost $7.6 billion of that value. That’s equal to about 95 percent of what Microsoft paid for the assets, excluding the cash that came with them. Along with a hefty writedown, Microsoft plans to cut as many as 7,800 jobs, many of them related to the purchase of the Finnish mobile phone maker. Reports Bloomberg “I am committed to our first-party devices including phones,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s current CEO, wrote in an email to employees about the moves.…

Drill-Down Report Finds Global Financial Services Businesses 300% More Susceptible To Cybercrime

June 24, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Global financial services businesses encounter security incidents 300% more frequently than other industries, according to a report released on Tuesday by Raytheon | Websense, a company that helps protect organizations from cyber attacks and data theft. The 2015 Financial Services Drill-Down Report found “a high degree of specialization among criminals attacking financial services, a huge investment in the lure attack phase and the specific and anomalous Cybercrime attacks pointed at global targets dealing in finance.” “For years, this industry has been under attack by highly specialized groups of criminals,” said…

AT&T hit with a $100 million fine after slowing down, “throttling” its ‘unlimited’ data

June 18, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Washington Post reports that the Federal Communications Commission slapped AT&T with a $100 million fine Wednesday, accusing the country’s second-largest cellular carrier of improperly slowing down, throttling Internet speeds for customers who had signed up for “unlimited” data plans. The FCC found that when customers used up a certain amount of data watching movies or browsing the Web, AT&T “throttled” their Internet speeds so that they were much slower than normal. Millions of AT&T customers were affected by the practice, according to the FCC. The fine, which AT&T says it will fight, is the largest ever levied…

Tech IPOs indicate slowest pace since the banking crisis

June 12, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

With the end of the first half of the year in sight, it looks like Fitbit may be the last tech IPO of what so far has been the slowest year for new public offerings in the sector since 2009. That was the middle of the banking crisis and just after Sequoia Capital made its “RIP:Good Times” presentation to its portfolio CEOs in 2008. There have only been two tech companies from the Bay Area to go public so far this year — Box and Apigee — and San Francisco-based…

Microsoft opens a ‘No Back Door’ Transparency Center to allow European governments a look at its source codes

June 8, 2015February 16, 2016 Staff Writer

Microsoft has opened a Transparency Center in the Belgian capital, offering European governments a look at its source code. The center, opened in Brussels last week, will “enable governments to review and assess the source code of Microsoft products and to access important security information in a secure environment,” Microsoft said. The center is the second such facility the company has built – the first was opened in Redmond last year – and will be open to governments that have signed up to the company’s Government Security Program, which lets…