Google to buy Waze for $1.3b
Reports about a possible sale of Waze are not new. Last year there were reports Apple wanted to buy Waze and in late August 2012, it was reported that Facebook was in talks to acquire the company. According to some reports, Facebook representatives arrived in Israel to meet Waze executives, but no deal was reached in the negotiations, apparently because of the price tag.
Another reason was that Waze insisted that its Israeli employees should continue working in Israel, which Facebook did not accept. Google has already made two acquisitions in Israel, and it has an office here, in contrast to Facebook, which closed most of the companies it acquired, including Israeli start-ups. Both previous Israeli acquisitions by Google were modest. Google acquired personalized Website gadget developer Labpixies for $25 million and interactive video-clip developer Quiksee for $10 million. Both acquisitions were in 2010.
In the past few months, there have been numerous reports that Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) was interested in acquiring Waze. However, in an interview with "AllThingsD" at the D11 conference in late May, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that Apple had not bid for Waze. He also stressed that use of Apple's map app was important, which was why the company was investing heavily in the product. “We screwed up," he admitted. "It’s greatly improved, but not there yet. We have more to do."
Waze was founded in 2009 and in October 2012, it announced a $30 million financing round from Horizons Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and iFund. The company has raised $67 million to date from Magma Venture Partners, Vertex Venture Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), and the investors in its 2012 financing round.
It's mind blowing......Originally Posted by Google India:
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New solid Sulphur batteries could be the answer to your smartphone battery woes
When we talk about consumer technology, most companies claim that the innovation is the slowest in battery technology. This is because batteries are based on innovation in chemistry than in pure engineering. But a solution is on the horizon as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the US has developed a new Lithium-Sulphur technology, that addresses flammability issues of traditional batteries and is yet a lot cheaper and lighter while having four times the density of existing batteries that are found in phones,
The most obvious advantage of this technology is that a Lithium-Sulphur battery maintains a capacity of around 1,200 mAh per gram while a Lithium-ion battery has a capacity of around 140-170 mAh per gram. This amounts to a 800 percent bump, but since Lithium-Sulphur only delivers half the voltage of Lithium-ion, it should deliver around 400 percent improvement in capacity on current battery weights.
While Lithium-Sulphur was for long considered to be an alternative battery technology, the liquid electrolytes needed to perform often broke down. To solve this issue ORNL made a solid electrolyte that combined a Sulphur rich cathode and a Lithium anode for an energy dense battery. However, this also meant that the all-solid electrolytes eliminated flammable liquids, making the battery much safer.
This battery technology is also cheaper because Sulphur is a byproduct of petroleum processing, which basically means waste fuel is being recycled to create these batteries. These batteries are still at a demo stage and are patent pending, but the team at ORNL hopes that it will soon be used in commercial applications. We hope that we see this technology trickle down to smartphones and tablets, because the current battery life of mobile products is simply not acceptable, and this technology could be a potential breakthrough.
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