(Reuters) – Data storage company Nimble Storage Inc filed with U.S. regulators to raise up to $150 million in an initial public offering of its common stock.

The company, which makes storage devices that combine hard disks and flash drives, competes with larger companies such as NetApp Inc and EMC Corp.

Nimble’s investors include Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company, founded in 2008, had raised $40 million in September 2012.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the major underwriters, the company told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in a preliminary prospectus.

Reuters reported in August that Nimble was planning an IPO later this year.

The filing did not reveal how many shares the company planned to sell or their expected price.

San Jose, California-based Nimble intends to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “NMBL.”

Net proceeds from the offering would be used for working capital and other general corporate purposes, the company said.

The company’s net loss widened to $27.9 million for the year ended January 31, from $16.8 million a year earlier. Revenue rose to $53.8 million from $14 million during the period.

The amount of money a company says it plans to raise in its first IPO filings is used to calculate registration fees. The final size of the IPO could be different.

By Soham Chatterjee and Alexei Oreskovic

(Reuters) – Google Inc shares jumped past $1,000 on Friday as investors bet on the Internet company’s continued dominance of the mobile and video advertising businesses despite aggressive competition from Facebook Inc and Yahoo Inc.

Shares of the world’s No. 1 search company rose more than 13 percent to hit an all-time high of $1,008.18, swelling the company’s market value by almost $40 billion. That vaulted Google past Microsoft Corp and Berkshire Hathaway Inc in capitalization and brought it to No. 3 among U.S. companies, behind only Apple Inc and Exxon Mobil Corp.

Google, which is also known for its Google Maps service, Chrome browser and Nexus line of smartphones and tablets, on Thursday reported a 23 percent jump in net revenue from its Internet business. Advertising volume soared 26 percent – the highest rate of growth in the past year – and more than made up for an 8 percent slide in ad prices.

But given concerns about how U.S. companies can increase revenue in an uncertain global economy, those numbers suggested Google was firing on all cylinders except for its perennially money-losing Motorola unit, analysts said.

“Google’s ownership of the Android ecosystem makes Google like the house, in Vegas terms,” said Stifel Nicolaus analyst Jordan Rohan. “The success of Android, which becomes more and more popular every day, is starting to really add up, and Google is collecting small tolls along the way.”

Rohan said accelerating revenue growth outside the United States and the UK was impressive, particularly in South Korea and Japan. “That could go on a while,” he said.

At least 16 brokerages raised their price targets on the stock to between $880 and $1,220. The shares traded at $1,006.44 on Nasdaq at midday.

“We view solid paid clicks growth to be a good indicator of demand, driven by the continued shift to mobile,” JPMorgan analysts said. They had expected 21.5 percent growth in ad volumes.

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS

Google’s Friday rally also stemmed from investors’ focus on Facebook and its own increasingly successful efforts to sell advertising on mobile devices. Google stock had gained just 26 percent this year, while Facebook’s has almost doubled.

“The worst is behind Google from a sentiment perspective,” Deutsche Bank analysts said.

Google and Facebook, which is expected to report its third-quarter results on October 30, also stand head-and-shoulders above the likes of Yahoo. The once-dominant Internet portal this week reported a tepid quarter, losing market share in display and search advertising.

Facebook rose 3.6 percent to $54.08 on Friday, while Yahoo was up 2 percent at $33.40. Baidu Inc, often called China’s Google, gained 7.1 percent to $164.78.

Google’s rally has already rewarded investors such as Fidelity Investments’ $101 billion Contrafund.

Contrafund added to its stake in Google in the third quarter and got a big lift from the surging performance of Facebook and Tesla Motors Inc as well. The fund returned 8.94 percent in the third quarter, easily beating the 5.24 percent advance of the Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

Some say Google still has room for improvement. JPMorgan analysts said continued efforts to counter declines in ad rates might yield a major opportunity in the upcoming holiday season.

Google earlier this year rolled out a service to help advertisers promote their products on a mix of smartphones, tablets and desktops. The move is also expected to bolster Google’s overall advertising rates by mitigating the impact of mobile ads, which command lower rates.

