BlackLocus uses it to create a dynamic pricing environment to help retailers stay nimble and respond to the current market. The Austin, Texas-based company raised $2.5 million in initial funding last summer, and aims to help online retailers of any size keep up with their competition through a mix of data mining and analysis. The end result will bring the same pricing transparency that tools like Google Product Search or Shopzilla have given consumers to online retailers.

Rodrigo Carvahlo, the CEO and founder of BlackLocus, explains that online retailers hire the company to help them track what competitors are charging for the same products. This sort of price comparison is hard to do at a massive scale, but BlackLocus’ success getting over the technical challenge, could pave the way for a future when retail prices could be set in real-time based on the retailer’s existing inventory, what other companies are charging and the overall demand threshold for the consumer.

For example, ahead of Christmas, I saw the FurReal Go Go My Walkin’ Pup on sale for prices that ranged between $45 and $65 online over a period of two weeks when I began eyeballing the toy as a gift for my daughter. I eventually picked it up for $45, after seeing it priced lower at Target.com than the current prices at Amazon or Toys R Us. Had I been more diligent I could have use a price tracking service like PriceProtectr, Google Product Search or just scanned a UPC code into Shopzilla or ShopSavvy while out and about to find the lowest price for that moment.

That kind of consumer transparency is what BlackLocus wants to bring for retailers when they are trying to set their prices. For a small online retailer being about to offer a similar or lower price than Amazon or Target could help keep them competitive. Similarly, if they saw that Amazon or Target were sold out, they might be able to raise their prices. But the problem of getting the data, matching it to the right products that might carry different names or SKUs online and then comparing the pricing all takes work.

The hardest part is matching the products across different sites said Carvahlo. To get the data, BlackLocus crawls online retail sites a few times a week, or as often as the prices tend to change (thanks to its knowledge about pricing, folks who work there know the absolute best time of year to buy televisions, or how many months a phone has to be one the market before the price drops). Once it has the pricing data it runs several algorithms against the data to match products across different sites and puts them in a database. It’s a significant amount of data and it’s growing rapidly. Robert Taylor the COO of the company emailed me to say:

We really look at [the data] two ways. First, the number of product URL’s (think product page) that we track and second, the price data cluster capacity. We are well on our way to tracking 150M product URLs, projected to be nearly 300M by the end of 2012. Similarly, our cluster capacity is nearing 9 TB over the next few months, significantly increasing to 125 TB by the end of 2012 as we store historical information. These types of increasing requirements really require us to constantly iterate on designing/deploying scalable infrastructure.

Like many startups, BlackLocus uses Amazon Web Services for some of its infrastructure and it’s planning on implementing a more enterprise data analytics product such as SAS to help it manage and analyze the prices. BlackLocus doesn’t disclose its customers, except to say that it has customers that range from those in the top 75 internet retailers to small mom and pop shops. So it’s not only mobile that’s changing the face of retailing, but data as well.

Increasing market demand and broader channel penetration for Alert Logic’s comprehensive suite of Security-as-a-Service solutions resulted in accelerated growth during 2011, with each quarter showing a larger growth rate than the one before. The Company recorded fourth quarter revenue of $6.1 million, representing a 45 percent year over year increase. Furthermore, Alert Logic’s annualized revenue run-rate in the month of December 2011 was $25 million – marking the successful achievement of an important growth milestone for the company.

“Entering 2012 as a $25 million company was a goal we set for ourselves at the beginning of 2011,” said Gray Hall, Alert Logic’s president and CEO. “Our growth rate has accelerated over the past two years, and we have plans to continue accelerating our rate of growth in 2012 and beyond.”

Among Alert Logic’s notable highlights for 2011:

• Announced the limited availability of the first fully managed advanced network security solution in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment, the world’s largest public cloud. Alert Logic expects to launch general availability of Alert Logic Threat ManagerTM for Amazon EC2 in the first half of 2012.
• Launched the Cloud Acceleration Partner Program (CAPP), enabling technology partners to deliver security solutions as fully managed security services.
• Integrated Alert Logic’s solutions for vulnerability assessment, intrusion detection and log management into SunGard Availability Services’ suite of managed security services, which is a finalist for SC Magazine’s Reader Trust Award for Best Managed Security Service.
• Added key executive roles, including Rohit Gupta, VP of Business Development and Chris Noell, VP of Product Management, who will each play a critical role in helping to advance the Company’s portfolio of Security-as-a-Service solutions.

More than half of the largest managed hosting and cloud service providers use Alert Logic’s services to secure their customer environments, making Alert Logic the de facto standard for securing infrastructure in hosted and cloud environments. Alert Logic’s Security-as-a-Service solutions provide customers four distinct advantages: market leading security tools, a fully outsourced and managed SaaS delivery model, integrated 24×7 Security Operations Center (SOC) services to monitor and provide expert guidance, and the ability to deploy wherever a customer has IT infrastructure – including the cloud.

Noell brings to Alert Logic a wealth of experience in risk management and compliance products and services for the enterprise market. He most recently served as senior vice president of product management with ANX eBusiness, a managed network and security service provider. Noell joined ANX through the acquisition of TruArx, where he was a founder and board member. TruArx focused on delivering governance, risk and compliance SaaS solutions with a particular focus on the PCI DSS market. Noell also served as Vice President of Marketing at Solutionary, an enterprise-focused managed security service provider, in addition to other senior leadership roles at Verisign, Cabletron and Arthur Andersen Business Consulting.

In his new position, Noell will lead product strategy, prioritization and execution to both expand and accelerate Alert Logic’s delivery of innovative, cloud-based security and compliance solutions. Alert Logic’s Security-as-a-Service model offers service providers and enterprise customers four distinct advantages: market leading security tools, a fully outsourced and managed SaaS delivery model, integrated 24×7 Security Operations Center (SOC) services to monitor and provide expert guidance, and the ability to deploy wherever a customer has IT infrastructure – including the cloud. With more than half of the largest managed hosting and cloud service providers using these services to secure their customer environments, Alert Logic is increasingly viewed as the de facto standard for securing infrastructure in hosted and cloud environments.

“Chris’ experience in managed security services and his strong background in compliance are ideal additions to Alert Logic’s industry leading expertise in delivering comprehensive solutions to service provider partners,” said Dave Colesante, Alert Logic CTO & Senior Vice President of Product Development. “We look forward to the contributions Chris will make in helping to advance our portfolio of Security-as-a-Service solutions and help our partners and their customers stay ahead of changing compliance mandates.”

Ambiq is commercializing technology out of the University of Michigan to build a real-time clock designed for sensors. The clock consumes less power, but also takes over functions that currently involve other chips in order to reduce the power usage of the sensor even further (yup, it’s like an SoC microcontroller). Scott Hanson, the CEO and co-founder of Ambiq explains that today’s sensors usually contain a microcontroller, a clock that puts the chip to sleep and wakes it as necessary, a power supply, a sensor of some sort (typically a MEMs device) and a radio.

But Ambiq combines the clock and the microcontroller so the chip requires less power and takes up less space. Some proposed uses of the chip include implanting it inside the human body, or a chip that can run on tiny solar cells the size of a penny.

As we put more sensors on devices and inside our infrastructure, Hansen believes we’re about to open up a new frontier for chip design firms who can build chips for the sensor web. Ambiq is his bet on this, but he expects many more. With an investment from ARM, he’s not the only one betting on a new generation of chips that will need specialized microcontroller and a smaller size, the British licensing company clearly sees an opportunity as well.