John Tu Waxes Philosophical; Viking Debuts Its DDR Module
An Orange County-based company that sells home-automation products online is $6 million fatter thanks to help from a Los Angeles merchant bank.
Digital Coast Partners, which provides a variety of financial services for tech-related companies, helped Irvine-based Smarthome.com snag a $6 million equity investment and a two-year alliance with Homestore.com, an online real estate broker and seller of home-improvement products.
Digital Coast offers help in everything from mergers and acquisitions to private placements to business consulting. Jonathan Davidson heads the company’s e-commerce group and was credited with putting together the deal.
In an unrelated deal, the bank helped another Irvine startup, Customized Commerce, attract an unspecified amount of seed financing. Customized Commerce helps online retailers to customize goods such as toys and clothes.
For more on Digital Coast: www.digitalcoastpartners.com
Service With a Smile
Kingston Technologies Co. Inc. is getting out of the technology business,at least according to co-founder and president John Tu. In fact, he says, the Fountain Valley memory maker never was in the industry at all.
Tu, speaking to a crowd of about 150 at The Entrepreneurship Institute’s periodic “President’s Forum” last week, said technology companies should see their jobs as solutions and service providers, even if that “service” happens to be a hi-tech product.
The philosophy makes sense in light of the industry’s relentless tendency to make even the best innovations a commodity, and could shed light on Kingston’s plans for the coming months as it moves toward contract manufacturing and original equipment manufacturing customers.
A few other tidbits from Tu’s talk included his reasons for repurchasing Kingston from Softbank last year, which had acquired the company from him and partner David Sun several years before: “Kingston is a family, and you don’t walk away from your family.” And on how to evaluate the trustworthiness of a potential business partner without a face-to-face meeting: “It’s the tone of their voice, whether their voice sounds honest.”
The Entrepreneur Institute is a 14-year-old nonprofit group designed to bolster promising small and mid-size businesses. For more: www.tei.net.
Thanks for the Memory
And speaking of Orange County-area memory companies, Rancho Santa Margarita-based Viking Components is joining the industry debate over two new memory formats by releasing its first DDR (double data rate) SDRAM memory modules. DDR is being pushed as the insurgent rival to the Rambus-based memory touted last year by Intel Corp.
Though most manufacturers, including Viking, are pledging support for both technologies as a successor to the current SDRAM standard, many expect DDR to dominate because of its lower manufacturing costs and power consumption.
Shares in Rambus Inc., which licenses its namesake technology to other memory makers, have fallen more than 100 points to around $315 per share on mounting evidence that DDR will be the heir to SDRAM.
The new Viking modules come in sizes ranging from 128 megabytes to a gigabyte.
For more: www.viking.com
Well-Documented Plan
NowDocs.com, the Aliso Viejo creator of a two-hour document delivery system, has racked up a big-time endorsement from Staples.com, the online arm of the office-supply retailer.
Staples will use NowDocs for a co-branded document delivery service that will put the service in front of millions of Staples customers. Under the deal, Staples will offer NowDocs’ service at its retail stores and web site. Staples hopes to expand its small business offerings as it tries to modernize its service offerings.
NowDocs promises delivery of any color document is as little as two hours for $19.95. The company electronically transmits digital copies of the documents to one of its regional printing centers and delivers the final document by hand to the recipient.
For more: www.nowdocs.com
Money for Something
And don’t forget: this Friday, March 29, is the deadline to submit applications for presenting at VentureNet 2000, the annual venture capital conference put on by the Software Council of Southern California. The event allows promising growth-stage companies to present their businesses plans to some of the best-known VC investors in the country in hopes of wooing a few. For more: www.venturenet.org or (310) 328-0043
Bits
Costa Mesa-based Internet access provider Epoch Internet is using Newport Beach-based network management services provider SiteLite under a deal between the two companies Two other OC companies are teaming up: Accessguide.net, a Newport Beach web site featuring local information and services, has hired The Sistonia Corp., Orange, to re-design its web site Interplay Entertainment Corp., Irvine, has received approval from Sega for its Dreamcast version of the game MDK 2 game Broadband Digital Group, the Newport Beach company promising free digital subscriber line service in April, announced it will use NetMind Technologies Inc., Los Angeles, for an e-mail service that tells subscribers when their favorite web pages have changed.