Others say YouTube, the world’s most popular video website, is still not fully tapped. Ads on the site increased more than 75 percent in the quarter from a year earlier, with 40 percent of traffic now coming from mobile devices.

“We estimate that Google’s key YouTube asset generated approximately $4 billion in revenue in 2012, positioning Google extremely well for the strong growth in video advertising,” RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note.

Analysts at Jefferies said Google was among the companies best positioned to benefit in mobile, given the 1 billion mobile devices running its Android software. The Mountain View, California-based company sells applications and content through its Google Play Store.

Despite promising results in controlling neuronal activity, leaders in brain research still wrestle over turning their work into treatments.

Recent achievements in neurotechnology are nothing short of stunning—blind people can see parts of their world again, and a woman who has been paralyzed for a decade can feed herself using a robotic arm. Leaders in the field presented these and other advances at the Aspen Brain Forum last week, while at the same time debating how quickly these technologies will lead to treatments for neurological disease and injury.

At the Aspen meeting, which was cosponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, Robert Greenberg, CEO of Second Sight, described how his medical-device company developed a prosthetic-sight system (see “Bionic Eye Implant Approved for U.S. Patients”). In its current form, the system transmits image data from a camera to a 60-pixel implant in the retina. However, the company is talking about a future version of the system that bypasses the eye altogether and instead sends the image information directly into the visual cortex.

But despite such progress, Greenberg and many other presenters made clear that much of how the brain works—and what happens when things go wrong—remains a mystery. The U.S. government announced this spring a $100 million initiative to develop new technology to map neuron- and circuit-level activity in the brain (see “Why Obama’s Brain-Mapping Project Matters”), and the European Union is funding a $1.3 billion project to understand the brain through computer simulations.

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“It’s so difficult to get anything to work in the human brain at all,” says Ed Boyden, an MIT neuroscientist who discussed his work using light to control neural activity, which could be developed into a treatment for blindness. “It’s enormously complex, and the risk for patients is high,” he says.

But medical treatments rarely wait on a complete understanding of how the body works. And there are successes even when there aren’t complete answers.Andy Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, discussed his group’s research on brain-computer interfaces, which have been used by quadriplegic patients to drive a robotic arm to move objects and even feed themselves (see “Patient Shows New Dexterity with Mind-Controlled Robot Arm”).

“We are starting to see a little bit of maturation and get a better understanding of what we can and can’t do,” says Schwartz. As his work has moved from monkeys to humans, his team has uncovered details of the neural code, but there is still plenty to learn.

Helen Mayberg of Emory University presented some of her still-experimental work treating otherwise intractable cases of depression with deep-brain stimulators. Such stimulators have been implanted in more than 100,000 people around the world. In most of these cases, the technology is used to treat mobility problems in Parkinson’s patients, but researchers have also found that they can treat a variety of neurological and psychiatric diseases (see “Brain Implants Can Rest Misfiring Circuits”).

But deep-brain stimulators are a rare example of new options for brain treatment, and Mayberg expressed frustration in the dearth of tools for human use. “We want what the animal people have to understand the choreography of the whole system,” she said, “to look at all the cross-talk between neurons and [eliminate] symptoms of psychiatric disease.”

One of the world’s largest chip makers is helping to instigate a boom in wireless health devices.

Asthmapolis has a GPS sensor for inhalers that uses a Bluetooth radio so people with asthma can track where and when they needed help breathing. CleverCap attaches to pill bottles, flashes and beeps when it’s time to take medication, and then, using Wi-Fi and cellular networks, reports to the Internet whether the pills were taken. The Garmin heart-rate monitor straps across the chest and digitally communicates beeps and blips with yet another wireless protocol, called ANT-plus.

That’s just a fraction of the wireless health devices reaching the “mobile health” market, gadgets that could one day be as ubiquitous as mobile phones. But this is no seamless ecosystem: these three devices alone use three different communication protocols. The potential flood of data pouring out of the machines might as well just disappear into the ether if it’s not stored, organized, and made accessible to the right people in real time.

