Investments

Flagship SBA Investments (representative):

OmniGlobe: Wireless Internet Broadband company which offers reliable, affordable broadband in geographic areas around the world where terrestrial communications are unavailable, inefficient or just too expensive. Championed and chaired by SBA Member Julian Costley with Deputy Chair and SBA Member John Forrester, OmniGlobe is a leading Wireless Broadband Internet company based in Canada. A number of SBA Members got in early on this exciting company.

Wigadoo is a consumer internet start-up, focused on the travel and leisure sector. Wigadoo aims to transform the way we buy leisure services. It is premised on one universal consumer pain: organising a group of friends is difficult, especially when money is involved. Whether it's a ski-trip, renting a villa, or simply going out to a concert together - someone has to play the role of organiser and chase people for money and commitment. Wigadoo makes organising time with friends easy, taking the hassle out of building a group and getting the money sorted out to make plans happen.

SBA Companies which have already exited (e.g: The SBA is proud that already two of its nine major investments have exited).

Allo Machines: Machine-to-Machine Value Added Services Company at the forefront of this exciting field. SBA Members invested at the beginning of 2006 and realized a 40% return on investment less than 15 months later

Innova Card: Maxim Integrated Products, Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced it has acquired Innova Card (La Ciotat, France), fabless semiconductor company specializing in the design and development of secure solutions for terminals, on 22 January 2009. Through this acquisition, Maxim said it enriches its secure transaction product portfolio.Innova Card has developed an integrated, secure 32-bit MIPS microcontroller and a precertified POS terminal reference design. In addition, the company supplies advanced customer support tools, including secure software libraries and a secure implementation of the Linux operating system.Innova Card claimed it has reduced the POS terminal design cycle time from 24 months to 6 months."The addition of Innova Card to Maxim gives us a great strategic position to stay ahead of increasing security and performance requirements brought by the new PCI-PED 2.0 security standard," stated Don Loomis, executive director of the microcontroller business unit at Maxim. "Furthermore, it provides an excellent means to increase the penetration of all of Maxim's silicon offerings in the secure transactions market."Innova Card was founded in 2002 by a few electronic system design engineers with experience in the design of security features for electronic systems and was one of the first companies to be funded by the SBA.

www.innova-card.com


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