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Happy Tuesday!

We promise that watching last Friday's inaugural episode of The Friday Nooner is 30 minutes well-spent. You can also tune in LIVE this and every Friday—at noon, natch—for Joe and Pete to break down the week in Triangle tech while diving down unpredictable rabbit holes and airing their grievances with each other. Here’s the Facebook Live link for this week's episode so you can get a notification.
 


The Download

You won’t want to miss the first 2021 edition of Brooks Malone’s The Download, which this week features Greg Dolan, the Co-Founder and CEO of Keen Decision Systems. Keen is a fast-growing SaaS startup that helps optimize marketing-investment decisions and is about to move into upgraded digs at The Frontier in RTP. (We profiled them in August, 2019.) Though I will say Brooks’ usual question about favorite coffee shop made me nostalgic for the Time Before. Greg named a coffee shop in Apex that I had taken a picture of myself in for “Where’s Pete?” but that didn’t have a chance to run before the pandemic curtailed in-person coffee-drinking overnight and made such pictures look discordant. Sigh. But such times will return! Just please stay safe until then.
 
Read the full Q&A here.


 


Small World

One side effect of the pandemic is that it’s made us all more comfortable—or at least more familiar—working remotely, even if some might be sick of it. That’s given a new boost to the perennial question of whether to use offshore developers; surely you’ll recall our Coffee & Conversation web panel on this very topic in November. SourceStack, a new startup from three Duke alums including 2020 grad Lusine “Lucy” Stepanyan as CEO, is connecting North Carolina startups and other businesses with global tech talent, such as from Lucy’s native Armenia. Read our full story on SourceStack here.


 


Plasma Screen

Yesterday’s TechWire ran an interesting feature on an RTP-based startup with some interesting capitalization in its name, APJeT. The company is about to roll out four new disinfection products that use its “groundbreaking” air plasma technology to kill the novel coronavirus and other pathogens. APJeT’s atmospheric plasma technology had historically been used for the “polymerization of monomeric coatings on materials in the textile industry,” and if you know what that means please email me. In fact APJeT established a partnership with NC State’s College of Textiles in 2008 and worked out of NC State until 2015. But with Covid’s arrival, APJeT realized it could apply its technology in a new, very important—and very profitable—way. Yay, innovation!


 


Good Optics

RTP-based ImagineOptix has reportedly banked $200K of a planned $500K fundraise. The startup with NC State roots has developed proprietary tech that allows optics for use especially in virtual and augmented reality devices to be “thinner, lighter and more efficient.” You know what would be a great VR “game” right now: something that makes you feel like you’re working in a just-busy-enough coffee shop.


 


Partnering Up

Sitation, an Apex-based ecommerce software and services startup that we profiled last May, has been named a Gold Partner of France-based Akeneo, a global leader in product information management (PIM) technology. Think: ecommerce customers being able to easily see and access key information on what they’re considering buying. Sitation joined the Akeneo partner program in November, 2019, and has since grown the largest team of Akeneo-certified developers and implementation specialists in North America. You can find more details here.


 


Speeding Up

OK, so Epic Games doesn’t just buy malls. Last week the Cary-based gaming giant acquired RAD Game Tools, which focuses on compression tech that helps speed upload/download times. What, was Pied Piper not available? (See TechWire for more details.)


 


All Grown Up

In the “they might not be startups anymore, but they’re still important tech companies in the Triangle” news bucket: 1) ChannelAdvisor names former AdvanceAuto exec to head global services (WRAL TechWire); 2) Red Hat makes first buy since IBM acquisition – stress point is security in cloud (WRAL TechWire) and What's Red Hat up to in 2021? CEO on real estate adjustments, new acquisition and remote workforce (TBJ); 3) 2 IBM inventors in Triangle contribute 128 patents to Big Blue’s US-leading total (WRAL TechWire). More on that last one: one Triangle-based IBM engineer, Martin Keen, landed 92 patents himself just last year. Wow, that makes me feel pretty inadequate for (humblebrag alert!) only having one patent to my name.


 


Virtual Cash

Cofounders Capital’s David Gardner wrote a piece for today’s TechWire in which he laid out what he sees as “four permanent changes” that the pandemic will lead to for startups. One in particular caught our eye: David thinks that because most folks have become more comfortable by necessity with conducting business remotely, startups will be more likely to land investments from non-local investors. That view was shared by several of the Triangle tech luminaries who made predictions for 2021 in last week’s GrepBeat.


 


Make It Legal

Hutchison is a boutique law firm that embraces the entrepreneurial spirit and steers technology and life sciences entrepreneurs to success through all stages of their company’s life. Hutchison partners with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial-minded organizations to enable business solutions that make the law work for them, and advises angel investors and venture capital firms to support their investment selections to maximize their potential for success. Hutchison takes the time to learn your business and understand what’s behind the deal.

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