Qualcomm Life, launched two years ago as a division of the San Diego–based telecommunications giant Qualcomm, is building software and protocols that could bring some order to the chaos of health data. Its first product, called the 2Net Platform, is a system for getting wireless data off those devices and onto the Internet servers of clients, like health device makers or hospitals.

About half of American adults have some kind of chronic condition, including obesity, arthritis, or diabetes, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Wireless devices could let more of their health care happen at home. To proponents of mobile health, like Don Jones, Qualcomm Life’s head of global marketing and strategy, this means that unnecessary visits to clinics and emergency rooms will plummet, people will refine their use of medicine, and doctors and nurses will have more time to focus on their neediest patients. A PricewaterhouseCoopers report this year estimated that mobile health technology could help save developed countries $400 billion by 2017.

Sitting in his office in decidedly mundane Sorrento Mesa—no stunning San Diego ocean views in sight—Jones pulls out the division’s first gadget, the 2Net hub, a plain-looking white box that’s about the size of a night light and plugs into a wall socket. The box solves a particular problem: people often don’t take advantage of the wireless capabilities of their health devices. For example, a bathroom scale might be equipped with Bluetooth, but it never transmits any data if the owner doesn’t complete the setup process, called pairing. “If you’ve ever paired anything, it’s not a complex process, but there’s a very high failure rate,” says Jones.

The box supports four different radio protocols, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and a USB port. Device manufacturers buy it from distributors for less than $100 so consumers can have a plug-and-play experience with their tracking devices, even if they don’t have an Internet connection. Devices that currently work with the 2Net hub include a thermometer, a blood-pressure cuff, a pulse oximeter, and a blood-glucose monitor.

By 2020 there will be 25 billion wireless devices transmitting data, estimates the Broadband Commission for Digital Development. To accelerate things in health care, a separate Qualcomm Life Fund has invested widely in startups such as Noom, publisher of an app for people trying to lose weight, and Telcare, which makes a system that diabetics can use to monitor their glucose levels.

This year Qualcomm Life paid an undisclosed amount to acquire Healthy Circles, a “software-as-a-service” platform that uses social-networking ideas to coördinate health care. Essentially, patients send their self-gathered data to a Web portal that also stores their medical records, information on their current medications, and up-to-the-minute lab reports. This allows nurses, doctors, and pharmacists to literally stay on the same page as the patients themselves, while obeying federal rules on data privacy.

Logical, efficient and slick as wireless, always-on health care may sound, Jones agrees that it’s still far from reality. “At the end of the day, one of your health-care providers has to make it available to you and build it in to a solution,” he says. “We’re selling that platform.”

GPS readings in cities and indoors can be terrible. One startup has found a novel solution.

A new antenna design being tested by the U.S. Air Force could make GPS significantly more reliable and able to function in dense urban areas where GPS accuracy is weak. It might even allow the technology to work indoors in some cases.

Good GPS readings are hard to get in cities because of the multipath phenomenon: signals from positioning satellites bounce off buildings and other structures. That confuses GPS receivers, which calculate their location by knowing exactly how long it took for signals to arrive from satellites overhead.

A signal that has bounced takes longer to arrive than it would if it had traveled directly, muddying a receiver’s math and sending location readings off by tens or hundreds of meters. Smartphones and in-car GPS units often have to work out their true location by analyzing maps and by getting a series of readings over time.

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The Air Force Institute of Technology is now trying to tackle that problem with an antenna able to recognize and ignore multipath GPS signals. The project builds on a design invented by Locata, a company based in Canberra, Australia. The institute is testing the company’s soccer-ball-sized proof-of-concept prototype, and plans to adapt it into versions that could conform with the frame of a Humvee or aircraft, or be built into helmets.

As the U.S. military tries to automate aircraft and other vehicles, it must rely on GPS to know where they are. Nunzio Gambale, cofounder and CEO of Locata, says that what the Air Force develops stands a good chance of trickling down to civilians, since most GPS technology in smartphones and navigational aids originated with the military.

“The requirements of the military are now converging with the requirements of Apple and Google,” he says. “Everyone wants to use these location tracking-devices indoors and in urban areas where people say GPS will never work.”

