We here at GrepBeat want to do our part to help you have a great holiday season—by making absurdist mini-movies. Here are It’s A Wonderful GrepMas and ‘Twas The Night Before GrepMas. You can watch them individually at those links—they’re about 5-6 minutes each—or as part of the latest Friday Nooner, which features Joe’s live reactions (he hadn't seen them before). I promise that you will be entertained.
And stay tuned to our social channels today for the world premiere of The 12 Days of GrepMas, in which the partridge in a pear tree, two turtle doves, three French hens and all the rest are replaced by... well, you’ll just have to watch.
Into The Cloud
Sometimes it seems like every business is talking about the cloud and how they need to be there. It’s basically the modern equivalent of (warning: movie quotes that will date me upcoming) Fletch’s “It’s all ball bearings these days” and The Graduate’s “One word: plastics.” But moving a business’s applications to a new environment demands new solutions to old problems like integration and syncing data across services and platforms. Led by two open-source cloud experts, Apex-based TriggerMesh tackles those issues. Cisco Investments, Cisco’s VC arm, led a $5M funding round in the startup this summer. Read our full story on TriggerMesh here.
Apple Scholars
Apple has picked three applicants from Durham-based Rewriting The Code as winners of the Apple Scholars Program scholarship. Rewriting The Code is a national nonprofit dedicated to increasing opportunities for women in tech. The organization was founded by former Duke basketball player Sue Harnett; we wrote about them in 2019. The three winners were selected from among 290 Rewriting The Code applicants. They attend Stanford, Northwestern and Indiana’s Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, respectively. TechWire has more details.
ThisClose
Now that Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney is TBJ’s new best friend, we should expect them to get plenty of mileage from the rare sitdown interview he did as part of being named TBJ’s Business Person of the Year. A story in yesterday’s TBJ focused on Tim’s comments on Epic Games’ battle with Apple and Google over the rules they impose over their app stores, which he argues are monopolistic and hurt innovation. He casts Epic Games as fighting for the little guy, and while at first it might seem incongruous for a company worth $28B (Epic’s latest valuation) to be cast as David, it fits when Apple and Google are both worth around $2.8T—or 100 times more.
Tim and TBJ are also email buddies, as he sent an email comment on his recent purchase of $1.1M worth of rural land in Chatham County as part of his conservation efforts. Though Cary Town Council officials seem to feel that Tim and Epic are being less transparent about their construction plans for the company’s new HQ in the former Cary Towne Center mall.
Higher Ed
We all know that the presence of three research universities is a major reason for the Triangle’s rise as a tech hub. Here are two more exhibits to support that belief: 1) NC State professor Amay J. Bandodkar has been named to Newsweek’s inaugural “America’s 50 Greatest Disruptors” list for his work on wearable battery-free sensors and skin-friendly wearable batteries. 2) Materials scientists at Duke have developed a lightweight material that traps thermal energy when dry, but opens a series of tiny vents to let heat escape when a person starts sweating—then close them again when dry. The garments use a (very) thin layer of silver on top of nylon. As someone who works out outside religiously regardless of the weather (and likes to talk about it endlessly), I must say I’m quite intrigued.
Here's The Tea
Triangle Inno recently ran a profile on Durham-based Mosi Tea, which we had profiled in August. Mosi Founder Paul Davis was previously a co-founder of SaaS startup Boostopia, which we wrote about last March and was acquired earlier this year. He leaned on his background growing up in tea-drenched African countries as the son of missionaries, and later brought on early investor Gavin Jocius as COO to help bring Mosi’s high-tech tea infuser to market.
Unicorn Corner
In Cofounders Capital Founder David Gardner’s latest piece from TechWire, which ran yesterday, he touts the rise of local unicorns as another factor driving increased interest in the region from investors. David writes that of the nine unicorns that the Southeast has produced over the last few years, four are from North Carolina—with three from the Triangle specifically. Namely: Epic Games, Pendo and Prometheus Group.
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To see all posted jobs, go to our (beta) CronJobs page. If you'd like your company to be listed, tell us at cronjobs@grepbeat.com and we'll do our best.
Guess where Pete is and (maybe) win a GrepBeat mug!
Don't you want to win the very last "Where's Pete?" of 2021? What if I told you this is the last GrepBeat mug we will award in this space until at least 2023? It's true. (More details in January.) So send your guesses here!
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