Strengthening and almost doubling its patent holdings, Universal Display (Ewing) has purchased the organic light-emitting diode(OLED) patent portfolio — totaling more than 1,200 patents — from Fujifilm (Japan) for $105 million. The company has also entered into a strategic alliance with Fujifilm, although it isn’t yet clear how that relationship will work. Fujifilm said it would continue to contribute to the OLED industry by supplying highly innovative materials such as barrier films.
Universal Display had previously entered into a three-year joint development agreement with Plextronics (Pittsburgh), investing $4 million in the company. The alliance will speed the development and commercialization of solution-based OLED material systems, incorporating Plextronics’ hole injection and hole transport materials with Universal’s phosphorescent OLED emissive layer materials.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has awarded a $2.5 million contract to Tradeworx (Red Bank) and its high-speed trading infrastructure arm Thesys Technologies (New York). According to Bloomberg News, Gregg Berman, senior advisor in the SEC trading and markets division, said the contract will provide the SEC information from “quote and transaction data used by algorithmic traders, high-frequency firms, electronic market makers and other professionals who buy and sell rapidly across venues.” Berman added that the contract will “run analyses on the information to search for potentially harmful or suspicious activity and trading patterns that can help it gain a better understanding of how rules affect the marketplace.” Others suggest the data will help the SEC evaluate abusive trading practice complaints and whether any charges are valid.
Red Bank-based Natcore Technology, which trades on the Canadian TSX Venture Exchange, has completed a 2.5 million Canadian dollar private placement. The funds will be used to finish optimizing the company’s promising black silicon technology and build a production version of Natcore’s AR-Box processing station. That version would be able to etch and coat cells with black silicon at a rate of 1,500 to 2,000 cells per hour. Natcore has received gross proceeds of CA$2,500,000 pursuant to the issuance of 4,166,167 units at CA$0.60 per unit. The overallotment has received regulatory approval, including sanctioning by the TSX Venture Exchange, the company said. Natcore announced the private placement in June and was able to close quickly, Natcore CEO Chuck Provini noted.
BIO-key, the Wall, N.J., fingerprint, biometric identification solutions provider, announced a significant step toward product acceptance in the business world on July 19, 2012: IBM has included the company’s offerings in its Redguide publications. IBM Redguides focus on the business view of technology that solves issues, provides value or enables competitive advantage by applying existing technologies or exploring a roadmap for emerging technologies. The book shows IBM customers how BIO-key provides a fingerprint, biometric-enabled sign-on to IBM Security Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On. By using BIO-key Biometric Service Provider, the user simply places a finger on a reader. The fingerprint is then identified and authenticated to enterprise applications and data using the IBM security access product. The identification and authentication occur within one to two seconds, without the user entering a user ID or password. In other news, BIO-Key has integrated its solution with Indigo Identityware (Edina, Minn.), making further inroads into the healthcare industry.
Beleaguered telecom company IDT (Newark) has announced it will spin off Innovative Communications Technologies (ICTI), the company’s patent and licensing subsidiary. IDT had previously announced this spinoff but decided not to go ahead with plans in 2011. ICTI holds patents related to voice over IP (VoIP). IDT said it had compared monetizing the patents within the corporation with spinning off ICTI and found the subsidiary would be more valuable as a separate entity. “It has become evident that separating ICTI completely from IDT is the optimal way to maximize the value in this portfolio,” said Jeff Ballabon, Chief Executive Officer of ICTI.
Connotate (New Brunswick), a venture-backed software firm providing solutions that help organizations automate data collection from the Web, said it had increased bookings by more than 40 percent compared with Q1 2012. While the company doesn’t report earnings, CEO Keith Cooper said Q2 earnings “reflected a healthy split between new accounts and existing customers who signed on for larger and/or longer-term contracts.” The company has been ramping up its sales, marketing and engineering staff and plans to go after the financial market more aggressively, with dedicated personnel aimed at particular use cases in investor trading, hedge funds and retail banking.