Locata’s antenna has many different elements that can be activated individually. In the current prototype there are 80 such elements positioned around a sphere. Switching on each element individually for about one millisecond makes it possible for a receiver to sense not only the strength but also the direction of incoming signals, by comparing what is detected by the elements on different parts of the antenna.

That makes it possible to ignore GPS signals that have bounced in favor of pure ones coming directly from a satellite. “It’s like the blinders coming off,” says Gambale. He believes that in some circumstances the new antenna design could even allow GPS readings indoors, where multipath effects are extremely strong and the signals from positioning satellites are extremely weak.

Constructing antennas from multiple elements isn’t a new idea. But such designs traditionally had each element controlled by its own radio, causing different elements to interact with one another in ways that required complex additional processing to clean up. In Locata’s design, all elements connect to a single radio. The sequence of signals it produces from different antenna elements can be processed relatively easily.

Todd Humphreys, a professor at the University of Texas geopositioning lab, says that Locata’s design shows promise because it can be so much cheaper than previous attempts to address the multipath problem. However, he cautions that this approach to antenna design requires a large receiver, so for now it will be practical only in military applications.

Locata is leaving it up to the Air Force to work out how practical the 3-D antenna can be. Gambale says his company is instead focused on using the technology to improve a competing technology to GPS: a system of ground-based location beacons that allows location readings to within centimeters (see “Ultra-Fine Location Fixes”). Last year the U.S. Air Force commissioned a Locata system for the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Locata is also working to sell systems to companies that operate mines and warehouses.

OpenRemote is an open-source Internet of Things platform that could help spur smarter homes and cities.

If you buy several Internet-connected home gadgets—say, a “smart” thermostat, “smart” door lock, and “smart” window blinds—you’ll likely have to control each one with a separate app, meaning it exists in its own little silo.

That’s not how Elier Ramirez does it. In his home, an iPad app controls his lights, ceiling fans, and TV and stereo. Pressing a single button within the app can shut off all his lights and gadgets when he leaves.

Ramirez can tap a lamp in an image to turn an actual lamp off and on in his apartment, and at the same time he’ll see the picture on the tablet’s screen go dark or become illuminated. Ramirez also set up a presence-sensing feature that uses his cell phone to determine if he’s home (it checks whether or not he has connected to his home Wi-Fi network). This can automatically turn on the lights if he’s there. Ramirez runs the whole setup from a small computer in his home.

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The software behind all this interconnection comes from a company calledOpenRemote, which is plugging away on an open-source software platform for linking Internet-connected gadgets, making it easier to control all kinds of smart home devices, regardless of who made them. And it makes it easy to automate actions like lowering your connected window blinds if the temperature sensed in your living room goes above 75 degrees.

Co-created in 2008 by Marc Fleury, who previously came up with the open-source Java application server JBoss, and Juha Lindfors, OpenRemote offers a way to control and automate all kinds of existing lights and home electronics without worrying about the various integration protocols in different gadgets or shelling out for a customized system. That’s because it supports a slew of different products and protocols, and continues to add support for more as they emerge. Best of all, the software is available to consumers for free.

Pierre Kil, who heads up business development for OpenRemote from Eindhoven, in the Netherlands, says the company eventually hopes to establish a common platform that manufacturers use to make all kinds of home-automation products simpler to set up and use, and to allow devices from different makers to work together smoothly.

When OpenRemote got started, the so-called Internet of Things—wherein traditionally offline devices are connected to the Internet—was largely unknown, and smartphones were just beginning to gain ground among consumers. It was the early days of the iPhone and of Android smartphones, and the iPad had yet to be released. At the time, home automation was expensive, requiring lots of proprietary hardware and installation time.

Now there are relatively inexpensive devices like Twine and Belkin’s WeMo, which can connect “dumb” devices to the Web, and a growing number of Internet-connected devices, like the Nest smart thermostat, that are easy to install and use. Yet different devices still operate on a slew of different “protocols”— the rules devices abide by when transmitting data.

