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Tag: particle

  • Particle Raises $40 Million in Funding to Empower IoT Adoption

    Particle Raises $40 Million in Funding to Empower IoT Adoption

    Particle, the IoT platform company focused on making the Internet of Things (IoT) easy, has raised $40 million in series C funding.

    Particle claims to be “the only all-in-one IoT platform on the market.” As such, they offer a competitive advantage for companies looking to bring their products and services online. This is especially critical for established companies looking to make the transition, companies who are at risk of being disrupted by smaller, more nimble competitors.

    “That’s because technology and innovation are not evenly distributed, and the decades-old manufacturers that lead traditional industries are more likely to be the disrupted than the disruptor,” wrote CEO Zach Supalla in the company’s announcement. “Particle is here to help to change this dynamic; we’re here to empower the next generation of IoT companies and bring the physical world online to fundamentally change how traditional industries operate.”

    Particle is already actively helping an impressive list of customers, including Opti, Jacuzzi, Shared Technologies, Korean-based Olulo and the Air National Guard. This latest round of funding will help Particle continue developing their IoT platform and supporting tools.

    “Particle will use the money raised in this round of funding to continue developing our enterprise IoT platform suite, as well as scale our engineering and product teams,” according to Supalla. “These new team hires will help bolster our professional engineering service (Particle Studios) and help our customers bring their products to market. We’ll also be expanding into new global markets while hiring in sales and marketing.”

  • Apple Acquired Justin Timberlake-Backed Particle

    Apple has acquired Particle, an HTML app company, which has received funding from superstar Justin Timberlake in the past.

    According to a report from CNET’s Josh Lowensohn, the acquisition happened last month, but nobody knew about it. The price is still unknown. Particle developer Lynn Collette (who is currently listed as a UI engineer at Apple on LinkedIn) confirmed the news on Twitter (via TechCrunch):

     

    Particle has done HTML5 work for Apple in the past, as well as for Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Motorola and Sony. For Apple’s sake, it’s probably good they scooped it up before Google did considering these relationships.

    Particle had said in its about page: “HTML5 and the WebKit rendering engine already drive the web experience on devices like the iPhone, iPad, and Android, but are increasingly becoming the lowest common denomination on the desktop web in next generation browsers like Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari. Particle has chosen to focus on this technology so intensely because we believe it will soon be the rendering engine that powers a new universe of light weight and embedded applications from set top boxes to game consoles to Chrome OS and Android devices to portable telephony and media devices of all kinds.”

    That page appears to have been taken down.

  • LHC Physicists Explain the Higgs Boson Particle

    The Large Hadron Collider is pretty interesting. New subatomic particles are being discovered with its utilization. Just last Friday a new particle was discovered – “neutral Xi_b^star baryon”. The new particle is made up of three quarks, and only exists for something like .00000000000000000000001 seconds.

    If it only exists for an amount of time that can not really be observed, then how do we know if it even exists? Well, scientists examine the end product, and from those results they are able to determine (somewhat) what type of particle existed. The “somewhat” comes from the fact that tons of tests have to be performed, and data analyzed across a large number of experiments to get information they can use.

    The ultimate goal of the Large Hadron Collider is to discover the existence of the Higgs Boson Particle. The theory is that the Higgs Boson particle is responsible for giving mass to other particles, and is the missing puzzle piece in understanding particle physics.

    The Higgs Boson particle is expected to be found later this year.

    I am not a scientist, obviously, so why not hear it from the source. Actual scientist working on the actual Large Hadron Collider.