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Happy Tuesday!
No snark up top today, given that it’s 9/11 and a serious hurricane is chugging toward us. We recommend hugs. Now to the news, both good and bad:
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Bad News: This week’s CED Tech Conference is being rescheduled. With Hurricane Florence’s impending arrival understandably making out-of-town investors extremely hesitant to fly to the Triangle lest they become stranded and our friends from the coast having weightier issues on their mind, CED will move the conference to early 2019.
Good News: Tomorrow night’s CED Afterparty is still on! Take a break from your hurricane prep to join the Pendo-sponsored event for tech entrepreneurs and their employees at 5:30pm Wednesday at Raleigh’s Lincoln Theatre. You can register here.
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Bad News: Roobrik Founder and CEO Nate O’Keefe was disappointed yesterday to learn that the presentation to investors that he’d been cramming for as one of the CED Conference’s showcase companies was no longer going to happen.
Good News: O'Keefe has already impressed investors enough to open their checkbooks. Durham-based Roobrik just completed a $1.4M seed round led by the Carolina Angel Network, with additional regional participation from the Wilmington Investor Network and Launch Place from Danville, Va. Roobrik enables older adults and families researching online to make more informed decisions about senior living facilities and home healthcare. See all the details in our full story.
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Bad News: Well, it's bad news if you’re a Facebook shareholder or The Zuck, but a new national poll of teens released yesterday by Common Sense Media found that 44 percent of teens say Snapchat is their primary social network, compared to 15 percent for Facebook. When the organization last conducted this survey in 2012, a whopping 68% of teens named Facebook as their top choice. Ouch.
Good News: One silver lining for Zuck is that Facebook-owned Instagram was No. 2 at 22%. Also consider that 89% of teens own their own smartphone (up from 41% in 2012), which means that the upcoming generation is even more mobile-first—and in some cases virtually mobile-only—than the current crop of whippersnappers. The digital transformation of seemingly everything is only accelerating.
That’s bad news for those with weaker—or just average—mobile offerings and good news for local startups like Dropsource, the Raleigh-based low-code mobile app development platform that makes it easier to build truly native enterprise mobile apps. GrepBeat will feature Dropsource and CEO Ben Saren later this week.
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Bad News: Spies aren’t just for John le Carré novels. (Or, if your tastes are more lowbrow, for Chevy Chase/Dan Aykroyd movies.) According to Jim Reese, the CEO of international security firm TigerSwan, “I can’t stress enough (how) this region is a hotbed for industrial espionage.”
Good News: The reason that prying eyes from China, Russia, Brazil, other foreign actors, and plenty of domestic snoops are interested in the Triangle is precisely because of its robust high-tech innovation. Consider that patents tied to local universities alone number 774 at Duke, 367 at NC State and 341 at UNC. So hey, be careful out there.
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Bad News: Inirv, a startup with Duke roots that appeared on Shark Tank this January but failed to secure a deal, has been sued by Charlotte-based Enventys Partners. The suit alleges that Inirv and Co-Founder Ranjith Babu—a Duke neurosurgery resident who founded the company along with Akshita Iyer, Duke ‘14—failed to pay for work that included the prototypes that Inirv used on Shark Tank. The company makes smart stove knobs that can sense smoke and, if necessary, automatically turn off the range to help prevent fires.
Good News: Inirv Labs and Babu will at least be well-represented by Raleigh-based Smith Anderson lawyer Jackson Moore Jr. Even better news: I have heroically resisted the urge to make an out-of-the-stovetop-into-the-fire joke. You're welcome.
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Bad News: Robert Ladd, the CEO of Durham-based bitcoin mining company MGT Capital Investments, has taken a leave of absence after being one of 10 individuals charged as part of an alleged “pump-and-dump” stock scheme that generated $27 million in what the SEC is calling unlawful stock sales.
Good News: Ummm, hopefully he’s innocent? That’s all we got.
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Extra Bit
Here's a link to the National Hurricane Center site. Stay safe, everyone!
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