Though OpenRemote isn’t targeting the consumer market directly, it has a community of individual users—including Ramirez, who runs his own IT consulting business in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and has been using OpenRemote for about two years. He discovered the software when browsing for home-automation remote control apps on his iPad, and he gave it a try after realizing how much he could customize it—including building his own remote app with interactive images of the rooms of his house.

“It took a little bit of work and testing, but ultimately I got it to work just fine,” he says. “And once you get it to work, it’s simple to add new things to it.”

Ramirez says he continues to use OpenRemote even as more options emerge because new options and support for new protocols are continuously added. But as more of a hobbyist than an actual programmer, he says, he does wish it were simpler for the average non-programmer to set up in the first place.

Though there are tutorials on its site, the average person may not find OpenRemote simple to set up, and it does require you to have a server on which to run it. Users have to download an OpenRemote controller and then use the Web-based OpenRemote Designer to set up the devices the controller should connect to and determine the look of the user interface. Once you’ve done that, you can access and control your gadgets from your computer or on a smartphone or tablet with Android or iOS OpenRemote apps.

OpenRemote is currently focused on building a sustainable business, which it believes it can achieve by licensing its software to the makers of connected devices. Kil says product integrations are coming, though he won’t yet say when they will happen.

OpenRemote also sees a moneymaking opportunity beyond the home in providing its software to cities, which are becoming increasingly interested in using technology for everything from communicating with citizens to monitoring traffic. Last year, OpenRemote conducted a small test in Eindhoven, in hopes of using automation and crowdsourcing to monitor a city. This included people-tracking with cameras, sound-level tracking, social-media monitoring, and an app that people in the area could use to rate what the atmosphere was like. The company is currently working on a larger-scale project in Eindhoven, Kil says. “If you put four walls around a city, it’s a big room, if you know what I mean,” he says.

(Reuters) – Lookout, one of the world’s biggest providers of mobile security software, said on Thursday that it has raised $55 million in financing.

The round was led by Deutsche Telekom AG.

Qualcomm Inc’s venture capital arm, Greylock Partners and Mithril Capital Management also participated, as did current investors Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and Khosla Ventures.

Lookout’s security software is installed on some 45 million devices runningGoogle Inc’s Android operating system and Apple Inc’s iOS.

Telecommunications firms such as Deutsche Telekom and Qualcomm are growing increasingly interested in mobile security products because cyber attacks on mobile devices have grown exponentially in recent years as sales of smartphones and tablets have surged to consumers and businesses alike.

Lookout said in a statement that it plans to enter the corporate security market later this year, which would put it in competition with older, more established software makers includingSymantec Corp and Intel Corp’s McAfee security division.

San Francisco-based Lookout, founded in 2007, has raised $131 million to date.

(Reuters) – Israeli chip manufacturer TowerJazz (TSEM.TA) is targeting annual revenue run-rate of $1 billion a year by 2015, its chief executive Russell Ellwanger said.

The company, which has plants in Israel, the United States and Japan, had revenue of $639 million in 2012.

“We would have to accelerate growth (to reach this goal),” Ellwanger told Reuters on the sidelines of a company symposium. “Our biggest focus is on sustainable GAAP net profit.”

Ellwanger believes this will be achieved when the company reaches quarterly revenue of $190 million to $200 million.

TowerJazz had a net loss on a GAAP basis in the second quarter of $23 million and has had few profitable quarters on a GAAP basis in recent years due to heavy investments in its second chip plant in Israel.

The company has forecast revenue in the third quarter of $130 million to $140 million, compared with $125 million in the second quarter.

TowerJazz, which makes chips used in smartphones like Apple’s (AAPL.O) iPhone and Samsung’s (005930.KS) Galaxy models as well as battery chargers and AC/DC adapters, expects to start seeing revenue next year from an anticipated contract to build a plant in India.

TowerJazz (TSEM.O) is part of one of two consortiums that have proposed building semiconductor plants in India.

TowerJazz’s consortium includes India’s Jaiprakash Associates (JAIA.NS) and IBM (IBM.N). The group has proposed a plant near New Delhi at a cost of about $4 billion.

