RIM could have a little more cash on hand next quarter. The flailing BlackBerry developer has sold its cloud services unit NewBay to Synchronoss Technologies, the provider of automation software, mobility management, and cloud technology solutions. The acquisition price was $55.5 million in cash, and the transaction closed in the fourth quarter of 2012.
It was a short-lived acquisition for RIM, which bought NewBay in October 2011 for $100 million and took a bit of a bath. In August, Reuters rep...
Cloud encoding vendor Encoding.com launched 
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. Giftly’s acquisition follows a number of other ones. Karma was picked up very early by Facebook although it may not produce meaningful revenue for some time for the social network, according to its earnings results earlier this year. Another gifting startup, Giftiki, which pooled together people’s money to get gifts, was acquired by Launchrock. Giftly built a platform that avoided the hassle of individually dealing with merchants and point-of-sale systems. They came out with a native mobile app last fall that made it easier to send presents to friends and family. The company’s platform didn’t put any limitations on what kinds of presents you could send because the company had a web of relationships with banks and credit card processors. When a recipient would go to redeem their gift, they would pay out of their own pocket, but Giftly would reimburse them that amount through their credit card. GiftCards.com said Giftly will be rolled into their operations, but will maintain offices in San Francisco. “We will continue to build out Giftly,” said Giftly’s CEO Timothy Bentley. “Our backend infrastructure will be used for their next generation products. We’ll continue to expand the ways our technology and services are available to developers, through our API, and merchants, through our merchant services.” The company is also looking to raise a first venture round, even though it’s been around for more than 10 years. That round will go toward completing the acquisition of Giftly. GiftCards.com has been around since 1999; they sell personalized, pre-designed and discount gift cards.
After scores of accounts were potentially compromised a few months ago, Twitter today launched two-factor authentication through SMS to protect people from hacks and phishing scams on the web. Unfortunately, it may not help shared accounts like big brands and news agencies where multiple people need to be able to log in and out but only one phone number can get the login verification codes.
We’ve confirmed with Twitter that it has rolled out a new part of its 
For this week’s episode of Founder Stories, I sat down with 
