For those of you who haven’t heard, Orange County has a new public company, and it already boasts a market value approaching $200 million.
Huntington Beach-based Foldera Inc., which offers Web-based services that help businesses manage e-mail among other things, hit the public markets with a reverse merger in February. It had raised about $13 million in funding through a couple of private placement stock sales.
Foldera shares trade on the over the counter bulletin board, so it’s not exactly on the radar of mainstream investors.
Still, its shares have had a nice climb. The stock went from about $2.50 a share in mid-February to as high as $10.60 in early March. It since has settled down at about $7, giving it a market value of $175 million.
The company, formerly known as Taskport Inc., hasn’t released its service yet, but has plans to do so by the middle of this year.
The company’s service combines Web-based email, instant messaging, a document manager, a task manager, a calendar, a contact manager and sharable folders into one “suite.” Foldera also can instantly sort and file email, instant message conversations and events.
The cost of these services? Free.
The company said it can make money the old-fashioned dot-com way: Web ads.
“We intend to integrate a paid search feature into each page of our online service and we expect to derive a substantial portion of our revenue from this feature,” the company said in a regulatory filing. “We have selected Google’s ‘AdSense for Search’ program to capitalize on Google’s popularity with Internet searchers.”
The company also aims to charge some customers for special services.
Don’t expect a big advertising blitz. The company wants its services to spread by word-of-mouth marketing. That’s what MySpace did when it began its free service back in 2003.
Foldera claims it’s off to a good start.
In less than two weeks, Foldera said it signed up 400,000 people who are interested in getting the service when it becomes available, according to a release.
If it gets half of those, it would be at its projected break-even point, the company said.
In the February reverse merger deal, Foldera was merged into Scottsdale-based Expert Systems Inc., a defunct golf products maker that kept its stock listing.
In the deal, Expert Systems issued 22.8 million shares to Taskport shareholders in exchange for all of its stock. Taskport shareholders ended up with about 92% of the combined company.
Expert Systems subsequently changed its named to Foldera and its board and management resigned to make way for Foldera’s team.
“We’re pleased to be transitioning from a private to a publicly traded company, which will heighten our presence in the investment community and make it easier for investors to follow our progress,” said Richard Lusk, cofounder and chief executive of Foldera, in a statement.
The company has 35 employees and 15 contractors. It has leased about 17,000 square feet of space.
Unlocking Funds
An Irvine-based network security company has landed $6.1 million in funding from private equity investors.
Uniloc USA Inc. said it will use the money to fund marketing, expansion into new markets and other growth pushes.
Uniloc USA has developed security software that makes a device, usually a computer, usable only by one person.
Its technology is called “device recognition,” and the company said its accuracy is better than what you get with human DNA.
Device recognition is based on the “naturally occurring, inherent physical imperfections” of a particular device, the company said. The resulting “device fingerprint” is used to authenticate users or access credentials.
Past key customers included IBM Corp. and Toshiba Corp.
With this new round of funding the company plans to extend its software know-how to network users and data security.
Memory Glitch
Three executives from Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea have agreed to plead guilty and serve jail time in the U.S. for participating in a global conspiracy to fix memory chip prices, the Department of Justice said.
The scandal hit many computer makers that buy memory chips, including Irvine-based Gateway Inc. and Round Rock, Texas-based Dell Inc.
The South Korean executives participated in the price-fixing conspiracy for what’s called DRAM (dynamic random access memory) while they worked for Samsung or its units in the U.S. and Europe.
The individuals, who will serve seven months or more in jail and pay fines of $250,000 apiece, include Sun Woo Lee, Samsung’s senior manager of DRAM sales; Yeongho Kang, associate director, DRAM marketing for Samsung’s U.S. operation; and Young Woo Lee, sales director for Samsung’s subsidiary in Germany.