Ellwanger said he expects a formal government notification regarding a contract will be made in the next few weeks.

Groundbreaking on the plant could be about six months later and it would take two years for silicon to start and three years to begin shipping revenue wafers, Ellwanger said.

TowerJazz’s share in revenue from the construction and running of the plant would be $300 million over eight years, according to Israeli media reports.

TowerJazz will also be able to use part of the facility for its own products, enabling it to penetrate the Indian market.

(Reuters) – Five buyout firms are expected to bid next week for a stake in Deutsche Telekom’s online classified advertising business Scout24, valuing the equity and debt of the whole unit at $2.2-2.3 billion, three sources close to the process said.

However, the auction is proving to be more than just a battle over price, with some bidders hoping the German telecoms firm can be persuaded to sell a larger stake and several unhappy with its proposals on the future funding of Scout24.

Deutsche Telekom wants to sell part of Scout24 – originally seen as a way to compensate for declining earnings at its traditional telecoms business – in order to free up cash for a planned 6 billion euros of investment in broadband in Germany.

The sources said private equity groups Apax, TPG, Hellman&Friedman, EQT and Silver Lake were expected to table offers in the latest round of bidding next week, valuing the whole of Scout24’s equity and debt at roughly 1.6-1.7 billion euros ($2.2-2.3 billion).

Final offers are due in early November, they added.

The sources said Deutsche Telekom was looking to sell a 30 percent stake, and that was causing some friction with bidders.

“An investor will have almost nothing to say,” an adviser of one of the potential buyers said, adding Deutsche Telekom had rejected offers for 100 percent of Scout24.

The buyout groups are also critical of Deutsche Telekom’s plan to grant Scout24 a shareholder loan worth several hundred millions of euros on what they see as unacceptable terms.

“Deutsche Telekom wants a coupon that is 100 basis points higher than the buyers’ refinancing costs,” one of the sources said.

The buyout groups have made counter-proposals to organize Scout24’s financing themselves, but in that case Deutsche Telekom would demand an even higher valuation of Scout24’s equity, the sources said.

Terms of shareholders loans have been a sticking point for Deutsche Telekom before.

Earlier this year it had to sweeten the loan terms for its acquisition of U.S. peer MetroPCS, which it merged with its T-Mobile US unit.

Only after cutting the debt load it was planning to transfer to the combined company and after sweetening the loan terms did Deutsche Telekom manage to save that deal.

Deutsche Telekom and three of the buyout groups declined to comment. Silver Lake and Hellman&Friedman were not immediately available for comment.

Separately, German daily Handelsblatt reported on Thursday that Swiss publisher Ringier had made a 200 million Swiss Francs ($220 million) offer for Deutsche Telekom’s 50 percent stake in Scout24’s Swiss operations.

(Reuters) – Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba Group Holding Ltd has decided not to list its shares in Hong Kong, but has not yet committed to listing on any other exchange, including the New York Stock Exchange, CEO Jonathan Lu told Reuters on Thursday.

The company, founded in 1999 by billionaire Jack Ma, had planned to list on the Hong Kong stock exchange in an IPO analysts and bankers have said could raise up to $15 billion.

Alibaba failed to convince Hong Kong regulators to waive rules over the group’s unique partnership structure – specifically that 28 partners, mainly founders and senior executives, would keep control over a majority of the board, even though they own only around 13 percent of the company.

“We’ve decided not to list in Hong Kong,” Lu said in an interview at the company’s headquarters in China’s Hangzhou city in Zhejiang province. “The Hong Kong authorities need time to study this corporate governance structure (for knowledge-based companies).”

In his first public comment on Alibaba abandoning Hong Kong for the IPO, Lu added the company had not yet committed to list on any other exchange, including the New York Stock Exchange.

Alibaba, whose platforms handle more goods in a year than EBay Inc and Amazon.com Inc combined, expects to nearly triple the volume of transactions on its marketplaces to about 3 trillion yuan ($490 billion) in 3-4 years from 2012, eventually surpassing Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

“In three years we hope to be the No. 1 retail network in the world – larger than Wal-Mart,” Lu added.